William L. Anderson

Apologies for not posting this week

2012-02-11T11:30:00.001-05:00

Things have been overwhelming recently with work and other things. I apologize for not having any posts the past three weeks, but I do have some things in the works. Thank you for your patience.

"They are just doing their jobs"

2012-01-19T10:12:00.000-05:00

As posted earlier, when I spoke to a representative of the Georgia State Bar about the conduct of Christopher Arnt and Len Gregor during the Tonya Craft trial, she blew off what I was saying with the flip comment, "They're just doing their jobs."

When I asked if "doing their jobs" included lying to jurors, suborning perjury, fabricating documents, and general misconduct, she hung up on me. After all, the Georgia State Bar has to protect privileged wrongdoers. (The Bar is great about going after private attorneys in small practices, people who have no real political constituency. Prosecutors are a protected class, however, and the Georgia State Bar will go to all lengths to protect them, no matter how many crimes prosecutors commit and how many innocent people go to prison.)

Unfortunately, the State of Georgia hardly is alone in protecting criminal behavior on behalf of prosecutors. The National Law Journal reports a most disturbing trend with state bars all over the country:

A report issued Monday by the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University School of Law found that of the 707 cases between 1997 and 2009 in which courts explicitly determined that prosecutors had committed misconduct, only six prosecutors -- 0.8 percent -- were disciplined by the State Bar of California. Sixty-seven prosecutors committed misconduct more than once and some as many as five times. The majority of those prosecutors were never publicly disciplined, the project said.

We are not dealing with naive behavior by state bars, but rather willfulness. As I see it, the state bars across the country are sending a clear message to everyone else: Prosecutors are to be protected at all costs, and if one of those costs is thousands of wrongful convictions and the destruction of law that comes with prosecutorial abuse, then so be it. The profession is above the law.

I would challenge ANYONE on ANY state bar in this country to tell me that what I am saying is wrong. Yes, they will spare no expense going after a crappy lawyer who rips off clients, lawyers that have no moneyed constituency behind them, but if my experience with the Georgia State Bar is typical of what happens in the USA, the state bars will do ANYTHING to protect politically-connected people from facing any consequences.

As I said in my interview with Lew Rockwell, the prosecutors have "captured" the "justice" system, and we can see the sorry results.

My interview with Lew Rockwell on prosecutorial misconduct

2012-01-18T10:44:00.000-05:00

My recent interview with Lew Rockwell on prosecutorial misconduct in this country is available here. You will find a number of themes that have been consistent in this blog.

Amerika, Obama, and Eric the Unjust

2012-01-17T11:38:00.002-05:00

To get a sense of what has happened to the "law" in the United States, and especially federal criminal law, the federal persecution of marine biologist Nancy Black tells us what we need to know about what is happening to the innocent. And shame on the federal grand jury that indicted her.

According to the story in The Economist:

ONE of the unforgettable experiences to be had in California is to go whale watching in Monterey Bay. Nancy Black, a licensed marine biologist, is one of the scientists who lead these commercial outings, besides doing her own whale research. As Lawrence Biegel, her lawyer, tells it, one day Ms Black was in her research boat with assistants when killer whales attacked a pod of grey whales and killed a calf. Its blubber floated to the surface, and the killer whales were about to feed on it. Seizing this opportunity to film their behaviour, Ms Black threaded ropes through some pieces of blubber, then lowered a camera underwater.

The government of Barack Obama and the Department of (In)Justice led by Mr. Perjury Himself, Eric Holder, had this response:

For this, Ms Black might now face up to 20 years in prison and half a million dollars in fines, after a federal grand jury indicted her this month. Little about the charges makes common sense. The federal law in question is the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, which was intended to save dolphins, seals and whales from being killed and harassed. The law also banned feeding these animals, on the theory that doing so might compromise their ability to forage naturally in future. Feeding is what Ms Black is now accused of. She says she was using the protocols she had learned from the federal agencies that are now investigating her to observe a natural feeding that was already in progress.

Just as ridiculous, says Mr Biegel, is the accusation, increasingly common in federal cases, that Ms Black lied to the authorities, which carries its own prison terms. Ms Black always edits the commercial videos of her whale outings to make them more interesting. When investigators demanded footage, she gave them one of these edited videos. Prosecutors now claim that she had tampered with evidence.

So, Ms. Black cooperated with investigators who then decided to interpret an edited film as "tampering with evidence" and "lying to investigators," which is an extreme way of looking at things. For doing these things, an innocent person might go to prison for 20 years, given how federal juries are nothing but lapdogs of federal prosecutors.

Now, how do Obama and Holder deal with federal employees who actually commit real crimes? Oh, they give their com-padres a slap on the wrist. Here are TSA agents who STOLE $40,000 from passengers and what do they get? A few months in jail.

At least we know how Obama and Holder look at crime. Real crime is overlooked and real criminals get a slap on the wrist, but when it comes to a marine biologist who has committed no crime, they want to put her away for two decades.

Now, in their defense, it was not Obama and Holder who did away with the mens rea portion of federal criminal law. No, that was the Supreme Court of Earl Warren and William O. Douglas, both of whom are revered by "Progressives" who believed that the ancient Anglo-American view of criminal law -- that someone must inflict real harm upon individuals or their property -- should be discarded and be replaced by rules that would reflect "the public good." Of course, "Progressives" would be the sole creators of what would be in the "public good" or not.

Harvey Silverglate, who has been a mentor to me for many years, has written a great book Three Felonies a Day and notes that many federal laws are vague and are easily manipulated by prosecutors. Furthermore, because the laws themselves are unclear, juries are forced to INTERPRET the laws as opposed to their historical duties of (1) knowing that a crime has been committed and (2) determining whether or not the defendant committed the crime.

Unfortunately, much of federal law consists of prosecutors charging people with a series of complicated and wordy charges and then leaving it up to the juries to determine if the law even was broken. Under such circumstances, jurors often conclude that if someone has been charged, then that should be proof of guilt.

There is a reason that the USA leads the world in incarceration. This country has some of the harshest laws on the planet and some of the world's worst prosecutors. And it is sad to see the former Constitutional Law professor Barack Obama and Eric Holder carry on that sorry tradition.

Sintija now officially is an Anderson!

2012-01-09T17:21:00.002-05:00

A Latvian court today granted our adoption petition for Sintija, so she now officially is our daughter! Johanna and Sintija are in Latvia this week and will return to the USA on Thursday and come home on Friday.

They will travel back to Latvia in about a month to obtain the permanent resident visa from the U.S. Embassy, and then we will go about doing the re-adoption here in Maryland.

This is a wonderful day, and we are thankful to all of you who have supported us.

RIP Carola Jacobson

2012-01-09T07:44:00.000-05:00

I have sad news to report: Carola Jacobson, a truly wonderful woman and a mother who stood alone against the Maricopa County Mafia, has succumbed to breast cancer, dying on December 30. Her memorial service is today in Phoenix.

This blog became involved with Carola and the case involving her son (then 14) in the fall of 2010. At the time, her son was accused of some very fanciful charges of having orchestrated several hours of sex play between two young children, and he was being held in juvenile detention.

As Kerwyn and I began to look at the charges, the conduct of police and prosecutors, and the circumstances around which the events supposedly took place, both of us came to understand that what the authorities were alleging were the facts actually were things that could not have happened at all. For example, they claimed that the boy somehow coerced neighborhood children to go into the passively-ventilated and unfinished attic in his Phoenix home in June 2010 and spend several hours during two different days, despite the fact that these acts would have had to have taken place in temperatures upward of 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

The fact that such actions would have created noticeable effects that no one ever observed (because they did not happen) did not faze Phoenix police and Maricopa County prosecutors. They had their narrative, and even though it had been proven wrong, they were going to stick with it at all costs. And the cost was the life of Carola Jacobson.

Last April, I had this post on how Maricopa County officials literally were murdering Carola, and how she had to stop her cancer treatments in order to pay her son's legal bills. Prosecutors knew this and they also knew they had no case, but continued on simply because Maricopa County has a policy that once prosecutors file a case, they do not let actual innocence stand in the way of pursuing it.

You see, according to Maricopa County prosecutors, if a person is charged, that is proof of guilt, and even if the facts show otherwise, the person still is guilty because there are criminal charges. Furthermore, prosecutors there go by the policy that once charges are filed, they MUST get at least a guilty plea to SOMETHING, even if everyone knows that "something" never happened.

In the Jacobson situation, the boy finally agreed to plead to one charge of "disturbing the peace" in order to have the other charges dropped, providing he passed a polygraph and have a psychologist say he was not a danger to the community. However, even after both of those conditions were met, prosecutors STILL were trying to pursue the case simply out of spite.

Why do prosecutors act this way? The logic is perverse, but perversity is the order of the day in American "law enforcement." Prosecutors claim that if it is discovered that they have charged innocent people with crimes that never occurred, the public will "lose confidence" in the ability of prosecutors to do their duties.

Therefore, they argue, it is important that they keep public confidence, so they must pursue wrongly-charged people anyway because if they were to admit they were wrong, the public would lose confidence in them. Get it? Thus, their unwritten rule of not dropping charges even when everyone -- including them -- know they are false. After all, prosecutors openly declared in the infamous Pottawattamie case that: "There is no freestanding constitutional right not to be framed." (emphasis added).

It takes a while to let that one soak in. Prosecutors in this country openly have declared that they have the RIGHT to "frame" people, and that doing so does not violate the rights of innocent people. If that does not infuriate readers, then nothing will.

I content that Maricopa County officials knew exactly what they were doing when they drove Carola Jacobson to an early death. They knew she needed cancer treatments, and by increasing her stress and by forcing her to choose between her son's freedom and medical care, she would choose her son -- and die in the process.

No one in the Maricopa County prosecutors' office will face any sanctions for this outrageous and evil behavior. It is business as usual in Arizona and in the United States of America. If I seem angry, it is because I am.

Rest in peace, Carola. You came to this country not knowing that its "justice" system is a sham and that vengeful and dishonest people would try to destroy you, and I wish I could apologize on behalf of others in this country, but somehow I doubt that will do any good.

Why do things like this make me suspicious?

2012-01-05T12:08:00.000-05:00

A recent death at the Dade County Jail, ostensibly by suicide, is one of those things that makes me suspicious. According to the Times-Free Press:

A Dade County, Ga., inmate was found dead in his cell 14 minutes after being jailed for driving under the influence of alcohol, authorities said.

A detention officer found Joseph Cochran, 29, dead at 4:40 Tuesday morning, Sheriff Patrick Cannon said. Authorities believe Cochran used his thermal underwear to hang himself, Cannon said.

Cochran had been arrested earlier in the morning and charged with DUI. He was in the holding cell when he was found, Cannon said.

“It’s a sad situation,” the sheriff said.

At least that is the story readers are told. And maybe it is true. Perhaps Cochran was so depressed about many things, including his arrest, that he just snapped and killed himself. We never will know.

Yet, this is Dade County, the place where Brad Wade was convicted after what essentially was a crooked trial in which Len "The Man" Gregor withheld evidence, lied to jurors, suborned perjury and gave the world a look at how he later would act in the Tonya Craft trial, which was just as crooked. This is Dade County, where "judge" brian outhouse resides in the judge's chair, and his exploits of operating his office outside of the bounds of the law already have been laid out in this blog.

Again, maybe the story that Dade County officials are telling is the truth and things transpired just as they claim. However, given that the "law enforcement" mechanism in that county -- and in the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit in general -- operates almost completely outside the law, I reserve the right to be skeptical, very skeptical.

My tribute to Siobhan Reynolds

2011-12-30T12:37:00.001-05:00

The attractive, diminutive woman who drove into my driveway on the last Saturday in October hardly looked to be the person that federal authorities desperately were trying to find a way to throw into prison. Her lovely eyes had a sparkle in them, and she hardly looked to be a threat to the life and liberty of anyone.

Yet, here was a woman coming into my home who was being targeted by the feds because she had the audacity to openly question the Drug War in general and the government’s war on people taking pain medications and the doctors that prescribe them. There is one thing that federal prosecutors and judges hate, and that is anyone who openly says that they are doing something that is immoral is a threat that cannot be ignored.

Our visit was short, unfortunately, because of family business, and I would have loved for this visit to have gone on for hours. But, it ultimately ended, and she and her son got back into the car and drove to her home in Ohio. I never would see her again, as she died Christmas Eve in a small plane crash near Circleville, Ohio.

Even now, it is hard to believe she is gone, and for the many people she helped and befriended, their loss is incalculable. Siobhan Reynolds was a vital person in the lives of many because she was one of the few people in this country who was willing to stand up and openly support drug-based relief for the millions of people in the United States who suffer from debilitating pain.

Federal officials, and especially those whose careers are tied directly to the Drug War and to the prosecutions of doctors that write prescriptions for pain medications, would disagree with my assertions that Reynolds was a hero, and I am sure that more than a few of them are happy that she no longer lives. (And, no, I don’t believe that the feds were responsible for the crash, as it seems to have been an error by the pilot, who crashed short of the airport runway.)

Even though Reynolds had committed no crime (except for having the effrontery of publicly questioning the validity of a federal prosecutor’s case), she was the victim of an ongoing federal grand jury probe into her life and into a pain patient advocacy group, the Pain Relief Network, that she once ran and the feds forced into bankruptcy through vindictive fines. The worst thing about the government’s faux “investigation,” however, was that it was done under the color of “government secrecy” in which legal experts agreed that federal prosecutor Tanya Treadway utterly abused the grand jury process.

How she got to that point in her life where the government was trying to destroy her is an important story in itself, and one that I shall tell here. In the beginning, Siobhan Reynolds was not an activist and certainly not an activist who bravely would challenge federal prosecutors who are used to having no accountability at all, least of all from lowly citizens who might deem themselves “worthy” to question the veracity and tactics of those who abuse the law.

Reynolds had a husband, Sean, who had a serious health problem, a congenital connective tissue disorder that left him with debilitating pain in his joints. Like so many others in the USA who suffer from severe chronic pain, he was unable to receive adequate medical relief because the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, not doctors, determine what is a “legitimate medical purpose” for prescribing of opioids for pain. However, Siobhan’s husband finally found a physician, Dr. William Hurwitz, a doctor in Northern Virginia, who was willing to write prescriptions for higher doses of pain-killers.

The higher doses worked, and for the first time in years, Siobhan’s husband was able to function at a much more normal level, but such satisfactory results were anathema to the nation’s drug warriors, and especially to U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty, the Religious Right federal prosecutor who might have publicly proclaimed his Christian beliefs, but did not carry them to his line of work.

I have detailed McNulty’s escapades in this earlier article, including what he did to Dr. Hurwitz, but the smarminess of what McNulty did bears repeating. First, in violation of the Rules of Conduct both of the Federal Bar and the Virginia Bar, McNulty made a number of inflammatory pre-trial statements about Dr. Hurwitz, likening him to a drug “kingpin,” and calling his office a “pill mill.” The Beltway media, of course, lapped up McNulty’s missives, thus ensuring that it would be almost impossible for Dr. Hurwitz to receive a fair trial. Radley Balko writes:

The judge acknowledged that Hurwitz ran a legitimate practice and had likely saved and improved the lives of countless people. His crime was not recognizing that some of his patients were addicts and dealers.

McNulty got his cherished conviction in federal court, but not before appealing to the DEA to withdraw the agency’s new policies on how doctors should determine doses for pain-killers. (The Hurwitz defense was going to use the new DEA policies to demonstrate he was operating within government guidelines, something the “win-at-all-costs” McNulty could not stand.)

(McNulty ultimately used this and other such cases to rocket his career to the number two position in the U.S. Department of Justice. He held that position until he was forced to resign after making “false statements” to Congress about the firing of a number of U.S. attorneys. Enjoying that legal double standard reserved for federal officials, McNulty did not have to endure any legal consequences for not telling the truth while under oath. Instead, he went to an international law firm and now is a very wealthy man.)

Dr. Hurwitz, his life and medical practice shattered, his family destroyed, and his future in prison, was not the only victim of McNulty’s viciousness. (While in prison, Dr. Hurwitz developed an eye disorder, and because of the lack of decent medical care provided for federal inmates, he became blind in one eye.) Patients suffering from chronic pain – people who at best McNulty considered to be “collateral damage” – found themselves in a desperate situation. The Hurwitz prosecution not only kept him from writing prescriptions, but other doctors did not want to experience the same fate and refused to adequately treat certain patients for pain.

One of the side effects of chronic pain is high blood pressure, and ultimately Siobhan’s husband succumbed to the pain and other effects and died. (When I introduced my wife to Siobhan, I said that Paul McNulty killed her husband – and I meant every word.) Reynolds did not go quietly, however, and started her organization, PRN, to help educate doctors about pain medications and also to serve as a resource for attorneys representing doctors being prosecuted for writing pain prescriptions that the government claimed “served no medical purpose.”

When someone challenges America’s prosecutorial police state, the authorities take notice, and Reynolds soon was in the feds’ sights. Keep in mind that Reynolds was trying to stay within the bounds of acceptable medical care and to be an advocate for people suffering chronic pain, but the feds were not interested in what might be true. Instead, they only were (and are) interested in throwing as many people into prison and destroying as many lives as possible, all while posing as the “good guys.”

In a recent article, Lew Rockwell accurately depicted what is going on with federal criminal law in which government agents can target whom they please and simply make the person disappear, all under “color of law.” He writes:

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.

Indeed, that is what happened to William Hurwitz and a large number of other doctors who committed the “crime” of believing their patients when they said they were in pain. There were no kickbacks for them, no under-the-table payments, no relations with drug dealers. And none of that matters.

McNulty and other federal prosecutors, with the help of federal judges who constantly have ruled in favor of the feds ever since the Progressive Era, have effectively destroyed the historical Anglo-American legal doctrine of mens rea, which is defined as: an element of criminal responsibility, a guilty mind; a guilty or wrongful purpose; a criminal intent. Guilty knowledge and wilfulness. One can understand why a “win-at-all-costs” prosecutor would want mens rea eviscerated, as the elimination of this doctrine would mean that more individuals could be caught in the snare of a prosecutorial witch hunt.

(One of the ironies here is that although McNulty made sure that the mens rea standard did not apply to people he prosecuted, he was given a free pass after giving Congress false statements because he claimed he had been “out of the loop” and did not realize that some of his comments were false. In other words, “Mens rea for me, but not for thee.”)

To make matters worse, federal prosecutors have agitated for years for Congress and the courts to ensure that many laws are as vague as possible, so that a person would not have clear boundaries within which to act. For example, insider trading law has been written in an intentionally-confusing manner in which there is no “statutory definition” of insider trading. This is a plus for prosecutors because they can target people who never can be sure if they are breaking the law or not.

This means that federal juries are left in the unenviable position of having to determine whether or not the law was broken in the first place, something jurors simply are no equipped to do. In the situation of writing pain-medication prescriptions that, according to the government, “have no medical purpose,” there is no law or no outright policy that is clear, which leaves doctors always wondering if they are next to be prosecuted, and places prosecutors in the driver’s seat.

Federal prosecutors are free to demonize doctors publicly, call them “drug dealers” or operators of “pill mills,” and their statements NEVER are scrutinized in the mainstream media. The doctor is guilty even before the trial begins, and even if a physician is acquitted, federal agencies effectively can ruin the person’s reputation and career. Furthermore, as the federal Reign of Terror expands, doctors protect themselves by writing as few pain prescriptions as they can in hopes of avoiding the federal “Eye of Sauron.”

That thousands of people are unable to gain relief is of no consequence to federal officials, who are interested only in convicting as many people as possible, which then is a boost to careerist prosecutors and government agents. These are people who literally advance their own pay, benefits, and power upon the backs of doctors and their patients, and in the case of Siobhan’s husband, the results were fatal.

(Not that Paul McNulty or any of his other prosecutorial minions cared what happened to Sean Reynolds or his widow and their child. These are people who enjoy inflicting trauma upon others and who love to exercise their absolute powers, knowing that no matter how dishonest or outrageous their conduct might be, they never have to fear being punished for their own lawbreaking, as the Congress and the federal courts have granted them “total immunity.”)

Reynolds was a godsend not only to patients and their families, but also to doctors and their loved ones who were watching the Paul McNultys of the world unjustly turn their lives upside down. She became involved in a number of such cases elsewhere in the country, helping some doctors to be acquitted and watching others lose at trial and go to prison.

Helping people defend themselves against federal prosecutors and vague laws is a sure way to attract the enmity of the State, and after she became involved in a case against a doctor and his wife in Kansas, the State struck back. U.S. Attorney Tanya Treadway opened an “obstruction of justice” investigation against Reynolds, destroying the Pain Relief Network in the process. To make matters worse, Treadway was able to convince the courts (which don’t need much convincing when federal prosecutors wish to abuse innocent people) to make the entire process secret, including any statements from Reynolds herself.

Grand jury secrecy is supposed to protect people being investigated, but in this situation, Treadway was able to use secrecy to protect herself and to destroy Reynolds, and the courts up to the U.S. Supreme Court agreed that secrecy was fine with them, which a former federal prosecutor says is an utter abuse of the grand jury. The tactics worked, and not only was Siobhan forced to shut down the Pain Relief Network, but she also was facing the possibility of contrived criminal charges up until the moment of her death.

There are many things that we can learn from the life and death of Siobhan Reynolds. Surely one of the worst things is that in the United States of America, federal prosecutors nearly are invincible, not because of any good that they do, but rather because they have become a law unto themselves. We also have learned that the State bows to no one, and that right and wrong are not standards at all because the State always is right, even when it is wrong.

Yet, we also can know that in our midst, there are people who are willing to stand up and be counted, and Siobhan Reynolds was one of them. She was a great person and her legacy goes on even though she no longer walks among us. Hers is a legacy of integrity and courage and that is the best lesson of all.

Sad news: Siobhan Reynolds has been killed in a plane crash

2011-12-26T10:21:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite people, Siobhan Reynolds, who was a voice of sanity in the insanity of the Drug War and especially the government's war on doctors and pain medications, has died in a plane crash. The account is here, and Radley Balko's tribute to her is here.

Siobhan and her son came by our place in Finzel two months ago for a brief visit. She was a most lovely woman and someone I admired greatly. This is a real blow, and I shall miss her very much.

Martez Mitchell conviction shows what is wrong with federal criminal law

2011-12-14T18:45:00.001-05:00

Former Tyner High School football star Martez Mitchell recently was convicted in federal court in Chattanooga for, according to The Chattanoogan, "drug trafficking and using a gun in connection with drug trafficking." He faces five years for each charge, and the sentences, according to federal law, must run consecutively.

While I doubt that most people will give this a second look, I read the article all the way through because I was curious about the second charge. Did he actually point a gun at someone during a drug trade? Was he uttering threats while waving a gun?

It turns out that the gun was in the house where he lived, and police and federal agents never demonstrated in court that he used the gun to facilitate the selling of marijuana. In other words, "using a gun in connection with drug trafficking," is one of those legal technicalities that the feds use when they want to pile up years in prison on someone.

I will put it another way: the law lies. It is one thing if a person uses a gun to threaten someone else with death in order to make that person hand over money or property or to do something else; it is quite another when the presence of a gun in another room is used as "proof" of "using a gun."

Unfortunately, federal law is full of such technicalities that empower federal prosecutors but undermine the Rule of Law. For example, if Joe were to sell a small amount of marijuana to an undercover officer, and Joe also had an unloaded gun locked in the trunk of his car nearby, the same "using a gun" charge also would be applied to him.

That is correct. Under federal law, one does not have to use a gun to be charged with using a gun. Just another example of how the government turns the law into a lie.

I also would like to say that the jurors should be ashamed of themselves for going along with such a bogus charge in the first place. I'm sure that Judge Curtis Collier explained how the law worked, but jurors did not have to listen to him, and they certainly did not have to listen to prosecutors.

As I see it, a "judge" who goes along with this kind of charade is not a judge at all, but rather is nothing more than a shill for bad federal rules. I don't know much about Collier, but this case does not give me any confidence in his dedication to justice.

New evidence for murder? Why do I have my doubts?

2011-12-12T15:23:00.001-05:00

It seems as though the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit is gearing up for yet another trial in which prosecutors try to "prove" what they cannot prove honestly. They did it with Tonya Craft in 2010, they want to do it with James Combs, and now Dale Higgenbottom is in the dock.

The December 11 story in the Times-Free Press lays out the actual case in which Catoosa County authorities now are claiming that Higgenbottom murdered an infant named Christopher Breazeale in 1992. While I cannot claim to know if the charges are true, nonetheless the fact that Buzz Franklin's office is bringing them without revealing any new evidence is beyond troubling.

The first question I have, however, is this: Why does Vickie Scoggins have any say in this at all? This is the same Vickie Scoggins who swore up and down that the charges against Tonya Craft absolutely were true, the same Vickie Scoggins who worked closely with prosecutors Chris Arnt and Len Gregor and helped them to suborn perjury and went along with their lies.

Given the reprehensible and utterly dishonest conduct of Franklin's office all during the Craft case -- from before and during the trial -- one should question ANYTHING that these people do. Arnt could not even keep himself from lying to jurors in closing arguments, telling the Craft jury that Dr. Nancy Fajman had diagnosed injuries to one of the girls that had been caused by sexual abuse.

That Dr. Fajman had said exactly the opposite -- something that Arnt knew -- should tell us what we need to know about Buzz Franklin and people who work for him. Arnt and Gregor should have been disbarred for what they did during that trial and criminal charges filed against both of them. However, given that the "justice" system in the State of Georgia is run by, well, criminals, I guess that the Criminals In Charge decided to let criminal activity of their own get a free pass out of professional courtesy.

Now, neither Arnt nor Gregor will be prosecuting the Higgenbottom case. No, that has fallen to Alan Norton, who also is prosecuting the bogus case against James Combs. Because Norton works for Franklin and because he was the prosecutor against Eric Echols in which Norton was prepared to lie to jurors about what actually had occurred when Mr. Echols delivered some court papers to Sandra "Mommie Dearest" Lamb, I am not prepared to give him any benefit of the doubt. Which leads to my second question: Just what is this "new evidence" that Norton claims to have?

Let us keep some things in perspective here. First, "new evidence" with Franklin's people generally consists of those things the ancients once called lies. Remember the "new evidence" that Joal and Sarah Henke brought to the Craft trial? Yeah, both of them "just remembered" stuff that was 180 degrees from testimony they had given under oath a year before.

Gregor and Arnt were quick to use this "I just remembered" and "judge" brian outhouse was quick to give it his stamp of approval, even though all of them knew that the Henkes were lying. Observers in the courtroom were able to witness Arnt, Gregor, and outhouse commit a number of felonies by their bringing in the Henkes and their transparently dishonest testimony. Yes, suborning perjury in Georgia is a crime, although the authorities don't pursue it because if they did, there would be no prosecutors left to bring cases to trial in Georgia. Furthermore, because Gregor, Arnt, and outhouse had a number of illegal secret meetings before and during the trial to plan strategy, they participated in criminal conspiracy.

From what I can tell, Norton is going to have to fabricate something in the Higgenbottom case or suborn perjury. However, given that he works with Arnt and Gregor, I am sure that they have given him plenty of pointers on how to lie and break the law -- and not indict himself. According to the article in the TFP:

Alan Norton, a prosecutor from the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit, said prosecutors are going to have to build their case by explaining what new evidence justifies bringing charges 19 years after the fact.

But he wouldn't say what new evidence they have.

Court documents filed by Higgenbottom's attorney say the state didn't preserve vital evidence -- X-ray photographs, original autopsy photographs and physical specimens -- and that the case is too cold to prosecute.

They also want to know why, if a caseworker had such strong suspicions about Christopher's death, the state waited 192 months to do anything about it.

Indeed, I also am suspicious. First, there are no "Perry Mason moments" in criminal court, even though outhouse tried to pull off something by letting in Joal Henke's "I just remembered" testimony and also allowing an obviously-fabricated document to be entered into evidence. If the prosecution has something, by law it MUST be shared with the defense, and that includes "new evidence."

Second, we are dealing with prosecutors and judges in North Georgia that long ago decided that they could make up the law as they go along, and that they had absolute power. Grand juries in that circuit will indict anything, as I doubt that anyone serving on those bodies actually has a clue about the law.

I have no idea what happened in the death of Christopher Breazeale -- and neither do Vickie Scoggins nor Alan Norton. That is why I have no doubt that unless there really is "new evidence" and a real-live smoking gun, Norton and his people will make it up as they go along and hope that jurors in the case are not as wise to their tactics as were the Tonya Craft jurors.

The Judge DID order prosecutors to give up exculpatory evidence in the Stevens trial

2011-12-03T09:12:00.000-05:00

In a recent post and in an article in Lewrockwell.com, I noted that the special prosecutor had recommended that prosecutors NOT be charged with criminal contempt because the trial judge supposedly did not order prosecutors to turn over exculpatory material to the defense.

However, Jim Morhard, a former Senate Appropriations Committee chief of staff, writes in the Wall Street Journal that as someone who attended the trial regularly, he observed that "Judge (Emmet) Sullivan continually direct(ed) the prosecution to reveal exculpatory evidence to the defense after they had been caught repeatedly not doing so." In other words, Sullivan DID order the prosecutors to obey the law and prosecutors openly and arrogantly refused to do so.

Special Prosecutor Henry F. Schuelke III did leave open the possibility of charging the Stevens prosecutors with "obstruction of justice," but I doubt seriously that the Department of Justice (sic) will charge its own, especially since their actions paved the way for the Democrats to have the filibuster-proof 60 members in the U.S. Senate, which was crucial for President Barack Obama to push through much of his legislative agenda during a two-year window, including "Obamacare." With prosecutors doing important dirty work for the Democratic Party, I don't think that they will be punished for doing what prosecutors everywhere do.

Furthermore, if prosecutors in the Stevens case are charged with any crimes, one can bet that their defense will be based upon the "everybody does it" line, and a lot of outright criminal dirty laundry will be aired in the courtroom, and if there is anything government bureaucrats don't like, it is having their evil and illegal deeds exposed. No, I am sure that the DOJ will announce that while the prosecutors behaved badly and that they have been "punished" internally, the government believes that pursuing criminal charges will be "counterproductive" and that the individuals "have been punished enough" by having their reputations tarnished.

To put it another way, the government is going to argue that while its crack prosecution team broke the law like other "criminals" in this country, prosecutors are of a very sensitive and honest lot and simply shaming them is all that is needed. However, for those people who are not employed by the DO(In)J, you don't have the privilege of breaking the law and staying out of trouble. In fact, you don't even have to break the law in order to go to prison, as federal prosecutors are masters at taking legal actions and turning them in to "crimes."

Yes, the feds have created a tyrannical prosecutorial state

2011-11-30T23:10:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-21T17:34:00.001-05:00

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.

"Five Hebrew Love Songs" by the Salt Lake Choral Artists

2011-11-21T11:12:00.001-05:00

This is an exquisite rendition of Eric Whitacre's "Five Hebrew Love Songs," sung by the Salt Lake Choral Artists. I think the piece speaks for itself.

Have a wonderful week! I will post later.

The Valerie Carlton Case...Again

2011-11-17T22:41:00.000-05:00

In 2010, I wrote a number of posts regarding the false charges against Valerie Carlton in Harford County, Maryland, home of the infamous prosecutor Joseph Casilly, who once tried to have a man put into prison for 15 years because he had the audacity to film a cop sticking a gun in his face.

When faced with the reality that Carlton was not guilty of child molestation, Casilly suddenly dropped the charges (after holding Carlton in jail for 13 months), but kept a misdemeanor charge against her for "assaulting a prison guard." Unfortunately, she recently was arrested in New York, which is trying to extradite her to Maryland to stand trial for this misdemeanor.

The video of the alleged assault is shown in this link, but although the images that I saw were not very clear, it is clear that if anyone is being assaulted in this video, it is Carlton, not the guard. (I must admit that I was brought up in an era that men who physically attacked women -- and especially women smaller than them -- were considered to be utter scum. Today, police beat up women all the time and are called "heroes.")

This is a very, very disturbing case on many levels. First, Casilly piled up 28 felony charges against Carlton, having her held on $10 million bond, and then he suddenly dropped all of them, which tells me that he had no evidence at the beginning and simply lied to a judge and grand jury. Second, while she was in jail, Casilly made sure her child was taken away from her and put into foster care. The child then died while in foster care, and this account explains how Casilly made sure that the officials at the Harford County Detention Center furthered the psychological torture of this woman:

Valerie was informed of her baby's death while she was in jail, but the prosecutor arranged that the Chaplain was not permitted to perform this duty; instead it was done by an employee of the Sheriff's office who brutally announced that the baby was dead, and then had Valerie strapped into a medieval torture de!=vice, called a "restraint chair," so that she choked on her own mucus as she wept and tried to pray for her dead baby. The Sheriff's department claimed, in writing, that Valerie was "talking in tongues" because she was praying in Hebrew. An employee of the Sheriff's Department apparently told this nonsense to the ex-husband's family, who spread the rumor that Valerie was insane because of the way she responded to the death of her baby.

So, as you can see, this case is far from over. Once again, we see a prosecutor who knows he will face no sanctions in Maryland for his misconduct. We also see the system turned in its full fury against someone who is not a criminal.

Like it or not, this is the country in which we live, and from what I can see, Americans are quite happy to accept what is happening -- as long as it happens to someone else and not themselves.

Harvey Silverglate on the Thompson decision

2011-11-17T15:41:00.000-05:00

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.

My recent LRC article on the Penn State mess

2011-11-12T10:34:00.000-05:00

Here is a piece I had on Lew Rockwell's site in which I criticize Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly. I don't expect agreement from readers, but nonetheless I do believe that Kelly has turned this thing into something out of control.

As I see it, there is no chance whatsoever of Sandusky being able to receive a fair trial (which I suspect was part of Kelly's plan), and by seeking questionable indictments and making inflammatory statements, she has made things much worse than they should have been.

Jerry Sandusky: Why I believe police have a strong case against him

2011-11-08T08:36:00.000-05:00

Last April, I posted about the investigation into retired Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky's alleged sexual abuse of young boys. Last weekend, the other shoe dropped and police arrested Sandusky and charged him with sexual abuse:

Jerry Sandusky, 67, the Penn State defensive coordinator during two of the team’s national championship years before retiring in 1999, was arrested Saturday on charges of sexually abusing eight boys across a 15-year period.

Two top university officials — Gary Schultz, the senior vice president for finance and business, and Tim Curley, the athletic director — were charged with perjury and failure to report to authorities what they knew of the allegations, as required by state law.

This is the result of an investigation that has been going on for a long time. Furthermore, the investigators were not making outrageous statements (unlike what we saw in the Duke Lacrosse Case and the Tonya Craft Case, where in both situations, police and prosecutors lied and made up things as they went along), at least while the investigations were occurring.

Unfortunately, after the arrests, Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly declared that Sandusky was: "a sexual predator who used his position within the university and community to repeatedly prey on young boys." She also declared about the two PSU officials:

It is also a case about high-ranking university officials who allegedly failed to report the sexual assault of a young boy after the information was brought to their attention, and later made false statements to a grand jury.

From what I can tell, the first statement violates the Rules of Conduct of the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court, Rule 3.8(e), while the second, with the word "allegedly," does not. The rule states:

...except for statements that are necessary to inform the public of the nature and extent of the prosecutor's action and that serve a legitimate law enforcement purpose, refrain from making extrajudicial comments that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused and exercise reasonable care to prevent investigators, law enforcement personnel, employees or other persons assisting or associated with the prosecutor in a criminal case from making an extrajudicial statement that the prosecutor would be prohibited from making under Rule 3.6 or this Rule.

In other words, Jerry Sandusky is CHARGED with the crimes; he has not been convicted, and the AG cannot call him a "predator" outright. (Not that this matters, since as a matter of course, prosecutors rarely are punished for breaking Rules of Conduct from their various states, as they have seized control of the judicial system.)

Furthermore, as this Wall Street Journal article points out, neither Curly nor Schultz are what the law calls "first responders" to allegations of child molestation. In other words, claiming that they legally were responsible for reporting Sandusky is something that AG Kelly should NOT be saying, given that she actually is supposed to know Pennsylvania state law on these matters. (However, while you and I are legally supposed to know EVERY LAW in EVERY STATE and the federal government, as well as every single regulation, the courts have exempted judges, prosecutors, and the police from that requirement. I'm not kidding. In other words, we already have legalized tyranny.)

That is why Kelly had the men charged with perjury, as she knew she did not have a legal case against them, but she is going to claim they lied to the grand jury. Using those standards, she could have also charged PSU coach Joe Paterno with crimes, but in so doing would have put herself out on a limb, given Paterno's status not only as the winningest college football coach but also as someone known for following the rules.

As I said last April, the status of Penn State football and the status of the coaches at PSU has served as a braking mechanism for investigators, who usually are more likely to be charging ahead, making outrageous statements, and trying to coerce witnesses. They knew they could not do that in this situation and get away with it, which means they probably did a much more effective job than they normally might have done.

The case against Sandusky, as I noted in the title, seems pretty strong. These paragraphs alone tells me that there are more than just rumors:

At approximately 9:30 p.m. on March 1, 2002, a Penn State graduate assistant entered what should have been an empty football locker room. He was surprised to hear the showers running and noises he thought sounded like sexual activity, according to a Pennsylvania grand jury “finding of fact” released Saturday.

When he looked in the shower he saw what he estimated to be a 10-year-old boy, hands pressed up against the wall, “being subjected to anal intercourse,” by Jerry Sandusky, then 58 and Penn State’s former defensive coordinator. The grad assistant said both the boy and the coach saw him before he fled to his office where, distraught and stunned, the grad assistant telephoned his father, who instructed his son to flee the building.

This isn't Joal Henke testifying to something he "just remembered this morning" about something that clearly was a lie; this is a graduate assistant who probably had dreams of being a college coach allegedly witnessing something that not only was stunningly awful, but also would have been a potential roadblock to his being able to get a job in coaching ranks, given the expressed prohibitions of "ratting out" other coaches. As the article states, he told Paterno, who then says he told PSU athletic director Curly.

Was this the proper course of action? All of the articles (and they are legion), including ones here, here, and here, say that Paterno and Curly should have gone to the police immediately.

As noted earlier, the law is unclear. However, I would like to go a step further and say that given what we have seen in the past regarding how police and prosecutors deal with allegations of child molestation, I also would be hesitant to go to the police unless I knew for certain. There are too many instances in this country in which people who have talked to the police either find themselves in legal trouble or are framed by cops and prosecutors.

In Tonya Craft's situation, it is absolutely clear that Sandra Lamb and Dewayne Wilson worked hand-in-glove with Tim Deal and Chris Arnt to out-and-out frame Craft, and when those entrusted with enforcing the law are most likely to lie, then one cannot trust ANYONE in law enforcement to do the right thing. Let me repeat my point: Police and prosecutors in this country already have proven beyond a doubt that they are untrustworthy and are willing to frame innocent people, so going to the police about anything is a very risky thing.

For all of the chest beating about what Joe Paterno SHOULD have done, I would say that not one of the journalists or other pundits was in his shoes, and to say that he was "covering up" something this awful is not warranted. I have no idea what happened, and neither do they.

That being said, however, I do believe that the police and prosecutors have a strong case. When I first heard the rumors, I thought it might be a situation of parents and children wanting to extort money from Sandusky and his organization, The Second Mile. The account of the grad student, however, changes my opinion.

How this will turn out, I don't know. Journalists always rush to judgment and they always will. However, if the police and prosecutors have the case against Sandusky they claim, then this will have an inevitable conclusion of finding Sandusky guilty. As for Curly and Schultz, I don't know.

I will add this, however. Given that prosecutors -- and this includes Kelly -- often use witnesses they KNOW are lying (and never charged with perjury), it seems like overkill to me to charge these PSU officials with perjury. Prosecutors are willing to use perjury as a tool to help gain wrongful convictions -- that we know for a fact -- and for them to turn around and use it in this way simply is wrong.

Another Texas injustice?

2011-11-03T14:33:00.000-04:00

Texas is known as an enterprise-friendly state and rightly so, but God help anyone moving into that state that is arrested. As Radley Balko writes in the Huffington Post, prosecutors are trying to get Hank Skinner executed before the courts order them to test evidence that could exonerate him of murder.

This is a compelling story, and I think Radley gets it right. Texas prosecutors for years have been able to get away with the worst kind of misconduct (and never receive even a smidgen of punishment) over the years.

And, if one is a judge in Texas, then that is a free pass to beat one's children. The moral of the story is this: do business in Texas, but you might not want to live there.

January 9, 2012: Our court date in Latvia

2011-10-24T09:17:00.000-04:00

We have reached another milestone in our process to adopt Sintija into our family. The court hearing for the Latvian adoption will be held January 9, 2012, in Valka, which is a city on the Estonian border. (Yes, we expect that the Latvian winter, especially in a city above the latitude of Moscow, Russia, will be pretty harsh at that time of year. Kind of like Garrett County.)

If the court approves our adoption, then we will return to the USA with Sintija (who is with us now here in the USA), and then we wait until being notified to return to Latvia in order for Sintija to receive a permanent resident visa from the U.S. Embassy in Riga. After that, we can have the USA re-adoption, and then she legally will be part of our family.

Obviously, Sintija already is part of our family and, more important, part of our hearts.

Johanna will accompany Sintija on both trips to Latvia, and I will remain in the USA to be with our other children.

More Ilgi from Latvia

2011-10-21T12:07:00.000-04:00

In celebration of Sintija's 13th birthday this past week, I am posting more songs from my favorite Latvian group, Ilgi. Sintija is doing very well, and all I can say is there are absolutely no doubts.

The first is "Labvakar, Rudzu Lauks" (Good Evening, Rye Field). There is a beautiful interlude with the Latvian instrument called the kokle at about 2:21.

The second is "Nesmejieti Jūs Ļautiņi," and I could not get a good translation from the Latvian, except that Jūs Ļautiņi means "You Folks."

Texas prosecutor (now a judge) enables a murderer to kill again (while pursuing the wrong suspect)

2011-10-13T22:25:00.000-04:00

It is hard to describe Texas and its system of state-sponsored homicide and its out-of-control prosecutors except to say that prosecutors and judges in the Lone Star State must be taking lessons from Buzz Franklin, Chris "Cruisemaster" Arnt, Len "The Man-Racist" Gregor, and "judge" brian outhouse. However, a former prosecutor who now is a judge, not only engaged in prosecutorial misconduct, but his misconduct virtually guaranteed that a woman would be murdered.

The case centers around the wrongful conviction of a man for murder and, as this article in Forbes demonstrates, by deliberately (yes, deliberately, given the evidence) going after the wrong man, the prosecutor, Ken Anderson -- now Judge Ken Anderson -- made sure that the real murderer was not impeded, and two years later the killer struck again. The article notes:

AUSTIN, Texas -- Caitlin Baker was 3 when her mother, Debra, was beaten to death and left naked in bed in her Austin home. Although the pain of the loss has faded in the 23 years since, her anger that her mother's killer was never caught has not.

Less than two years before that January 1988 slaying, unbeknownst to all but a few people until recently, the mother of another woman bludgeoned to death in bed during an attack at her home about 15 miles away told an investigator that her 3-year-old grandson watched a "monster" do the killing, not his father, as police suspected. She urged him to pursue other leads, but her daughter's husband, Michael Morton, was instead convicted of murder and sentenced to life.

There is much more to this sickening story. In the original case that Anderson prosecuted, there was the usual aspect of the prosecution ignoring evidence that led to another killer. (Like the drunk looking for his keys under a street lamp instead of where he dropped them because the "light is better" under the lamp, Anderson was like most prosecutors in that he went for the easy conviction and the truth be damned.)

Anderson's misdeeds included hiding exculpatory evidence (a favorite tactic of prosecutors throughout this country) and lying (something prosecutors do all the time):

Investigations have been ongoing into the actions (or lack thereof) by the prosecutor in this case because there is reason to believe that evidence which would prove that Morton was innocent was withheld by the district attorney’s office of Williamson County.

The evidence withheld includes: (1) the eyewitness account of Morton’s young son, who said that the killer was not his father; (2) the victim’s Visa card found later at a store in San Antonio; (3) a cashed check, made out to the victim, with an apparent forged endorsement on the back where it was cashed almost two weeks after the homicide; and (4) the bandanna found at the crime scene with DNA evidence on it (which has been the basis of the vacated conviction).

Why did Anderson withhold this crucial evidence? Like any typical prosecutor, he wanted to win and knew that prosecutorial immunity protected him, and once he had focused upon Michael Morton, he wanted to do what he could to pound square pegs into round holes.

So, Morton went to prison where he sat there for 25 years until the courts ordered him to be free. However, this is not a typical story of "new evidence exonerates innocent man." No, it was a case of one of Anderson's successors, Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley who, according to Time Magazine, is "a well-connected ally of Texas Governor Rick Perry" and "who fought tenaciously for six years to keep Morton behind bars."

I'll get back to the Bradley-Perry-Anderson show, but in the meantime, there is even more to this sickening story. Two years after the murder of Morton's wife, another woman, Debra Baker, was murdered in the same way that Morton's wife had been killed, a crime that police and prosecutors did not bother to solve. (Was it because in solving it, they would have been forced to take a hard look at the Morton case? I would not be surprised, given the depraved nature of police and prosecutors in this country today.)

Lest one think I am exaggerating, DNA evidence from both crime scenes implicate the same man:

New DNA testing linked the killings of Debra Baker and Christine Morton to another man with a prison record in several states. Police have not publicly identified the suspect, whom they are trying to locate, but his genetic links to both slayings led to Morton's release from prison last week after nearly 25 years behind bars, and his formal exoneration by an appeals court on Wednesday.

However, we are fortunate that Morton's attorneys were able to find the DNA, given the efforts of Rick Perry's allies, of Bradley and Anderson to suppress evidence. Again, the record shows:

In early 2005, Morton’s attorneys sought DNA testing on a blood-stained bandana found outside the Morton home on the day after the brutal murder, which took place on Aug. 13, 1986. Court records show that Bradley, who was appointed by Perry in 2001 and was not Morton’s original prosecutor, sought to prevent that testing from ever taking place and tried to limit its effect on the case.

At first, Bradley argued that testing the bandana would open the floodgates to an indeterminable amount of new evidence. “One has to wonder whether petitioner would file another motion at some future date seeking additional testing of even more items,” he wrote in October of 2005. In a 2009 filing, Bradley argued that the bandana was irrelevant because it was found “a football field’s length” from the Morton’s house, and that if any DNA testing did take place “it should not incorporate the possibility of a match of any DNA profile recovered from the bandana to a known offender.

District attorneys vary widely in their willingness to consider new evidence, but Bradley’s efforts make him an outlier. The Innocence Project says it has to fight a prosecutor’s objections to DNA testing in less than half of its cases, and most resistance dries up quickly. Death penalty opponents are particularly critical of prosecutors who resist DNA testing. Steve Hall, director of the StandDown Texas project, called Bradley’s behavior in the Morton case “abhorrent.”

Morton’s attorneys ultimately prevailed on the DNA issue in May 2010. A 2011 lab report showed that blood on the bandana matched Christine Morton’s DNA, and that DNA from a hair on the bandana matched that of a convicted felon in California, as well as DNA recovered at the site of a similar, unsolved murder of another Texas woman.

DNA wasn’t the only potentially exculpatory evidence that Bradley tried to wall off. Morton’s lawyers had long wondered about the original prosecutors’ decision not to seek testimony from the chief investigator in the case, Sgt. Don Wood of the Williamson County Sherriff’s office. But when they filed a Public Information Act request in 2008 to view Wood’s files, Bradley tried to block the release. TIME reviewed a flurry of correspondence about the records request between the Innocence Project, the sheriff’s office, and the Texas attorney general’s office. A 2008 letter from the AG to the sheriff’s office notes that, “The Williamson County District Attorney’s Office is a party to the litigation and has requested that the information be withheld.”

Again, when Morton’s attorneys ultimately prevailed, they found compelling evidence that their client was innocent: a transcript of a phone call in which Morton’s mother-in-law told Wood that Morton’s three-year-old son had witnessed a different man commit the murder, and a hand-written message to Wood dated August 15, 1986, showing that Christine’s credit card had been recovered at a jewelry store in San Antonio two days after the murder. With the new evidence he sought to block made public, Bradley capitulated and freed Morton last week.

This is depraved behavior from a man voted by Texas district attorneys several years ago as the "top prosecutor" in Texas. (If anything, it demonstrates just how dishonest and utterly depraved prosecutors and "law enforcement" in Texas really are.)

Unfortunately, there is even more, and this deals in the infamous Cameron Todd Willingham execution in which it is strongly suspected that the State of Texas executed an innocent man:

At the same time that Bradley was showing his penchant for stonewalling evidence in the Morton case, Perry appointed him to another sensitive position. By 2009, several studies had been conducted suggesting that the 1991 house fire that killed Cameron Todd Willingham’s three daughters was not arson and that the experts who sealed Willingham’s conviction with testimony to the contrary had based their investigation on outdated techniques.

The Texas Forensic Science Commission, a state organization tasked with ensuring that forensic investigations adhere to the highest scientific standards, began reviewing the evidence. But in late September 2009, Perry fired three commission members, including its chairman, just days before they were scheduled to hear testimony from an outside arson expert who had determined that the evidence against Willingham was based on shoddy science. Perry chose Bradley to take over the commission, and he quickly cancelled the testimony, effectively burying the investigation.

Again, we are dealing with utter depravity and one of the people responsible for the State of Texas covering up its misdeeds is Rick Perry, who now wants to be President of the United States. A well-known Baptist minister recently endorsed Perry from his pulpit, and I have the sinking feeling that the minister is quite aware of the perfidy outlined in this post -- and could not give a damn.

Just like the churches in the LMJC that have helped enable people like "judge" brian outhouse and Len Gregor, we see that the churches in Texas are placing their stamp of approval upon behavior that in the Old Testament would have resulted in men like Bradley, Anderson, and Perry being stoned to death. And apparently, they want those anti-Christian "standards of justice" to be the standard for the USA. All I can say is God help us.

Thank You!

2011-10-09T14:29:00.005-04:00

Thanks to everyone who contributed to our fund raising campaign to adopt 12 year old Sintija from Latvia. Sintija is with us now and is adjusting well to her new life as part of our family. While we can't adopt any more children, we want to continue to advocate for orphans to find their forever families. Please see our new fundraising campaign at The Point.

Bill and Johanna Anderson

Eric Holder: Perjury for me -- but not for thee, Roger

2011-10-05T19:55:00.000-04:00

Legendary Major League Baseball pitcher Roger Clemens faces a retrial for perjury for allegedly lying to Congress during a hearing. The U.S. Department of Justice and Congress spared no expense to try to put him into prison after he testified that he had not used steroids. (During his first trial, the federal prosecutor brought in hearsay "evidence" that the judge already had ruled inadmissible, which led to a mistrial.)

Fast forward to this year. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who ultimately is responsible for the Clemens prosecution, told Congress last May that he only had heard of the infamous "Operation Fast and Furious" just a few weeks before. However, as this article demonstrates, Holder had been briefed about this program on a number of occasions during the summer of 2010.

So, assuming that both Clemens and Holder have lied under oath, which action was worst? If Clemens lied, it was about something he had ingested into his body that may have let him throw a baseball longer (and faster) than otherwise may have been the case. Operation Fast and Furious, on the other hand, resulted in scores of people being murdered, shot down with weapons that the government purposely made sure got into the hands of Mexican drug gangs.

From what I can tell, however, the government thinks that what Clemens allegedly did was much worse. Eric Holder will not face a second of scrutiny, as I am sure that the White House and the New York Times will come to his aid. In fact, the NYT recently had an article that tried to whitewash the whole thing, claiming that only Republicans were making any noise about the memos. Holder will not have to worry about being indicted (especially since prosecutors are not in the habit of indicting themselves). There are "two Americas," but they are not rich and poor; they are the Ruling Political Classes -- and everyone else.

Nancy Grace: Flashing with the "stars"

2011-10-02T21:56:00.000-04:00

Last August, I had some commentary about the execrable Nasty Nancy Grace being part of "Dancing with the Stars," and while I mused about someone "dancing with the Devil," no doubt, I had no idea that Her Nastiness also would engage in exhibitionism.

Despite the protestations that she "was not flashing anybody," the photo below (from the UK Daily Mail) shows that Grace was exposing more than just some cleavage.

I include this post not to show off any of the endowment of Her Nastiness, but rather to point out the obvious: despite being cited by appeals courts for lying in court, Grace is one of the most insufferable self-righteous characters on the tube. Had a female accused of a crime ever worn such a low-cut dress in public, Nasty Nancy (or maybe "Nansty") would have been all over her, claiming that the woman's wardrobe was "proof" that she was a criminal.

So, here we have Nansty wearing a dress that shows, well, a lot of stuff, claiming that what we are seeing is not what we are seeing and that she did not "flash" anyone when, clearly, this is the very definition of "flashing." Gee, Nasty Nancy Grace is lying again. Just shocking. Hoodathunkitt?!?!? (By the way, is it just me, or does Nasty Grace look like Miss Piggy -- with no insult intended toward Miss Piggy and the Muppets?)

This reminds me of the "fundraiser" that the LMJC had for the Children's Advocacy Center -- you know, the place that hires high school grads to do fake interviews of children and then claims they have "discovered evidence of child molestation" when, in fact, they have helped fabricate lies? Yeah, that place.

You will remember that prosecutors Chris "Cruisemaster" Arnt and Len "The Thong Man" Gregor and the rest of the Children's Advocacy Center crowd was claiming that a tasteful photo of Tonya Craft in an evening dress was "proof" that she was "narcissistic" and, therefore, a child molester. During the trial, the announcement was made and the sponsors proudly put out a promotion photo of an Elvis impersonator and two "Vegas" women -- wearing thongs. It was the ultimate example of how the LMJC gives everyone else the middle finger.

(After I pointed out that the LMJC was using half-naked women in thongs to promote a fundraiser, the photo was quickly changed and the women suddenly were wearing pink leotards. Yeah, you can't make up this stuff.)

As I see it, this is more of the double standard that those involved with "law enforcement" are promoting. One set of rules for us, and another set of rules for them.

By the way, I doubt that Arnt, Gregor, Tim "Dirty" Deal, and Alan Norton will tell the attendees at the conference this week about those double standards. No, they will pose as people who "care" about the law, all the while crossing their fingers.

NOTE: If any readers attend the conference, please contact me so that I can prepare a report. Unfortunately, I am 600 miles away and cannot attend and listen to these "dynamic" speakers too people how to lie and get away with it.

The Northwest Georgia Conference on How to Commit Perjury (and get away with it)

2011-09-30T12:18:00.002-04:00

Despite the fact that Northwest Georgia is one of the most heavily-churched areas in the nation (and it even features a Christian college, Covenant College), it also is a place where the police and judicial systems are so utterly corrupt that they are beyond any repair. And when dishonest people get together for a conference, well, things happen that fall into the category of "You Can't Make Up This Stuff."

On October 3 and 4, the Northwest Georgia Child Abuse Conference will be held at The Colonnade in Ringgold. Not surprisingly, the Usual Suspects will be there and three men who are experienced in suborning perjury and lying to juries will be featured speakers. If you love perjury, then you don't want to miss this conference that will tell you how to lie in court, make up outlandish stories, and pretend you are "saving children."

In fact, this conference is aptly named, for people who coach children to lie under oath and to give false testimony against their mothers and fathers and teachers indeed are child abusers. So, if you want a career in legal child abuse, then this is the place to start.

Because this conference is one big howler, featuring child abusers from all over the State of Georgia, I will concentrate upon just one session, and it is self-explanatory: Overcoming Defenses in Child Molestation Cases. The presenters? Chris Arnt, Len Gregor, and Alan Norton. (I guess Buzz Franklin could not make it, as he must be engaged in something else, like writing stupid press releases.)

I will include the conference blurb on this session, which you don't want to miss:

Child molestation cases are outside the norm for the average citizen. Defense attorneys often will take advantage of the general public’s misperceptions concerning such cases. The presentation will to teach those who investigate child molestations cases to be cognizant of such defenses and properly prepare with such defenses in mind.

In case one does not understand the language of these "professionals," here is an interpretation:

Prosecutors are desperate to keep exculpatory evidence out of child molestation trials, and they also are desperate to keep the defense from exposing prosecution lies. Given that fact, this session will teach budding prosecutors how to lie to jurors, how to get judges to make outrageous rulings in order to deny the defendant a fair trial, and it will give demonstrations on how to bully witnesses. Of extreme importance in this session will be a segment on how to employ the non sequitur when the defense starts blasting holes in your case, in hopes that jurors will buy into your diversion tactics.

This session also will include interview techniques if you lose so that when you are interviewed by the media, you can continue to lie, blame jurors, and try to push your view that no accused ever should be allowed any kind of defense. The prosecutors also will show you how to lie about the credentials, testimony, and qualifications of the defense expert witnesses, and of special importance is the segment on trying to convince jurors that your own "experts," most of whom have no credentials or field of relevant study (except for taking a five-day course), really are more qualified than the other experts who have spent their entire careers studying this material, and who have doctorates and often have engaged in extensive post-graduate study.

The final part of the session will involve how to make false comments to jurors, how to lie about the testimony of expert witnesses, and how to disrupt the work of the defense, all with help from friendly judges. The sum total of this session will be teaching attendees how to make sure that truth never enters the courtroom so that you can get wrongful convictions and boost your careers. Len Gregor also will give conferees a demonstration on how to run to one's car following a verdict of "not guilty" and hide one's face from the media by using a notebook.

Lest anyone think I am exaggerating, do the following comparison:

On the prosecution side, we had Suzi Thorne, who at the time was studying for an on-line college degree with Kaplan University, a for-profit diploma mill. According to Arnt, Gregor, and Norton, Thorne (who did attend a five-day training class) was eminently qualified to testify as an "expert" in child sexual abuse. Furthermore, despite the fact that Thorne never has written about child sexual abuse in any publication, and despite the fact that she never has read any publications in any reputable journal, professional or academic, on this subject, Arnt, Gregor, and Norton believe she is eminently qualified to testify.

Furthermore, despite the fact that Thorne clearly committed perjury during the Tonya Craft trial (and there is no doubt about this), Arnt, Gregor, and Norton want people to believe that her testimony ALWAYS is true and perfect. Compare Thorne to a witness that Arnt, Gregor, and Norton claim is a "liar" and a "whore of the court," Dr. William Bernet of Vanderbilt University.

Dr. Bernet has his medical doctorate from Harvard University Medical School (which tends to have higher academic standards than Kaplan University's undergraduate program) and is widely published and widely respected in his profession. This is a man who has published in top journals and is asked to speak at conferences and sessions all over the world. (Yeah, he is not good enough to speak at the Northwest Georgia conference, but everyone knows that the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit is a world-class example of honest police, prosecutors, and judges.)

Lest one think I am exaggerating, let me remind readers of what Arnt and Gregor did during the Tonya Craft trial:

Arnt lied to jurors about the testimony of Dr. Nancy Fajman of Emory University, telling jurors that Fajman said she saw evidence of sexual abuse when, in fact, Fajman said she saw NO physical evidence of sexual abuse. All of the jurors caught this lie, and maybe Arnt will tell conferees how to do a better job of covering up lies;

Arnt and Gregor desperately tried to keep Dr. Fajman, Dr. Ann Hazard, Dr. Nancy Aldridge, and Dr. Bernet from testifying, and after their testimony, they told jurors that these were unqualified witnesses and that they were nothing but "liars" and "whores of the court" who lied for money. I am not kidding. They actually said that;

They regularly had ex parte meetings with "judge" brian house before and during the trial, and reported none of them to the defense, despite the requirement by the Code of Ethics of the Georgia State Bar, which means that these are people who believe they are not bound either by law or ethics.

When Tonya Craft came into the courtroom for the verdict, Arnt and Gregor stood to the side snickering at her and making snide remarks. (No doubt, their presentation also will include how act professionally during a trial while at the same time trying to emulate the members of Delta House from the movie "Animal House.") There is a reason that "judge" brian house turned ashen when he read the verdict and Arnt and Gregor ran from the courthouse instead of acting like mature adults and talking to the media.

No doubt, these men will share with conferees why it is important for prosecutors to act like spoiled children, and why it is so important that the courts of the LMJC perform like the courts of bastions of freedom and liberty like North Korea. They also will stress the importance of teaming with the judge in order to have a rigged trial, although they might claim afterward that the judge was a "pointy-headed liberal" who was too lax toward the defense. They will give techniques in making improper and prejudicial pre-trial statements to the media and maybe they might REALLY go to the Dark Side and give tips on how to contact jurors during the trial in order to intimidate them into voting guilty. (I'm just imagining the last point, but given that these men already have demonstrated that they have no problem in suborning perjury and openly violating the Rules of Ethics that supposedly govern their behavior, I doubt seriously that Chris Arnt and Len Gregor would frown upon anyone on the prosecution side illegally contacting jurors. Prosecutors elsewhere have done it and, if anything, these men have demonstrated that they are willing to engage in extreme prosecutorial misconduct.

Will they answer questions about the Tonya Craft trial? If they do, I'm sure they will spout the line that they have been giving everyone:

Craft was guilty and got away with it;

Defense objections were frivolous, as all defense attorneys really should expect prosecutors to scream in the face of witnesses, yell about someone's "boobs," throw books down on the table while the defense is making its case;

The jurors were fooled by the idiot expert witnesses like Dr. Bernet and should have been impressed by experts like Holly "Roll Your Eyes and Make Noises" Kittle and Suzy "Perjury" Thorne;

The jurors were too stupid to recognize that Arnt and Gregor are brilliant prosecutors and that when jurors all caught Arnt lying about Dr. Fajman's testimony (and all of the caught it), well, they were so stupid that they could not recognize that Dr. Fajman was speaking in code that only a brilliant guy like Arnt could understand;

The defense shamelessly carried on a campaign in the media and the blogosphere that prejudiced the case and "deprived the state of a 'fair trial'." This despite the fact that the defense operated under a gag order and the defense had NO contact with the "blogosphere," and that Tonya Craft was on trial, not the state, which is under the legal obligation to present a fair trial. (So much for the State of Georgia performing its obligations.)

What Arnt and Gregor and Norton won't tell the conferees is that some of the prosecution witnesses have admitted privately that they were lying, and that in the case of Sarah and Joal Henke, their testimony in trial conflicted 180 degrees from what they had testified under oath in depositions a year before. In other words, these men will tell conferees everything -- but the truth.

As an added attraction, Chris Arnt will give pointers on how to have fun on a cruise! Enjoy the conference!

Who is this guy kidding?

2011-09-28T12:26:00.000-04:00

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.

Lynn Blanchard outlines the police misconduct in the Brad Cooper case

2011-09-19T12:28:00.000-04:00

The wrongful conviction of Brad Cooper for the murder of his wife -- and I have no doubt that it was wrongful -- is testament to the corruption of police and prosecutors in North Carolina. When someone trots out the "they disbarred Mike Nifong" line, keep in mind that Nifong not only acted unethically, but he also acted criminally, yet there was no investigation of this erstwhile felon.

It always has been my contention that when it comes to police, prosecutorial, and judicial misconduct, the authorities will toss out a bone in order to make it look as though they are "doing something" about the lies and corruption. That is what was done in the Duke Lacrosse Case, and now that the State Bar has Nifong's trophy on their wall, the members are free to look the other way when it comes to outright criminal behavior on behalf of prosecutors.

Lynn Blanchard had done a heroic job in pointing out the massive misconduct and outright lying that was part and parcel to the Cooper case. From the police to the judge (who is a former cop and prosecutor, so he knows all of the tricks and is anxious to remain in the club). Her latest post outlines the police misconduct in the case, and I would urge you to read it.

I list two sections below:

Fabricated evidence/shoes: The police and prosecutors put a great deal of focus on shoes in this case. In all three cases the facts were misrepresented. First, Detective Young claimed to have found two right shoes, implying that while hastily cleaning up the crime scene, Brad grabbed two left shoes by mistake and disposed of them. During the trial there was a LOT of discussion about the “missing” two left shoes and honestly, it does sound good if you believe someone is guilty. However, the truth is that the two right shoes were different sizes, different styles, were not even Nancy’s current size and they were not even found in the house! There were a ton of shoes scattered all throughout the Cooper’s home and Young “found” the mismatched shoes on a shelf in the garage. Clearly this was fabricated evidence and the prosecutors had no problem using it at the trial. They made sure they highlighted this in closing.

Then throughout the trial they referred to Brad’s missing shoes, the pair he was wearing in the Harris Teeter video. It was their theory that he disposed of the body right before that trip and that is the significance of the “missing” shoes. The site where the body was found was extremely muddy and if Brad had been there in those shoes, mud would have been in the car, on his shoes and on the floor in the HT video. It was not. Detective Young testified that he never asked Brad for the shoes, it’s not in any of his notes that he ever searched for the shoes and the shoes were not even included in the initial search warrant. They were included in a search warrant right after his arrest, over three months later. Yet, the prosecutors went on and on about Brad’s “missing” shoes. I can’t think of any reason why they neglected to find and examine those shoes in those first days of the investigation. They had the HT video on July 12th.

Finally, there’s Nancy’s missing Sauconys. Brad told Young on 7/13 that Nancy had 3 pairs of running shoes. One pair was never found and that is obviously the pair she wore that morning when she left to go running. Police found the receipt for those shoes at the Athlete’s Foot store. Brad told police that Nancy purchased her running shoes there. They tried to determine if Nancy possibly returned that pair of shoes. Young testified that the store was unable to determine whether or not the shoes had been returned. That was a lie that was revealed in further testimony when he read his signed statement about the store verifying that the shoes had never been returned at that store. Why would the police detective feel compelled to lie on the stand if the investigation was honest? Again, the prosecutors ran with this and stated to the jury that Nancy’s only running shoes were in the home.

“The bed did not appear to have been slept in” - Detective Daniels had this written in his notes on 7/12, referring to Nancy’s bed. But the bed did look slept in. Photos displayed during the trial confirmed this. When asked, officer Hayes testified that it looked as if someone sat in it. When the defense attorney asked Daniels about the bed, he testified that he first wrote the note that the bed didn’t look slept in, sat in the bed, did not document that he sat in it, then took a photo of the bed. It is simply unbelievable. The bedding would later be sent to SBI for bodily fluid and fiber analysis and Daniels didn’t bother to inform SBI that he had contaminated it by sitting on it. Please watch trial summary part 2 for testimony on this.

So, Brad Cooper is in prison while a murderer runs free. THAT is justice in North Carolina. I have come to believe that cops and prosecutors pretty much don't care if they get the "right" person, just as long as they get SOMEONE.

Some music from Ilgi

2011-09-15T15:50:00.000-04:00

While in Latvia, I thoroughly enjoyed the music scene and there was no group I enjoyed more than Ilgi, which played three times at Egle's, which was right below our apartment window. I am including a couple of songs they did that I really like. (The words are in Latvian; don't even try to repeat them unless you understand the language, believe me.) The first is "acis veras, aizveras" ("Eye opening, closing").

The photos in "Aiz upītes meitas dzied" ("Behind the river, daughters sing") bring back many, many memories!

Thomas and Aubuchon should have been investigated years ago

2011-09-13T19:55:00.000-04:00

While I welcome the investigation that the Arizona State Bar has made against former Maricopa County DA Andrew Thomas and his partners-in-crime Lisa Aubuchon and Rachel Alexander, nonetheless, I cannot help but note that the bar and the media in Arizona (and especially in Phoenix) were all-too-happy to paint these people as heroes as long as they were abusing people who did not have political connections. In other words, I am saying that as long as the DA's office went after people like Courtney Bisbee who were not politically wired into the establishment, the media (other than the Phoenix New Times) simply went along with whatever the authorities wanted them to believe and ignored the abuse.

Like Michael Nifong, who went to the North Carolina Bar Woodshed four years ago for his role in the Duke Lacrosse Case, Thomas and Aubuchon don't have a chance to keep their law licenses. (I believe that Alexander, who played a minor role, might get off with a reprimand.) Yet, I also believe that these people should have been in the dock long ago before Thomas made the strategic error of becoming Sheriff Joe Arpaio's errand boy.

For example, when Supervisors Don Stapley and Mary Rose Wilcox were indicted on multiple felonies, and Superior Court Judge Gary Donahoe was charged with bribery and other crimes, there also was Susan Schuerman. She had the bad fortune of being Stapley's secretary, and Thomas and Arpaio wanted her to give the DA more ammunition, and what followed was utterly shameful. As reporter Laurie Roberts writes:

Schuerman, 57, has worked for the county for 25 years – 17 as Supervisor Don Stapley's secretary.

She came under the steely gaze of the Sheriff's Office in December 2008, when she returned from a dentist appointment to find detectives waiting for her. Stapley had just been served with a 118-count indictment charging him with failing to publicly disclose loans, real-estate dealings and other assets.

“They take me into this conference room and hand me a grand jury subpoena and say we want to talk to you about the Stapley matter,” she tells me. “I didn't even know what the Stapley matter was.”

Over the next few weeks, Schuerman says Sheriff Joe Arpaio's right-hand man, Chief Deputy Dave Hendershott, hounded her for information, trying to scare her into turning on Stapley. She refused. One, because she says she didn't have any dirt on her boss and two, because she saw this for what it was -- an orchestrated campaign to bring down Stapley and anyone else who dared cross the sheriff.

“Hendershott told me I would be sorry,” she says, “and I was.”

Deputies followed her to lunch. Undercover cops watched her east Phoenix home, leaving her daughter in tears and her neighbors wondering what she'd done.

Then in February 2009, word suddenly “leaked” out to the media that Schuerman was under investigation for using county resources to conduct Stapley's private business and later, bribery. Her office was searched and she was told to leave the building, to go outside where the media pack was waiting.

Declaring her a suspect was an ingenious way to turn up the heat. Thomas blocked the county from giving her an attorney, noting that taxpayers don't provide lawyers to government employees suspected of crimes.

And so Schuerman was on her own.

She had no money for an attorney. She'd raised three kids on a secretary's salary. She'd lived on the financial edge since 2005 when her daughter suffered a stroke on her 21st birthday, one that left her paralyzed and dependent on her mother.

Schuerman, too, was paralyzed -- with fear. That she'd lose her job and her health benefits – all the more precious because she has Crohn's Disease. That she'd be taken to jail and then what would happen to her daughter, Jenifer?

“I wanted to die,” she says. “I didn't know what to do.

This simply is sick. Sick. For all of his identity with the Evangelical Right, other people are nothing but pawns for Thomas, people that he uses to help his own political career, and if innocent people are destroyed in the meantime, well, that is "collateral damage" that comes when someone is "rooting out corruption."

What do the Republicans have to say? Their own words expose their perfidy:

Just this week, the chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party decried the ethics hearing that begins Monday.

“Andy was trying to do the right thing by rooting out corruption,” Rob Haney said.

Right. Unfortunately, the real corruption is found in the DA's office (which STILL is trying to destroy the Jacobson family) and with Joe "Pink Underwear" Arpaio. When there is no accountability with people who have the power to arrest and prosecute, there always will abuse. Always. No exceptions.

Home from Latvia

2011-09-10T17:22:00.000-04:00

We arrived home last night, and today, I finally am starting to feel a bit normal again. Sintija is with us, and we now await the word from the Orphan Court in Latvia to come back for the final Latvian side of the adoption. (After that, we have to return to Latvia for a third time in order to receive the permanent visa for Sintija from the U.S. Embassy.)

Again, I thank all of you for your prayers and support.

I do intend to start blogging soon on things that have established this blog in the first place. However, I have been swamped with a lot of things, and also I have been posting often on my other blog, Krugman-in-Wonderland. Thanks you for your patience and understanding.

I have posted a number of pictures of our trip on my Facebook page. (It is under the name Bill Anderson.)

Riga Update

2011-09-01T15:48:00.001-04:00

I want to give everyone an update on our adoption and our stay in Riga, Latvia. We arrived on August 15 and will leave Thursday, September 8. Sintija will accompany us to the USA, and we will have to return this fall to complete the Latvian side of the adoption.

This has been very challenging, as Sintija has been in a children's home most of her life and for a good part of that, pretty much had no good supervision. (The last home in Smiltene was much better, but when she arrived, she had a lot of behavior problems that still are issues.)

Sintija will be 13 in October, but clearly is not at her age in maturity. That being said, she does have a good heart and I believe God has wonderful things planned for this young lady, and I am thankful to be a part of that whole endeavor. I believe that she will develop in time, and I have to remember that her challenging us is part of growing up (and I don't take it personally).

The trip itself has been wonderful. Old Riga, where we are living, is a beautiful place, full of very old buildings, churches, narrow, winding cobblestone streets, good restaurants and shops, and a vibrant music scene. I could not have asked for a better place to stay, and am glad we have been able to take in all of this.

We also have been out of the city on several occasions and have been to the Jurmala region three times, including two trips to the beach. (Yes, the Gulf of Riga is cold, but it is invigorating, and the beach there is fine.) This Tuesday, we went to Sigulda, which is a "tourist" town and a lovely place. Although Latvia mostly is quite flat, the Sigulda area has a number of ridges and the Gauga River, and is quite scenic.

Latvia was a "republic" in the old Soviet Union for about 50 years. The country was invaded by the Soviets in 1940, and then was a back-and-forth battleground during World War II as German and Soviet troops did what they could to destroy the country. Afterward, the victorious Soviets gobbled up the country, decimated its economy (and especially the farm economy via collectivization), and shipped hundreds of thousands of Latvians to Siberia, along with bringing in hundreds of thousands ethnic Russians.

Like the rest of the U.S.S.R., Latvia was a grim place during that era. (I remember my own trip to East Berlin in 1982, and it was not a pleasant place by any means.) The Soviets build numerous concrete-and-brick apartment buildings, using pretty much the same floorplan, and these eyesores dot the region. (Yeah, they are pretty darned ugly, really ugly.)

However, the economy has done some growing since it became independent in 1991, and while it was hurt badly during this past recession, nonetheless I still is a better place to live than when it was under communist rule. For one, it actually has nice grocery stores -- and they even sell Jack Daniels in them! I had lunch recently with a friend who lived here before independence, and the changes in shopping alone have been astounding.

Prices are comparable, at least for food, to what we pay in the USA, but incomes are well below what we make. Taxes are pretty high, and gas is about $8 a gallon. Nonetheless, the country's currency, the Lat, is doing well against the dollar. When we first arrived, we were told that the apartment owner wanted to be paid in dollars, but then we found out that the last thing they wanted was the greenback. I made a trip to the bank and switched money.

Latvia is not cheap, but it is less expensive than are most areas in Europe, and especially Scandinavia. An overnight cruise ferry arrives each morning from Stockholm, and Swedish and Norwegian tourists spill off to take advantage of the lower prices.

One thing they take in is the local music scene, which is quite good, even world class, I believe. Bands have played every night in the square next to our apartment, and almost all of them have been good to excellent. (I remarked to one person that I had to cross the Atlantic to hear good American rock 'n roll.) We also went to a concert by the Riga Dom Boy's Choir (which is world famous), and also went to a concert at the Riga Dom itself.

I have included some pictures of the trip.

This young lady is playing the Kokle, which is a Latvian string instrument.

Majori Beach in Jurmala on the Gulf of Riga

Royal Square in Old Riga from our apartment window

Young violinist playing in Jurmala

Concert in Dom Square for Riga's 810th anniversary celebration

Dancing with the Devils

2011-08-30T01:28:00.001-04:00

Since we don't have television reception at our house and have not had it for a decade (and I don't miss it), I never have seen "Dancing with the Stars." I have no idea who does what and really don't care if Bristol Palin can do the Tango, or if she just falls over her own feet (like I would).

However, I am a bit interested when I see that the newest lineup of "stars" this fall includes the Evil Nancy Grace and the notorious Ron Artest, the NBA player Ron Artest, who forever was immortalized by his role in the infamous Pistons-Pacers brawl of 2004. (Nonetheless, I will say that overall I prefer Artest to Grace.)

I only can wonder if the judges realize the fix they are in with these two, however. If Grace does not like their decisions, will she demand their arrest on trumped-up charges? (Grace is good at lying on her show and declaring innocent people to be guilty of non-existent crimes.)

Will Artest react to negative fan reaction by wading into the crowd and whacking a few people? Who knows? I guess that will be part of the intrigue. As for Grace, since she declared that the "Devil is dancing" after the Casey Anthony verdict, will the Nasty Nancy do a Tango with Beelzebub himself?

Alas, my readers will have to tell me what happens, as I will be missing another year of the boob tube. In the meantime, while Nancy Grace is treated like a celebrity, the "justice" system she has represented incarcerates millions, including thousands of innocent people. Dance away.

Yeah, a jobs program for out-of-work lawyers. Just what we need....

2011-08-24T01:52:00.000-04:00

As the economy continues to crumble, the editors at the NY Times are becoming increasingly unhinged, and while it is hard to watch the greater collapse, nonetheless I must admit that these folks are providing some grim comic relief. An editorial today demands essentially that Congress create a program for out-of-work lawyers to represent poor people.

At one level, I don't mind seeing people receive legal help, and as I watch poor people being railroaded into prison because of the horrible tactics used by prosecutors as well as the hard fact that public defenders are terribly overworked, I agree that at all legal levels, the poor are getting the shaft. Unfortunately, what we see here is just another clueless suggestion from people who are becoming increasingly clueless themselves.

First, and most important, we need to ask why people in a society that supposedly is free actually need as much legal help as is necessary. Notice that the Progressive NYT never asks that question, given that these people actually believe that the "solution" to our problems is the massive expansion of the state. (A day never passes without the NYT editorializing for the growth of government and further intrusion into our lives.)

While the editorial addresses legal help in the civil arena (as though the help poor people get in the criminal area of law is adequate), nonetheless there is a much larger issue here that needs to be addressed, and that is the proliferation of laws and the increasing use of the courts to solve what used to be small disputes or problems. The Washington Post has highlighted a growing practice in Texas for students who misbehave in class to be made subject to criminal law. That's right, criminal law.

No doubt, people like Bill O'Reilly probably are applauding (O'Reilly's "solution" to everything is expansion of the police state), but as I read through this article, I am horrified at the consequences of what the authorities are doing. For example, a fourth-grade boy got into a fight on the bus and here is how the government handled it:

The child was ordered to do eight hours of community service and take classes in anger management and decision-making, at a cost of $370, Smith said. “I’m a single parent,” she said. “Four hundred dollars? I have two other boys.”

Yes, anger management. The ultimate bureaucratic solution to everything. And these people are serious.

At the federal level, laws are expanding and Congress is demanding that even more people go to prison. As the economy goes further into the tank, we are going to see demands for more criminalization of business failures and even more families destroyed as fathers (and sometimes mothers) are sent away for long prison terms because Congress and Obama want to blame anyone but themselves for the unfolding tragedy.

And what does the NYT do in the face of this? Oh, it comes up with a scheme to employ unemployed law school graduates. Yeah, that will work.

The return of "Honest Services Fraud"

2011-08-17T15:34:00.000-04:00

Neither Congress nor the president ever seem to learn anything. The U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down the "Honest Services Fraud" statute because it was too vague. So what do the clowns in Washington do? They look to create an even MORE expansive and vague law.

Apparently, the government is set to imprison thousands of business owners and managers for having the effrontery of being unsuccessful during the government-caused depression. And I guarantee that the return of this horrible law will create even more uncertainty, which in turn will help lengthen the depression.

Here is my recent commentary on the subject on Lew Rockwell's page.

Brian House and the moral bankruptcy of judges

2011-08-11T23:03:00.001-04:00

Brian House and I read the same Bible (I guess they read the Bible at Peavine Baptist Church, where House attends), but I don't think we find the same meaning in it. Where the Holy Scriptures admonish judges to act honestly, show integrity, and not to "pervert justice," House must interpret those passages to mean that judges are supposed to rig convictions and destroy the lives of innocent people.

As the child molestation trial of James Combs approaches, I still am thinking back to House's performance in the Tonya Craft trial. There is good reason that House had an ashen expression when he discovered the jury's verdict, as the jurors were openly declaring that House's best efforts to rig an illegal conviction were wrong, unjust, and his actions demonstrated that his judgeship is fraudulent.

Why do I write about House more than a year after the Craft trial? I do it because he still is on the bench, bilking Georgia taxpayers for six-figures, and tag teaming with dishonest prosecutors like Chris Arnt to screw over innocent people. Let us revisit some of the things he did in that case that demonstrate beyond any doubt at all that he tried to rig a conviction.

He consistently refused to permit Tonya Craft's defense to admit exculpatory evidence even though the evidence was legitimate and documented. For example, after Sandra Lamb told the court that her daughter had not received acting lessons, House refused to let the defense enter the online IMDb resume of the child, despite the fact that it was a public link that anyone could look up on the web.

He permitted the admission of a forged document that Tim Deal created during the trial, a document that was not in his or any other files before the trial began. The prosecution had created a huge hole with the "hand rape" allegations and Deal had to cover for them. Do I believe that House knew the document was forged? Absolutely. I have no doubt at all.

He permitted Joal and Sarah Henke to give "I just remembered" testimony that was perjury on its face, and the testimony directly contradicted earlier sworn testimony that both had given a year before.

According to media representatives who were keeping count, he sustained 90 percent of the prosecution's objections and only 10 percent of the objections from the defense.

He permitted prosecutors Arnt and Len Gregor to yell, make catcalls, throw books down on the table, scream at defense witnesses, verbally attack the defense team, and harass Craft all during the trial. Any attempt by the defense to protest this action was met with a personal attack from House himself who refused to discharge the ethical duties of his office.*

He had a long conversation with Sandra Lamb a few days before she testified, yet he did not report this illegal ex parte conversation to the defense. During the trial, a number of people contacted me to say that they saw House meeting with prosecutors on several occasions after court had ended for the day. One observer told me about seeing House and the prosecutors leave the courtroom together and enter a room adjacent to the courtroom. I have no doubt that he, Arnt and Gregor had illegal strategy sessions together, none of which were reported to the defense as required by Georgia's rules of ethics for judges.

All during the trial, he and the prosecutors (especially Arnt) had pre-worked signals in which House would look at Arnt, who then would signal to House what his next move should be. (More than one observer told this to me.)

Jurors after the trial said that one thing that really bothered them was the obvious prejudice that House showed against the defense and in favor of the prosecution.

During a break in the trial, House spoke to a court employee and vilified both Craft and the defense in private conversation, not knowing that it was being recorded. While that recording has not been released, nonetheless, the incident demonstrated House's lack of integrity.

This is only the tip of the crimes against justice that House committed during the trial, and it was clear that Arnt, Gregor, and Sandra Lamb were running the show and pulling his puppet strings. I wish that House were the only offender, but as I hear from people around the country, and I watch the performance of judges like the one who helped the prosecution railroad Brad Cooper into prison, I have come to see the situation in this country as being pretty hopeless.

Yes, there are good judges out there, but the number of honest men and women wearing the black robes is dwindling. Furthermore, when the good ones retire, they are replaced by people like Brian House.

As the conflagration known as World War I began, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey declared, "The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time." I must admit to believing the same about this country and our system of "justice." Americans once prized justice, but like so many things that have been good about this country, that also is in our past, not our present and certainly not our future.

*Here are some things that the Georgia Judicial Code of Ethics includes. Compare this code with House's conduct and you will see that no one in authority in Georgia actually believes in these things, as those in power hold that living by the rules does not apply to them.

Canon 1
Judges Shall Uphold the Integrity and Independence of the Judiciary.
An independent and honorable judiciary is indispensable to justice in our society. Judges shall participate in establishing, maintaining, and enforcing high standards of conduct, and shall personally observe such standards of conduct so that the integrity and independence of the judiciary may be preserved. The provisions of this Code should be construed and applied to further that objective.

Canon 2
Judges Shall Avoid Impropriety and the Appearance of Impropriety in All Their Activities.

A. Judges shall respect and comply with the law* and shall act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.

B. Judges shall not allow their family, social, political or other relationships to influence their judicial conduct or judgment. Judges shall not lend the prestige of judicial office to advance the private interests of the judge or others; nor should they convey or permit others to convey the impression that they are in a special position to influence them. Judges should not testify voluntarily as character witnesses. (House also has done that in a recent divorce/custody case)

Canon 3
Judges Shall Perform the Duties of Their Office Impartially and Diligently

On ex parte meetings, the Georgia code declares:

Judges shall accord to every person who has a legal interest in a proceeding, or that person's lawyer, the right to be heard according to law*. Judges shall not initiate or consider ex parte communications, or consider other communications made to them outside the presence of the parties concerning a pending or impending proceeding, except that:

(a) where circumstances require, ex parte communications for scheduling, where administrative purposes or emergencies that do not deal with substantive matters or issues on the merits are authorized; provided:

(i) the judge reasonably believes that no party will gain a procedural or tactical advantage as a result of the ex parte communication, and

(ii) the judge makes provision promptly to notify all other parties of the substance of the ex parte communication and allows an opportunity to respond.

None of those things held during the trial. Instead, House was engaged in strategy sessions and his personal conversation with Lamb before her testimony demonstrated beyond a doubt that not only was he Lamb's sock puppet, but that he has absolutely NO RESPECT for the law and for the codes that supposedly are to govern his conduct.

Yet, Brian House will continue as a judge, and I would not be surprised if the voters of the LMJC were to return this sorry person back to office for another four years in the 2012 elections. One hopes otherwise, but I cannot say I have much confidence in the political choices that Americans make.

Preparing to go to Riga, Latvia

2011-08-08T08:12:00.000-04:00

While we have not yet received our official referral from the Latvia government that we are assigned to Sintija, nonetheless we have been told to fly to Riga this coming Sunday, August 14. We will be flying with the children (lots of children) when they leave JFK International Airport after the five-week hosting program here.

Right now, we are scheduled to come back to the USA on September 8. If all goes well in Riga, the Orphan Court there will grant us custody of Sintija, who then also would fly back with us to JFK. If we get that far, then there are two more trips to Riga to finalize the Latvian side of the adoption, and then to get the permanent visa from the U.S. Embassy there.

Thanks to all of you for your prayers and support. I will keep you posted as things develop.

Jim Broderick is re-indicted

2011-08-04T20:07:00.000-04:00

Ken Buck has not given up in pursuing perjury charges against Jim Broderick, the police detective who framed Tim Masters in his wrongful conviction for the murder of Peggy Hettrick. In last week's post, I noted how Buck could have looked the other way -- as so many prosecutors do -- but did the right thing, instead.

The charges against Broderick were dismissed because the original indictment did not say when the perjury was discovered, which meant that the statute of limitations (three years) against Broderick would have kicked in for his testimony in 1991. This time, however, the indictment is more specific on the date.

I applaud Buck for his diligence and his honesty, and I hope this good deed is rewarded, not punished.

*************************************

We will have some news soon on our pursuit of adoption of Sintija from Latvia. Stay tuned.

No good deed goes unpunished: the saga of Ken Buck

2011-07-28T13:37:00.000-04:00

Last November, Ken Buck, a prosecutor who ran for a U.S. Senate seat in Colorado, was narrowly defeated. As a Tea Party and Republican candidate, he already was the target of the media, and when it was publicized that he refused to prosecute a particular alleged rape case, you can imagine what the media reaction became.

Mother Jones, the hard-left publication, all-but-declared this refusal was "proof" that Buck was a misogynist. Declared the magazine:

On the campaign trail, Buck has called this a nonstory. But between this, his controversial "high heels" attack ad against a female primary challenger, and his view that abortion should be illegal, even in cases of rape and incest, Buck's been beset by charges of sexism in his race with incumbent Sen. Michael Bennet (D). The victim says that's at the heart of Buck's non-prosecution of her alleged attacker. "It reflects his stereotypes," she says. "It shows that he's unable to [fulfill] his professional duties without taking his personal biases and stereotypes into consideration."

Other publication, from Salon to the Huffington Post to The Atlantic also followed suit with similar accusation, and the hard-left blogs had a field day. HERE IS A GUY WHO SUPPORTS RAPE!! As these same media outlets spewed forth their rhetoric in the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case, so they gave the open-and-shut opinion which one has come to expect.

Libertarian writer James Bovard once told me that in politics, no one cares about the truth, and I will say that political journalism falls into that category. None of the writers whom I contacted on this story really cared whether or not what they were saying was true. In fact, to all of them, it was true by definition. To put it another way, the facts did not matter because political ideology always trumps the truth, as it is politics and the media that determine truth, anyway.

The syllogism went like this:

Ken Buck is running as a conservative Republican
All conservative Republicans are misogynists who support rape
Therefore, Ken Buck did not pursue a "slam dunk" rape case because of political ideology.

There are two things, however, that would negate this syllogism as well as the tone of the "news" coverage. First, one would have to assume, from reading these journalists and law professors, that Buck's office in Weld County never, ever prosecuted rape cases, or was ideologically reluctant to do so. Yet, there is nothing in the record to show that Weld County prosecutors refused to prosecute rape cases.

The second thing is even more telling and more important, and was unknown to the media: a key investigator in this case, someone who is not associated with the Tea Party or conservative politics and who has helped put many rapists behind bars, strongly believed these accusations to be false. This person's input into the case was not irrelevant, and in my personal dealings with the person, I find nothing but credibility and lots of it.

In other words, Buck took advice from someone who understood the situation much better than did any of the media people or law professors who were using this case to push their own partisan political agendas. The difference is that the particular adviser was looking at the facts, while the others did not care, as facts never do seem to matter to political ideologues.

There is another matter I believe that the media conveniently left out: Ken Buck played an important role in seeking justice after the railroading and wrongful conviction of Tim Masters. (Masters was convicted of the murder of Peggy Hettrick after Fort Collins Det. Jim Broderick lied during the investigation and then lied in court. The two prosecutors, Jolene Blair and Terry Gilmore, later became judges and were voted out of office after Masters' verdict was overturned and he was freed.)

It was Buck who secured the indictment against Broderick, and it is very, very rare that a prosecutor will go after a police officer for lying. Face it, most prosecutors are quite happy to have police lie if the lies can help them secure convictions. My previous post about Lee's Summit, Missouri, is more typical in American "justice." (Unfortunately, Broderick never will come to justice, as a judge has dismissed the charges, claiming that the statute of limitations already had passed.)

Because rape has become a political crime in an overly-politicized society, Ken Buck was punished for not pursuing a case that would have been questionable at best. At the same time, the same media that decided there could be no other reason than misogyny failed to look at anything else in his record to point out that at least he was a prosecutor who believed that those people who often are untouchable also needed to be brought to justice.

As I see it, people like Ken Buck are a rarity in our system, as most prosecutors really don't care if the person on trial actually committed a crime. We also see time and again outfits like Mother Jones and the New York Times feature people who have been wrongly convicted. However, when it comes down to it, these same people really don't care about guilt or innocence at all. They care for nothing but partisan politics and demand that everyone shape their reality according to their worldviews. If innocence fits their political agenda, then it is important, and if false accusations, like those in the Duke case, fit their agenda, then they promote false allegations. And those that fail to bow down will be vilified, and so it was here.

Think cops and prosecutors and judges are honest? I give you Lee's Summit, Missouri!

2011-07-26T22:54:00.000-04:00

Whenever there is a story about police and prosecutorial misconduct, invariably the writer will make a statement to the effect of "Most cops and prosecutors are honest, as we are talking only about a few bad apples." I hate to say it folks, but the damned barrel is rotten, and there are few good apples left.

The latest outrage comes from Lee's Summit, Missouri, and I had to find out about this not from the American media, but from Russia's RT network. (Disclaimer: I have been interviewed on RT three times, and consider it a much more reliable source of news than any mainstream news outlet in the USA.)

As you read this story, your blood pressure will go up, and as you read the comments on this account from people who actually knew the police and prosecutorial characters, your blood will boil even more.

The story goes as such. Ted White, who lived in Lee's Summit, had a wife (then on her third marriage) who was having an affair with a cop, Richard McKinley. In order to get her husband out of the way, Tina White claimed that her husband was sexually abusing their children and the lead detective was none other than...McKinley.

The authorities from the police to the prosecutors, Jill A. Kanatzar (whose husband now is a judge) and Jennifer Mettler knew about the affair, but withheld it from the defense. White was convicted and only later did he find out what had happened, but not before being in prison for five years. Here is one account, which is absolutely shocking:

Prior to [the detective's] January 1999 deposition, the prosecutor told Richard that he would need to answer questions about the affair truthfully. The prosecutor said he would cough to signal to Richard when he needed to disclose the affair in response to a question. Richard was asked if he had any personal interest in the case, during a deposition, and he stated he did not. The prosecutor did not signal him to say otherwise. Consequently, White never learned of Richard and Tina's affair before his first criminal trial. (Emphasis mine)

Recently, White won a $16 million judgment from Lee's Summit, although McKinley still is employed as a detective, and never faced any consequences for lying under oath and framing an innocent man. (There was also a huge monetary reward for McKinley, as White's wife was able to grab more than $600,000 in the divorce settlement because her husband was convicted of a crime. McKinley got to cash in and the entire Missouri legal establishment looked the other way.)

As for Kanatzar, she is employed with a high-rolling law firm in Kansas City appropriately named Dollar. Like the ex-wife of the man that Kanatzar helped to frame, she also was able to cash in on wrongdoing. And with her husband being a judge, she knows she never has to worry about facing any legal troubles no matter what she does.

By the way, none of the felons in this case -- and there were several -- even lost a dime, much less had to face any legal consequences. If you want to see a picture of government "justice" in the United States of America, I give you this case. This is not an exception; it is the rule.

The Wall Street Journal and federal criminal law

2011-07-24T23:04:00.000-04:00

Those of us who believe that federal criminal law is itself a crime are not surprised by this recent article in the Wall Street Journal. Federal authorities have eviscerated the old mens rea provision of criminal law -- that the person in question intended to commit a crime -- and replace it with, frankly, legal terror.

I had a similar piece in Regulation last year. Watching these vicious animals called federal prosecutors is very difficult if one has even a shred of humanity. Prosecutors can charge and convict anyone of their choosing, and they love to see people as nothing more than prey to be hunted down and destroyed. THAT is the American legal system, and there is none other.

More on the Brad Cooper railroad

2011-07-20T14:55:00.001-04:00

There are a couple of websites, including a blog, dedicated to the railroading of Brad Cooper. Before I list them, however, I want to direct readers to comments left on the Cooper blog. They are an eye-opener, and confirm what I have known for years about the utter dishonesty and criminal behavior of North Carolina prosecutors:

I'm closely connected to the BC murder trial, from the prosecution side. I can honestly say the following:

1. The reason why the prosecution took so long with its case was to wear down the jury so that they would be too exhausted to really pay attention.

2. A portion of the prosecution does not think he did it but were directed to win this case at all cost in order to save face for the police department.

3. The google maps defense didn't stand a chance. The prosecution understood that, in today's climate, jurors, especially black jurors, are likely to believe in setups by the police department. This counter-evidence didn't have a chance of getting admitted.

4. In jury selection the defense had a lot of people they liked but the prosecution asked questions about if they could participate in a "extensively lengthy trial" and this forced those that the defense liked to step down. Had the defense not excused the ones they did the jury would have had 0 men and would have been a mixture of poor black women and very wealthy white women.

5. The defense's expert who was on the witness list and had spent thousands of dollars and countless hours trying to find the same evidence as the prosecution's expert couldn't find the google maps. He was under contract with Raleigh Police Department on some other cases and was told if he was to present said non-evidence as exculpatory then he would lose his livelihood.

If what this person has said is true, then a number of people associated with "law enforcement, the D.A.'s office, and the North Carolina judiciary should be looking down the barrels of the law. Instead, the real murderer is free and so are a host of other criminals in blue costumes and the prosecutor's uniform.

The blog is Justice for Brad Cooper, and the website is Justice for Brad. Because both of these are impressive sites, I am going to feature portions of them from time to time, as well as make commentary on my own.

Is this another Craft/McMartin case?

2011-07-19T11:48:00.000-04:00

The headlines are quite familiar to those of us who have been in this country post-Mondale Act: "Molestation investigation shuts down _______ school." (Of course, it always seems to be a private school, as I don't recall the government going after government schools or daycare centers.)

While I think that the writer for the Sacramento Bee in this story at least tries to give another side to the story in writing about the McMartin case, although she does not give full justice to how bad those accusations were and why they were bogus. As I read her article, however, I cannot help but wonder just how bad this investigation really is and I cannot help but wonder if we have another Craft/McMartin situation.

Before explaining my position, however, I cannot help but note that it was also a McClatchy-owned newspaper (like the Bee), the Raleigh News & Observer, that jump-started the false accusations in the Duke Lacrosse Case, as the newspaper published one false story after another. (The N&O even distributed the infamous "wanted" poster of the lacrosse players with a Sunday edition, thereby lending credence to what was found to be an utterly dishonest investigation.) One hopes that McClatchy has learned a lesson about rushing to judgment, but given that most journalists are anxious to jump off the cliff whenever police and prosecutors tell them to do so, I'm not confident that ANY mainstream paper can handle such a story.

Here are some excerpts from the story, and I will explain afterward why my b.s. detectors are on full alert:

Officials shut down a private Citrus Heights elementary school Monday and suspended its license pending a sweeping investigation into allegations that its principal molested children over the past 15 years.

And:

In its complaint, the Social Services Department alleges that Adams, whom students referred to as "Mr. Bob," touched female pupils on their chests and vaginal areas, touched their bodies under their shirts and down their pants, and "secluded" female children under a computer desk and lay with them on a mat in his office.

The complaint also names office administrator Cynthia Higgins, alleging that she failed to report the principal's behavior after receiving complaints. It says a volunteer, Irma Mertens, saw Robert Adams touch a girl's buttocks after inserting his hand under her swimsuit and told Higgins about it.

OK, now I have some questions:

How does something like this go on for 15 years and NO ONE report it? No one else witnessed the kind of behavior that we see? Sorry, people, but child molesters don't just do this in complete anonymity for 15 years without people getting suspicious, especially in an open setting like a school.
What are the cirumstances under which Mertens made the claim? For example, Sandra Lamb and Sherri Wilson wanted to "get back" at Tonya Craft, and had the means to do it through Chris Arnt, who had hoped to be able to ride a "big case" to a higher political office. Did Mertens actually see this? Was she on the "outs" with Adams or someone else? The article does not say, but I would be quite interested to know some of the background.
How is it that parents would rave about the school for years? Would they have been THAT blind? Would not have kids and parents have been talking?
Did he allegedly go after both boys and girls, for if that is the claim, then we know it HAS to be suspect, as real child molesters go for one or the other. (Yes, I know, the Usual Trolls will claim that Adams is that one-percent exception. Yeah, everyone accused ALWAYS falls into that one-percent category, which is interesting, since one-percent means one out of a hundred, not everyone.)

One has to understand that I have no confidence at all in the police and social services to handle these cases. What happened in the LMJC in Tonya Craft's case happens all over the country. Given the current political climate, it is very, very rare for government police, government prosecutors, and government social workers actually to do their job and conduct honest investigations.

Believe me, the police and prosecutors in Citrus Heights already have made up their minds, and now the social services interviewers are going to try to manipulate the children they interview in order to obtain the results that they want to get. I will GUARANTEE that this will NOT be an investigation carried out by honest brokers. Honest brokers no longer exist in any sizable numbers in the various U.S. government systems of "justice."

People familiar with the Craft case, or, for that matter, Brad Cooper's case, already know the drill. Police and prosecutors begin with a conclusion, and then they manipulate the "evidence" in order to prove that one really can easily drive square pegs into round holes.

Don't forget that it was the State of California that touched off the whole modern Molestation Witch Hunts, first with Ed Jaegels in Bakersfield, California, and then the McMartin Case. Janet Reno in Miami joined in the chase later, and it was off to the races from there.

This would not be possible, except that judges often are in on the fix, as they were in the Craft and Cooper cases. I hope that things are different in this one, but right now, I have the sickening feeling that everyone is going to jump off the same cliff once again.

The Newest Outrage in Arizona

2011-07-18T14:43:00.000-04:00

It looks as though the situation involving false charges against the son of Carola Jacobson is not over, even though it should have ended months ago. Carola has sent me an email with the latest prosecutorial/government outrage from a state (Arizona) that seems to lead the country in being outrageous:

As I think you know the judge ordered that the state has to pay for our expert, well, she has not been paid due to "budget cuts". The prosecutor does not want to dismiss until she has interviewed the expert and not surprisingly the expert will not talk to the prosecutor until she has been paid. So I guess we are moving forward with a trial date at the end of September. They seem to have enough money to persue a b.s. case but can't pay for the expert which was ordered to be paid for by the state by the judge. Doesn't that leave you scratching your head???

This kind of Catch-22 is not unusual for people who have dealt with the courts in this country, and Maricopa County is especially bad. Notice that the prosecutor is not even trying to do any research on this case or is trying to apply even basic common sense.

No, the modern American prosecutor is told to hold onto a case and never assume innocence, no matter how ridiculous the evidence. The idea is to use the powers of the office to string out people, and then "bleed 'em and plead 'em," as prosecutors like to say.

I hope that people reading this will not be silent. I'm going to do what I can to publicize this latest outrage.

Apologies for no post

2011-07-18T10:18:00.000-04:00

Sorry that I have not posted in a week. This has been a very busy time, both with dealing with the arrival of Sintija (who will be with us for the next four weeks), and working on deadlines for papers and articles.

I just had an academic paper accepted in which I critique the response of the Duke University administration according to an organizational "crisis" model to see how Brodhead and company did. Yeah, they did badly. I know everyone is shocked. More on the paper later.

Update on our adoption of Sintija

2011-07-11T10:32:00.001-04:00

This past weekend, we drove to New York City to get Sintija, who is staying with us for five weeks this summer. This is part of a hosting program that is separate from the adoption process, but plays a part in the process, no less.

Our hope is that there will be a good relationship established (and we already are off to a good start, even if she speaks no English) this summer so when (Lord willing) we are assigned to her and travel to Latvia in the fall, that things will go well. This process with Latvia is long and costly and requires three trips to the country, but so far we have managed to get to this point.

After arriving home last night, Sintija slept until about 10 this morning and was greeted by our two dogs, Teddy (the one in the picture) and Spanky. We are happy to report that this first meeting was successful!

Again, this is a long process, but I can tell readers already that we really like Sintija. She is tall for her age (12, turning 13 in October) and is a prettier girl than what we had seen in the original picture. She seems to have a wonderful, mischievous personality, shy, but at the same time ready to be part of our family. She does not yet know we are trying to adopt her, and may not know until the fall.

So, pray for us that this will turn out to be a wonderful time. Thanks to all of you who have supported us.

Bradley Cooper and the case narrative

2011-07-07T00:01:00.005-04:00

On July 12, 2008, Nancy Cooper, a middle-class wife and mother of two young children living in Cary, North Carolina, was declared missing. Two days later, her body was found in Wake County and the affluent community (where many people are employed in high-paying jobs at the Research Triangle or at the nearby University of North Carolina) was stunned.

The police investigation almost immediately centered on Nancy's husband, Brad. In their investigation, police found that the couple, which had moved to Cary from Canada, was on the verge of divorcing. This was not going to be an amicable divorce, from what people who knew the couple were saying, and in these kinds of cases, the estranged spouse almost always is going to be the prime suspect.

Almost immediately, police locked in on Brad Cooper, and at that point, to be honest, they decided that he would be the one they would investigate. Pat Bazemore, Cary's chief of police, declared that it was "not a random crime," which meant that whoever killed Nancy Cooper meant to kill her. What is important to remember is that from that point on, the police would interpret ALL information as pointing to Brad's guilt, rather than trying to use the information they found as a roadmap to finding a suspect. (He was arrested in October of that year and charged with Nancy's murder.)

This hardly is unusual with police these days, and this is one of the biggest criticisms that defense attorneys and people like Radley Balko (one of the most accurate and important journalistic commentators on the law today) have of police investigations. All too often, police decide beforehand who is guilty and then tailor their investigation toward proving what they already believe to be true.

To put it mildly, this is a recipe for disaster, and it is the single worst cause of innocent people being framed. What starts out as a flawed investigation ultimately turns into police putting together a house of dishonest cards, and that is what happened in the Brad Cooper case.

Police and prosecutors claimed that Bradley strangled his wife to death the night of July 11, put her body into the trunk of the car, drove her to the place where he had found in a Google search, and dumped her there. Brad, on the other hand, claimed that she had gone out jogging that morning and had called him on her cellphone at about 6:40 a.m.

Obviously, if she was out jogging and calling her husband instead of lying dead in a drainage ditch, the police/prosecution narrative made no sense and there was a killer on the loose. Making matters worse for the law enforcement narrative, a number of people told police that they had seen her jogging that morning. Obviously, there would be a huge collision course between competing streams of "evidence."

As readers know, houses of cards fall apart, and this one did, too. However, when prosecutors AND judges decide that they are going to do their best to prop up a bad case, then it really does not matter whether or not the charges have a foundation. If a jury goes along with what the judge and prosecutors want, then the defendant is doomed, and innocence means nothing.

There are a number of things that did not make sense in this prosecution, led by Assistant District Attorney Howard J. Cummings and ADAs Boz Zellinger and Amy Fitzhugh, and as I will point out in future posts, it is clear that the police, prosecutors, and the judge decided to find a way to deal with the red flags of the investigation. They include:

Police destruction of the cell-phone data in Nancy Cooper's cellphone. Police claim it was accidental, but the defense was able to raise some important questions about it. By destroying the material and not notifying the defense for nine months about it, one gets the sense that something more than just carelessness is at work.

The Google search of the area where Nancy Cooper's body was discovered was found on Brad Cooper's computer, and jurors said afterward that this was the key piece of evidence that led them to convict Cooper. The defense had an expert who was going to testify that this particular bit of "evidence" had been planted, but Judge Paul Gessner, an ex-cop and prosecutor whose rulings and demeanor clearly favored the prosecution (a reminder of "judge" brian out-house in the Tonya Craft trial), declared that the expert could not testify because, in Gessner's words, he was "not qualified." Thus, the jurors were not permitted to hear contrary evidence, and future posts not only will go into the expert's findings, but also will take a hard look to see whether he was unqualified or not;

The witnesses who claimed to have seen Nancy Cooper that morning jogging. Since more than a dozen people made that claim, one would think that the police and prosecution would have been interested in their story. Think again. Police and prosecutors clearly did not want to have their narrative distracted and ignored these witnesses.

There is more to the trial and investigation (or the lack of an investigation), and I will cover it over time. I end this post with a timeline prepared for me by one of Brad's supporters:

• On Friday evening, July 11th, 2008, Brad, Nancy and their two daughters attended a neighborhood barbecue. Brad took the children home at approximately 8PM while Nancy stayed at the party until approximately midnight.

• At approximately 4AM, Brad woke up to his younger daughter (just under age 2) crying for a bottle of milk. He was trying to calm her down and shortly after, Nancy woke up too. They were trying to wean her off the bottles of milk so they were trying to find other ways to calm her down, plus they were out of milk.

• The two of them started some laundry and it was typical for this family to be awake early in the morning since Nancy often went running early in the morning. Finally, shortly after 6AM, Brad decided to go to the Harris Teeter to buy some milk.

• He returned home with the milk and Nancy gave their daughter the bottle and they realized they were out of laundry detergent so Brad went back to the store to buy some. The store was approximately 2 miles from the home. While en route to the store, Nancy called Brad and asked him to also pick up some green juice for their older daughter. This phone call was received at 6:40 AM, just before Brad is seen entering the Harris Teeter Supermarket.

• Brad returned home and took his daughter upstairs to the home office so she could finish her bottle while he got some work done. He heard Nancy leave to go jogging at approximately 7AM.

• Brad received phone calls from two of Nancy’s friends that morning and he told them that he thought she may have gone jogging with a friend, Carey Clarke but that she hadn’t returned yet.

• Brad had made plans to play tennis the prior evening with a friend for 9:30AM. When Nancy hadn’t returned home by then he called his friend, Mike Hiller to cancel.

• As it got later, Brad became worried and called Nancy’s friend, Jessica Adam to see if she had Carey Clarke’s phone number. She didn’t. Brad told Jessica he was going to put the girls in the car and drive around to look for Nancy.

• At 2:15PM, Jessica Adam called police. Attached is the audio of the phone call: http://www.wral.com/news/local/audio/3250012/

• In the phone call, Jessica implicated that Brad may have had something to do with Nancy’s disappearance.

• Over the next 2 days, police questioned Brad repeatedly and he fully cooperated with them. They also had police follow him and claimed it was to protect him, yet they didn’t put a police trail on the children.

• Nancy’s body was found in the evening of July 14th in a drainage pond in a new construction area 3 miles from the Cooper home. The autopsy report would later indicate that she was strangled.

• Police took possession of the Cooper home on July 15th as part of the investigation.

• On July 16th, Nancy’s parents filed for temporary custody of the children and the judge granted them custody.

• In early October, Brad agreed to undergo a custody deposition in order to regain custody of his children. It was 7 hours long and was more of an interrogation than a deposition. Very specific questions about the events leading up to and following Nancy’s disappearance were asked. It was evident the police supplied questions to the custody attorney.

The Casey Anthony verdict: the jury was right and Nasty Nancy (as always) is wrong

2011-07-06T11:53:00.000-04:00

Nancy Grace is livid. She had been shilling for months for a conviction of Casey Anthony for allegedly murdering her two-year-old daughter, Caylee, and now the jury has acquitted Anthony of murder charges. What's a gal like Nasty Nancy to do?

Perhaps the first thing that Nasty Nancy should do is to read the laws of this country, and learn the standards that supposedly exist for conviction. Even though Nasty Nancy's standards for conviction are simple -- an accusation automatically means one is guilty -- the legal standard actually is "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt."

(One must remember that Nasty Nancy during the Duke Lacrosse Case, in which she automatically declared the lacrosse players guilty of gang rape, actually tried to claim that the legal presumption of innocence was a creation of Hitler's Germany. I'm serious.)

During the trial of Casey Anthony, the prosecution managed to establish what people already knew:

The skeletal remains found were those of Caylee and there was duct tape sticking to her skull;
Casey lied to the police about a number of things;
Casey denied murdering her daughter;
Casey was not a person of the highest character.

Some of those things are damning indictments if a woman applies for the Mother of the Year Award or is trying to be a role model to young women. I would hope that none of my daughters turns out to be like Casey Anthony.

However, having a bad character does not mean one is a murderer. If that were so, then Washington, D.C., would be the murder capital of the world. (Come to think of it, not long ago, D.C. WAS the murder capital of the world, and it is true that bad character abounds in that city. Nonetheless, my original point stands.)

Seizing on the duct tape, prosecutors then claimed that Casey smothered her child with it in order to get rid of her so that she could be a Big Party Animal. The problem was that they had no idea if the child were smothered with duct tape or not, none. They were engaging in conjecture, and any jury that takes its job seriously is not going to convict on the basis of a pretty loose conjecture.

Now, had Casey's DNA been found on the duct tape, that might have demonstrated a connection to the prosecution's narrative, but, alas, they found nothing of the sort. What they had was a little girl's skeletal remains and a mother of less-than-savory character.

In the end, the jury did convict Casey Anthony of the obvious: she lied to the police. The crimes are misdemeanors, and the maximum she could get if the sentences for each of the four counts are run consecutively is four years, and she already has been jailed for three. Thus, whatever time she will spend in jail almost is over.

I predict that in the coming days, Nasty Nancy will be hounding the jurors and doing everything but demanding that lynch mobs burn down the jurors' houses. Certainly, the Usual Suspects in the media will denounce what they see as a wrongful acquittal.

Along with Nasty Nancy, Andrea Peyser at the New York Post, a writer who always seems to believe that anyone accused is guilty, and that no trial ever is necessary, already is on the "O.J. Verdict" bandwagon. Her column is the "How DARE a jury disagree with my views!" screed that I would expect from her. Peyser really does seem to believe -- and I have read her columns for years -- that an accusation is the same as proof of guilt, and that there is no need for a trial when she already has been judge and jury.

Yet, what I see is a jury that did its job. Prosecutors and Nasty Nancy and company demanded that jurors engage in speculation, and the jurors refused to do that, and I applaud them for their integrity. Maybe Casey Anthony did murder her daughter, but the prosecution never proved it, and jurors are supposed to acquit when that happens. And it happened.

The Nifong Times

2011-07-05T22:34:00.000-04:00

Other than the Durham Herald-Sun, no newspaper in the country disgraced itself in the Duke Lacrosse Case more than did the New York Times. This is a paper that claimed an obvious deus ex machina report written by a police sergeant who took no notes in the case was a vital piece of evidence. (One would guess the report was "evidence" in a crime if one understands that the Durham Police Department helped fabricate the charges and had its officers lie to grand jurors, and prepare false documents, which actually is criminal behavior.)

This is a paper that claimed that police had discovered what would amount to a "magic towel" that would wipe away the DNA of one person and keep another. This is a paper whose reporters, columnists, and editors seemed to believe that Political Correctness means that one can suspend the laws of time and space when left-wing "values" are at stake.

After the Duke case imploded and left egg all over the faces of NYT staffers, there was a promise by media people in general and the folks at the NYT in particular to "do better" the next time. That was a lie, a huge lie, as the very institutional nature of modern American journalism simply does not permit reflection, only reaction, and the reaction is done by people whose tunnel vision worldviews only make things worse.

Along came the rape and sexual assault allegations against former International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn and -- Guess what? -- the NYT and other newspapers and media outlets run over the same cliff that they did in the Duke case, from the early rush to judgment and the usual platitudes about power and poverty to the media frenzy at the "perp walk." As in the Duke case, when the facts came out, the NYT once again looked to be a ridiculous rag.

So, what does the paper do? It puts out pro-prosecution propaganda. Yes, it was the PROSECUTION that found the discrepancies in the accuser's statements. And, on the editorial page of July 5, columnist Joe Nocera put out every ridiculous platitude that one could imagine in praising D.A. Cyrus Vance, Jr.

Before looking at the guy's ridiculous column, I remind readers of the recent column by Eric Margolis, a writer and thinker I respect much more than Nocera. Margolis reminds his readers that the revelations by the prosecution were not done in the name of "doing the right thing," but rather because the defense was about to lay out the facts, and the prosecutors didn't want to be shown up:

It is unprecedented for prosecutors to discredit their own star witness. The city’s red-faced DA, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., probably did so because of rumors that the defense, which had assigned a number of crack investigators to check into the maid’s background, was about to go public with the embarrassing information.

(Interestingly, I had said the same thing in my previous column on this sorry case.)

Enter Nocera. After giving the typical NYT view of the case, he declares:

For the life of me, though, I can’t see what Vance did wrong. Quite the contrary. The woman alleged rape, for crying out loud, which was backed up by physical (and other) evidence. She had no criminal record. Her employer vouched for her. The quick decision to indict made a lot of sense, both for legal and practical reasons. Then, as the victim’s credibility crumbled, Vance didn’t try to pretend that he still had a slam dunk, something far too many prosecutors do. He acknowledged the problems.

Lévy, himself a member of the French elite, seems particularly incensed that Vance wouldn’t automatically give Strauss-Kahn a pass, given his extraordinary social status. Especially since his accuser had no status at all.

But that is exactly why Vance should be applauded: a woman with no power made a credible accusation against a man with enormous power. He acted without fear or favor. To have done otherwise would have been to violate everything we believe in this country about no one being above the law.

For starters, the prosecutors lied about the strength of their case. What they had was a woman who was a good actor, and who had engaged in sex with DSK. Hey, if a politician were to be charged with rape for every sexual escapade, then Ted Kennedy would have died in prison.

But Nocera doesn't stop there. No, channeling what the NYT crowd was saying about the Duke case, he declares:

As for Strauss-Kahn’s humiliation, clearly something very bad happened in that hotel room. Quite possibly a crime was committed. Strauss-Kahn’s sordid sexual history makes it likely that he was the instigator. If the worst he suffers is a perp walk, a few days in Rikers Island and some nasty headlines, one’s heart ought not bleed. Ah, yes, and he had to resign as the chief of an institution where sexual harassment was allegedly rampant, thanks, in part, to a culture he helped perpetuate. Gee, isn’t that awful?

What is Nocera saying? He is declaring that because DSK was wealthy, there was nothing wrong in bringing false charges against him. Where have we heard that before? Try reading the NYT columnists on the Duke case, and you will see the similarities in thinking.

The real problem is that facts no longer matter at the NYT, only ideology. It was ideology that gave the NYT license to help Rudy Giuliani commit felony after felony in his pursuit of Wall Street figures and the pursuit of ideology that permitted the NYT to give a free pass to the brutal predations of Elliot Spitzer, a.k.a., Client #9.

Like the Bourbons of France, the journalists at the NYT learn nothing -- and they forget nothing.

The false accusation case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn collapses

2011-07-01T12:16:00.000-04:00

To the surprise of no one who has done even a smidgen of due diligence in the sexual assault case against former International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the New York Times and other news outlets are reporting that the whole thing is falling apart because the accuser has been spinning more stories than did Crystal Mangum of Duke Lacrosse case fame. His release on his own recognizance (after originally being held on $5 million bond) is the last step before this case officially is trashed, I believe.

Shortly after Strauss-Kahn's arrest, Kerwyn and I were discussing the case and as she laid out the facts, it was pretty obvious that from the start, the police and, more important, the Manhattan district attorney's office, were telling Mike Nifongesque lies. Remember that he supposedly left the hotel immediately after the attempted rape, being in such a rush that he left his cellphone behind in an attempt to quickly get out of the country?

It turns out that he checked out of the hotel in an orderly fashion, went to the airport, and then called the hotel to see if they could deliver his cellphone to him. None of his actions seemed to be those of a man desperately trying to leave the USA, although given the state of "law enforcement" in this country, I can't blame him for wanting to get the heck out of this place.

Even those lies from the police and prosecutors aside, it gets even better, much better. However, we first must travel down a short memory lane, courtesy of our friends at the Grey Lady, who always are outraged, OUTRAGED at the mere accusation of sexual assault or sexual harassment. Let us look at the various statements coming from the DA's office right after the arrest (this is significant because of what the NYT NOW is claiming about Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr., and his underlings):

Artie McConnell, assistant district attorney, at Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arraignment in Criminal Court on May 16:

“The victim provided very powerful details consistent with violent sexual assault committed by the defendant, which establishes all the necessary elements of the crime he is charged with.”

“She made outcries to multiple witnesses immediately after the incident, both to hotel staff and law enforcement. She was then taken to the hospital and was given a full sexual assault forensic examination. The observations and findings during that exam corroborate her accounts.”

Mr. McConnell at a bail hearing on May 19:

“The complainant in this case has offered a compelling and unwavering story about what occurred in the defendant’s room. She made immediate outcries to multiple witnesses, both to hotel staff and to police.”

“The victim was given a complete and expert forensic examination and the findings from that examination are consistent with her account. The Crime Scene Unit processed the hotel room and the scene, and while those scientific tests have not been completed, the preliminary indications are that forensic evidence that supports the victim’s version of events may be found.”

Of course, what sexual assault claim would be complete without the editorial page angst that came from the opinion folks at the NYT? Here is Maureen Dowd, who never seems to be without a stupid and poorly-informed opinion:

In the wake of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, as more Frenchwomen venture sexual harassment charges against elite men, the capital of seduction is reeling at the abrupt shift from can-can to can’t-can’t. Le Canard Enchaîné, a satirical weekly, still argues that “News always stops at the bedroom door,” but many French seem ready to bid adieu to the maxim.

As Libération editor Nicolas Demorand wrote in an editorial: “Now that voices have been freed, and the ceiling of glass and shame has been bashed in, other scandals may now arise.”

After long scorning American Puritanism and political correctness on gender issues, the French are shocked to find themselves in a very American debate about the male exploitation/seduction of women, and the nature of consent.

Just as the NYT immediately jumped to the conclusion that Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans had raped Crystal Mangum, writers at the paper quickly assumed that the Strauss-Kahn accuser was telling the unvarnished truth. The letters that the paper saw fit to publish were full of the rush to judgment. This piece by Linda Martin Alcoff, a philosophy professor in New York, was pretty typical of the mindset of the NYT crowd.

In other words, it was assume guilt first and always believe the prosecutors, especially when they are prominent Democrats like Vance who have political ambitions. But, as in the Duke case, truth has carved a bit of a wedge in the NYT's narrative:

The sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is on the verge of collapse as investigators have uncovered major holes in the credibility of the housekeeper who charged that he attacked her in his Manhattan hotel suite in May, according to two well-placed law enforcement officials.

Although forensic tests found unambiguous evidence of a sexual encounter between Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a French politician, and the woman, prosecutors now do not believe much of what the accuser has told them about the circumstances or about herself.

Since her initial allegation on May 14, the accuser has repeatedly lied, one of the law enforcement officials said.

Senior prosecutors met with lawyers for Mr. Strauss-Kahn on Thursday and provided details about their findings, and the parties are discussing whether to dismiss the felony charges. Among the discoveries, one of the officials said, are issues involving the asylum application of the 32-year-old housekeeper, who is Guinean, and possible links to people involved in criminal activities, including drug dealing and money laundering.

I have no doubt that the story that police and prosecutors fed the media -- that this large, naked man jumped from the bathroom and forced this poor, African immigrant to give him oral sex -- is utterly false. First, keep in mind that she is from Guinea, and is a French speaker. Second, I suspect that the encounter not only was mutual, but she planned it in advance, and most likely with some of the people with whom she is associated.

The article continues:

According to the two officials, the woman had a phone conversation with an incarcerated man within a day of her encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in which she discussed the possible benefits of pursuing the charges against him. The conversation was recorded.

That man, the investigators learned, had been arrested on charges of possessing 400 pounds of marijuana. He is among a number of individuals who made multiple cash deposits, totaling around $100,000, into the woman’s bank account over the last two years. The deposits were made in Arizona, Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania.

The investigators also learned that she was paying hundreds of dollars every month in phone charges to five companies. The woman had insisted she had only one phone and said she knew nothing about the deposits except that they were made by a man she described as her fiancé and his friends.

In addition, one of the officials said, she told investigators that her application for asylum included mention of a previous rape, but there was no such account in the application. She also told them that she had been subjected to genital mutilation, but her account to the investigators differed from what was contained in the asylum application.

I smell a setup from the beginning, one that even a semi-competent investigator would have found. However, given that the original investigation was done by the New York police and the DA's office, competency really is not in the job description; however, being able to act in an ideological manner that fits with the mentality at the NYT IS part of the job.

Nonetheless, the NYT continues to protect Vance and his crew, declaring:

In recent weeks, Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers, Benjamin Brafman and William W. Taylor III, have made it clear that they would make the credibility of the woman a focus of their case. In a May 25 letter, they said they had uncovered information that would “gravely undermine the credibility” of the accuser.

Still, it was the prosecutor’s investigators who found the information about the woman. (Emphasis mine)

Right. It seems that no one at the NYT has managed to deal with what is obvious: If government investigators had found this damning evidence on their own, then why were Vance and company continuing to claim that the accuser was truthful and that they had a strong case? In other words, if their investigators found out these things, either one of two things happened, neither of which would reflect well on NY authorities.

The first would be that investigators told them what they had found, but Vance's charges continued to spout the same narrative, hoping that their rhetoric would overcome any problems. In other words, they knew the truth but lied.

The second would be that the investigators withheld information and gave it to their superiors only long after they had found out the truth, leaving Vance and the other prosecutors in the dark. This one makes no sense, which means that if what the NYT is saying is true, then Vance and those prosecutors involved with the case should be disbarred at the very least for knowingly making false statements in a very high-profile case.

There is a third possibility, and that is that the private investigators for the Strauss-Kahn defense did their own work and presented the facts to the Manhattan DA and warned them that if they did not act, the defense would make sure that the material would be leaked in a very unceremonious way. Any way one slices this material, however, it is clear that Vance and his employees have a lot of explaining to do.

Don't expect the mainstream media to ask those questions. Vance and the editorial staff at the NYT are joined at the ideological and political hip and the paper will do everything it can do to protect him. Likewise, the fact that Strauss-Kahn over the years has had the reputation of acting as, well, one might expect from someone who is known to be sexually-boorish, I doubt that too many mainstream reporters are going to invite the rage of the Maureen Dowds.

Nonetheless, we see yet another example of the Government-Media Alliance making false accusations, bringing false charges, and then ending up with egg on some collective faces. This is not the last time we will see this sorry scenario, and I only can feel for the next person who is caught in the crosshairs.

North Carolina prosecutors get their wish: the permanent disappearance of exculpatory evidence

2011-06-27T16:19:00.000-04:00

Four years ago, the State of North Carolina saw something more rare than a wild polar bear in Florida: the actual disbarment of a prosecutor for withholding exculpatory evidence and then lying to a judge about it. While it was morally satisfying to see a lawbreaker like Mike Nifong get at least a tiny bit of comeuppance for his crimes, apparently the other prosecutors in North Carolina got nervous.

Never fear. This week, the North Carolina legislature passed a bill ensuring that prosecutors, in violation of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brady decision, can withhold exculpatory evidence indefinitely. (Notice that the information is barely mentioned in the news article, but it definitely has major implications, as I see it. This article has a bit more information.)

Now, prosecutors no doubt will claim that it is not their fault if the police withhold information that is vital for the defense and do so without the knowledge of prosecutors, and if something is put into those terms, I can understand their point. However, my sense is that situations in which exculpatory evidence is withheld rarely, if ever, involve police mishandling of evidence or even police misconduct in absence of the knowledge of prosecutors.

Anyone familiar with how criminal law works knows that police and prosecutors work closely together. The notion that police are going to treat prosecutors the same way they treat defendants and defense lawyers truly is a howler, but that is what prosecutors want us to believe.

So, what is likely to happen as a result of this new law? I have no doubt that prosecutors simply are going to make sure that a lot of exculpatory information somehow remains in police files and doesn't make its way to the courthouse. The police will be able to claim that they "just forgot" and prosecutors will be able to claim that they had no clue this stuff existed.

As outrageous as this law is, I doubt it could have saved Mike Nifong's skin in the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case. First, Nifong took over the investigation from the police and was involved in a number of details, including overseeing the "lineup" from which Crystal Mangum picked her alleged assailants. In fact, this very point is why he is able to be sued, given he went outside the normal scope of his duties.

Second, while Nifong in his response to the North Carolina State Bar (after it filed charges against him), first claimed no recollection of being at a meeting with Brian Meehan, whose DNA lab had found the results which ultimately led to Nifong's downfall. His only hope would have been that the police had not turned over the relevant exculpatory information, but given that he and Meehan actually planned strategy at that meeting, his "I don't recall being there" defense was seen for the sham it was.

I have no doubt at all that this new law will lead to more wrongful convictions in North Carolina, a state that already is known for a bad criminal "justice" system. Furthermore, I suspect that most legislators voting for this abomination knew just that, but really didn't care. And prosecutors now have been handed yet another weapon to destroy innocent people.

As I further develop the case narrative and look into the conviction of Bradley Cooper, I can see this mentality at work. The police (as we shall see) destroyed a key piece of exculpatory evidence and then lied about what they did. Was this done with collusion with prosecutors? Who knows. All I know is that the legislature and Gov. Bev Perdue have handed police and prosecutors the opportunity to destroy and hide even more evidence -- and it all will be perfectly legal.

All in a day's work, I suppose.

The framing of Bradley Cooper

2011-06-24T16:58:00.001-04:00

I have despised the "justice" (sic) system in North Carolina for a long time, beginning with the railroading of the Little Rascals defendants when prosecutors and police falsely accused a number of people of horrible acts of child molestation, although it was clear from the substance (or lack, thereof) of those charges that the Laws of Time and Space contradicted what the authorities were claiming. Unfortunately, many lives were ruined before the North Carolina Supreme Court overturned the convictions.

That was only the beginning. The Duke Lacrosse Case, with all of the lies told by government officials and others in authority, told me that once and for all, North Carolina is a dangerous place to live, as the authorities are not bound by the law or even common decency. The Durham Police, along with Durham County DA Mike Nifong, did everything possible to frame Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans, and while the case fell apart, it was only because some members of the North Carolina State Bar actually did their duties and ultimately disbarred Nifong.

I had no forum by which to protest the lies told by authorities in the Little Rascals case, but by the time Nifong went after the Duke students, there was Lew Rockwell's blog, and he generously let me fire away at the false charges, which I did on a regular basis for a year. When Tonya Craft was falsely charged with child molestation in my old stomping grounds of North Georgia, I had this blog, and utilized it to expose the lies being told under the direction of prosecutors Len "The Man-Racist" Gregor, Chris "Facebook-Cruisemaster" Arnt, and "judge" brian (out)house.

Craft was acquitted and one of the ringleaders of the farce, Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit District Attorney Buzz Franklin, blamed me in part for the state's failure to secure a wrongful conviction. I deeply appreciate the compliment that Buzz gave me, although something tells me he wasn't saying those things as praise.

Over the next several days, I will be spending a number of posts examining the trial and conviction of Bradley Cooper, who allegedly murdered his wife, Nancy, in Wake County, North Carolina. I have looked over a lot of the evidence and have become convinced that Cooper was framed.

Readers should understand that I don't come to this conclusion easily. When Cooper's wife was murdered three years ago, like the police, I immediately suspected that Bradley was the killer, as he seemed to be the obvious choice.

However, as the case went on, and especially during the trial, I came to believe that (1) the state had destroyed or hidden possible exculpatory evidence, and (2) their "smoking" gun, a Google search map of the area where her body was found that allegedly was found on his computer, was the work of the authorities themselves.

In other words, I am accusing North Carolina authorities of deliberately framing someone because they could do it. This is not a hard thing for me to believe, given what I have seen in past incidences in that state.

Yes, it is true that NC Attorney General Roy Cooper did declare the lacrosse players to be "innocent" after his appointees did their own investigation. What else could have he done, given that the "evidence" already had been made public and there was no way that the charges could have had an ounce of truth? Likewise, Cooper could have further investigated the whole mess and found criminal conduct on behalf of authorities, but neither he nor anyone else in government, state or federal, wanted to go there.

Would a North Carolina cop lie on the stand? Absolutely. "Testilying," a term made up by police officers themselves to describe what they do after taking an oath to tell the truth, is common all over the country and North Carolina is no exception. A middle class woman was murdered and the police and prosecutors had the pressure to find a killer.

Given the lawlessness and dishonesty that dominates the police and prosecutorial culture in North Carolina, I doubt that framing Cooper was a difficult decision. And, if there is a conspiracy to lie, destroy or alter evidence, and to railroad an innocent man into prison, what better people to do it than the men and women who wear the blue costume.

When people speak of the infamous "Blue Wall of Silence," they are speaking of the various police departments in the United States. No one lies better than a cop and no one covers up a lie better than a whole police department.

I make this point because one of the problems of holding conspiracies together is that someone spills the beans. Police departments tend to be the exception because cops tend to stick together, and if a cop were to tell the truth, he knows that his life afterward most likely will be very short.

Bradley Cooper was convicted by a jury that saw only weak and contrived circumstantial evidence. A judge who was in league with the prosecutors oversaw the trial, or whatever one calls one of those things in North Carolina. While it was true that the authorities from police to the judge in Craft's trial were trying to rig a conviction, jurors in Catoosa County saw through the lies.

Jurors in Cooper's case, however, did not. But their verdict will not stop me from presenting the case against guilt over the next several days.

Joe Collins is acquitted, one "hung" charge

2011-06-17T23:20:00.000-04:00

The attempts by Isanti County authorities to throw Joe Collins into prison on fake charges seems to have run into a bit of a roadblock: a judge who actually knew the law, a good defense attorney, and 11 jurors who understood what was happening. As one juror later said, the charges never should have been brought in the first place.

The charges consisted of two gross misdemeanor charges of "witness tampering" and one felony bribery count. One of the misdemeanor charges was dismissed before the state presented its case. After the state rested, the judge ordered a directed verdict of "not guilty" on the felony charge, leaving only the misdemeanor "tampering with a witness to provide false information to police" accusation.

Jurors deadlocked 11-1 to acquit, and the judge declared a mistrial. As I see it, because the Isanti County prosecutors would not present the case themselves (claiming "conflict of interest"), they dumped the charges on prosecutors of a neighboring county, and I don't think that prosecutors are going to want to go through this nonsense again.

The question is this: Why were Isanti County prosecutors so anxious to go after Joe Collins? The answer is simple: He is a much better investigator than they are, and time after time, he uncovers lies and misconduct, and given that police in America today are little more than assortments of criminal or near-criminal gangs, an honest investigation is the last thing cops want.

As they did with Eric Echols and Ron DeLaby, prosecutors have brought criminal charges against Joe Collins not because these men created crimes, but rather because the police and prosecutors no longer want the truth as part of their investigations. That is a sad commentary on "law enforcement," but it also is the truth.

People in Minnesota may think of themselves as being more "civilized" and "honest" than folks in Georgia, but police "testilying" and prosecutorial misconduct are found all over this country. Even in Minnesota, ya betcha.

The evil Nancy Grace

2011-06-17T08:02:00.000-04:00

On Lew Rockwell's blog today, I have a column about Nancy Grace, whom I consider to be the most evil television personality, and there is a long line of evil people in that genre.

Here is a person who as a prosecutor lied simply because she knew she could get away with it, and someone who actually believes that the Rights of the Accused are the product of totalitarianism, and the legal assumption of guilt is the product of freedom. Yes, Big Brother (or maybe Big Sister) lives.

The Lawless Buzz Franklin

2011-06-14T12:16:00.000-04:00

I have not made many forays into the LMJC recently, although the baseless trial of James Combs is scheduled to occur in September. (Once again, Tim "Dirty" Deal will be front-and-center, parading his utter dishonesty in front of a jury and hoping that this time jurors will overlook his outright perjured testimony and dishonest "investigations.")

But today, I want to take a few moments to look once again at the bogus RICO case against Joe Mohwish that Franklin concocted last January. Somewhere in the bowels of the laws of the State of Georgia, it states that prosecutors are not to knowingly bring false indictments into court. However, because the Georgia State Bar openly lets prosecutors know that the bar "has their backs," prosecutors feel free to engage in lawless behavior because they can do it.

Someone like Franklin who never felt bound by the law must be utterly grateful to the State Bar that he won't have to answer for the regular lawbreaking that goes on in his office. So it is with the Mohwish case.

As you recall, Franklin filed RICO charges against Mohwish for two alleged misdemeanors that he could bundle into RICO felony charges and the nonsense that goes with them. However, if what Mohwish was doing was legal, then there are no misdemeanors and, thus, no RICO.

The latest filing by Mohwish notes that his operation clearly did not operate under a raffle license (as claimed in the indictment) because he was not eligible for such a license, per an amendment enacted by Georgia voters in the 1994 general election. Thus, we now are in the area where Franklin does not only disrespect the law, but he ignores his own state constitution as well.

I have no idea what Franklin will do after he leaves office at the end of next year. I only can hope that whatever he pursues will have nothing to do with the law, since he doesn't know Georgia law and has no intention of obeying it.

Victoria Sprouse's conviction is overturned!

2011-06-13T10:33:00.000-04:00

Two years ago, a Charlotte federal jury convicted Victoria Sprouse of "mortgage fraud," and I had a strong comment on that verdict in this column on Lew Rockwell's page. I have not changed my mind in the interim.

This past Friday, U.S. District Judge Martin Reidinger overturned her conviction and ordered a new trial, basing his decision upon the fact that the prosecution wove a highly-expansive view of "honest services fraud" into all of the charges, even though she was not actually charged with "honest services fraud." (I have this commentary on "honest services fraud" on the LRC page.)

The U.S. Supreme Court recently overturned most of that open-ended federal law and it was abundantly clear from Judge Reidinger's decision that the feds had no case at all without using the part of the statute that was overturned. I have my doubts as to whether or not the feds even can refile charges, and her counsel, Pete Anderson, will be a highly-effective force against anything that the U.S. attorney's office there throws against him.

Because the former assistant U.S. attorney, Matt Martens, now is the Chief Litigation Counsel of the Division of Enforcement of the Securities and Exchange Commission, he will no longer be leading the new prosecution team in that case. Let us just say that I have nothing good to say about Martens, and his appointment by the Obama administrations speaks volumes about the respect that administration has for the law. However, because Martens is extremely vindictive and unethical, I will not say much about him.

I will note, however, that in the Sprouse trial, he had her property seized so that she could not defend herself. The judge declared Sprouse indigent and then allocated $25,000 for her defense. Pete Anderson, at the time, was her attorney and he agreed to stay on as counsel.

Martens, however, told the court that it would take "4-6 weeks" to present the material to the jury, and Anderson had to back out, and Sprouse's court-appointed counsel turned out to be less-than-enthusiastic in defending her. During the trial, Martens presented his material in about three days.

That is correct; About three days. One can draw his or her own conclusion as to whether or not the government was skillfully able to consolidate its supposedly massive amounts of evidence and narrow its focus, or Martens did not tell the judge the truth about the evidence, especially given that Anderson is well-known as a criminal lawyer and had represented Rick Graves, who was acquitted of charges that Martens brought against him. The reader is left to decide what the truth might be in this situation.

There will be a hearing Tuesday to set the current terms of bond. Sprouse, since the conviction, has been under house arrest.

The Joe Collins case: yet another prosecutor breaking the law (and getting away with it)

2011-06-09T22:05:00.000-04:00

The Tonya Craft case was full of illegal and immoral actions by prosecutors Chris Arnt and Len Gregor, along with the predations of "judge" brian outhouse, and it is hard to pinpoint any one low point, given the whole thing was in the gutter from the start. However, besides illegally (and knowingly) bringing false charges against Craft, Arnt also had private investigator Eric Echols indicted on false charges of "intimidating a witness."

While the charges against Echols ultimately were dismissed, it was yet another attempt by a lawless prosecutor to demonstrate to others that he indicted Echols -- because he could do it. Unfortunately, lawbreaking is not limited to Arnt; in fact, prosecutors all over the country are finding that they can indict any private investigator who manages to shoot holes in their flimsy cases.

Joe Collins, a successful private investigator in Minnesota goes on trial in Isanti County next week in what clearly is a contrived charge of felony bribery. The scenario is all-too-familiar.

In this case, a woman claimed that a man kidnapped her and raped her. (They left a party together and she spent the night and most of the next day with him. After that, she realized that her boyfriend might not like her sleeping around, so she then claimed rape.) The details of the story (like so many others) don't match the prosecution's line, especially given that the woman was not exactly anxious to flee from the home of her "rapist."

Collins was hired by the defendant's law firm and it did not take him long to start blowing holes in the woman's story, and he also found that the Isanti County Sheriff's Office had conducted a slapstick investigation, led by Det. Lisa Lovering, who moonlights as a real estate agent.

Furthermore, he found out that "the victim" had stolen something from an antique store in another county. He spoke to her about it, and she admitted stealing the item. She asked him if he could make the charges (no one had charged her with anything at that point) go away, and he agreed that he would, provided that she would tell the truth about the alleged rape.

You see, whether in Minnesota or Georgia or Washington, D.C., getting someone to tell the truth is a crime, while prosecutors are permitted -- indeed, encouraged -- to suborn perjury. The one thing that seems not to be tolerated by judges and prosecutors these days is the truth.

So, Isanti County County Attorney Jeffrey Edblad filed felony charges against Collins and that is where we stand. (Edblad, however, has recused himself from the case, citing a "conflict of interest.")

I'll be reporting on the trial next week.

Reason Magazine and Criminal "Justice"

2011-06-07T15:44:00.001-04:00

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.

Sorry for the absence

2011-06-06T16:42:00.001-04:00

I am in the midst of a number of projects, along with a summer school class. Furthermore, my laptop is being fixed, which really limits my mobility with Blogger.

I will have some stuff on the upcoming Joe Collins case in a day or so. Please be patient.

The New York City "Rape Cop" verdict

2011-05-27T14:19:00.000-04:00

This past week, two former New York City police officers, Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata, were acquitted of raping a woman while on duty. As I have not followed this case, I really cannot comment on the specifics of the charges except to say that the events the woman described and the reality of the investigation were two different things.

In other words, the "victim" lied. Of that, I have no doubt. Like the Duke Lacrosse Case in which Crystal Mangum described a 30-minute assault complete with ejaculation and being beaten with fists, the forensic evidence simply did not match the story. Despite the best efforts of the prosecutors to, frankly, suborn perjury, the jury was not buying the fantasy that the government was trying to conjure up.

Now, the cops were convicted of three counts of official misconduct for entering the woman’s apartment, and that was inevitable, given that the officers had gone to the apartment when they should have been doing their normal duties. That conviction cost them their jobs and may well result in jail time, but there was no evidence that they had raped the woman and plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Unfortunately, keeping with the theme that made the NY Times a laughing stock during the Duke case, we see the newspaper continues with the same narrative: a woman accused them; therefore, they are guilty. The article declares:

For Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, the verdict was an unsatisfying conclusion. The decision, after a trial that lasted almost two months, also comes at a critical juncture for an office that is navigating the biggest case of Mr. Vance’s brief tenure: the sexual-assault charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund.

The jury’s decision also underscores the difficulty of obtaining favorable results for women who say they were sexually assaulted, and who often are subjected to scrutiny and skepticism that keep many of them from speaking out. In this case, defense lawyers pounced on the credibility of the woman because she was very drunk on the night in question and did not remember many details.

So, we see that this is about the politics of rape and sex, not about justice. It is about the promotion of the political career of the son of Jimmy Carter's secretary of state, and about prosecutors that decide that evidence does not matter, only politics.

What these cops did was bad and certainly a dereliction of their duties. However, what the prosecutors did was worse, for while Moreno and Mata violated their legal duties, the prosecutors suborned perjury, which is a felony and goes to the very heart of the system.

Unfortunately, the NYT and the political elites favor the felons.

Update on our Lavian adoption

2011-05-26T15:34:00.000-04:00

Sintija (who is age 12) is coming for five weeks this summer, and will arrive July 10. We are still in the adoption process. We have raised about $10,000.00. We are currently awaiting approval from US Immigration to bring Sintija into the country on a permanent basis.

We have most of our paperwork completed. We would like to be able to go to Latvia and bring her home to stay this fall, but we still need to raise money. Our most pressing need is for $5,100.00 to pay for the document translation and the Latvian attorney. After that, all of the subsequent expenses will be for travel.

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

2011-05-20T12:56:00.000-04:00

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.

Sean Lanigan is lucky: At least the Fairfax County Police didn't murder him

2011-05-17T20:58:00.000-04:00

Fairfax County, Virginia, is a Washington, D.C., bedroom community, and most people there owe their employment either to government or to businesses that serve government workers. It also is the home of a brutal and marauding police force that is quick to gun down unarmed people and to make false accusations against good people.

The sad case of Sean Lanigan, a teacher in Fairfax County falsely accused of child molestation and the victim of police and prosecutorial misconduct, is only one of many victims in that county, where the police and prosecutors run amok because they can. But I say that Lanigan is lucky, given the fate of Salvatore Culosi, who was gunned down by a member of a Fairfax County SWAT team.

Culosi, an optometrist who bet on a few football games, had made the mistake of befriending a Fairfax County detective whom he met in a bar. David J. Baucom, the detective, decided to see if he could get Culosi to bet more money, and he finally talked him into betting $2,000 on a game, which meant Culosi could be arrested in Virginia for "running a gambling operation."

Keep in mind that this "crime" was masterminded by the police, and then the authorities sent a SWAT team to arrest Culosi. When police arrived, Culosi walked out unarmed, and then he was gunned down by officer Deval Bullock. (As this article in Reason shows, Bullock's official story was a lie, and all that he received for punishment was three weeks off from work.)

The police were not content in murdering an unarmed man (and if any of us were to shoot down -- even accidentally -- an unarmed person, we would be tried for murder, since we don't wear a blue costume and tin badge). Radley Balko's Reason article explains:

In the months that followed (the shooting), Baucum continued his investigation, badgering Culosi's grieving friends and relatives after pulling their names and numbers from the cell phone he was carrying and a computer taken from his home the night he was killed. Steve Gulley, Culosi's brother-in-law, told The Washington Post the following April that Baucum called him and menacingly asked, "How much are you into Sal for?" Scott Lunceford, a lifelong friend of Culosi's, told the Post Baucum called him and accused him of being a gambler. The calls, Gulley told the paper, smacked of intimidation aimed at discouraging a lawsuit.

In the end, the family of Sal Culosi settled with Fairfax County for $2 million, but no one at the department was prosecuted and only Bullock received a mild punishment.

Following the shooting, Fairfax Chief David Rohrer wrote a report of the incident which turned out to be fabricated. As Balko explains, in response to Rohrer's claim that the shooting was accidental, as Bullock was bumped by a car door and the gun simply went off:

The Culosis were dubious. They believed Bullock mistook the cell phone their son was holding the night he was shot for a gun. They hired their own investigators, who determined, based on the department's own measurements of the crime scene, that when Bullock pulled the trigger he was away from his vehicle and much closer to Culosi than he had claimed. Using the recorded locations of shell casings, police vehicles, and Culosi's body, they produced computer animations showing that the incident could not have happened in the manner described by Chief Rohrer's report.

Writing false reports is a crime called "obstruction of justice," but Rohrer did not have to worry about being charged.

However, in Lanigan's case, Fairfax police threw the possibility of charging people who were contradicting the story the cops wanted to be told with "obstruction of justice." (Again, if one wishes to lie, it helps to be wearing a blue costume and tin badge. After all, government workers are "heroes" in Northern Virginia.) Writes Tom Jackman, who covered this story for the Washington Post:

But when others – staff, parents – tried to tell (Fairfax Det. Nicole) Christian anything she didn’t want to hear, she threatened them with prosecution for obstruction of justice, the staff members and parents said. School district investigator Steve Kerr’s investigative report, written after Lanigan’s acquittal, confirmed those claims, noting that: “Because of the jury’s decision, the detective [Christian] advised that she will not pursue criminal charges against [staff member] or [staff member].”

In other words, in the Orwellian world of Northern Virginia, lies told by government employees in blue costumes are the truth, while the truth told by Mere Mundanes is considered to be a lie.

But, Christian's smarmy tactics did not stop with threats against witnesses with exculpatory evidence. No, it gets MUCH worse:

In addition, the accuser’s close friend and corroborating witness to the incident quickly tried to retract her story, her mother said, but Christian wasn’t hearing it. In a letter to the mother of the witness from assistant superintendent Kevin North after the trial, North confirmed that “you requested a re-interview with your daughter, which the detective declined.”

Police feel that child victims and witnesses can be manipulated or intimidated into changing their story, and the witness’s mother said Christian told her, “if she changes her story, they’re going to wonder why she changed her testimony. She said, ‘I know how to do my job. Don’t tell me how to do my job.’ ”

But when Christian and assistant Fairfax prosecutor Katie Pavluchuk approached the witness and her mother outside Lanigan’s preliminary hearing in March 2010, the girl and her mother refused to speak with them. The girl then joined the accuser in recanting the claim that Lanigan had lain on top of the accuser.

Not long after that hallway encounter, Fairfax County launched a Child Protective Services investigation into the witness’s mother ~~-- the reasons for which have not been made public~~ for alleged inappropriate behavior by her boyfriend. The witness’s mother was eventually cleared of any allegations of misbehavior, but also had to undergo the pressure of being investigated. The girl and her mother have since moved from the area. (Emphasis mine)

In other words, if people want to tell the truth, the Fairfax County police counter with tactics of intimidation, just as they did to Sal Culosi's parents after police gunned down their son. And even after a jury quickly acquitted Lanigan, police and prosecutors STILL are insisting that he was guilty, apparently telling each other that it was an "O.J. verdict."

In other words, the police and their social services allies did what they do best: intimidate through false accusations. (No, I don't think that the social services investigation was a coincidence.)

For all of the accolades that Jackman laid on Christian for her supposed experience, one thing stands out: she clearly fabricates "evidence." First, she is so incompetent that even when she was at the school where the alleged molestation occurred, she never even looked a the room where the alleged incident was supposed to have occurred.

This is important, because (like the tiny bathroom in the Duke Lacrosse Case that could not have fit three young men raping a woman in the way that Crystal Mangum described) the room could not fit the tumbling mats that the lying 12-year-old accuser claimed she was placed. In other words, there was a key piece of evidence that Christian ignored, but then she threatened to charge people who pointed out that issue with "obstruction of justice."

But, it gets worse. Jackman writes:

Police declined to allow Nicole Christian, the lead detective on the case, to be interviewed for this article. Several months after Lanigan was acquitted, Fairfax prosecutors dismissed another of Christian’s child abuse cases in the middle of trial, a rarity, when the detective acknowledged that she had “misstated” some key facts in her sworn testimony. (Emphasis mine)

In police vernancular, a "misstatement" actually is a lie. In other words, Christian was caught fabricating material, but she still remains on the job and no doubt will be instrumental in destroying other innocent lives.

The people of Northern Virginia consider themselves to be "progressive," and if "progressive" means the endorsement of the lying, smothering state, I guess we can say that it is a "progressive" community. Yet, for all of the sophistication these people claim for themselves, in reality there is a brutal underside to this area. Police and prosecutors are free to lie, falsely accuse, and even commit murder, and nothing ever is going to be done about it. People who choose to live there do so at their own peril.

The end of the semester is here

2011-05-09T08:23:00.000-04:00

My posts will be spotty over the next couple of weeks, as I am at the end of our semester. I'll post when I can do it.

Daniel J. D'Amico on "The American Prison State"

2011-05-07T11:31:00.000-04:00

The United States imprisons more than two million people, which is more than a quarter of the world's incarcerated. Like so much of government life in this country, many prison employees are unionized and their leaders agitate for more prisoners in order to keep this unholy industry going.

Daniel J. D'Amico, who will teach a course this summer with the Mises Institute with the same name as the title of this post, gives a brief history of the mentality that goes behind this drive to incarcerate. Like so many other public evils in this society, the drive to fill and expand prisons comes from a tag team effort of both liberals and conservatives.

Before he left his office of U.S. attorney general, John Ashcroft spoke to fawning employees of the Heritage Foundation, telling them how wonderful it was that the prison population is growing, claiming that throwing more people into prison was responsible for lowering the nation's crime rate. On the other side of the political spectrum, liberals have believed that the answer to "crime" is to create new "crimes" that fall within their mantra of Political Correctness.

And then there is the Drug War, which also is driven by both the political and social attitudes of liberals and conservatives, along with police and prison guard unions. So, we see a huge social disaster unfold, yet those in power only make things worse.

Obama's campus kangaroo courts

2011-05-05T20:14:00.000-04:00

When Barack Obama ran for president, he spoke somewhat eloquently (when he had his teleprompter in front of him) about due process and all of the other things that the Bush administration was eviscerating in the name of "security." As one who vociferously criticized Bush and his attorney general, John Ashcroft (who now is an "ethics" adviser to the murder firm formerly known as Blackwater), I don't believe that justice is or should be partisan and it certainly should not be political.

The Obama administration, however, has "jumped the shark" with a new Department of Education order to colleges and universities that receive federal money to adopt new "standards" when deciding sexual harassment and sexual assault cases against students, faculty, and employees. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reports:

Under the new regulations, announced in an April 4, 2011, letter from Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, colleges and universities receiving federal funding must employ a "preponderance of the evidence" standard—a 50.01%, "more likely than not" evidentiary burden—when adjudicating student complaints concerning sexual harassment or sexual violence. Institutions that do not comply face federal investigation and the loss of federal funding.

In other words, the government is demanding that more males on college campuses be offered up on the altar of Political Correctness and Feminism. There is no other explanation.

For years, feminists have tried to lower legal standards for criminal convictions in rape and sexual assault cases, and they really don't care that such actions result in wrongful convictions and innocent people being sent to prison. (To most hardcore feminists, there is no such thing as an "innocent" male.)

FIRE's press release continues:

"The Office for Civil Rights' unilateral revision of campus codes across the country is unquestionably unjust. Students accused of serious crimes like rape should not be tried under the same standard of proof used for a parking ticket," said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff. "OCR is proceeding from the fallacy that reducing protections for the accused will somehow increase justice. This is a dangerous and wrongheaded idea that will undermine the accuracy and reliability of the findings of campus courts."

OCR is the federal agency tasked with enforcing federal civil rights laws, including Title IX, in educational programs and institutions that receive federal funding. OCR's April 4 letter decrees that under Title IX, the "prompt and equitable resolution" of student complaints regarding sexual harassment and sexual violence requires that "school[s] must use a preponderance of the evidence standard (i.e., it is more likely than not that sexual harassment or violence occurred)"—a requirement not previously discovered in the 39-year-old law. OCR explicitly rules out the use of higher standards of proof, stating that university judicial systems maintaining the "clear and convincing" standard—which requires accusers to prove that "it is highly probable or reasonably certain that the sexual harassment or violence occurred"—are "not equitable under Title IX." Both standards of proof fall far short of the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard required in every criminal case in the United States.

My sense is that this is the Obama administration's answer to the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case which fell apart when it became obvious that not only was accuser Crystal Mangum lying, but police and prosecutors -- Durham County D.A. Michael Nifong even was disbarred for his role in the case -- were in on the Big Lie. The outcome was not popular either with civil rights groups and feminists, who believed that the three defendants in the case should have gone to prison for what they WERE, not what they did or did not do.

After the charges were dismissed in 2007, the Marxist and feminist sites were seething, and the North Carolina NAACP continued to claim that the lacrosse players raped Mangum. (Now that Mangum is charged with murder, the Marxists, feminists, and civil rights advocates have been a bit more silent.)

So, we now have the government's answer to the Duke case: turn campus disciplinary hearings into kangaroo courts -- if it is possible to make them even bigger farces than many of them are at the present time. If the law did not put the Duke boys into prison, then maybe a future young man accused of rape (and who is falsely accused) can have his life ruined.

As I see it, many colleges and universities are welcoming this ruling, and not because it has anything to do with justice. Instead, it will further strengthen the atmosphere of Political Correctness that already rules in higher education.

Now, given the prevalence of alcohol and drug consumption in the contemporary college scene, and given the fact that the current generation of young people don't seem to have many sexual inhibitions, I hardly am surprised that there are going to be unwanted, or at least regretted, sexual encounters. However, keep in mind that colleges, through the unabashed handing out of condoms everywhere and through their constant promotion of the Sexual Revolution, also are helping to bring on this collision course.

So, how are we to handle a bad situation? Obama has the answer: create more kangaroo courts. In other words, deal with the decline of civilization by attacking one of the last bastions of civilized society: due process of law.

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

2011-05-02T08:23:00.000-04:00

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.)

Some good news from Phoenix

2011-04-27T20:03:00.001-04:00

Carola Jacobson called today to let me know that a court-appointed expert will become involved in the case. According to Carola, "Now more papers have to be filed, the expert will be interviewed by the prosecutor with the next hearing in 30 days being the one where the expert testifies and the attorney will file a motion to dismiss there."

The expert "will testify that the police interviews were tainted, thus false memory was planted into the kids heads and the testimony would not be reliable. The judge granted the motion that the state pays for the expert instead of me and released the funds."

The only reason it has gone this far is because the prosecutor, "Ignoble" Murphy, has insisted on using all of the authority of his office to keep the Big Lie alive. Murphy already has given his reason: he doesn't like to lose cases, and given what I have seen from the Maricopa County prosecutors, the "polestar" of that office is "win at all costs," regardless of guilt or innocence.

These are people who stop at nothing, people who often are more ruthless and more dishonest than those they prosecute. But at least in this situation, a courageous woman has protected her son from people who have no more conscience than a shark that smells blood.

(My apologies for the earlier error.)

The prosecution never rests -- from lying "Early" and often

2011-04-22T09:57:00.000-04:00

Whenever there is an opinion piece in the mainstream media about prosecutors doing evil things, there always is the disclaimer: "The majority of prosecutors in this country are ethical and truthful, and we are just dealing with a 'few bad apples' here." Once upon a time, I believed that, too. No longer.

The "tipping point" for me was not simply the Duke Lacrosse Case, but the statements of other prosecutors around the country when the charges still were in play and the story was dominating the talk shows in 2006 and 2007. In particular, Norm Early was especially outrageous.

Early is not a bit player among prosecutors in the USA. While he no longer is a district attorney, for many years he was the elected DA in Denver, Colorado, and was a major player in Democratic politics there. He later served as media director National District Attorneys Association, an organization that serves as “the voice of America’s prosecutors and to support their efforts to protect the rights and safety of the people.”

According to the NDAA's official "mission," the organization professes "to foster and maintain the honor and integrity of the prosecuting attorneys of the United States in both large and small jurisdictions by whatever title such attorneys may be known ." Actually, given Early's conduct as the former face of the organization, perhaps its Official Mission should be "encouraging prosecutors to lie, hide exculpatory evidence, convict innocent people, and get away with it, all while hiding behind the robes of U.S. Supreme Court justices."

If you wish to get a sense of the outrageous conduct of Early in the Duke case, K.C. Johnson's Durham-in-Wonderland blog had an excellent post on the man and his statements that were made while he was a major player for the NDAA. If this guy is typical of prosecutors in the USA, then there is no hope for any of us.

I would urge you to read the post if for no other reason than to understand how these people think and the lies they will tell in order to pursue innocent people. Furthermore, to get a sense of how prosecutors view the rights that Americans have to defend themselves against criminal charges, read what Early had to say about that, too. According to typical prosecutors, we should go directly from accusations to sentencing. Why bother with innocence, since prosecutors tell us there are no innocent people?

For me, the one event that seals my views has been the situation with Carola Jacobson. A prosecutorial office that will engage in the outright murderous assault against a single mother, a good woman who has done nothing to deserve this treatment, is nothing but a den of liars. But, the U.S. Supreme Court says that liars like this are special people who deserve special protection. The SCOTUS, however, does not say how we can be protected against a pack of vicious dogs as make up the Maricopa County District Attorney's office and other prosecutorial offices around the country.

Happy Easter.

"Ignoble" Murphy's cold-blooded attempt to murder Carola Jacobson

2011-04-18T22:46:00.000-04:00

Since last fall, I have written several posts about the unwarranted and utterly dishonest prosecution of the son of Carola Jacobson in Phoenix, Arizona. Even now, the case is not over because "Ignoble" Murphy, the Maricopa County prosecutor handling this one, says that he doesn't like to lose, which he actually seems to believe is justification for going after a young man who is innocent of the charges.

Unfortunately, this case has a very tragic side to it: Carola's health. The website set up to help raise money for her tells a story that portrays not only a mother willing to give up her health in order to defend her son, but also tells us something we need to know about modern prosecutorial "ethics." The site says:

Carola was initially diagnosed with stage IIb breast cancer in 2008. After surgery, treatment and a complete change in life style the cancer remained in remission until she was thrown for another loop when her 14-year-old son was arrested in August 2010 on false charges. Doing what mothers do she put her son's interest before her own and stopped ongoing treatment to pay for his legal defense. Despite of clear evidence of his innocence the authorities kept pursuing the case, the legal fees reached astronomical amounts and depleted all of her savings. Then in March 2011 the next shoe dropped when she was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. Tests revealed that this was only the tip of the iceberg and the cancer had spread to her lungs, bones and spine, one tumor causing a compression fracture in her back keeping her bedridden and unable to work. Treatment needs to start as soon as possible but the insurance will only cover a fraction of the cost and payments are due before the treatment starts. (Emphasis added)

By the way, don't think for a second that Murphy and others at the Maricopa County District Attorney's office are unaware of this situation. To people like Murphy, it actually is an advantage, for it gives him the opportunity to try to push Carola's son into a "diversion" program, which is tantamount to a guilty plea.

Why? Murphy knows that he can push this case as much as he wants, as the "ethics" of Maricopa County are to bleed people whenever possible. In this situation, he figures that sooner or later, Carola will be faced with the awful choice of paying for cancer treatments that will keep her alive, or continue to pay legal fees to keep Murphy from trying to put her son in prison.

It would be one thing if the boy were guilty of these charges, but as Kerwyn and I have demonstrated on numerous occasions in posts on this blog, the entire case is a fraud, and the authorities know it. Thus, we are seeing what I believe is nothing less than an attempted cold-blooded murder of a woman whose only "crime" is defending her child.

What Murphy and Maricopa County authorities are doing is unconscionable. If there are human beings in this country who can go even lower, I would hate to know who they are.

I will add one important thing: Carola did not ask me to write this, and she has not sought the publicity. I write this because I want people to fully understand what is at stake in this case and what the authorities in Phoenix are doing in what I believe as cold-blooded an act as I ever have seen. These really are people who will stop at nothing.

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

2011-04-18T00:01:00.003-04:00

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.

In praise of strong-willed women who seek justice

2011-04-15T08:46:00.000-04:00

A year ago today, Tonya Craft was on trial for her life, falsely accused of child molestation, with the "justice" machinery of the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit attempting to railroad her by falsifying evidence and outright lying. Tonya, however, was able to fight back, and in the end she prevailed, as "judge" brian outhouse's attempts to rig the trial (with cooperative efforts from prosecutors Chris "Facebook-Cruisemaster" Arnt and Len "The Man" Gregor) failed.

(Even after using questionable means to secure a jury, the fact was that the prosecution really believed that the Catoosa County jurors were stupid and venal and would think that they would believe every lie told to them. It never occurred to them that the jurors might be interested in the truth, not what Sandra Lamb and her rich daddy wanted them to believe.)

In the past year, much of this blog has been dedicated to dealing with cases of false accusation, including that of Tonya, but also similar situations elsewhere in this country. While each case is different, I have found one constant: the presence of strong-willed women who know how to fight back.

Tonya is strong-willed, stubborn, and a stickler for the truth. Carola Jacobson is strong-willed, stubborn, and a stickler for the truth. Becky Rasmussen is strong-willed, stubborn, and a stickler for the truth. Kerwyn is strong-willed, stubborn, and a stickler for the truth.

These women have made a difference, even though only one has been on trial, that being Tonya. The others have played supporting roles, and I can tell you that in each situation, the women have made a difference.

Kerwyn, of course, has not just supported the families going through the hell of false accusations. She also has supported me and kept me on an even keel and has always been the voice in my ear saying, "We get it right, period."

(By the way, Kerwyn does not automatically assume that the accused are innocent. If she comes to that conclusion, she comes to it because she understands the facts behind each case and can go with not only her instincts and intuition, but also her knowledge of how these cases actually work.)

I have found something else about each of these women, and the others whom I have not mentioned, but have been pillars of strength: they are not petty and vindictive. Look at how Tonya has handled the aftermath of her own case, including the custody battle.

She could be trying to destroy Joal and Sarah Henke, both of whom were willing to commit perjury both in Georgia and Tennessee in order to go after Tonya. Joal committed fraud in a federal home loan application, and a number of people have gone to prison for the same thing. (So far, federal and state authorities in Chattanooga are not interested, and that is fine with me, although it does tell me that they have a rather selective view of justice.)

Instead, Tonya has been as gracious as anyone could be, given what she experienced. Likewise, I have seen gracious acts from Carola and Becky.

Pettiness is not strength, and vindictiveness is not a virtue. None of these women claim to be perfect, and all have their faults -- and they would be the first to tell you they have faults and weaknesses.

I have come to understand something important about each of these women: they may have fears, but when it comes to doing right, they are fearless. And because there are so many people in authority out there who are hellbent on doing wrong, we need more women like Tonya, Carola, Becky, and Kerwyn. Lots more.

*******************************

Of course, there also are women like Crystal Mangum, the false accuser in the Duke Lacrosse Case. Mangum has graduated from prostitution and lying to murder. K.C. Johnson covers the latest news of the saga of Crystal.

On hiatus for a few days

2011-04-12T10:16:00.001-04:00

Work beckons and I am in the weeds again. I'll get back to the blog when I can see over the top of my desk.

Chanticleer sings Herbert Howells' "Here is the Little Door"

2011-04-09T09:03:00.000-04:00

This is stunningly beautiful. Here is the text, which the great Herbert Howells put to SATB in 1918:

Here is the little door.
Lift up the latch; O lift!
We need not wander more,
but enter with our gift.
A gift of finest Gold,
Gold that was never bought nor sold;
Myrrh to be strewn about his bed;
Incense in clouds about his head;
all for the Child who stirs not in his sleep,
but Holy slumber holds with ass and sheep.

Bend low about his bed: for each he has a gift!
See how his eyes awake--lift up your hands! O lift!
For Gold he gives a keen-edged sword (defend with it thy little Lord)!
For incense, smoke of battle red.
Myrrh for the honoured happy dead.
Gifts for his children, terrible and sweet,
Touched by such tiny hands and oh! such tiny feet.

The text was composed by Frances Chesterton, wife of G.K. Chesterton.

A truly heroic public defender

2011-04-07T22:42:00.000-04:00

I received this email recently, and am publishing it with some changes, as suggested by the author. It is the story of a public defender who tore up a prosecutor's false accusation case. This attorney now is in private practice.

In May of 1997 my ex-wife made a false allegation of child sexual abuse to Child Protective Services. I went through nine months of hell. I was earning $28,000 a year at the time so my only choice for legal counsel was to accept the services of a public defender. The PD, a fairly young woman named Camille Neider was full of integrity and very hard-working. In January of 1998 she came to the preliminary hearing with two three-inch-thick binders full of documents she had subpoened. She had key passages highlighted and had put tabs on the key pages. She was calm and brilliant. After a few minutes it became apparent that this woman was working a miracle. She questioned my ex-wife and two of my sons. At some points it seemed the judge was about to fall off his chair in astonishment. After about an hour and 20 minutes (most of the time being taken up by Ms. Neider), the judge said he wanted to see the prosecutor and the defender in his chamber. They emerged about 20 minutes later. The judge announced he was taking the case under advisement and would let all parties know within 30 days whether or not the court would proceed to a full hearing.

Then Ms. Neider took me into a separate room where I met with her and her legal intern. She said, "Now I'm going to tell you what really went on in the judge's chamber." She said that the prosecutor said, "There's no way in hell I'm going to prosecute this case." The judge replied, "Don't worry, I wouldn't let you...Like this woman is going to convince a jury that her son isn't lying?! I don't think so."

Ms. Neider told me that they had to come up with a diversion. I asked what she meant. She said the judge had to help the prosecutor "cover his ass." “How so?” I asked. She explained that in these days of "so much hysteria" over child abuse allegations it could destroy the prosecutor's career if he comes to be viewed as not being willing to prosecute a case of alleged child abuse.

Two days later the prosecutor dropped the charges on his own (without a diversion having been worked out). The next day the judge dismissed the case entirely.

I started the process of having my record expunged with all the relevant agencies (city police, county sheriff's office, state office of criminal investigations (whatever it's called), and the FBI). I also called the Office of Administrative hearings and told them I wanted CPS's "substantiation" expunged. The head guy there told me it was too late...I had missed some deadline. I said that the case had just been dismissed a few days ago and asked if he would have allowed me to appeal the substantiation while the case was still pending. He said, "Good point" and eventually scheduled a hearing with the agent from CPS who had substantiated against me, and himself, and me.

That hearing took a full morning in May or June of 1998. In that meeting the CPS agent admitted that she had substantiated against me in violation of state regulations (she had substantiated after speaking with only one person: my ex-wife). The administrator asked her why she did that. Her answer: pressure from the police. (And yes, I had foolishly trusted the police and met with an officer without having a lawyer present...and boy do they twist things!) In November 1998 I got a letter from the Office of Administrative Hearings. They had completed their investigation and ordered CPS to unsubstantiate the prior substantiation (from May 1997) (there is no mechanism in our state law to expunge a substantiation). In May of 1999 I got a letter from CPS saying that they had changed the original report from "substantiated" to "unsubstantiated".

I'm leaving out many, many details of the severe anguish the false allegations caused me. Unfortunately the damage to my six children was also very real, especially to two of them. My ex-wife had put these two (who were also my most troubled son and daughter) in counseling with a "therapist" who believed in the recovery of repressed memories. (In one of the subpoened documents containing the therapist's notes to himself he stated that he "supported my son" by telling him that all his troubles came from "the fact" that his father had molested him! Of course, he would have gotten that idea from my ex.) In the hearing my son answered Ms. Neider as noted here.

Ms. Neider: How certain were you at the time the report was first made, that your father had molested you?
Son: Not very certain [or something to that effect]
Ms. Neider: How certain are you NOW that your father molested you?
Son: Completely certain [or something to that effect]
[I still have a complete 160-page transcript from that hearing.]

My son and I eventually reconciled—though he was troubled for years. Then it seemed he was making good progress from the time he was 19 (2000) until the day he committed suicide (early January 2009). I believe that a child who thinks he or she was molested suffers just as much psychological damage as a child who was molested.

My troubled daughter is now 25. She has just taken the initiative during the last 3 weeks to reconcile with me. She didn't know me well due to the fact that my wife left me when my daughter was 7 years old. To keep peace with her mother my daughter was more or less required to hate me. One year ago I feared she'd die prematurely due to the heavy burdens that she carried. She's made some miraculous changes in her life since then—including marrying a man who seems to truly love her. She and her husband have moved to another state and are therefore also away from the influence of her, dare I say, vindictive mother.

Of course, there's a lot more to this story. I can't say how grateful that I am for the good people who helped me (and my children) along the way. I would say that my state’s judicial system is as screwed up as that of any other state, but I recognize that I was fortunate enough (blessed enough) to have dealt with some very honest, intelligent, dedicated, and kind-hearted professionals who made the difference between justice having been met (for a large part—though not entirely, of course) and my possibly having gone to prison for 15 years for a crime that I didn't do and that in fact never happened at all.

Your work is important in alerting Americans to the plight of corrupt laws and, worse than that, corrupt officials. I do not doubt that many innocent persons are unjustly imprisoned. What amazing stories will come out and what fitting punishments and rewards will be handed out come judgment day!

This is important: Carola needs our help!

2011-04-06T17:12:00.000-04:00

Carola Jacobson has been a rock in the defense of her son, and I am proud to be her friend. However, she is seriously ill with breast cancer and friends have established a website to help raise funds for her.

It is utterly outrageous that a woman is forced to spend all that she has for legal help in a case that is a farce and a lie. The "justice" system of Maricopa County, Arizona, has done everything it could to destroy her life and the lives of her children. Now it wants to destroy her health by continuing to place her under huge amounts of stress.

While we cannot force the authorities of Maricopa County to do what is right, at least we can give to help Carola get the cancer treatment she needs. So, if you have the opportunity, please give what you can!

What if you are falsely accused? Part II: Choosing legal help

2011-04-05T00:01:00.005-04:00

In the first part of this series, I pointed out that if the authorities falsely accuse you of a sex-related crime (or anything else), you should NEVER talk to the police. The police are not interested in finding out what happened; they are interested in finding a way to get you thrown into prison, whether or not you did anything wrong.

This post gives advice on choosing an attorney, which other than deciding not to talk to the police is the most important decision you will make. Many an innocent person has been railroaded into prison because of bad legal representation, and people who have been acquitted of these kinds of charges will tell you that their choice of attorney really mattered.

The vast majority of people who are falsely accused never have been in trouble with the law before and, thus, are not exactly on a first-name basis with criminal defense attorneys. They often take the first name out of the phone book, or get the name of an attorney from someone else, or a website in which the lawyer promises to be the Second Coming of F. Lee Bailey or Johnny Cochran.

I have been personally involved in four of these kinds of cases and each time the defendant has had to fire his or her original counsel, which means thousands of dollars thrown down the drain. I have seen attorneys attempt to sell out their clients, refuse to look at exculpatory material, and tell their clients to do nothing and let them do all the work. (And then they proceed to do the minimum amount of work until the defendant is in a huge hole.)

Believe me, it is MUCH better to have good counsel at the start, as opposed to having to fire the attorney mid-way through the case and then begin afresh with a new lawyer. So, how do you do it, and, more important, how do you afford it?

The first thing to remember is that your attorney needs to be someone who has at least some experience with these kinds of cases. As Tonya Craft has told me more than once, these cases are very different than any other kind of criminal charge. The public is much more likely to believe the charges, and the courts have been willing to accept "evidence" that is not evidence at all. Furthermore, as Tonya saw, more often than not, the judge may very well act like a member of the prosecution team. (I will say that "judge" brian outhouse's conduct during the trial was on the extreme side, but a lot of people who have been wrongfully convicted in these kinds of cases had trials in which the judges were hostile to them throughout the proceedings.)

The second thing is that the attorney you choose needs to be amenable to the belief that you are innocent of the charges. Criminal defense attorneys usually represent guilty people, and like everyone else, they become jaded over time dealing with liars, crooks, thieves, rapists, and murderers. Many times, they don't like their clients, would not want to meet them in a dark alley, and believe that they are guilty as sin, but still do their professional duty and represent them as they should.

It is very rare that a criminal defense attorney has an innocent client and all-too-often, that lawyer fails to recognize his or her client's innocence and immediately tries to find a way to plead out the accused. If you are innocent and want to fight the charges, and your attorney is suggesting that you plead out, fire that attorney immediately. Don't wait for him or her to have a change of heart. An attorney who will want to plead you out is an attorney who does not care about you, your innocence, or doing what is right.

No, if you want to prevail, you have to get a lawyer who believes in you and your innocence. You need to get a lawyer who will take a hard look at exculpatory evidence, and who will be open to receiving material from you. For example, Tonya had very good attorneys, but she also played a major role in her defense, poring over material, putting together timelines, and unearthing exculpatory material. You have to be willing to do the same, and if your attorney wants you to sit back and be passive, be active instead and say, "You're fired."

I have seen one case in which the attorney lied to his client and read NO material on the case before the bond hearing and then had no argument at all, which meant the client remained in jail. There is another case in which the attorney clearly did not know anything about how child molestation cases worked and never even raised a question about some very untenable claims the prosecution was making. And on and on.

Believe me, it does not take much for a lawyer to sell out his or her client, pocket the money, while you spend the rest of your life in prison for something that never happened. This sad event happens more time than you ever can imagine, and the attorney will not shed a tear as you are dragged away to hell on earth.

So, how do you choose an attorney? The first thing you have to do is to find out whether or not he or she is familiar with cases such as yours involving false accusation. If so, then you need to find out if the counsel is willing to fight for you. Keep in mind that you are employing the attorney, not the other way around.

Second, see if there is a personal connect. Can you work with this person? Does this attorney have references that you can call? Has he or she been able to get other falsely-accused people acquitted?

Third, do NOT hire someone who is part of the "courthouse crowd," especially of the courthouse where you will be tried. Tonya's first attorney, a local lawyer in Catoosa County, immediately tried to get her to plead out. There was no way that he was going to be willing to antagonize Chris Arnt, and he was all-too-happy to sell Tonya down the river.

A local member of the "good ole boy" crowd will not fight for you, for that means taking on the local "justice" apparatus and doing battle with his drinking and lunch buddies. That will not work.

There is a hazard in hiring someone from out-of-town, and that is the fact that the judge and others might be hostile to him or her simply because of the out-of-town label. During Tonya's trial, "judge" brian outhouse was openly hostile to her counsel, and both Len "The Man" Gregor and Chris "Facebook-Cruisemaster" Arnt many times during the proceedings reminded jurors that they counsel was not local, which I guess they thought would inflame the jurors to vote "guilty." (It turns out that the jurors were not the in-bred hicks that Arnt, Gregor, and outhouse thought they would be. The only in-bred hicks in the building were those employed by Catoosa County and the State of Georgia.)

Then there is the cost. You have to remember this simple fact when you are falsely accused: your life as you have known it is over. Over. Forget your career, your job, your friends, your church, and maybe even your family. People who shook your hand now will turn away; you are likely to be fired, or at least suspended from your job, and even if you are acquitted, a sizable group of people will claim that you "got off on a technicality" and really are a child molester or a rapist. (In modern America, unfortunately, "innocence" has become nothing more than a "legal technicality.")

Most of us don't have $50-$60 thousand of spare change lying around, so that is going to mean you will have to be created in your spending. One of the reasons that prosecutors love false accusation cases is that the defendants generally are not wealthy, yet are forced to pay for the legal counsel while the taxpayers (including you) finance the prosecution. Just this financial disconnect alone is a huge reason that thousands of people are wrongfully-convicted in American courts today.

This might mean a second mortgage, selling your house and anything else you own, cashing in on your pension, or whatever it takes. If you cannot afford an attorney, that means that you will be assigned a public defender, who is NOT going to be competent if you go to trial. Furthermore, the public defender will be a product of the "courthouse crowd," which means it is likely he or she will ignore exculpatory information and offer you up as a sacrifice to the prosecutors.

I have a friend who was convicted in federal court in what truly was a smarmy action by the feds. First, the feds seized her property, depriving her of being able to pay a lawyer, with the government assigning her counsel that demanded she plead out. My friend, who believed she was innocent, insisted on going to trial, so her court-appointed lawyers undermined her, refused to present exculpatory evidence during the trial, and let a jerk of a prosecutor win a conviction.

[Note]: Someone has commented on the board that where he or she works, the public defenders are more aggressive in their cases than are the regularly-paid attorneys, and that my earlier statement then negates the truthfulness everything I ever have posted. First, it is not my point to defame PDs. Many of them are overworked, underpaid, and face serious odds.

Second, I have listed the experiences I have witnessed, which means that I have not seen personally a situation in which public defenders are effective in dealing with the prosecution. The problem is NOT that public defenders are callous or craven, per se, but rather that the deck is stacked against them. They often have to dig into their own funds, as the payment they receive from the state is woeful, and they face constraints that prosecutors don't face.

Third, if they really go after the prosecution's case aggressively, they are liable to be victims of prosecutorial retaliation. That is the cold, hard reality of the world of the public defender, and I think where I made my error was in making it seem as though the PD always INTENDS to sell out the client.

The PD has a difficult job. In cases where I have been involved, at least on the periphery, the PD has wanted to plead out the defendant. One case especially bothered me, as the attorneys had in their possession a document that clearly contradicted what one of the prosecution's star witnesses was claiming. My friend, an attorney herself, showed that document to her public defenders, and they blew it off. During the trial, they literally presented NOTHING to contradict the prosecution's case, even though they had available material. Not surprisingly, she was convicted.

True, one case does not determine a trend. It is my contention, however, that in the kinds of cases we see here, unless a PD has experience with wrongful-accusation charges, it is better to have counsel that does have experience and that is likely to hold you really are innocent.

Again, let me emphasize that I am not dissing PDs or their work. They labor against constraints that are terribly unfair and that make theirs an uphill battle. That is the reality of their situation.[End Note]

You want to get a lawyer who believes you are innocent and understands the nature of these kinds of cases. Anything less than that will land you in prison for the rest of your life.

The Jerry Sandusky Case: What are the appropriate questions?

2011-04-02T08:22:00.001-04:00

With false accusations of sex-related crimes running rampant in our country, it often becomes difficult to ascertain what the truth might be when someone makes an accusation that might be credible -- or could be a lie. It becomes even more difficult when the person accused is well-known and admired.

The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is reporting that a grand jury there is looking into allegations that Jerry Sandusky, the legendary assistant coach who worked with Joe Paterno at Penn State until retirement in 1999, sexually assaulted a 15-year-old boy. Here is what was said on the Huffington Post today:

Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State defensive coordinator known for his charitable work helping at-risk children, is being investigated by a state grand jury on allegations he indecently assaulted a teenage boy, a newspaper reported.

Sandusky has not been charged. A grand jury examines accusations to determine if evidence warrants filing charges.

A message left by The Associated Press at a number listed for Sandusky in State College was not immediately returned. His lawyer, Joseph Amendola, said in a statement that Sandusky maintained his innocence and was disappointed the newspaper published a story "prior to any determination by the Attorney General's Office that he did anything inappropriate at all."

"While Jerry has been aware of an ongoing investigation by the Attorney General's Office for many months dating back to 2009, he has steadfastly maintained his innocence throughout this ordeal," Amendola said.

The Patriot-News in Harrisburg reported Thursday that it spoke to five anonymous sources with knowledge of the case who say a grand jury has been meeting in Harrisburg for 18 months to hear allegations made by a 15-year-old boy in 2009.

The paper reported the teen told authorities that there was inappropriate contact over a four-year period.

The Patriot-News also reported this:

Two months ago, state police at Rockview in Centre County began calling witnesses to a May 1998 report by Penn State University police detailing an earlier allegation of inappropriate contact against Sandusky by another boy.

According to several sources, that boy, who was 12 at the time, alleged he and Sandusky were showering in the football building on Penn State’s campus when the incident took place.

The boy’s mother told The Patriot-News she was specifically instructed by state police at Rockview not to speak with a reporter. Her name is being withheld by The Patriot-News to protect the identity of her son.

No charges were ever filed against Sandusky.

According to sources close to the investigation, the boy told police in 1998 that Sandusky had showered with him in a locker room of the Lasch Building — home to the football program — during a tour. The boy claimed Sandusky washed his body during the shower, sources said.

As part of the May 1998 investigation, police had the boy’s mother call Sandusky to her State College home and confront him while they hid in another room, according to sources.

Another boy, now an adult in the armed forces, was named as a witness in the 1998 Penn State police report and has been contacted by state police, his wife confirmed.

All of this sounds quite damning, yet as one who is familiar with how the police work in such cases, this information might provide real evidence that Sandusky is a child molester -- or it could be absolutely meaningless. Unfortunately, as I read some of the comments made by readers of the articles, it seems that they have seen absolute proof of his guilt.

Let me explain a parallel case, that being the charges against Michael Rasmussen. Like Sandusky, Michael has more than one person making accusations. However, as one looks closely at who is accusing Michael and the context of those accusations, one finds that there absolutely is no evidence except what three people are claiming.

Furthermore, as one examines EACH of the accusations, it is not hard to see that they are questionable, and when the case comes to trial, we will find that the prosecution's "slam dunk" witnesses are going to be stumbling over a lot of facts that will be put in front of them. As I see it, the fact that there are multiple accusers in the end will make the case even weaker as the defense exposes the contacts between them. For example, Apryl has claimed that she had not had any contact with Scott Monroe, another accuser.

However, it will not be difficult for the defense to establish that there was contact and planning between them. When that happens, the defense also will have demonstrated that Apryl committed a felony by making false statements and then lying on top of them. (Prosecutors already have told Apryl that this will be an easy case, and that she will only be on the stand for a short time. So, they have lied to her as well. This should be interesting.)

Likewise, there were multiple accusers in the Tonya Craft case, and they crashed and burned, especially when it became obvious that they had been coached, and when Sandra Lamb's daughter actually recited lines from the movies in which she acted. So, I cannot say that two accusers against Sandusky actually means anything.

I do find it interesting, however, that the police are doing what seems to be a careful investigation, unlike what we saw with Tonya Craft, the Jacobson child, Michael Rasmussen, and James Combs. In those cases, the police decided on the front end that the accused were guilty and that their job was to find a way to hammer square pegs of evidence into the round holes of truth.

It is obvious to me that the police are being careful because if they are seen trying to railroad someone as prominent as Jerry Sandusky, then they are going to be scrutinized in every other sex-assault case they have investigated. Likewise, prosecutors will come under the kind of scrutiny that the press and others rarely give them if they are seen to try to fabricate evidence against one of the most respected sports figures in Pennsylvania.

Now, I cannot say in this post that Jerry Sandusky is guilty of anything. In the accusation from more than a decade ago, police tried to trick him into making a self-incriminating statement, and their scheme fell apart. (That is why I say that just because someone accused him of sexual assault more than 10 years ago might very well mean absolutely nothing.)

Nor can I say I believe the guy is innocent. I don't know, and right now I have no idea about what the investigation is doing, what people are saying, and if there is evidence beyond the "he said, he said" nature of this case. If a number of other young men come forward and make similar claims -- claims, I might add, that could be demonstrated to be credible -- then things might become much more difficult for Sandusky.

Here is the problem in a nutshell: the law permits sexual-assault-molestation cases to go to trial simply on the word of an accuser. No physical evidence is necessary. (I don't know the details of Pennsylvania law, but when the federal government became involved in this area through the Mondale Act, one of the provisions was that states change their law to eliminate the need for physical evidence or anything else besides an accuser's words. I suspect that Pennsylvania has fallen into line.)

I'm extremely wary of cases that are built upon someone's accusation, and especially someone who would stand to gain money (should a jury convict) through a lawsuit. I would be curious to know if any of the accusing parties have approached Sandusky or the organization he represents to demand money. Maybe that has not happened, but in other cases, we do find money to be a powerful motivator.

I know nothing about Sandusky's attorney, Joseph Amendola. He might be an excellent attorney, someone who is well-versed in these kinds of cases, or he might be a friend who has handled other matters for Sandusky and has been called upon for this case as well. The important thing here is that if Amendola is NOT experienced in dealing with sexual assault accusation cases, or if he is not familiar with the reasons that such cases are very, very different from other kinds of criminal cases, then Sandusky could be in serious trouble, even if he is innocent.

Jerry Sandusky's fame and reputation have served as a check upon the authorities in Pennsylvania to throw together a slipshod case in hopes of scoring a quick and easy victory. Nonetheless, here is a man whose reputation forever is stained, and if he is innocent and the accusations false, may those who accused him be forced to pay dearly. If the accusers are telling the truth, then I would hope the law would deal properly with him. We shall see.

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

2011-03-31T22:52:00.000-04:00

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!

2011-03-30T13:00:00.001-04:00

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.

The False Accusation Industry and Why I Write about It

2011-03-28T13:56:00.000-04:00

For the most part, this blog deals with individuals who have been falsely accused of sex crimes. Its genesis comes long before blogging even existed, with the starting point being a PBS Frontline broadcast of the the Little Rascals case in North Carolina.

As I watched the series, I realized that there was no way -- no way -- that the charges could be true, yet so many people seemed inclined to believe them. People went to prison only to have convictions overturned; lives were ruined, and it became obvious that if the authorities wanted to convict someone on the basis of, frankly, coached testimony from children, it was not difficult to do so.

For whatever reasons, I came to see these kinds of cases as a symbol of what American "justice" was becoming, and as more and more cases, like that in Wenatchee, came about, I realized that when it comes to these kinds of accusations, the authorities seem to lose all sanity and the ability to reason. Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal picked up on the subject and wrote a number of columns and editorials excoriating police, prosecutors, and judges for going along with the scam, winning a Pulitzer Prize and writing an excellent book, No Crueler Tyrannies.

At the time, I had no forum to stand up for people falsely accused, but my opportunity finally came when Lew Rockwell gave me near carte blanche on his blog in the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case of 2006-07. In response, over the next year, I would write nearly 70 articles on his blog about the case, the lies being told by prosecutor Mike Nifong, and the misconduct of the Duke University faculty and administration.

The Duke case was a watershed for me, as I came to understand that the Progressive institutions in this country are built and primed for false accusations in sexually-charged situations. The problem, as I came to see it, was not "overzealousness," "mistaken identity," or even "insanity" or "misunderstandings."

No, the problem is systematic and it is built into the very laws passed supposedly to protect "victims" of these crimes. The formula for tyranny came about innocuously and innocently enough; Congress passed laws to aid local law enforcement in order to stop sexual crimes against children and women. The formula, whether it was contained in the Mondale Act of 1974 (and subsequent such acts) or the Violence Against Women Act, went as such:

The nation faced a "crisis," whether it was children being abused or women being the victims of rape and other violence;

The federal government would provide financial and other assistance to state and local governments in exchange for those entities aggressively pursuing those kinds of charges.

In order to successfully prosecute such cases, however, the feds also made states change the rules of evidence to make the job easier for prosecutors. For example, if a woman claims to any "first responder" that she has been raped or sexually assaulted, by law she MUST have a medical "rape" exam by a qualified medical professional and have a forensic interview. In other words, the authorities are to assume that the original accusation is true, no matter how off base it might seem.

The same is true regarding any claim of child molestation, "inappropriate" touching, or anything of the sort, and the charges MUST be investigated as though they were true. Furthermore, in the case of children, the various federally-created (and often funded) agencies like Child Protective Services and the Children's Advocacy Center become involved in the investigations and the interviews with children.

One easily can spot the bias for assuming guilt in such situations. In the Duke Case, Tara Levicy, a hardcore feminist who was seeking her certification to be a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE), was involved in the investigation and ultimately fabricated material and lied to the police in an attempt to frame the three defendants. It is clear that Levicy was not interested in the facts, but rather promoting her "women never lie about rape" ideology that is common among many (but certainly not all) feminists.

In Tonya Craft's case, we saw not only just how the Children's Advocacy Center "interviewers" acted unprofessionally while testifying (giggling, shrugging their shoulders, rolling their eyes, and sighing out loud). Even a cursory look at the transcripts of their interviews with the child accusers demonstrates just how they broke every rule of forensic interviewing, yet were treated by the court as "experts" in investigating "child molestation."

Combined with the federal money that comes to states and localities for pursuing such accusations, as well as the built-in bias that comes into the way the authorities are to pursue such cases, it is no wonder that people are easily railroaded into prison even if they are innocent.

There are other factors at work, too. First, defending oneself is an expensive proposition, and very few people have six figures of spare change needed to have the kind of legal representation that will effectively deal with false allegations. Second, the authorities are spending other people's money and have nothing of their own at stake, which means that the odds are against the person falsely accused.

Third, the media often jumps on the "Guilty!" bandwagon early. There is the use of the mug shot, which exists ONLY to make someone look guilty. Second, because media sources usually are concentrated in the government sector, prosecutors and police are first in line to undermine the defendant's case, and most reporters (but not all) gladly go along with the scam.

To me, this not only is wrong, but it is immoral and has no place in a free society. (Of course, ours no longer is a "free society," but we like to pretend that it is.) People who are falsely accused -- and it is not difficult to see that many of those charged with the "crimes" I have mentioned -- are demonized unfairly in the media and have a huge battle to fight just to win their freedom. I believe that fighting for the rights of the accused is a battle worth fighting, especially since the so-called gatekeepers of our rights -- the news media -- for the most part have decided that helping to deny the rights of the accused is more fun and more profitable.

In future posts, I will cover things one should do if falsely accused, and I will write on things that one might do in order to avoid false accusations, at least in some circumstances.

No moral hazard here! Not at all! Carol Chambers (again)

2011-03-24T09:57:00.000-04:00

One of the reasons that the Law of Unintended Consequences rears its head time and again is because people in authority often institute new policies or changes in existing policies that contain perverse incentives that entice people to act in a way that is contrary to what the authorities supposedly intended. In economics, we call such situations, "moral hazard."

As I have written before, American prosecutors, both state and federal, generally face no consequences for illegal, immoral, and unethical behavior, and this situation tends to create two effects:

Prosecutors are more likely to employ a "win at all costs" strategy, including knowingly prosecuting innocent people, because there are rewards for winning, while there are no negative consequences if the prosecutor is caught;

There will be a "Gresham's Law" effect over time in which the dishonest and unethical prosecutors will "drive out" the honest people, so that prosecutors will tend to be bad or incompetent lawyers who could not make it on the outside, but who enjoy bullying and getting away with wrongdoing.

For all of the ballyhoo about Michael Nifong being disbarred over his nefarious role in the Duke Lacrosse Case, he was a notable exception even though his conduct was not unusual in prosecutorial circles. Nifong's error was giving 70 interviews in which he clearly made up things as he went along, driving the publicity of the case in apparent hopes that the public outrage against the Duke players would be so great that there would be no possibility that any of them could receive a fair trial and, thus, would plead out or be convicted in a kangaroo court trial in Durham, North Carolina, one of the most left-wing cities in the country, and where guilt automatically was assumed because of the racial aspects of the case.

His strategy almost worked, but the North Carolina State Bar intervened during the case, something that almost never happens. Nifong had to remove himself from the case and after North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper led a real investigation (as opposed to the dishonest "sham" investigation conducted by Nifong and the Durham Police Department), the charges were dismissed and Cooper declared that the players were "innocent."

In an interview with The Atlantic, Radley Balko pointedly noted that Nifong's fate was an exception and a huge exception to the rule. The usual occurrence, even when prosecutors clearly have lied and engaged in illegal conduct, is for nothing to happen. The Tonya Craft case is proof that dishonesty pays, even when the defendant is acquitted, as none of the wrongdoers faced any punishment, despite the fact that the judge (if we can call brian outhouse a "judge"), the prosecutors, and the police literally conspired to fabricate a document DURING the trial that they hoped would fill a huge hole in the case. That is outright criminal conspiracy, and a representative of the Georgia State Bar told me that she was fine with it, so we can see that the Georgia authorities have no interest at all in reining in criminal behavior on behalf of Georgia prosecutors.

Carol Chambers

This brings me to the latest revelation from the office of Colorado's most unethical prosecutor, Carol Chambers. If ever there were a "win at all costs" prosecutor, it is Chambers, who has set up a bonus schedule in her office that reeks of moral hazard.

The Denver Post reports:

Eighteenth Judicial District Attorney Carol Chambers has created an unusual incentive for her felony prosecutors, paying them bonuses if they achieve a predetermined standard for conviction rates at trial.

The threshold for an assistant district attorney to earn the average $1,100 reward: Participate in at least five trials during the year, with 70 percent of them ending in a felony conviction. Plea bargains or mistrials don't count.

Granted, the bonus money is not that much, which tells me that her office is full of people who have spent six figures in pursuit of a law degree but then earn the pay of a manager at a fast-food restaurant. In other words, most of them probably are sub-standard lawyers who are likely to manipulate the system for their own benefit. They win cases not because of their legal talents, but rather because the rules are overwhelmingly stacked in their favor.

While it is true that the conviction rate in Chambers' district is comparable to what it is elsewhere in Colorado, nonetheless the perverse incentives are there and Chambers seems to be encouraging unethical behavior. What else can explain her decision to charge a 10-year-old with felony arson in a situation that openly and clearly did not warrant such charges?

(To find other examples of prosecutorial misconduct from Chambers, this blog has more information. To quote a jury foreman in one of Chambers' cases, this one ending in acquittal:

“In the DA’s office’s agenda to prosecute so overzealously, it seems that the facts of a case aren’t really an objective,” says Chris Cashbaugh, foreman of the jury that cleared Ruth Tsehaye at trial.

There is much more from Chambers' record that demonstrates to me that she is an out-of-control prosecutor, someone who is fundamentally dishonest, but who gives a "law-and-order" front to the conservative Republicans in her district.)

As for paying prosecutors for winning convictions, Chambers creates the worst kind of moral hazard. On the one side, even if her prosecutors are caught lying and breaking the law, they face no penalties because no one will discipline them. On the other side, if they win, they get money.

There is a reason that Radley Balko nominated Chambers for the "Worst Prosecutor of 2010" in his blog. Yet, the real problem is that Chambers never has to pay a price for her dishonesty and abuse of the law and of innocent people.

If authorities in the USA were willing to do their jobs and to enforce the laws of the land as they claim to be doing, this blog would not exist, or it would cover other subjects. Instead, because prosecutors are permitted to be lawbreakers, someone has to speak out, and that is what I am doing.

Catching Up on Work

2011-03-22T12:32:00.002-04:00

My apologies for not posting so far this week. I'm catching up on a lot of work that was neglected during my two trips, and will post after I have completed some grading and lesson preparation.

My Appearance on Judge Napolitano's Show Thursday

2011-03-18T09:21:00.001-04:00

Here is the link to my appearance on Judge Andrew Napolitano's "Freedom Watch" show last night. My thanks to the makeup team at Fox Business News! I'm not sure exactly where I appear, but I really am on there!

I have added a link that has just my appearance.

Still On the Road

2011-03-13T21:32:00.000-04:00

Sorry I have not posted anything this week. I'm on the road again Monday, as Habtamu and I will travel from my parents' place here in Chattanooga and drive home. On Tuesday afternoon, I drive to New York City for another conference.

Yes, I'm tired.

I will be doing a post soon on a prosecutor who did the right thing, and for whom the adage "No good deed goes unpunished" was certainly true.

On the Road This Week

2011-03-07T05:57:00.000-05:00

I am attending a conference in Auburn, Alabama, this week, the Austrian Scholars Conference at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, so my posting will be a bit more sporadic. (Actually, I am trying to finish a paper I will present on Saturday, which is why I am going to be in hibernation at the beginning of the week.)

However, I will get back to posting as soon as I can.