People are waking up. And it won’t be long before prosecutors are held to the same kind of scrutiny other public officials are held to. What makes anyone think that senators and even presidents should be held to public accountability, but the people who can directly take the freedom away from you personally should not be?
Of course, prosecutors will always, at all times, tell you how they need no watchdog, other than themselves and that prosecutorial immunity is essential to keep the system running.
Their days are coming to an end. They will be scrutinized and, as for police who lie, who arrest people through lying, the day will come when they will be prosecuted. People are beginning to wake up – and if that is what ‘woke’ brings then let’s be woke.
Power corrupts – and checks and balances are needed. We do not have sufficient checks and balances on prosecutors or police. Protests against police have commenced and people are becoming aware of the powers they have to ruin lives with mere allegations.
An arrest today is almost as good as a conviction. Few have the ability to defend against charges and a gullible, even insane number of the population never appreciate the standard of “innocent until proven guilty” and why it is the bedrock of due process. It serves as a check on governmental abuse.
One of our readers, Kent, had this to say, and it is true:
Due process and constitutional rights have no relevance in our society. Police reports are false – they are required to provide no evidence and lives are ruined based on the unchecked words of police. Lives are destroyed in family courts by the mere words of Guardians Ad Litem – in fact, there is a hearsay rule for guardians ad litem – a rule which promotes falsehoods and protects them.
Be it an arrest made on an unsubstantiated police report, or a “temporary order” of the court – innocent people suffer; they are essentially convicted in the public arena without any evidence being presented or required.
Children are seized like property, reputations are destroyed, and the innocent are compromised; bias ensues from the arrest or the order – innocent people are told they can spend money to fight the false claim. Money most don’t have to begin with. There is no accountability for our government. The abuse of power needs to end. Too many lives are destroyed daily.
***
Another commenter wrote:
Frank is attacking a system that rewards prosecutions via quasi plea-bargains at the expense of justice.
Plea bargains currently are de facto prosecutions without trials.
When a prosecutor offers you a 2-5 year sentence vs a 30 plus year sentence…what does a defendant do if they can’t hire a good criminal lawyer?
Public defenders many times are losers who can’t find work at a law firm. Public defenders get paid crap.
Wake up!
***
Peter Bregg/Maclean’s
The estimable Conrad Moffat Black, the Baron of Crossharbour, in his article for the NY Sun, It Will Take More Than the Rittenhouse Verdict To Vindicate American Justice wrote about the US justice system (At one time, Black published The Daily Telegraph (UK), Chicago Sun-Times (U.S.), The Jerusalem Post (Israel), National Post (Canada), and hundreds of community newspapers in North America).
In 2007, in what has all the earmarks of a federal witch-hunt, Black was convicted on four counts of fraud in U.S. District Court in Chicago. Two of the criminal fraud charges were overturned on appeal. The bogus convictions for felony fraud and obstruction of justice were upheld in 2010 and he was re-sentenced to 42 months in prison and a fine of $125,000.
In 2019, Trump granted him a presidential pardon. Black is a columnist and author, including having written a column for the National Post since he founded it in 1998. He has written over ten books, including biographies of Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis and U.S. presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump.
Here is what Black, born in Canada, and a British citizen, learned about the American system of criminal justice:
Black wrote:
American federal prosecutors get a conviction on 98% of their cases, 95% of those without a trial, such is the hideous abuse of the plea-bargaining system. As that system functions, prosecutors can and frequently do summon a number of witnesses to whatever conduct they claim is objectionable and tell those witnesses that unless they are able to recall evidence valuable to the prosecutors, with an absolute guarantee against prosecution for perjury, they are clearly participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice and will themselves be indicted.
With this heavy-handed encouragement, such a mountain of effectively incontrovertible evidence piles up on top of designated defendants, that they are advised that they have no chance and get a minor level of leniency for simply folding and pleading guilty, regardless of the real facts. This is why 95% of these cases don’t go to trial.
Again and again, we have seen cases where prosecutorial abuse generated unjust outcomes including outcomes the prosecutors knew to be unjust: The case against Senator Stevens, the Duke University lacrosse team prosecution, and the John Thompson case where a man spent 14 years on death row for a crime prosecutors knew he did not commit.
These are all examples of outright prosecutorial dishonesty. Yet there are thousands of cases in which false evidence was extorted or suborned and convictions unjustly obtained. This is why the United States has six to 12 times as many incarcerated persons per capita as those countries most comparable to it: the large prosperous democracies of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
Senior American judicial figures and eminent attorneys regularly inveigh against this lopsided system that has produced the shameful anomaly that the United States has five percent of the world’s population and more than 25% of its incarcerated persons…
In Canada, the prosecution succeeds 61% of the time and in Britain a little over 50%. This is because cases can only be brought in those countries when approved by judges in preliminary hearings rather than by American grand juries rubber-stamping whatever they’re told by prosecutors; and because prosecutors would be disbarred for attempting to impose anything like the plea-bargaining system in the United States, and because as in other civilized countries except the United States, the defense speaks to the jury last, and not the prosecutors…
Writing as someone who is unfortunately familiar with it, the American criminal justice system is an abomination: a mockery of impartial justice and a conveyor belt to the bloated and corrupt prison system in which millions of innocent or grossly over-sentenced Americans are ground to powder every generation.
All you had to do was watch Serpico to know the extent, based on true story
—A gullible, even insane number of the population never appreciate the standard of “innocent until proven guilty” and why it is the bedrock of due process. It serves as a check on governmental abuse.
Educating the public is the only way to rectify the situation.
*****
RE Bad cops:
It’s disgusting so many police departments keep police on the payroll, who have been caught committing PERJURY.
Lying Cops: Keep their jobs:
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/10/14/brady-lists-police-officers-dishonest-corrupt-still-testify-investigation-database/2233386001/
There are a lot of abuses in the system, but I think that overcharging/plea bargaining is low on that list.
Think about this . . . the state always charges the most serious offense possible under the facts. People think that’s unfair, but its actually the opposite. It ensures (in theory) that everyone gets charged the same. Then, almost always, the state will let you plead to something less serious. This sounds merciful and reasonable. If the state didn’t do that, we would say its a tyrant. And if it charged different people with different offenses for the same conduct, we’d say that its rigged because people don’t get treated the same.
The only time a plea bargain is bad is if the case is a fraud, and you are forcing an innocent person to plead guilty. Here, we should be certain to distinguish people who are actually innocent, and people who are guilty and plea because they don’t want to run the risk of losing at trial. When these people take a plea, its a good thing. We want them to be admitting guilt and taking responsibility.
Honestly, I do not believe that there are many cases where actual, innocent people plead guilty. It can happen and, when it does, its a problem. But the plea bargaining system works pretty well, almost all the time.
“In Canada, the prosecution succeeds 61% of the time and in Britain a little over 50%”
We definitely should do things the way Canada and Britain do. Prosecute lots of innocent people!
Pause to consider that the Feds getting a 95% conviction rate might be a GOOD thing. It means we’re not putting a lot of innocent people on trial 🙂.
Pause to consider also that this guy is a convicted felon. His opinion of US prosecutors may be just slightly colored by that fact. I mean, Raniere and his remaining followers hate prosecutors also. The alternative is admitting that he did the crimes that he did.
This is an excellent point. A 50% win rate means, at a minimum, that British prosecutors are outrageously over-zealous and bring extremely weak cases. So probably, many innocent people are being wrongly charged.
In the UK we have (dare I say it to a US audience) a better system? Yours is based on ours, of course, as we used to own your country but you moved away from ours… and have pretty awful plea bargains and what can amount to blackmail. It is one reason I am against the US/UK extradition treaty.
And I would argue that the US justice system is better. Just look at the UK prosecution of Mark Meecham, the guy who was hit with an £800 fine and threatened with jail for posting a joke video on YouTube. His appeal was dismissed and his legal team was censured by the judge for daring to appeal the conviction.
Utterly shameful.
Fortunately, in the US, our right to free speech is protected by the Constitution. We have the right to express ourselves, even to make jokes that some find offensive. Even if they offend a judge.
Natives owned the country pre-colonization. The UK never did.
Like pretty much everywhere else they colonized.
The Justice system in your country does have some “better” aspects. But it’s smaller. There are waaay fewer guns. And a lot of other notable differences.
In my younger days, I worked for a probation system. I was working on the case of a young man who was on probation for a year after taking a plea for a misdemeanor. He was a smug kid, running his mouth about what he did and he only got a year. I was far less patient than I am now and asked him why he took a plea. He told me the lawyer told him to. Like most offenders I saw, he was defended by a public defender. Plea deals are used to shorten the legal proceedings. It works almost like an assembly line. A public defender offers a plea, the prosecution accepts, the judge approves, and onto the next case. This made the penalties predictable. A few years of supervised probation, fines, community service, and restitution.
The theft he committed normally resulted in a felony and three years on probation. With a year of probation and a misdemeanor, the prosecution had nothing on him. I told him this, and when he left my office, he was not so smug. A mean thing to do for sure, but if he had fought the charge, he would have walked.
I have no doubt the young man was guilty, but I have to wonder how many people take the plea deal without thinking.
Are you saying that the state’s evidence must have been weak, since they plead down a felony to a misdemeanor? If so, I disagree – I don’t think you can know that. The state charges a million cases and they don’t have time to have a million trials, so they need defendants to plead out and have to offer good deals to make that happen. And while the evidence might not have been super-strong with respect to the felony charge, it may have been extremely strong with respect to the misdemeanor (which the defendant pled to).
I doubt that many people take criminal pleas without thinking. Defendants usually have a pretty good idea about the evidence against them.
The Jizzlane Maxwell sex trafficking trial is starting in Manhattan.
Here is an article by Whitney Webb about the ties between Jizzlane Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, Silicon Valley and Bill Gates.
The Cover-Up Continues: The Truth About Bill Gates, Microsoft, and Jeffrey Epstein
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/05/investigative-reports/the-cover-up-continues-the-truth-about-bill-gates-microsoft-and-jeffrey-epstein/
Here is a related video
Whitney Webb Explains The Epstein And Gates Relationship You Won’t Hear About
inconvenient reveal the first day of trial:
EPSTEIN PILOT SAYS TRUMP FLEW ON ‘LOLITA EXPRESS’
> https://www.the-sun.com/news/4176059/donald-trump-andrew-clinton-epstein-maxwell/
What about the Trump relationship?
They’re all corrupt, Shadow! Wake up!
You are no different than the lefty schmuck.
Amen
Roadmap for Prosecuting COVID Crimes – Interview with Francis A. Boyle
The Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 imposes fines and prison sentences on anyone who “knowingly develops, produces, stockpiles, transfers, acquires, retains or possesses any biological agent, toxin or delivery system for use as a weapon”
https://www.infowars.com/posts/roadmap-for-prosecuting-covid-crimes-interview-with-francis-a-boyle/
Francis Boyle is a law professor at the University of Illinois.
Anthony Fauci had better lawyer up!
“In Canada the prosecution succeeds 61% of the time and in Britain a little over 50%. This is because cases can only be brought in those countries when approved by judges in preliminary hearings rather than by American grand juries rubber-stamping whatever they’re told by prosecutors; and because prosecutors would be disbarred for attempting to impose anything like the plea-bargaining system in the United States,” From the article
In America Grand Juries are rubber stamps for prosecutors.
A famous quote from New York Judge Sol Wachtler states, ” a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.”
As for Conrad Black his newspaper the Chicago Sun-Times had its seven story building torn down to make way for the 98 story Chicago Trump Tower.
Picture of the old Sun-Times building.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Sun-Times#/media/File:Chicago_Sun-Times.jpg
Picture of the Chicago Trump Tower
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_International_Hotel_and_Tower_(Chicago)#/media/File:Chicago_September_2016-2.jpg