The oversimplifications and intellectual dishonesties of RFK, Jr.’s utterances on the Paul Minor case make me want to barf.
You can read them for yourselves in the article Free Paul Minor and Paul Minor’s Attornies File Emergency Motion for His Release on the Huffington Post site.
Ranting aside, decency argues that Minor should receive more compassionate leave than was granted. He’s a first time, nonviolent offender whose wife is dying. Whether he was properly prosecuted or not, he is neither dangerous nor likely to flee or reoffend if released. His whereabouts can be pretty confidently predicted and I expect he would return promptly to jail after the funeral.
I agree that the article was a little over the top, but he should have been granted some additional time.
Speaking of Judicial bribery, has anyone heard of anything going on in Oxford regarding grand jury proceedings, etc…
There has been no visible movement, amicus.
somslawyer and amicus: I’m bothered by how both Siegelman and Minor have been jerked around on delays on their appeals and release pending appeal (although I’d understood Minor’s problems were partly self-inflicted by not following conditions of pretrial release); I’d grant him time with his wife and wish the Bureau of Prisons would do so. But I’m a bit of a bleeding heart.
What bothers me in these articles is the assumption that he is 100% innocent of wrongdoing. I’m willing to have a debate about whether the feds proved a federal crime and about whether he had a fair trial. The over the top assertions about his complete innocence grate, a lot.
“…’despite the fact that Mississippi law allows” the practice of loan guarantees to candidates…” Isn’t it supposed to be campaign related, not just a loan to buy a house?
“Paul’s passion for a fair and impartial justice system…” So that’s what it’s called if you pay for judgements to go your way? Like he was convicted of, by a jury and not just a bunch of GOP partisans.
If the standard for sympathy and special allowances is being “first time, non-violent offender” shouldn’t that include poor, minority crack cocaine users being held in county jails or state prisons also? Or should it just apply to affluent, connected, rich white guys in a federal prison and being friends with other affluent, connected, rich white guys?
I too think he should be able to attend to his dying wife. But I also feel the same standards should apply for everyone. Until that happens. NO ONE should get special treatment due to being a popular cause for partisans of any particular ideaology
Razor: “But I also feel the same standards should apply for everyone” I agree with that, too.
Does the Bureau of Prisons normally let husbands out to visit their end-stage terminally ill wives?
I agree with your lede, NMC. Reading those articles made me want to yell at my computer. “Campaign fund-raiser”? Whitfield’s girlfriend’s house was part of the campaign?
Also, the articles make too much out of Rove’s involvement (?). Unlike Siegelman, I have never seen Rove’s name anywhere in the Minor record. It’s a political argument that fits a narrative that has been pushed by a certain political party.
Yeah … the article may be overly strident. But then again … the Bush DoJ bears watchin’ in many of its prosecutions of public people who were deemed to be “deviationists” in the minds of some pretty squirrely people, including, among others, Rove, Cheney, and Rodriguez, who ran roughshod over good people and wrecked careers.
And they ate their own, too: look what they did to Sen. Ted Stevens. I don’t know and don’t care what Stevens did to get on the Bush hit list, but this one is gonna come back to bite some DoJ attorneys in the arse.
One of the greatest threats to the Republic may be Bush’s turning the DoJ into a blackbag operation site. There’s a whole lot more I want to know about all the “questionable” prosecutions the former administration instituted and maintained. There’s a lotta snakes out there … I want some rocks turned over.
Barf bag or not, with the Stevens case, Holder’s message is that the DOJ will be reviewing prosecutorial misconduct in political cases like Minor, Siegelman, and Schmitz. The fact is in Puerto Rico and Wisconsin the political corruption cases backfired.
I’ve read that Stevens did something to permanently anger Chemey. Anyone else remember that?
Stevens has/had little use for Cheney personally, thought of him as something to be scraped off his shoe. I suspect Cheney told him to go F himself after some cocktail circuit argument (behavior which Stevens is rightly famous for), and Stevens sniped back. That’s all it took. And that, friends, is why we lived in a nation of Men, not Laws, during the Cheney Administration.
And apparently the Obama DoJ is mostly interested in sweeping it under the rug. The really interesting question is: why are they so ready to? You would think that outing your political enemies as petty and thuggish as well as laughably incompetent would be to the good.
Good goobly-goop, WT. You might be on to sumthin’.
Unbelievable. Paul Minor must have contributed BIG TIME to RFK Jr.’s pet enviro charity. How ill-informed can a man be? If one still has respect for a Kennedy given their checkered history of late, this could surely put it in the toilet. I’m sorry, if you do not live on the Coast and did not experience the “justice” surrounding Paul Minor and his cases (particularly where his judge of choice stole the case after a non-favorable ruling to Minor) then you really cannot comment as JFK, Jr. has apparently done….
The barf bag should be reserved for the comments about his poor wife, who Minor never had a regard for BEFORE he was charged/convicted.
I thought Paul had been divorced for sometime before he ever went to prison. Here’s a hint: if you want to be present when your (ex?) wife dies- don’t commit a felony because you could be in prison and therefore absent when she does breathe her last.
Whitfield was one of the most hideous unfair judges ever. Now I see why.
and why is it that prosecutorial misconduct seems to only be investigated when it involves political cases like Minor, Siegleman and Stevens? What about when it involves children who have been railroaded and coerced and given life sentences? Or poor Africian-Americans? Or poor white folks, or …..Would there be any chance of investigation in those cases?
Pam: I can’t answer your questions the way you want them answered, but I’ll volunteer this: the prosecutions you broadly refer to all too often involve a corpse (or two or three). Prosecutors, rightfully so, jump all over murder cases. These are what they promised to prosecute vigorously during their election campaigns and they’re the cases their next election hinge on. They don’t worry about actions an appellate court may take … prosecutors just wanna nail the murderers. Political shenanigans usually don’t produce corpses.
As to Ben’s answer about cases involving a corpse it would seem to me that prosecutorial misconduct should be considered very serious. As in Texas where a man served 20 years on a murder charge before the Innocence Project was able to free him. What they discovered was that the prosecutor in the case did not turn over evidence that would help prove that another man (not the defendent) was seen at the crime. Generally speaking “political shenanigans” don’t usually result in a life in prison or death row decision.
Madison: I don’t disagree with a thing you say … to the contrary, I agree fully. But the cold reality is that state prosecutors are elected officials substantially answerable to no one but the voters in their district. There are prosecutors who have more interest in getting elected and re-elected than in the prospect of being outed by a review of the convictions they achieve … for them, the voters ARE the only review they worry about. I’d like to think … and, in fact, I strongly do think … that the federal DoJ is several cuts above even the best state prosecutorial system. DoJ has a process for investigating, reviewing, evaluating, and punishing prosecutorial misconduct. Few states do (if any). You know full well that Mississippi will never have any such review processes. No Mississippi circuit court judge or supreme court judge will put a DA or county attorney on formal report for misconduct. And even if he/she wanted to report a prosecutor, to whom would the report be made? The supreme court? The AG? The State Board of Cosmetology? No one in state government is gonna cross the lines of the fiefdoms.
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PS. What’s wrong with this picture?
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/04/08/teens.life.sentence/index.html
Ben, so what you are saying facetiously or not is that the life of a politician is more valuable than the life of anyone else because their crime doesn’t involve a corpse regardless of how the corpse became a corpse.
as long as a prosecutor can cheat and lie and sneak things in that can’t be examined, and then cheat and lie to cover it up, and there is no investigation or even concern by the judical branch, the system is corrupt.Do you think the voters really want that, or is it they don’t know.
but, Ben, I agree with your assessment totally. Seeking the truth is not on the top of the list at the DA’s office, winning is though. When did it become that? Or has it always been that way and I’m just new to all of this.
Ben @ 11:16 – “And even if he/she wanted to report a prosecutor, to whom would the report be made? The supreme court? The AG? The State Board of Cosmetology?”
The Mississippi Bar.
“The System” might be analogized to a pointillist painting: from a distance the picture appears complete and visually acceptable. But the closer you get, the spottier it becomes. I admire your heart … it’s clearly in the right place.
the boy that I’m supporting legally had a trial that was equal to a kangaroo court. It featured Dr. Hayne and the usual cops & robbers on the State’s side, and the boy witness on the defense side. It lasted 2-1/2 days and a boy of 15 has a life sentence.
An example of ONE of the State’s shenanegans-the DA came up short on copies of the boy’s illegally otained statement that the judge never ruled on until the motion to suppress was strangely withdrawn at the start of the trial. When it was discovered they were short a few copies, the DA snatched the copy off the table in front of him and asked the judge if he could make the photocopies. Coincidentally, the newly made copies included redacted information. The next day a juror reported it to the judge and the judge asked the jurors who had the redacted information on their copy if they could set it aside. They of course said they could. The boy’s lawyers spoke with him for a few minutes convincing him he didn’t need to declare a mistrial. His parents were not consulted. I know what the redacted information was. It would be damaging un-explained. Since it was never able to be examined because it was snuck in it was potentially very damaging. Examined, it would not have carried much weight and it was irrelevent to the current case, completely unrelated, but wouldn’t look good on the face. This must be the oldest trick in the DA handbook. If you can’t get it in, sneak it in and hope there won’t be a mistrial.
The good thing, is the case has made it’s way back to the trial judge, via the Supreme Court on a PCR, so hopefully there will be some justice. But what of the prosecutors who did every sneaky and thing to get this conviction in cahoots with the Sheriff’s department. Do they have any responsibility whatsoever?
I don’t think what I said made any sense. What I meant to say was the pretrial motion to supress the statement was never ruled on by the judge and it was oddly withdrawn at the start of the trial. The defense decided to keep it in and put the boy on the stand. That was the extent of the defense. The boy and the coerced statement. And as it turned out the boy and the coerced statement with redacted information.
States do have review processes for prosecutorial conduct. Some even use them. For example, the prosecutor in the Duke University lacrosse team rape case was disbarred for unethical conduct, and the chairman of the disciplinary committee blamed “political ambition” for his downfall. http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/06/16/duke.lacrosse/index.html.
AS OMTL notes the body to which the report should be made initially is the Mississippi Bar. Whether the same rigor is or will be applied in Mississippi depends on what the citizens of Mississippi demand.
“States do have review processes for prosecutorial conduct” Good Luck with that if you decide to give it a try Pam. I am sure while kennebunklegal is accurate it probably will not amount to much. More than likey nothing will come of what happened in the case Pam is mentioning even if she went through the process. The prosecutors would just say they made an innocent mistake . . . or it was never their intent … With that said, if you do not try you will never know.
OMTL @ 12:26. Yeah … I thought about including the bar in that list, but decided the cosmetology board has more clout. The bar is not much more than a grown-up’s version of student council.
Pam @ 9:15: not even a snowball’s chance.
Pam: the bar won’t help and the Mississippi Supreme Court probably won’t either but still complain. You never know if enough complaints pile up perhaps the tipping point will be reached one day during your lifetime and something will happen one day.
Said but true comments as not much recourse where prosecutor’s guilty of misconduct, whether Fed or State. The Court (Judge) or Bar Complaint is only remedy.
As to Scruggs II or III, BOP shows Dickie still “In Transit” does anyone know if he’s still at Lafayette County Jail? That can’t be any better than other local jails?
I’m definitely going to file a complaint when and if this is ever over, even though I know it won’t go anywhere. I just want it on file just in case. This was only one of the questionable things they did to get the conviction. This was the least despicable but just as damaging. Hopefully (not), this retired prosecutor can live with himself. That’s punishment the bar can’t inflict, so it’s some consolation that crap like this haunts in the middle of the night, maybe. I won’t count on that either.
Ben, I’m gonna watch the CNN video link you posted sometime today. Thanks for that.
In regards to the CNN piece, I have to say I’m a little offended by the victim’s rights groups that they think they know individual cases and child lifers that they can lobby against them collectively. There is vengeance and ignorance there.
In the child lifer case I’ve gotten involved in the victim’s rights woman shows up at court and in my opinion prevents any possible healing between the family because her presence is a reminder to the family that they shouldn’t and can’t heal, cause they are eternally victims. She says so. This victim’s rights woman does not know the family, the case or the lifer, she just shows up with her notebook and plops down in the courtroom next to the “victims” and acts like she is important in some way. Plus, the way she got involved in the first place was she offered the “family member victims” money. The victim’s were paid by the victim’s rights folks. I felt that this woman was somewhat of a wedge and it made me angry and sad. I want to see the family heal, I know they can. But she is always lurking. I just don’t get it. I personally think she should mind her own business if she can’t be of some positive help.
I hope the legislatures do the right thing and don’t let politics dictate.