Detecting Wrongful Prosecutions

[midnight]

"With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone"

http://www.roberthjackson.org/the-man/speeches-articles/speeches/speeches-by-robert-h-jackson/the-federal-prosecutor/




During the Bush-Cheney years Karl Rove turned the DoJ's US attorneys into a political hit squad, and human rights attorney Scott Horton and others at Harper's chronicled some of the worst instances of wrongful prosecutions amid the purging of US attorneys refusing to go along. (Taylor, McClathchy Newspapers; Horton, Harper's Magazine)

Horton used to conduct an annual seminar (after the break-up of the Soviet Union) for the State Department entitled "How to Spot a Political Prosecution" in a foreign land (Horton, Harper's Magazine).

Political prosecutions in former totalitarian societies of the USSR bear resemblances to malicious and wrongful prosecutions domestically, and as Horton noted elsewhere, prosecutions by Rove and US attorneys whose victims include Don Siegelman, Keith Roberts, and Georgia Thompson lack any semblance of public integrity and the rule of law.

Horton points out some of the elements that should be examined to determine if a political prosecution has been inflicted:
Nature of the Charges
Timing and Circumstances of Criminal Investigations and Charges
Circumstances of Investigation; Arrest and Detention; Media Dealings
Conduct of the Preliminary Investigation
Conduct of Trial
Interview of Prosecutors and Defense Counsel
State Secrecy
Parallel Public Campaigns
Media Coverage
http://malcontends.blogspot.com/

[Agony]

1. Kick

Nixon/Reagan/Bush/Cheney/Rove have destroyed a lot..
"the best protection against the abuse of power, and the citizen’s safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility"

The Democratic Party has not stood up to this with nearly enough zeal and truth seeking…

"Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm—in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself."

(from your link)

[midnight]

2. Not a lot of human kindness in our courts.