Category Archives: Justice System

More on the "Jena-Six" Case

September 23, 2007 – 8:37 am

Now the AP is reporting that a white supremacist web site has essentially called for the lynching of the six black kids accused of beating up a white kid in Jena LA. Both Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are calling for state and federal protection of the kids and their families.

I agree that they might need protection now that Jesse and Al have stirred up the hornet’s nest (although one family member said she didn’t feel threatened). No reasonably intelligent adult believes that Al and Jesse didn’t realize beforehand that their over-the-top actions would incite the opposing hate groups. It is exactly what they wanted. And, yes, I consider Jackson’s and Sharpton’s organizations hate groups.

What is unfortunate about this whole thing is the system appeared to be working. Yes, the original charges — of attempted murder — against the black kids seems a bit severe. But only one kid has been tried so far. He was convicted of aggravated second degree battery, not attempted murder. And his conviction has been overturned by a state appeals court. Four of the other kids charges were reduced when they were arraigned several months ago. The sixth kid was booked as a juvenile and his charges are sealed.

I can think of no good reason that Jackson and Sharpton needed to do more than provide good legal representation for the kids and moral and financial support for their families. Holding a press conference in Jena with the family members standing behind them might have been a reasonable thing to do. But bringing in thousands of demonstrators to overwhelm a tiny town was not the kind of help they needed.

Clearly, obtaining justice for the Jena-Six was not Jackson’s and Sharpton’s primary objective.

By Carson Sasser | Also posted in Race, Racism | Comments (0) |

Death Penalty Does Deter Crime

June 20, 2007 – 9:26 am

John Lott, writing on FoxNews.com, reports that studies are showing that the death penalty is discouraging crime. I think that should be quite obvious. No executed person has ever committed another crime. At least not in this world.

Seriouly though, the one strong reservation that I have about the death penalty is due to the possibility that an innocent person might be executed. Considering the number of imprisoned people being released these days because modern forensics is proving them to be innocent of the crimes they were charged with, executing an innocent person is a very real possibility.

I don’t have much confidence that judges, juries and prosecutors will always reach the right verdict. I strongly believe that no person convicted of a capital crime based solely on circumstantial evidence should be sentenced to die.

Related post: Mike Nifong and the Justice System

By Carson Sasser | Comments (1) |

Bush Should Ignore Court on Auto Emissions

April 2, 2007 – 11:12 am

CBS News reports:

The Supreme Court ordered the federal government on Monday to take a fresh look at regulating carbon dioxide emissions from cars, a rebuke to Bush administration policy on global warming.

So what? President Bush should simply ignore the “rebuke.” He should just announce after a few weeks that he has taken “a fresh look” and found no compelling reason to change his current policy.

Anyway, I don’t know how a 5-4 decision by the Court can be considered a rebuke. It would appear that the Court is divided almost down the middle on the issue.

I have said that no bill before Congress should become law without approval by a two-thirds majority. I also believe that all rulings by the courts (Supreme, District, and Appeals) should be unanimous. If a small number of justices can’t reach agreement on an issue, then it should be considered a ‘no decision’.

Another argument for unanimous decisions is that the makeup of some courts — like the present Supreme Court — essentially gives one justice the power to make most rulings. The Supreme Court often decides along ideological lines. The Court is now made up of four liberals, four conservatives and one moderate. The vote of the moderate ’swing voter’, Anthony Kennedy, often determines the decision on major cases before the Court.

In a 5-4 decision, the court said the Clean Air Act gives the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from cars.

Again, so what? Police have the authority to shoot criminals when threatened by them but they don’t always do so. (Yeah, I know. They do sometimes shoot innocent citizens when they aren’t threatened by them.) ‘Authority’ doesn’t mean ‘obligation.’ If the Supreme Court thinks it does, does that mean that the Court will rule in my favor if I sue the federal government to get them to enforce immigration laws? That may turn out to be the best thing about this ruling: It establishes a precedent that can be used to force the government to shut down the flow of illegals into this country.

By Carson Sasser | Also posted in Environment, Global Warming, Majority Rule, Supreme Court | Comments (0) |

Does PROTECT Act Make Bloggers Criminals?

March 27, 2007 – 8:57 pm

The PROTECT Act became law in 2003. PROTECT stands for Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today. It has numerous provisions but the one that caught my eye is the one called the ‘pandering provision’. It conferred criminal liability on anyone who knowingly:

… advertises, promotes, presents, distributes, or solicits through the mails, or in interstate or foreign commerce by any means, including by computer, any material or purported material in a manner that reflects the belief, or that is intended to cause another to believe, that the material or purported material is, or contains (i) an obscene visual depiction of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; or (ii) a visual depiction of an actual minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.

On this blog, Akismet traps spam comments promoting child porn sites most every day. What if one gets past Akismet and appears on my blog for the public to view? Does that make me a criminal? Does the fact that it is there on my blog satisfy the ‘knowingly’ qualifier?

Some think this provision is overly broad and have challenged it in court. The Supreme Court has taken a case regarding the Act, but I couldn’t find any details on the case. I don’t know if they are looking at the pandering provision.

By Carson Sasser | Also posted in Child Abuse, Crime and Violence | Comments (0) |

Democrats Shocked: Governing is Political

March 15, 2007 – 9:04 am

About a month ago I posted an article about complaints from private advocacy groups that government scientists were being subjected to pressure from their superiors. I pointed out how disingenuous it is to suggest that any employee should not be subject to pressure from above. Now the Democrats are all aghast that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales fired eight federal prosecutors.

The Associated Press reports that:

Gonzales, expected to meet with lawmakers this week, has been fending off Democratic demands that he resign over the ousters of eight U.S. attorneys - dismissals Democrats have characterized as a politically motivated purge.

A politically motivated purge? Never mind that Bill Clinton fired every federal prosecutor except one when he took office. In the unique logic of Democrats and their media minions, that is different. It is somehow alright for Democrats to be free to select their own appointees, but not for Republicans. How would they characterize the Clinton purge? The long-awaited replacement of mean-spirited Republican prosecutors with fair-and-square Democrat prosecutors?

So, how do the Democrats get away with these kinds of attacks? There are two reasons: (1) They have most of the media on their side. (2) Republicans are spineless and weak-kneed. The pattern is always the same. Some Democrat makes a charge. The liberal media pick it up and run with it. The Republicans cave.

The Democrats and the media are looking past this simple fact: U.S. attorneys are the federal government’s prosecutors and serve at the pleasure of the president. They can be hired or fired for any reason, or none at all.

I’m no big fan of Gonzales but he shouldn’t be replaced for his handling of the firing of the eight prosecutors.  Bush should fire him for prosecuting the two Border Patrol agents for shooting a drug smuggler and for his role in the whole border control fiasco.

By Carson Sasser | Also posted in Politics | Comments (0) |

Bush Should Pardon Libby

March 7, 2007 – 8:39 am

But he won’t. He doesn’t have the courage to stand up to the outrage it would elicit from the liberal media. He has already shown that. He failed to resist their call for an independent counsel to be appointed to investigate the supposed leak of Valerie Plame’s identity. He allowed the appointment of Patrick Fitzgerald even though Attorney General Ashcroft knew at the time that Richard Armitage was the ‘leaker’.

I’m not going into all the details again here. I’ve posted on this before. If you’re interested, there is a good summary of the case and reaction to the verdict at National Review Online.

Why Fitzgerald was allowed to proceed with an investigation that focused on White House ‘insiders’ when he already knew that Armitage was the ‘leaker’ is beyond comprehension. In my opinion another independent counsel should investigate that.

Libby’s defense team will petition for a new trial and, failing that, will appeal the conviction. President Bush could spare us from all that by giving Libby a full pardon now. He has botched this whole affair just like he has botched just about everything since he has been in office. He has a chance to do something right. But he won’t.

By Carson Sasser | Also posted in Plame Leak Inquiry | Comments (0) |

Plame-Wilson Case: Much Ado About Nothing

February 20, 2007 – 11:39 am

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald (or Gerald Fitzpatrick; I can never remember which) has spent three years and millions of dollars investigating a non-crime. And he is complaining because today he only has three hours to make his closing arguments to jurors after a month-long trial.

Fitzgerald was appointed to determine if a crime had been committed in the ‘outing’ of Valerie Plame as a covert agent of the CIA. Plame is married to Joe Wilson who, after a trip to Niger to investigate the White House’s claim that Saddam Hussein tried to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger, wrote an op-ed that said there was no evidence for the claim and that the supposedly supporting documents were forgeries. The media and Democrats insisted that some White House insider (Karl Rove, they hoped) revealed her identity in order to cast doubt on Wilson’s credibility. He was sent to Niger by the CIA and some believe that his wife was instrumental in setting up the trip.

Here is what I find wrong with this case:

  • Valerie Plame was not a covert CIA agent at the time she was ‘outed.’ She had not operated covertly for several years before the Niger trip took place. According to her friends and neighbors it was common knowledge that she worked for the CIA. So how can it be a crime to reveal the identity of a CIA employee when it is already commonly known? Fitzgerald apparently believed that it was because her identity was revealed by a government official without the authority to do so and because she was still ‘officially’ considered to be covert. (I’m charging you with theft for taking a mattress from the public dump because the original owner still believes that the mattress belongs to him.)
  • Though Fitzgerald apparently felt that a crime had been committed (he pursued it for three years), he was unable to bring charges against anyone for revealing Plame’s identity as a covert CIA agent. But he did charge a staff member of the Vice President, I. Lewis Libby, with lying to a federal investigator about when and what he knew about Plame and when and what he told someone else about when and what he knew (makes my head spin). Libby says that he didn’t intentionally provide false information; that he may have mispoken due to his poor memory of how events unfolded.
  • It was discovered — but not by Fitzgerald’s investigation — that someone other than a White House insider was the person who first mentioned to a reporter that Plame worked for the CIA. Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State under Colin Powell, admitted that he was the leaker. Armitage was certainly no insider; he was known to oppose many White House policies. The media and Democrats were surely devastated by this news, but silent. But none of this deterred Fitzgerald; he proceeded as if nothing had happened. Libby was charged with lying to cover up a crime that he didn’t commit. And Fitzgerald took him to court knowing that he nor any of his closest associates were responsible for the leak and he is still vigorously pursuing his prosecution. (Well, I know now that you had nothing to do with the bank robbery but I’m still going to charge and prosecute you for telling me there were only three male robbers when actually there were three male robbers and one female robber.)

The crime in this case is the one foisted on the taxpayers by the media and Patrick Fitzgerald. He’s another out-of-control prosecutor.

By Carson Sasser | Also posted in Plame Leak Inquiry | Comments (3) |

A Different Slant on the Matt Bandy Case

January 29, 2007 – 7:12 pm

A few days ago I wrote about the case of a 16-year-old boy in Arizona, Matt Bandy, who was originally charged with possession and distribution of child pornography. I used his case as an example of an overly zealous prosecutor in that post. My position on the case was based on an article by Wendy McElroy and an episode of ABC’s 20/20. Now the Maricopa County Attorney’s office has gone public with their version of the facts in the case in an article by Deputy County Attorney Rachel Alexander.

She says that the defense mounted a media campaign to misrepresent the facts in the case. She says that the prosecution has incriminating physical evidencce not mentioned in the media coverage of the case. I have no way of knowing who is telling the truth. I don’t have access to the record in the case. But I do know that for some reason Alexander failed to mention the defense claim that they had to go all the way to the State Supreme Court to get the prosecution to give them access to the computer hard drive confiscated from Bandy. If the prosecution’s evidence was so sound why did they try so hard to keep the defense from seeing even a copy of it? It doesn’t add up for me.

Alexander says that they never intended to send Bandy to prison for 90 years. I hope that means that they are more interested in finding and severely punishing the hard-core producers and distributors of child porn than some teenager with raging hormones that viewed, and perhaps shared with friends, a few pornographic pictures. I know that, like in the case of illegal drugs, if no one is willing to pay for child porn there will be no child porn. But I believe that it is impossible to eradicate child porn by punishing the consumers. There are too many of them out there. Law enforcement and prosecutors must attack this problem at the point where the children are actually being abused.

Although I just drew a parallel between illegal drugs and child porn I didn’t mean to imply that their similarities go any further. We can never give up in our efforts to eliminate the abuse of children by pornographers. But I do believe that it is time to admit defeat in the war on drugs. More on that later.

By Carson Sasser | Comments (4) |

Out-of-Control Prosecutors

January 24, 2007 – 10:57 am

I’ve written before about how prosecutors around the country seem to be riding roughshod over the rights of citizens. I based this partly on Mike Nifong and the Duke Lacrosse case. Prosecutors build cases around unreliable accusers and witnesses, bought testimony, and flimsy evidence. Once they initiate a case they seem incapable of dropping the case with an admission that they were wrong or acted too hastily.

An unreliable accuser was used to make the Duke case. It boggles the mind that Nifong couldn’t see this before committing to the case. So, one looks for other motivation. Many believe that it was political.

Bought testimony was used to make the case against the two Border Patrol agents. They were convicted and imprisoned for irregularities surrounding their shooting of a drug smuggler attempting to cross the border with a huge amount of marijuana. Their conviction was obtained mostly on the testimony of the smuggler. He agreed to testify because the federal prosecutor granted him complete immunity from drug smuggling and other charges. It doesn’t take a mental giant to understand that such testimony is unreliable. Yet, prosecutors are buying and relying on such testimony every day around the country. I believe that granting immunity in return for testimony should be outlawed. If not, then the defense should be allowed to hire an actor to provide testimony that exonerates the defendant from the commission of the crime.

Another aspect of this case boggles my mind. The agents claimed that the drug smuggler had a gun when they shot him. It seems to be generally accepted that the smuggler escaped across the border into Mexico after being shot. Yet the prosecutor made much of the fact that no gun was found. Hello! Did he not have ample opportunity to dispose of a gun while in Mexico? Can you trust the word of a drug smuggler? I’m beginning to believe the justice system in this country is an absolute joke.

Flimsy evidence was used to make a pornography case against a teenager in Arizona. Matt Bandy faced up to 90 years in prison for having nine images of child porn on his computer. Wendy McElroy describes the case in greater detail in her recent column. It’s a tragic story of out-of-control law enforcement.

An intercepted transmission of one of the images was traced to Matt’s computer. About ten policemen raided his house and confiscated his computer. Although the police found the images on the computer there was no evidence that Matt knew they were there or was responsible for the transmission. In fact, it is generally known — by anyone the least bit savvy about computers and the internet — that the possibility existed that someone else was using his computer as a repository. None of this mattered to the prosecutor. He refused to let the defense and forensic computer experts examine the hard drive until ordered to do so by a judge. When the examination of the hard drive blew away his case he refused to drop the case. Instead the prosecutor extorted a confession from Matt that he had once shown some Playboy pictures to some of his friends — which apparently is a felony in Arizona. He converted the case into something that had nothing to do with the original charge in an attempt to save face. It hasn’t been reported but I suspect that he also extorted from Matt’s parents an agreement not to sue. Matt’s defense cost his parents about a quarter million dollars — all apparently to protect teenage boys from viewing Playboy pictures.

Many lawyers gain work experience as prosecutors early in their careers before moving into private practice. But those that make their careers as prosecutors do so for one of two reasons. Either they don’t have what it takes to make it in private practice or they are power hungry. Or both. OK, some of the career prosecutors are probably fine upstanding citizens that abhor the conduct of those described above. But I’m beginning to wonder where they are.

I’m also beginning to wonder where the Governors are in the states where this nonsense is occurring. Aren’t they responsible for the oversight of all public officials in their states? In my state the Governor can suspend or remove officials from office for misconduct. Short of that I would think that he could call a prosecutor and commit a little extortion of his own.

Update:  There is a web site devoted to Matt Bandy’s plight called Justice for Matt.  I discovered this because they have linked to this post on the site.

By Carson Sasser | Comments (3) |

Mike Nifong and the Justice System

January 8, 2007 – 12:04 pm

Just about everyone else has written about the Duke (non)rape case so I might as well add my two cents worth.

The mess that Mike Nifong has made of the Duke rape case makes me wonder how many similar cases and prosecutors are out there somewhere that aren’t getting the kind of publicity that Nifong is getting. How many more are riding roughshod over the rights of the accused? Is this case just the tip of the iceberg?

Prosecutors seem to have almost unlimited power to charge and hold people on the flimsiest of evidence. Grand juries are supposed to function as a check on the power of the prosecutors, but in many cases they don’t seem to be doing their jobs. They seem to think that a check means a blank check. It’s obviously time for them to acquire some backbone and start challenging the prosecutors.

Since the advent of DNA analysis we have found that large numbers of innocent people were charged and convicted of serious crimes. Many of these innocents served decades in prison before finally being freed. Many more innocents are probably still in prison. I’ve long thought that we might do a better job of determining guilt or innocence on circumstantial evidence cases if we just flip a coin.

Courts rely too heavily on circumstantial evidence. Prosecutors often try to convince jurors that a given ‘coincidence’ just couldn’t happen. A good example comes from the Scott Peterson murder trial in California. Two facts in the case were that his wife’s body was found in a particular body of water and that Peterson went fishing in that same body of water the same day that his wife was discovered to be missing. The prosecutor was able to convince the jury that this was just too great a coincidence to be believed; that in fact Peterson went there for the sole purpose of dumping his wife’s body in the water.

There are at least two things wrong with the prosecutor’s assertion. The first is that coincidences like that do happen every day; they just don’t always involve a murder. How many times have you been hundreds of miles from home and bumped into someone you know hundreds of miles from their home? The second is that if before you consider the evidence you assume that Peterson is innocent, as jurors are supposed to, then the alleged coincidence doesn’t have to be a coincidence at all. The murderer could have dumped the body after he or she heard that Peterson went fishing there to ensure that attention would be focused on Peterson if the body turned up later. A long shot? Perhaps so. But raises reasonable doubt? I think so.

Another problem I have with prosecutors is their practice of trying to convince jurors that if the defendant is a mean or naughty person then it is obvious that he or she is guilty. This was also present in the Peterson case. The fact that he was having an affair with another woman was considered evidence that he wanted to kill his wife. This idea runs counter to actual facts. The percentage of men having affairs that kill their wives is extremely small compared to the percentage of men having affairs that don’t kill their wives.*

It was present in a case on Court TV this week. The prosecutor led the jury to believe that the defendant’s belligerent and surly conduct on the witness stand was evidence of his guilt. If I was wrongly charged with a crime I think I might be belligerent and surly toward the prosecutor.

Trials today seem to be more about whether the prosecution or the defense wins than about whether the defendant is guilty or innocent.

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*Someone might want to point out, though, that of those men that do kill their wives a large percentage of them are having affairs with other women. This is probably true but in this case we are starting with the fact that the men did kill their wives (confessions, strong physical evidence, etc.) and then examining their behavior before the act. In a trial we are supposed to start with the assumption that the defendant did not kill his wife. That is, we have to assume that the defendant is no different than the entire population of men who are having extramarital affairs. Further, it might be true that the percentage of men having affairs that kill their wives is larger than the percentage of men not having affairs that kill their wives. But, unless the former percentage is 100 this is still not an indicator of guilt.

By Carson Sasser | Comments (1) |