A story last week in the Niagara Gazette broke the news that charges against me concerning alleged defrauding of Clare Bronfman and Sara Bronfman-Igtet, were dropped by the US Attorney for the Western District of NY. This news came as the US DOJ WDNY issued a superseding indictment against me listing no new charges – but dropping the Bronfmans as victims. It lists a series of new actions allegedly committed by me – all of which strangely are perfectly legal actions when taken in isolation – but were conflated together to allege a scheme to obstruct the IRS and defraud a deceased partner of mine who never once complained in his lifetime about me defrauding him.
I understand the problem the DOJ faces and why they had to issue a far-fetched superseding indictment. I believe the case was fomented initially by Keith Raniere and the Bronfman sisters and was handled at the WDNY by now retired and I suspect corrupt Assistant US Attorney Anthony M. Bruce. He retired shortly after my indictment. It was a bad case from the beginning and was possibly prosecuted mostly as a favor to the Bronfmans and their attorneys.
So what should the DOJ WDNY do now? They should drop the case, if justice was the primary consideration. But they don’t do such things. It is well known that the DOJ must keep up appearances and never admit being wrong. To admit you are wrong is to contradict your assertion that you are always right. That you never bring a bad case. That you are infallible. That your defendant is always guilty. They need this to uphold their high conviction rates and juries must never suspect they can be wrong. That creates reasonable doubt.
This isn’t justice but it is why we have more people in prison than any other nation. It’s not that Americans are inherently more criminal than any other nation.
This prosecutor-is-never-wrong mentality leads prosecutors to focus on convictions, not justice. It is a cult worse than Raniere and results in putting poor, often innocent people, disproportionately in prison. Because the prosecution cannot be wrong and because poor people take plea deals since they know juries believe the prosecutor is never wrong, it is a vicious circle. But a very good one for the people who profit from the prison industrial system.
Since prosecutors cannot be wrong, juries believe the defendant is the only one who has a motive to lie. Yet, the prosecution also has a motive to lie and ignore evidence of innocence [lying by omission]. Once they have chosen their target, their motive to lie is that they must never appear be wrong.
Their whole shtick, their swagger is dependent on one premise: They are competent and virtuous. If once you show them incompetent, fallible or having charged the wrong man – knowingly or unknowingly – their house-of-cards falls. It is better to preserve the honor of the Department for the greater good [and put a few hundred thousand innocents in prison] than let the public know that wrong people are often charged – and sometimes because of convenience and sometimes because of politics. The truth is prosecutors often charge the wrong man and that is partly because there is no punishment for the prosecution for making mistakes.
At best, the innocent person is acquitted – or a conviction is overturned on appeal. But many innocent defendants take plea deals because the system allows the prosecution to over-charge them and because a defendant is facing decades in prison if convicted at trial – versus a few years with a plea deal. Poor defendants cannot afford top lawyers and, as many studies show, unequivocally accept plea deals rather than chance it with a jury whose every member believes the prosecution has no motive to lie, and is never wrong.
In any event, a reader, calling him/herself, “Truther”, made a comment in the Niagara Gazette story about my superseding indictment and the dropping of the Bronfman charges. I do not know who Truther is. Some of the remarks refer to my efforts to expose corruption in Niagara Falls, NY via my newspaper, The Niagara Falls Reporter. I believe that Raniere’s desire to see me indicted was welcomed by local politicians who I criticized and who were very close to the US Attorney who made the final decision to indict me. Whether they had a corrupt hand in my indictment is something I am currently investigating. My explanatory notes are in [brackets and bold].
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One thing that is certainly a thing that’s much better in Germany: prosecutors can be charged and send to jail for prosecuting someone they know or even suspect to be Innocent.
Calling the US “land of the free” is really a bad joke…
It’s the same in the U.S. It’s just extremely hard to prove and most people want to move on after being exonerated.
Actually no. In the US prosecutors are immune to be prosecuted for malicious prosecution. They can prosecute anyone they like if they can make a case and make the charges stick, even if they know that the person charged is completely innocent.
The US legal system is on paper actually worse than the legal system of the Soviet Union was. In practice it is slightly better – as long as you have the money to get a good lawyer.
“…the U.S. Supreme Court has carved out one limited exception to absolute immunity: When prosecutors act as investigators — that is, when they engage in activities more often associated with police — they may lose some of their immunity, at which point they’re only protected by the doctrine of qualified immunity given to cops and other public officials….”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/01/30/7th-circuit-pokes-a-hole-in-prosecutorial-immunity/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b039ba681563
It’s difficult to cross-exam dead men.
[…] on my recent article Bronfman charges dropped against me, but commenter wonders about other charges, a reader had a […]
I do not understand the justice system in the US more often than not. Why is it so important to bring up only “good” cases? The main job should be to serve Justitia and not to have a clean sheet. If there is a case like murder they have to find evidence and hand the evidence and the possible murderer over to the court, nothing else. At the point in time they start to screen cases for success probability it is very likely that criminals end up free due to the case not being easy.
The next completely fucked up thing is the time some relatively simple cases take. How long was yours vs the Bronfmans? Something like a decade+ if my memory serves me and they still try to delay. For what reason? Why do the judges accept that in the first place? How hard can it be to make your point and present evidence in the first place?
How can they prove you defrauded your ex-partner if hes not around to testify? Seems like the monkey with his hand in the jar grabbing the food. With a fist he can’t get the food out, but to let go means he can’t get the food.
Another example of the government wasting our tax dollars
The DOJ should drop the indictment altogether based on the fact that the initial charges were based on bogus allegations from the Bronfman sisters and Raniere.
People with an obvious axe to grind.
Nothing calls the integrity of the DOJ more into question than pursuing a case based on the personal vendettas of exposed charlatans.
DOJ means Department of Justice, not Department of Injustice.