Alcohol, Lies, and Ambition: Another Texas “Justice” Outrage

“Good fences make good neighbors,” – Robert Frost in “Mending Wall”

 A Texas jury in 2007 believed prosecutors that claimed Hannah Overton deliberately force-fed salt into her foster child (whom she and her husband were going to adopt) four-year-old Andrew Burd until he became so ill that he soon died. Overton received the sentence of life without parole and is in prison.

The lead prosecutor, Sandra Eastwood, had desperately wanted to win and had told her second chair, Anna Jiminez, later would testify under oath that Eastwood had told her, “I will do anything to win this case.” Before the trial, Eastwood, the police, and, of course, the local media, already had demonized Overton and her family. During the trial, the prosecutors, judge, jurors, and the media pointedly ignored the very complex medical evidence that pointed toward the child having a rare disorder, and why not? These are people who hate complexity; simple narratives and villainous witches are much more preferable, especially when the accused might have religious beliefs that “sophisticated” people might discard.

The Overtons are Pentacostals and to Progressives that populate the mainstream media, Pentacostals are even stranger than men from Mars and have no place in a Progressive society. To make matters even worse, Nueces County District Judge Jose Longoria clearly sided with the prosecution and ensured that at best it would be a show trial. Jurors did what Texas jurors usually do: ignore any exculpatory evidence and convict, many times sending the accused to the execution chambers that are so frequently used in the Lone Star State.

Yet, things did not seem to make sense. Hannah Overton had no police record, was highly-regarded in her church, and had never engaged in any acts of violence against her children. Nonetheless, jurors and Longoria believed Eastwood and Jiminez when they claimed Overton somehow snapped under the pressure of having a fifth child and killed her soon-to-be-adopted son.

As often is the case in Texas, there was a story that was not told, and evidence that neither jurors nor the defense had seen, but that prosecutors knew. But Nueces County prosecutors also knew something else: Sandra Eastwood was an alcoholic and drug addict, and was well-known for lying. She was ambitious, and often impaired, and those two characteristics meant that defendants, and especially high-profile defendants like Hannah Overton, would be tried in circumstances not unlike what was known to happen in communist countries like the former U.S.S.R.

 Prosecutors are officers of the court, and they also are required by law and by the rules set by the Texas State Bar not only to act ethically, but also to report unethical or dishonest actions of themselves or their peers to the authorities. Instead, as is usually the case in all prosecutorial offices in this country, both state and federal, the “ministers of justice” of Nueces County were silent, as they protected their own.

 Anna Jiminez knew a lot of things about Eastwood, and later after Jiminez was elected Nueces County District Attorney, she fired Eastwood. As second chair, she knew the case file and she claimed later that she suspected Eastwood was withholding evidence in violation of the Brady ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, and by the Rules of Conduct for prosecutors in the State of Texas. But while Jiminez reported Eastwood to her superiors, according to later testimony, she never reported Eastwood to the Texas State Bar, as was required by the rules of conduct that govern her as a lawyer and as a prosecutor. (Not surprisingly, Eastwood’s superiors did nothing. They enjoyed winning and if a few innocent people went to prison, that was collateral damage. And, anyway, everyone already knew that Hannah Overton was a monster.)

Fortunately for Overton, a number of people were not willing to accept this conviction and began their own investigations. The best journalism was done by Pamela Colloff of Texas Monthly, who had this excellent and lengthy article in January of this year, and readers can find the particulars of the case if they so choose. Instead, I will deal with the police and prosecutorial abuse that sent Hannah Overton to prison for a “crime” that never happened.

 Nonetheless, one cannot blame police for being suspicious when the four-year-old child was brought to the emergency room and then later died. Colloff writes:

The death of a child – particularly a sudden, unexplained death in which abuse is suspected – evokes strong emotions, even among seasoned investigators, doctors, forensics experts, and prosecutors. A more thorough investigation would have uncovered ample evidence to suggest that Andrew had an undiagnosed eating disorder, raising the possibility that he had unintentionally consumed too much salt on his own. But law enforcement officials are accustomed to handling child abuse cases, not medical mysteries, and salt poisoning is rare enough that most emergency room doctors will never encounter a case during their careers. Against the backdrop of possible abuse, authorities wasted little time. Larry was charged with injury to a child for failing to get Andrew timely medical attention. The onus for the boy’s death fell on Hannah, who was charged with capital murder.

As they do in so many situations, the local journalists acted as little more than stenographers. Writes Colloff:

Corpus Christi’s introduction to Hannah came the following week, when she and Larry were arrested and led past a bank of TV cameras outside the Nueces County jail. News reports that followed, prominently featuring their grim-faced mug shots, cast the Overton home as a house of horrors. (“More shocking details on abuse suffered by four-year-old before death,” began one breathless report.)

Colloff adds:

The media coverage of the case stirred widespread outrage. The Corpus Christi Caller-Times’s online comments section filled with the vitriol of readers, some of whom called for Hannah to receive the death penalty. (“You can just tell by looking at her how evil she is,” one wrote.) Fueling the public’s antipathy was an affidavit written by a CPS child abuse investigator named Jesse Garcia, who claimed that Hannah had admitted to forcing Andrew to drink two cupfuls of “chili with water” and quoted her as saying that she then “beat the shit out of him.” Garcia never produced any documentation or witnesses to corroborate his claim, and internal police memos show that law enforcement officials doubted the veracity of his story. Hess disavowed Garcia’s account at a court hearing regarding the Overton children, and prosecutors never entered Garcia’s affidavit into evidence or called him to testify at Hannah’s trial. (He was subsequently fired by CPS after having three car accidents on the job in less than six months.) But the damage was done: that Hannah had confessed to force-feeding Andrew and beating him was repeated, uncorrected, on the local news.(Emphasis mine)

Rudy Giuliani said during his infamous Wall Street prosecutions in the late 1980s that once he made the accusations, the media would do his work for him. Whether it was the “sophisticated” New York media, such as the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, or the newspapers and television stations near Corpus Cristi, the relationship between prosecutors and the press has been insidious. Journalists rush to judgment, as they did in the case against Michael Milken, the Duke Lacrosse Case, and the case of Hannah Overton. Later, after the truth comes out, media representatives claim that they have “learned our lessons” and promise not to jump to conclusions. And then they repeat the process again and again.

In the area of “justice” and criminal accusations, narratives are a powerful force, and most journalists and government agents like to keep them simple: Michael Milken and Jack Abramoff were greedy Jews who lost their way and broke the law to get rich; the Duke lacrosse players were “privileged” white “jocks” in a violent sport who brutally beat and raped a poor black woman because they believed they were so “privileged” that they could get away with it; George Zimmerman was a white racist who hated blacks and gunned down Trayvon Martin in cold blood. The simple stories were so compelling; evidence that undermined the narratives was ignored or shouted down.

And so it was with Overton. The police and prosecutors had their narrative, and they were not going to let their prey go free, and the media simply did what it always does. But the prosecution also withheld evidence, as was discovered in an evidentiary hearing that ended last month. Yes, while Texas is a place where at least two innocent men have been executed recently, and while prosecutorial misconduct has dominated other wrongful convictions in that state, even the Texas State Court of Criminal Appeals decided that the evidence that jurors said convicted Overton was questionable, and that the court needed to examine what had happened.

 For example, after he was brought into the hospital, Andrew vomited and doctors took samples, but the defense never was told about it nor given any information. Colloff explains:

Forensic pathologist Judy Melinek, an assistant medical examiner in San Francisco who had testified at Hannah’s trial, then took the stand to explain how critical this sample would have been to understanding exactly what had happened to Andrew. Determining the precise makeup of his stomach contents and the time they were collected, she said, would have been pivotal in a case in which the defendant was accused of poisoning the victim. After reviewing all the evidence, Melinek said, she firmly believed that Andrew had ingested a fatal amount of salt on his own. Her opinion was bolstered by the testimony of Edgar Cortes, an emergency medicine pediatrician who had seen Andrew twice before his death. Cortes maintained that he had informed Eastwood prior to trial that the boy had suffered from significant cognitive delays. These delays, Cortes now testified, put Andrew at greater risk for eating inappropriate items and ingesting something lethal. Yet Andrew was portrayed during the trial as a normal four-year-old. As for why the jury never heard his medical opinion, Cortes stated, “I felt like the prosecution had its own theory about what happened.” 

At the evidentiary hearing ordered by the appeals court, Dr. Michael Moritz, one of the world’s leading experts on salt poisoning, told the court that none of the scenarios painted by the prosecution made sense, given all of the cases of salt poisoning he had seen:

Intentional salt poisoning, the doctor went on to explain, is extremely rare. When it does occur, the victims are often bottle-fed babies whose food supply can be easily tampered with. Moritz stated that there was only one documented case in which an older child—a five-year-old—was poisoned with salt, and there were obvious signs of a struggle, including lacerations to his lips and gums. Yet Andrew had no such lacerations. Typically, Moritz added, someone who salt-poisons a child is mentally ill or a drug addict and has a well-documented history of child abuse. “So what we’re seeing in this case does not fit with any cases of intentional salt poisoning in the literature,” Moritz said.

Judge Longoria periodically glanced down at the doctor when he spoke of children poisoning themselves, studying him with skepticism. Moritz described how “voluntary salt intoxication” almost uniformly happened to children who fit a narrow profile: they were between the ages of one and six, they had been in the foster system or were from abusive homes, and they had some form of eating disorder, such as pica. Andrew, who had tried to eat everything from cigarette butts to glow sticks to toothpaste, fit this profile well. 

Moritz had not testified at Hannah’s trial, and his testimony would seem to have been authoritative, but Nueces County prosecutors Doug Norman and Bill Ainsworth claimed that there was nothing new and that the jury’s verdict should stand no matter what. And then Sandra Eastwood took the stand.

 Eastwood admitted to being a recovering alcoholic who abused prescription diet pills during the trial. (Notice that while prosecutors will go after others who do the same, Eastwood got a free ride.) While she claimed to have turned over everything to the defense, it was clear that she was less-than-competent to give any useful information at all:

Under withering questioning from (attorney Garry) Goldstein, Eastwood answered “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember” 72 times when asked whether she recognized notes written in her handwriting, emails sent from her own account, and papers signed with her signature. “I have trouble remembering phone numbers,” she said. “I have trouble remembering what I had for lunch yesterday. I think that’s normal. I had hundreds of conversations and there were thousands of documents, so I don’t remember specifics.”

 Goldstein became so exasperated with her that he asked if she remembered the trial itself. “You recall the trial, do you not?” he said. “The individual got life in prison.”

“The question is . . . ?” said Eastwood.

“Do you remember the trial?” Goldstein asked, his voice rising. “Yes,” she replied. “It ended in life without parole,” Goldstein scolded. “That means they spend the rest of their life in prison. You remember cases that have those kinds of consequences, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said softly. 

When Anna Jiminez took the stand, she said that she believed that Eastwood “was not truthful,” and that Eastwood had told her there had been no vomit or vomit samples taken. She admitted that she had no proof of Eastwood’s alleged misconduct, but then added that the kind of circumstantial evidence that made her believe Eastwood had lied was the kind of evidence that gets people convicted in criminal court.

With the hearing ended, prosecutors parroted their own views that the hearing had produced nothing to make them change their minds about Hannah Overton’s guilt. However, it is a very rare prosecutor who even admits that any conviction was wrong and Texas prosecutors are, well, Texas prosecutors: even when the evidence against them is overwhelming, they make up fantasy stories or just lie.

I have no idea how this case will end. Judge Longoria, as one might expect, ignored all of the medical evidence given to him and recommended that Overton not receive a new trial. However, he does not have the final say in this situation. In retrospect, there was no way that Longoria ever would admit to having made errors during Overton’s 2007 show trial, and it is a rare judge anywhere that will admit to having been wrong. Nonetheless, I imagine that with the media now questioning the verdict with the same ferocity that they once condemned Overton, even the Texas courts cannot ignore the firestorm. So, while it seems certain that Longoria will claim that “no new evidence” was introduced during the hearing, his superiors will overrule him.

As I see it, however, this case is much more than just another example of prosecutors bringing junk science into the courtroom and trying to make facts fit their narratives. The real story is that nothing is done about it, and that is because the U.S. Supreme Court – and especially the conservative wing – has torn down all of the fences that are needed to give ordinary citizens an opportunity to keep police, prosecutors, and judges honest.

In decision after decision, the SCOTUS has ruled that prosecutors must be given absolute immunity from lawsuits filed by people wrongfully convicted. True, the high court has claimed that official remedies exist such as criminal prosecution for wrongdoing or discipline by various state bars, including disbarment.

While this may sound good, one should remember that the disbarment of Duke lacrosse prosecutor Michael Nifong was extraordinary precisely because such actions by a state bar are extremely rare. Two years ago, I spoke to a member of the Georgia State Bar about extreme misconduct by two prosecutors in the district where I once lived, citing chapter and verse from the Georgia State Bar Rules for Prosecutors, and the woman to whom I spoke blew it off. “They were just doing their jobs,” she replied.

I asked, “Do you mean to tell me that suborning perjury (and the perjury was obvious, and some of the dishonest witnesses even have admitted to lying since the particular trial), lying to jurors during the closing arguments, making outrageous public comments, disrupting the trial with catcalls and loud noises, fabricating evidence and such are ‘their jobs’?” She hung up.

While it may sound highly official that prosecutors, police, and judges have government agencies which can levy charges and punishment upon them when they engage in misconduct, in truth, these agencies really are the proverbial foxes guarding the hen houses. Lawsuits filed by people actually injured by misconduct, however, are the only real mechanism that people outside the employment of government can employ to gain at least some matter of redress. Texas happens to be a big offender, but the problem is universal in this country.

Government agents in the “justice” system protect their own, as those entrusted with overseeing wrongdoing within their ranks operate according to a perverse logic: if the public were to see just how often misconduct and wrongdoing are part of the prosecutorial process, then the public would lose confidence in the honesty of the people engaging in misconduct and wrongdoing, and then might question that system that sends innocent people to prison or even their deaths. Got that?

Thomas DiLorenzo has written more than once that the government now has become the final judge and arbiter of its own actions, which destroys any meaningful systems of accountability. While government repeatedly tears down the fences that restrict the actions of government agents, it increasingly is erecting arbitrary fences around everyone else who is not part of the “club.” In the situation of prosecutorial misconduct, the problem is not “a few bad apples,” as prosecutors, judges, and the media tell us ad nauseum.

No, the barrel itself is rotten, and the few good apples that are left either are corrupted, compromised, or get out before they lose their souls.

Yes, the feds have created a tyrannical prosecutorial state

When I was in journalism school about 40 years ago, I learned about the early American journalist John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of criminal libel in 1735 by a jury in Philadelphia. It was clear that Zenger had broken the law -- although a law that would be considered tyrannical -- but jurors decided to acquit him anyway to show their displeasure with the law and with the authorities that brought the charges.

The principle was jury nullification, and it has served Americans well for centuries. Juries in the North refused to convict people under the awful Fugitive Slave Law, and juries have nullified when they believed prosecutors were hounding someone for no good reason.

(Unfortunately, juries also have nullified for bad reasons such as the not guilty verdicts in the South during the Civil Rights Era when whites were accused of murdering blacks. Likewise, juries in Herrin, Illinois, refused to convict union workers who executed 22 non-union workers during a coal strike in 1922.)

Jury nullification, while controversial, IS legal but federal prosecutors in New York City now are going after a man who publicly endorses the practice by charging him with crimes and trying to imprison him. Like always, the feds demonstrate beyond a doubt that they are bullies that despise the Constitution and our rights.

The feds have charged Julian P. Heicklen, a 79-year-old retired chemistry professor from Penn State University, claiming he is violating laws against jury tampering. I must admit that this is a "creative" interpretation of the law that was written to keep people with vested interests in the outcome of a verdict from bribing or threatening jurors to vote in a certain way.

Heicklen has done nothing of the sort, but that does not stop federal prosecutors from trying to stretch the law into oblivion. One would hope that Judge Kimba Wood, who is hearing the case, will dismiss it, but Wood demonstrated without a doubt 20 years ago when sentencing Michael Milken for a series of non-crimes that she did not understand the law. Thus, I must admit I have no confidence in Wood doing anything but bow down to the will of federal prosecutors.

According to the New York Times, the activity in which Heicklen was involved consisted of standing

...on a plaza outside the United States Courthouse in Manhattan, holding a “Jury Info” sign and handing out brochures that advocate jury nullification, the controversial view that if jurors disagree with a law, they may ignore their oaths to follow it and may acquit a defendant who violated it.

He has not dealt with jurors individually nor has he tried to influence them in any particular case, which is exactly what the jury tampering laws were supposed to prohibit. By charging Heicklen, however, the feds are moving into new legal territory, yet another "creative legal theory" that federal prosecutors have loosed upon this country as they seek to criminalize legal behavior.

The federal prosecutors clearly are making things up as they go along. The NYT writes:

But now prosecutors are offering their first detailed explanation for why they charged Mr. Heicklen, arguing in a brief that his “advocacy of jury nullification, directed as it is to jurors, would be both criminal and without Constitutional protections no matter where it occurred.”

“His speech is not protected by the First Amendment,” prosecutors wrote.

“No legal system could long survive,” they added, “if it gave every individual the option of disregarding with impunity any law which by his personal standard was judged morally untenable.”

Not only do federal prosecutors want to deny this man his right of free speech, but they also are seeking to deny him a jury trial:

Mr. Heicklen, who could face a six-month sentence if convicted, has asked for a jury trial. Ms. (Rebecca) Mermelstein (the lead federal prosecutor), opposing that demand, cited as one reason Mr. Heicklen’s ardent stance that juries should nullify. He would probably “urge a jury to do so in a case against him,” she wrote.

In other words, Heicklen should be denied his right to trial by jury because (horrors) a jury might acquit him. If the feds cannot have the results they want, then the Constitution and the very Rule of Law should be abandoned so that prosecutors can win.

The problem in this country is NOT jury nullification. No, the real problem is that juries too often are willing to defer to prosecutors because they believe that is what they are supposed to be doing, or they reach verdicts out of convenience.

When juries use their right of nullification to deal with what they believe to be a wrongful or malicious prosecution, they do so out of a sense of principle and belief in a Higher Law. That federal prosecutors are trying to destroy that right tells us that nothing scares the feds more than decent Americans acting out of the sense of right and wrong that government employees in the "justice" system abandoned long ago.

In American "justice," principle and right and wrong is seen as a foreign object in the bloodstream, something that government demands be eradicated at all costs. In the Heicklen case, we get a sense that prosecutors today are so emboldened and so protected that they will openly advocate people have their rights taken away -- in the name of "doing justice," of course.

Judges and Prosecutors: Law for thee, but not for me

The long-awaited report on prosecutorial misconduct in the case of the late Ted Stevens has been released and it unwittingly declares that federal bureaucrats -- and especially those at the U.S. Department of "Justice" (sic) -- are not required to obey the law if they are not specifically told they have to obey the law. Chew on that for a while, folks.

According to the New York Times:

...the 500-page report by the investigator, Henry F. Schuelke, recommends that none of the Justice Department officials involved in the case be prosecuted for criminal contempt of court because the judge who presided over the trial, Emmet G. Sullivan, of Federal District Court in Washington, did not issue an order specifically instructing prosecutors to obey the law by turning over any exculpatory evidence. (emphasis mine)

The report admitted the prosecution was “permeated by the systematic concealment of significant exculpatory evidence which would have independently corroborated his defense and his testimony, and seriously damaged the testimony and credibility of the government’s key witness.” In other words, the Brady violations -- and these clearly fell into the Brady category -- were deliberate. Prosecutors wanted a conviction and were willing to lie to get it.

All of the prosecutors are regularly briefed during mandatory training about Brady requirements of turning over all exculpatory evidence and sharing files. As law school graduates, they also had Brady instruction in classes on criminal law. To put it another way, they did NOT have to be instructed in the requirements of Brady; they already knew, but chose NOT to obey.

This is breathtaking, but maybe I should not be surprised that Official Washington is so contemptuous of everyone else but themselves. The courts have ruled that you and I (if we are not government lawyers or judges) are required to know by heart every jot and tittle of the law, for the courts have declared, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse."

In this situation, however, they are not even saying that prosecutors were ignorant of the law. Instead, the judge who wrote the report is saying that because prosecutors were not reminded of what they already were supposed to know, they should not face criminal contempt charges.

What about the rest of us. Well, the courts have ruled that under federal law, the mens rea doctrine -- the people charged with crimes intended to break the law -- can be ignored, which means that you can I can go to prison for breaking laws we did not know existed AND even though we did not intend to break the law and might have thought we were obeying it.

Yet, prosecutors who knowingly lied and hid evidence, prosecutors who are regularly briefed and trained in the law, do not have to obey it, or at least do not have to worry about being charged with lawbreaking as long as a judge does not remind them of what they already know. This is the very definition of tyranny.

Harvey Silverglate on the Thompson decision

Once again, the great Harvey Silverglate lays out the case in simple but eloquent prose, noting that the U.S. Supreme Court once again has ensured that prosecutors that flaunt the law, suborn perjury, hide evidence, and lie are protected by the pernicious doctrine of "absolute immunity."

This is an article worth reading.

Who is this guy kidding?

In a recent op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal, James Kirchick, a contributor to The New Republic, deals with the recent statements of Shane Bauer after being released from an Iranian prison.

Now, I must admit that Bauer made statements following his release (Iran accused Bauer and two other American hikers in that region of being spies) that most Americans would not find agreeable, and Kirchick jumps on them heavily -- and with some justification:

On July 31, 2009, you're traversing a mountain trail in Iraqi Kurdistan, near the Iranian border. You're with one of your best friends and your girlfriend. Suddenly a group of Iranian border guards capture you, and the next thing you know you're in Tehran's infamous Evin prison accused of "illegal entry" and "espionage."

Your girlfriend is kept in solitary confinement and you can see her only for an hour each day. The Iranian government prevents you from contacting your family for almost a year, at which point they decide to let your mother visit you for two days at a Tehran hotel.

While your captors treat you humanely and provide three square meals a day, your Iranian co-prisoners aren't so lucky. Every night you hear their screams. Evin is the world's most notorious torture dungeon, where political dissidents (men and women) are routinely raped, beaten and subjected to all manner of physical and psychological abuse.

Ahmad Batebi, a student activist who spent 17 months in solitary confinement there, reports that guards kicked him in the teeth, dunked his head into a toilet "stopped up with feces," and whipped his back and testicles with a cable. When he tried to sleep, they slashed his arms with a knife and rubbed salt in the wounds.

As you sit in this hellhole, no less than the president of the United States takes up your cause, insisting that you "never worked for the United States government," that you're "simply open-minded and adventurous" and "represent the best of America and of the human spirit."

Following two years of strenuous work on the part of committed American diplomats, you are freed on $500,000 bail, paid by the billionaire Sultan of Oman. And what is the first thing you say upon your release?

"Two years in prison is too long and we sincerely hope for the freedom of other political prisoners and other unjustly imprisoned people in America and Iran."

But, it is the next paragraph that I do find objectionable and, frankly, untrue: "Mr. Bauer didn't name any of the "political prisoners" allegedly held in America's jails—because there aren't any." He goes on:

The American justice system is far from perfect. But it is transparent, offers the right of appeal, and is routinely challenged by a free press and active civil society. Moreover, it doesn't imprison people for their political beliefs.

I wish that were true. I wish that there were real transparency, and I wish that the appeals courts actually took more time to examine convictions that have occurred in kangaroo courts.

For example, I suspect that Brad Wade and Brad Cooper would laugh at the notion that American courts were "transparent." Because prosecutors are immune from serious punishment for acts of blatant misconduct, hiding exculpatory evidence, lying, and suborning perjury (sorry, but disbarment is not serious compared to innocent people going to prison) we have seen U.S. courts -- state and federal -- turn into charnal houses for the innocent.

A recent article in the New York Times spelled out what has been happening:

After decades of new laws to toughen sentencing for criminals, prosecutors have gained greater leverage to extract guilty pleas from defendants and reduce the number of cases that go to trial, often by using the threat of more serious charges with mandatory sentences or other harsher penalties.

Some experts say the process has become coercive in many state and federal jurisdictions, forcing defendants to weigh their options based on the relative risks of facing a judge and jury rather than simple matters of guilt or innocence. In effect, prosecutors are giving defendants more reasons to avoid having their day in court.

“We now have an incredible concentration of power in the hands of prosecutors,” said Richard E. Myers II, a former assistant United States attorney who is now an associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina. He said that so much influence now resides with prosecutors that “in the wrong hands, the criminal justice system can be held hostage.”

Furthermore, it is clear that many prosecutions in the USA are done for political purposes or to appeal to a political constituency. A couple of examples include the federal trials of the police officers in the Rodney King beating case in Los Angeles and of Limerick Nelson, who was acquitted in state court of stabbing a rabbinical student to death in Brooklyn.

In both cases, the defendants had been acquitted at the state level, and while the verdicts were unpopular, constitutional prohibitions against double jeopardy should have been honored. Instead -- with approval of the courts -- the defendants were charged in federal court with different "crimes" for the same acts.

Not surprisingly, jurors got political message in both cases and the defendants were found guilty. The second time around, the system "got it right." It does not matter that in the process of "getting it right," courts and prosecutors destroyed one of the most important legal protections that anyone could have.

At the founding of this country, the law followed the natural rights views of the great English jurist William Blackstone, and the bedrock of criminal law was "mens rea, or Latin for "a guilty mind." Intent was a big portion of the law, and prosecutors were not to pursue criminal charges unless they also could prove that an individual intended to commit a crime, and did not just ignorantly run afoul of some arbitrary rules.

That situation no longer exists, as the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out in a stunning article:

For centuries, a bedrock principle of criminal law has held that people must know they are doing something wrong before they can be found guilty. The concept is known as mens rea, Latin for a "guilty mind."

This legal protection is now being eroded as the U.S. federal criminal code dramatically swells. In recent decades, Congress has repeatedly crafted laws that weaken or disregard the notion of criminal intent. Today not only are there thousands more criminal laws than before, but it is easier to fall afoul of them.

As a result, what once might have been considered simply a mistake is now sometimes punishable by jail time.

The paper then takes the case of Wade Martin in Alaska:

When the police came to Wade Martin's home in Sitka, Alaska, in 2003, he says he had no idea why. Under an exemption to the Marine Mammal Protection Act, coastal Native Alaskans such as Mr. Martin are allowed to trap and hunt species that others can't. That included the 10 sea otters he had recently sold for $50 apiece.

Mr. Martin, 50 years old, readily admitted making the sale. "Then, they told me the buyer wasn't a native," he recalls.

The law requires that animals sold to non-Native Alaskans be converted into handicrafts. He knew the law, Mr. Martin said, and he had thought the buyer was Native Alaskan.

He pleaded guilty in 2008. The government didn't have to prove he knew his conduct was illegal, his lawyer told him. They merely had to show he had made the sale.

The article gives a number of other cases in which conduct by individuals that they never even thought might violate the law led either to prison time or criminal convictions and probation. Why does this happen? It happens because American prosecutors have become all-powerful. Lew Rockwell writes:

Those raised on a steady diet of courtroom television shows believe that they are true to the way justice is meted out. This is completely naive. Trials in federal criminal cases are rare. Nine in ten cases are settled in pleas like the above case. Only 3 percent of the cases go to trial. Among those that go to trial, the defendant wins once in every 212 times.

What this means is that there is no way out for the accused. The prosecutors have all the power. Not even the judge has discretion because lawmakers have mostly taken that liberality away in the name of cracking down on crime. This happened all through the 1980s and 1990s, and the prosecutorial dictatorship has entrenched itself to become the norm since 2001. For the last ten years, the police state has had free rein.

It was not "liberals" or "conservatives" who did this. It was both parties acting with massive support of the American public, as tyrants in the public sector licked their chops. This was a result of security-minded madness, and even now hardly anyone cares.

He continues:

Today, every single citizen, no matter how free he or she may feel in daily life, is in reality a sitting duck. You can be made to disappear. There is essentially no way you can escape once the feds sweep you into their net. There is no justice. The total states of the past used to pretend to have trial-based convictions. The total state of the present doesn’t even bother. It just puts a sack over your head and takes you away.

When Rockwell writes that we now are in a police state, he is not using hyperbole. The USA IS a police state. It has by far the highest number of people incarcerated (more than two million) of any country in the world and a fourth of the entire world's prison population.

People are expected not only to know all of the laws that are passed (the courts have ruled that "ignorance of the law is no excuse") and the ONLY people who are not punished for ignorance of the law are police, prosecutors, and judges. I am not kidding.

Thus, we often see prosecutions made for political -- yes, political -- reasons. Why did Michael Nifong pursue rape charges against the three Duke students he knew were innocent of any crimes? Because he wanted to win an election, and he knew that his actions, no matter how outrageous, were popular with a number of political constituencies, including the "Progressive" crowd at the New York Times, which supported him until his case utterly fell apart.

And Rockwell is correct that all of this is a prescription for tyranny, the very kind of tyranny that Kirchick claims does not exist in the USA, only in rogue countries like Iran. How did this come about? It is very simple: Progressives, including people like Herbert Croly, who founded The New Republic, believed that individuals should not have protections against State power because a society could "progress" only if the State could advance the agendas of the intelligentsia without interference from "obsolete" documents like the U.S. Constitution.

Thus, most of the rights that were guaranteed (not granted, as Progressives like to claim) by the Constitution now either have been breached or have disappeared altogether. We literally are at the mercy of police, prosecutors, and judges, who are free to frame whom they like and unless one can raise hundreds of thousands of dollars quickly, people who are targeted pretty much disappear.

None of this excuses what Iran did to the three hikers, nor does it explain or justify everything that Bauer told the media. For that matter, many of the same leftist groups with whom Bauer is associated have been front-and-center in the destruction of rights in this country.

Iran is governed by a rogue and cruel regime and I have no use for people who engage in torture, beatings, and imprisonment of people simply for their political or religious beliefs. However, we really should not kid ourselves that Americans are above acting like the Iranians. From the CIA renditions to Guantanamo to the daily abuses of the law and outright decency that prosecutors commit while they are "just doing their jobs," people in this country who legally operate without boundaries also are capable of cruelty and outright murder.

Reason Magazine and Criminal "Justice"

In the everlasting "war on crime," the people with whom I have the most in common -- religious conservatives -- pretty much do not "get it." Most of the people at my church tolerate me, and even a few have said I have helped them change some of their thinking, but overall, it was the Right that ratcheted up the "crime wars" in the 1970s and 80s.

After first resisting, the Left joined in the race. During Bill Clinton's eight years in office, the nation's prison population doubled, and it was Clinton's own Department of "Justice" that carried out the biggest government-caused massacre of individuals since Wounded Knee in 1890. (And the biggest cheerleaders for Clinton's massacre were liberals and the Religious Right, which showed that at least on the shooting and burning of innocent children, Left and Right happily could co-exist.)

Not everyone has been silent. Radley Balko of Reason Magazine (and now the Huffington Post) has been a hero, and his work on behalf of those who have been falsely accused is featured in the recent Reason Magazine edition that covers this nation's system of "justice." Radley's article on wrongful convictions alone makes the issue outstanding.

Why are wrongful convictions endemic? Balko gives a number of reasons, but he singles out what he calls "he professional culture of the criminal justice system." He writes:

In addition to the more specific causes of wrongful convictions listed above, there is a problem with the institutional culture among prosecutors, police officers, forensic analysts, and other officials. Misplaced incentives value high conviction rates more than a fair and equal administration of justice.

Prosecutors in particular enjoy absolute immunity from civil liability, even in cases where they manufacture evidence that leads to a wrongful conviction. The only time prosecutors can be sued is when they commit misconduct while acting as investigators—that is, while doing something police normally do. At that point they’re subject to qualified immunity, which provides less protection than absolute immunity but still makes it difficult to recover damages.

For all of the points prosecutors make of criminal liability and state bar sanctions against prosecutors guilty of misconduct, Balko sets the record straight:

...criminal charges are few and far between, and prosecutors can make egregious mistakes that still don’t rise to the level of criminal misconduct. Professional sanctions are also rare. A 2010 study by the Northern California Innocence Project found more than 700 examples between 1997 and 2009 in which a court had found misconduct on the part of a prosecutor in the state. Only six of those cases resulted in any disciplinary action by the state bar. A 2010 investigation of federal prosecutorial misconduct by USA Today produced similar results: Of 201 cases in which federal judges found that prosecutors had committed misconduct, just one resulted in discipline by a state bar association. Prosecutorial misconduct was a factor in about one-quarter of the first 225 DNA exonerations, but none of the prosecutors in those cases faced any significant discipline from the courts or the bar.

There is also a common misconception that appeals courts serve as a check on criminal justice abuse. It is actually rare for an appeals court to review the evidence in a criminal case. Appeals courts make sure trials abide by the state and federal constitutions and by state or federal rules of criminal procedure, but they almost never second-guess the conclusions of juries.

In fact, NO prosecutor in this country EVER has been convicted of prosecutorial misconduct, and it is not because the prosecutors in the dock were innocent. Instead, juries tend to treat prosecutors like they do police officers, often engaging in nullification decisions because Americans are taught to hold people of these professions in absolute deference.

Then there is lying. This comes from one prosecutor who apparently believes lies are just fine with him:

If you were to take every jailhouse informant at his word, you’d find that a remarkably high percentage of the people accused of felonies boast about their crimes to the complete strangers they meet in jail and prison cells. Informants are particularly valuable in federal drug cases, where helping a prosecutor obtain more convictions is often the only way to get time cut from a mandatory minimum sentence. That gives them a pretty good incentive to lie.

There is some disagreement over a prosecutor’s duty to verify the testimony he solicits from jailhouse informants. In the 2006, Church Point, Louisiana, case of Ann Colomb, for example, Brett Grayson, an assistant U.S. attorney in Louisiana, put on a parade of jailhouse informants whose claims about buying drugs from Colomb and her sons were rather improbable, especially when the sum of their testimony was considered as a whole. According to defense attorneys I spoke with, when one attorney asked him if he actually believed what his informants were telling the jury, Grayson replied that it doesn’t matter if he believes his witnesses; it only matters if the jury does. He expressed a similar sentiment in his closing argument. (Emphasis mine)

No, Grayson won't have to worry about being charged with suborning perjury, nor will he face discipline from his state bar. And it is my sense that Grayson is typical of prosecutors, both state and federal. We saw enough of that during the Tonya Craft trial, and a representative of the Georgia State Bar told me that she was just fine with that conduct, and that the State Bar pretty much condoned it. "They were just doing their jobs," she told me.

I wish the state of things was different, but it is not. Lying is accepted in our political and "justice" culture, and nothing ever will change. Those of us who believe that lying has no place in either sphere are a tiny minority, but at least we still can raise our voices, just as the people at Reason have done so.

"An Absolute Honest-to-God Texas Frame-up"

People have written me on occasion asking if I were familiar with the "Mineola Swingers Club" case, and while I was, I can say I didn't know much about it. As this article in Texas Monthly demonstrates, those who did know the facts decided that the facts were not good enough, and that the only "satisfactory" outcome would be to frame the defendants. And that is what the authorities did.

The facts are fairly well-known. A group of adults supposedly had young children engage in sex behavior on stage at a "swingers club" in Mineola, Texas. The children alleged a number of wild things, but at the beginning the authorities in Woods County could see through it, but, as often happens, someone else got involved, the "child protective" workers did their guilt-assuming, suggestive interviews, and the rest was history. Innocent people went to jail.

Writes Michael Hall:

To recap, from 2005 to 2008, four Tyler children--three siblings and their aunt—all aged 4 through 7, made allegations that in 2004 seven adults, including their parents, had forced them to attend a sex kindergarten in a trailer park, where they learned to play sex games, and then took them to a swingers club in nearby Mineola, where they performed sex acts on stage in front of crowds of as many as 30 adults, who videotaped the shows. The stories told by the kids were wildly inconsistent and sometimes outright bizarre: adults casting spells, wearing witch outfits, and sacrificing chickens; one child said she had flown around on a broomstick. Every single child initially denied to social workers knowing anything about a sex kindergarten or club; it was only after multiple interviews that they started making outrageous allegations. But there was nothing to back them up: no adult witnesses and no physical evidence—no DNA, no fingerprints, not even any videotapes.

In fact, Wood County, where Mineola is located, did its own investigation, back in 2005, when just one child was talking about a sex club. Investigators (including an FBI agent), found absolutely no evidence to back up her accusations.

Unfortunately, the truth was not enough:

This didn’t stop the criminal justice machinery of Smith County. A Texas Ranger got involved and before long he was helping interview the other kids. In 2007 arrests were made; the public was outraged that a sex kindergarten and a sex club would operate under their noses. Three of the adults went to trial in 2008 and their juries, made of good country people who want nothing more than to protect their children, found them guilty in a matter of minutes. A fourth defendant was found guilty last summer.

If you wish to know why I have no hope at all that authorities will want to do what is right, the following pretty much explains the current state of "law" in this country:

I find it unfathomable that so many good people could allow and encourage these prosecutions to go forward. What happened to the lawyerly skepticism of Judge Jack Skeen and DA Bingham and the other men and women in his office?

*Why didn’t they look closer at the kids’ weird, implausible stories?

*Why didn’t they look closer at the foster mother of three of them, a woman named Margie Cantrell who moved to Mineola from California in 2004 and who has a history of manipulating her foster kids? (One of her California kids characterized her to me as “the puppet master” and said, “She brainwashes the kids to believe the stories she makes up.”)

*Why didn’t they give serious credence to the fact that not one of the seven defendants would testify against the others in exchange for a lesser sentence?

If they had done just one of these three, much less all of them, they would have realized the obvious: Nothing happened. There was no crime. There was no sex kindergarten and there were no child-sex shows at a swinger’s club. Ultimately, I can’t help but believe that Bingham knows this. Let’s put it this way: If he really believed these people put on live sex shows with children, would he really be setting them free now?

I always figured the cavalry would ride in and save the day for them. First I thought it would be the office of the Attorney General, which, in the summer of 2009 sent two lawyers to help investigate the case after Bingham tried to recuse his office from further prosecutions. But the AG’s office didn’t do anything. Then in the spring of 2010 two of the defendants had their verdicts thrown out by the 14th Court of Appeals in Houston—a process which saw the DA in neighboring Wood County file an extraordinary amicus brief in which he officially called into question everything the Smith County DA had done. “[N]o evidence was found to corroborate the stories told by the children,” he wrote.

But that was it. No cooler or wiser heads stepped in to actually free these people. In fact, those two defendants whose cases were overturned were going to be folded in with the remaining defendants (two of whom are grandparents of two of the children) into one mass trial in June. It is these six who pled guilty.

No matter how many times these kinds of cases are exposed, no matter how much research is published on problems that we find when "child protective" workers interview young children, no matter how many times that the "evidence" contradicts the Laws of Time and Space, the authorities will bring charges and compliant juries will vote guilty. Why does it happen?

It happens because people in authority are not held accountable for their actions. Protected by legal immunity and the mainstream news media, which needs these people as sources for their stories (no matter how fantastic those stories might be), the bad actors are free to lie, suborn perjury, and conspire with judges to rig trials. Protected by politicians and the U.S. Supreme Court, police, prosecutors, and "child protective" workers will pull off this scam time and again -- because they can do it.

Hall ends with this depressing thought:

Why would they do this if they aren’t guilty? Well, innocent people plead guilty all the time. They confess to crimes they didn’t commit (about a quarter of the DNA exonerations involve some form of false confession) and they plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit. They especially do it when they are certain they will be found guilty, no matter what they do or how good their attorneys are. In these cases we’ve already seen four different juries vote guilty—in the time it takes to watch a movie. These defendants know the realities. They can go to prison for life—or they can go home. They don’t have a whole lot to lose by pleading guilty. Their lives have already been ruined—they’ll always be known for these allegations anyway.

So, Patrick “Booger Red“ Kelly told his mother that he was taking the plea. “I don’t like it at all,” she told me. “But he’s screwed here. Despite all anybody can do, he’s never going to be found ‘not guilty’ in Tyler. He’s at the end of his rope. He told me, ‘Mama, I’m tired. I’m in here for something I haven’t done. I want to go home.’”

I usually believe in the ultimate good will of good people; justice will triumph. Of course, that only happens if people actually do something about injustice. In this case decent people turned away from doing anything about a terrible wrong. They’ve got a word for that, and the word is “evil.”

In Smith County, the bad guys won.

In Catoosa County a year ago, the "bad guys" did not win when jurors saw through the lies of the authorities and acquitted Tonya Craft. But they still are on the job, still trying to frame innocent people, still lying, still suborning perjury, still fabricating "evidence." As long as people like this are in positions of power and authority, the "bad guys" will be winning.

My latest article on Lew Rockwell's page: More problems with prosecutorial immunity

In my latest article on Lew Rockwell's page, I take issue with court decisions that establish absolute immunity for prosecutors. While I do understand their arguments, nonetheless, because the only accountability mechanisms for prosecutors are in the hands of fellow prosecutors and government lawyers, the situation creates perverse incentives because prosecutors know that no one will hold them to account unless the situation is so publicly bad that the other prosecutors are running for cover. (The Duke Lacrosse Case and the disbarment of prosecutor Michael Nifong is a case in point.)

Prosecutors and their unwritten rule: Don't drop a case no matter how bad it might be

On the 27th of this month, Carola Jacobson's son will have a hearing before a Maricopa County juvenile judge who is going to decide what will happen to the young man. As has been covered extensively in this blog, the charges against the young man (now 15) are bogus, and transparently so.

We have seen how the police interviews of the children were beyond tainted, and that the scenario which police and prosecutors claim was in the realm of physical impossibility, unless one is willing to believe that for a few days in a row, a 14-year-old boy could coerce young children (who lived elsewhere and voluntarily came to the house) into an unfinished attic and make them engage in sex play for several hours.

The main reason that the prosecution's account is not believable is that the Maricopa County authorities want us to believe that young children would do those things for hours in a place where temperatures in June would be upwards of 140 degrees. (Remember, this is Phoenix, Arizona, where daytime temperatures in June average well above 100 degrees.)

In other words, it makes no sense at all. I'm sure that the American Academy of Pediatrics might have something to say about prosecutor Noble Murphy's claim that these things MUST have happened because he says it did.

So, what is a prosecutor to do? One would think that most prosecutors would say that if there is no evidence, or if the evidence is hopelessly tainted, then all charges should be dismissed. Think again.

No prosecutor openly will admit this, for obvious reasons, but the policy of most prosecutorial offices in the United States is explained by the nihilistic phrase, "Bleed 'em and plead 'em."

WHY PROSECUTORS HOLD THE ADVANTAGES

When I was a newspaper reporter in Chattanooga more than 30 years ago, I heard the local district attorney in a speech claim that prosecutors face all sorts of unjust barriers in their never-ending fight against crime and criminals. At the time, I believed him, but no longer.

Prosecutors really hold all the cards; all of them. They can bring whatever charges they want against anyone they target because grand juries have become prosecutorial playthings. Once charges are filed, they can keep them on the books even if they have no evidence because they can use them as bargaining material.

Lest you think that perhaps they might be hindered by that thing called a guilty conscience, think again. In the recent Pottawattamie vs. McGhee case heard (but not decided because it was settled after oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court), the defendants, prosecutors from Pottawattamie County, Iowa, contended (and I present their exact words): "There is no freestanding constitutional right not to be framed." (emphasis added)

Not ONE prosecutor in this country made a public statement against that utterly chilling statement. The Obama administration supported it, and every association of prosecutors in the USA publicly agreed. Let me repeat what was said: Prosecutors in the United States claim that they have a right to frame whomever they want, and that no citizen can or should be able to do anything about it.

No, I am sure that prosecutors reading this blog would tell me that is NOT what is what the statement meant, but please don't feed me crap, people. The government will tell you that if a prosecutor engages in outrageous or even criminal framing of a defendant, the government has plenty of options to take against the offender, from bringing criminal charges to hauling the prosecutor before the state bar.

However, government authorities are playing a shell game. Yes, these "remedies" theoretically can be imposed. No, the government won't impose them, no matter how outrageous and outright criminal the conduct of prosecutors.

The one option that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that regular citizens -- including those that are framed -- DON'T have is to be able to sue the prosecutor. (The courts and advocates for prosecutors claim that lawsuits would keep them from "doing their jobs.")

The problem is that the one remedy that an individual citizen might have to rectify a grievous wrong is the lawsuit. All of the other vaunted remedies must be launched by the government itself. In other words, the government is given the power and the authority to discipline...the government.

Lawsuits can be brought by citizens and can be decided by juries consisting of citizens. Government disciplinary actions, on the other hand, are launched by the very people who stand to be harmed if their cohorts are disciplined.

Don't kid yourselves. Yes, prosecutors in North Carolina were happy to see Mike Nifong get thrown to the sharks of disbarment after his execrable conduct in the Duke Lacrosse Case, but they also knew that Nifong's disbarment potentially made all of them just a little more vulnerable to the same treatment, should they get out of line. Thus, they made a big show out of disbarring Nifong, but then made sure that other prosecutors in the state that lied and broke the law would not have to face the same fate. Nifong's disbarment actually protected the other miscreants employed by the State of North Carolina as prosecutors.

If anyone were to question their conduct, they could reply: "What do you mean saying prosecutors get away with bad acts? Mike Nifong got disbarred! What further proof do you need to know that the authorities stand ready to discipline anyone in our profession who does wrong?"

As for criminal charges, they rarely are brought and juries are loathe to convict wayward prosecutors, no matter how outrageous their conduct. Call it a belief in law-and-order, but the record stands, as no American jury ever has convicted a prosecutor of criminal misconduct.

When I spoke to a representative of the Georgia State Bar last year about the conduct of Christopher Arnt and Len Gregor in the Tonya Craft case, she told me that she believed that the prosecutors were "just doing their jobs." She then said to me, "She was acquitted, wasn't she?" as though that made everything just fine.

My response to her was: "Yes, after spending more than a million dollars to debunk charges that transparently were false and never should have been brought in the first place."

In the Duke Lacrosse Case, the three families spent close to five million dollars to defend their sons against charges that from the start were laughingly false. (The accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum, now has graduated from lying and prostitution to murder. This is the woman that Durham and Duke University held up as a near-saint.)

To put it another way, if prosecutors want to bleed someone to death, they can do it because, well, they can do it. The vast majority of people cannot afford the kind of defense needed to fight false charges, and prosecutors know it. And because they actually believe that they have a "right" to frame innocent people, and that nothing will happen to them if they do, you can bet that the profession attracts the very kind of people that one does not want to see in a courtroom in the first place.

This brings us back full circle to the case involving Carola Jacobson and her son, which I will cover in my next post. Why does "Ignoble" Murphy continue to insist that he wants to prosecutor this case? He claims it is because he "has not lost a case in seven years." In other words, it is nothing but a game to him.

However, the situation -- not that anyone in Maricopa County government would care -- is that Carola Jacobson is very, very ill, and that she had to give up cancer treatments in order to pay her son's legal bills. This situation deserves more attention, as do other cases which I will be covering soon enough.

What if you are falsely accused? Part I: What NOT to do

None of us believe that we ever will be falsely accused of a sex crime. After all, we have been brought up to believe that the USA has the best "justice" system in the world, and that police and prosecutors are honest people who never would try to frame an innocent person.

Unfortunately, that is not the case anymore. Police gladly will frame innocent people and prosecutors are all-too-happy to put innocent people on trial or force them to plead out to crimes they didn't commit because they cannot afford to defend themselves. THAT is the reality of law in the USA.

Most likely, the person reading this won't ever be charged in a sexual assault/child molestation case, as prosecutors cannot charge everyone. If you are falsely accused, however, there are a number of things that you should do -- and not do. I will deal with those things in this post.

After you get over the first wave of shock and anger of being falsely accused, you probably just are confused and want this nightmare to go away. You have to understand, however, that the police and the local prosecutors really are not interested in whether or not you actually did the things of which you are accused. That's right; they are not interested. They already have decided you are guilty, and their mission is to spin everything that they find into a way to get you thrown into prison for the rest of your life.

It does not matter if the accusations are a lie. Cops and prosecutors lie all the time and the honest people in that business often are intimidated and threatened by the bad guys. You are going to be dealing with people who don't care if you are innocent or guilty; they already have decided you are guilty, and they don't like to be confused with facts.

So, let us assume that you are accused. What do you do. What do you NOT do?

Don't Talk to the Police

The first thing that you DO NOT do is talk to the police without an attorney present. If you wish to have an expert tell you why, just watch this video by a law school professor telling people NOT to talk to the police.

Yes, you reply, but the police will listen. They will hear your story and then they will realize that the charges are ridiculous and the whole thing will go away. Right.

It is not going to happen. If you sit down with the police, they are not going to try to find out what occurred; no, they are going to try to find a way to twist your statements into an admission of guilt. No matter how much they tell you that they only are trying to help, it is a lie.

As Tonya Craft has told me more than once, charges of child molestation and rape are very different than, say, charges that you robbed a convenience store. Regarding the latter, you can present evidence that you were not there or that the eyewitness has engaged in mistaken identity. (Granted, cops try to find ways to work around alibis in these kinds of cases, too, but if you can prove you were not there, you have a strong case for innocence.)

In charges of child molestation or rape, however, alibis simply don't matter. For example, "judge" brian outhouse actually claimed in court that prosecutors had demonstrated that Tonya Craft molested the daughter of Sandra Lamb at her home -- before she even bought the home and moved into it. Logically, there was no way that Ms. Craft could have been at that place when prosecutors said she was (and entered no evidence at all to show she had been there before she bought the house), but it did not matter.

Why? House and the prosecutors already were of the mindset that they were going to rig a conviction, and had no interest in evidence. That is common in such cases. We have seen it not only in the Craft case, but also all of the other cases covered on this blog, including the one against Michael Rasmussen.

Look what happened when Rasmussen agreed to talk to detectives Young Austin and Kim Selkirk. They wrote down a bunch of notes and claimed that he had "confessed" to everything they had claimed. Given that Selkirk and Austin did not record this supposed momentous "confession" and given that Selkirk's notes conflicted with the state's own "evidence," it is not hard to conclude that Austin and Selkirk are lying.

A friend of mine who was a police officer in Florida for many years told me that all too often, cops reach conclusions first and then try to find "evidence" that fits their theories. A good investigator, he told me, tries to let the evidence lead to a conclusion, not the other way around.

Yet, cops also are under pressure to charge people, to close cases, and to help prosecutors get convictions. The "win at all costs" combined with the fact that the ONLY "evidence" needed in many rape and child molestation cases is an accusation. For example, it was painfully clear in the Duke Lacrosse Case that (1) Crystal Mangum was not raped, and (2) that the three lacrosse players could not have been the "rapists," anyway.

Yet, the charges stayed live for a year even though they had thoroughly been debunked by the attorneys and by outside experts who saw the "evidence" for what it was: a sham. But because of political considerations and because of the feminist ideologies driving the charges, the case very well could have gone to trial and there very well could have been a conviction.

It is very rare in these kinds of cases that police and prosecutors will look at evidence that does not fit a profile that says you are guilty. That is just the way it is. Don't talk to the police; they only will use your words against you.

Don't Assume the People in the System will be Fair

Americans like to believe that this is a country where fairness and justice reign. That is nonsense, but most people don't discover just how bad things are until they are charged with something they did not do. The American courts will go overboard to convict the innocent, and once there is a conviction, it is almost impossible to have it overturned, as the courts love "finality."

As I noted in a previous post, the immunity that government players have in the justice system also provides perverse incentives for them to lie. After all, prosecutors don't get raises and promotions for "seeking justice." They get raises and promotions for winning.

Chris Arnt believed that he could ride a conviction against Tonya Craft to much higher political office. Despite the fact that he lied in court, suborned perjury, and broke the law with impunity, he still is employed as a prosecutor, going after other people who allegedly have broken the law.

In other words, Arnt paid no legal price for his actions. Whether or not he ever can be elected to public office after his show of dishonesty depends upon how much garbage voters in North Georgia are willing to swallow.

Even though the police will accuse you of "not cooperating," you MUST invoke your Constitutional rights at this point. Trust me when I tell you that neither police nor prosecutors care about your rights and will violate them with impunity if they think they can get away with it.

You have to be responsible to protect yourself, and that means invoking your rights. Don't talk to the police, period.

In Part II, I will write about choosing an attorney. In Part III, I will point out resources you can use to help defend yourself.

NOTE: Good news from North Carolina. A federal judge has ruled that the lawsuits filed by various Duke lacrosse players against Duke University, Durham, and Mike Nifong can proceed. If Duke and Durham lose on appeal, I suspect that the defendants will settle quickly with the plaintiffs.

How far should prosecutorial immunity go? Apprently, SCOTUS believes into infinity. Or, Liability for Thee, but not for Me!

Because this blog deals with prosecutorial misconduct, the issue of immunity is front-and-center. Years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled that judges and prosecutors have absolute immunity from civil action, which means that for the most part, they are not liable for pursuing wrongful convictions.

Because the various state bars are very, very reluctant to discipline prosecutors, the typical prosecutor knows he or she pretty much is invulnerable. Yes, they can be criminally prosecuted, but no prosecutor in the history of this country ever has been convicted of criminal malfeasance for conduct in the "line of duty," even though it has been obvious that at least in some cases, the criminal behavior was deliberate and cold. Thus, armed with that knowledge, a prosecutor knows that he or she does not operate with the same set of personal restrictions that hold back the worst behavior in other occupations.

The SCOTUS ruled in the Imbler v. Pachtman case (1976) that district attorneys or prosecutors were found to have full immunity from civil suits resulting from their government duties. Unlike the qualified immunity that was given to many public officials, the justices reasoned that while a wrongly-charged defendant would not be able to seek legal satisfaction against a prosecutor who engaged in outrageous conduct, nonetheless the immunity would better fit a broad "social good" as the court saw it.

Obviously, the court opened a huge can of worms, as it basically said that as long as a prosecutor can claim he or she was doing something within the scope of prosecutorial duties, then that person cannot be sued, even if he or she deliberately withheld evidence. Furthermore, the SCOTUS declared that

alternative sanctions to civil lawsuits against prosecutors were available to deter a prosecutor’s malicious and dishonest behavior. Indeed, the availability of bringing criminal charges against a prosecutor, as well as the availability of professional discipline by bar associations, would “not leave the public powerless.” “These checks,” said the Court, “undermine the argument that the imposition of civil liability is the only way to insure that prosecutors are mindful of the constitutional rights of persons accused of crime.”

People who saw that decision as overreaching had some hope in a case Pottawattamie County v. McGhee in which prosecutors clearly framed innocent people for a murder. In fact, prosecutors claimed in their defense the following outrageous statement: there is no constitutional "right not to be framed.” That's right; prosecutors were claiming that even if they framed someone, that was OK, as the Constitution does not forbid it.

Unfortunately, the case was settled before the Supremes could rule on it. However, they gave what I hold to be a partial answer in Connick v. Thompson, declaring that the DA's office of New Orleans Parish could not be held liable for failure of its prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence. In other words, the SCOTUS ruled that violation of the Brady Rule inferred no particular responsibility upon the people who were responsible for violating it.

Keep in mind that most readers of this post are not prosecutors, nor are public officials. That means that the laws regarding liability are imposed differently upon them than upon those who are sworn to uphold the law and who hold special powers in bringing people to trial. The people with greater responsibility have less liability than everyone else.

If that seems to be an outrage, that is because it IS an outrage. What SCOTUS has done once again is to declare that prosecutors are a special class of people who, de facto, do not have to obey the law. And, guess what? There are lots of prosecutors who take advantage of that privilege and, surprise, surprise, violate the law with impunity.

The Rule of Law is supposed to mean just that: rule of law. A nation that has Rule of People Who Do Whatever They Want cannot survive as a decent society.