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!
***
Lord Black of Crosshabour – Conrad Black
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.
