Prosecutorial Corrpution, like the Energizer Bunny, Just Keeps on Going!

This is from the Huffington Post, and it calls to mind instances when people ask me why I have diminishing respect for law enforcement and for prosecutors and for the criminal justice system.

We keep hearing discussions about originalism and the intent of the Framers and what the founding fathers meant and would do about various things in society, and one of the things they would not have tolerated is the current system in which judges and prosecutors have absolute immunity, and cops have qualified immunity, for their injurious official deeds.

In colonial times, if judges or prosecutors did things that injured citizens in the courts, they could be sued [and arrested] for that.  And proactive policing didn’t even exist, after that excrescence on the body of the law was evicted in the Declaration of Independence.

But now, the U.S. Supreme Court has protected itself and its fellow judges, and its prosecutorial chums, with absolute immunity [pretending that such inheres in the meaning of, and is an incident of, sovereign immunity, which is bogus], and it protects its constabularial chums with qualified immunity [the poor law enforcers should not be liable if they did not know their enforcement of the law was illegal!], which invites the sort of outrage reported below.  And it happens all the time; there is rampant corruption in the administration of justice system, because its administrators are not held responsible for their transgressions.

Where else are people given carte blanche to injure others without liability?  Only in government, and it must stop, and it must stop now.

The legislature, state and national, must immediately put a halt to all immunities for government actors.  Part of the premise underlying the revolution in 1776 is that no one is above the law, no one is better than others in accountability, there are no elites, we are all equal in accountability for transgressions.  So how have we let the judges proclaim first their own immunity, and then that of their governmental chums?  It must stop, lest the outrages described below increasingly become the norm.

The Brady rule discussed in the item below is taught in all law schools and it is a talismanic component of American constitutional law, and has been literally for decades, but not long ago, the Supreme Court, ever protective of its prosecutorial chums, excused prosecutors for not knowing it, when an issue of accountability for its violation was before them.  The Brady rule is to prosecutorial duties what the periodic table is to a chemistry practitioner, and they were excused for their ignorance of it?  We creep closer to the abyss, and when we eventually peer into it, it shall peer into us.

Prosecutors Gone Wild: How Many Wrongful Convictions Will the Public Stand for? [Conrad Black, to the Huffington Post]

Posted: 1/6/12 08:07 AM ET

 

Even casual samplers of the media now come across colossal injustices and failures in the U.S. justice criminal system every two weeks or so. Yet these stories, everyone a heart-breaking recitation of how willful prosecution misconduct has ruined a life or a family, with no consequences at all to whoever has abused his great powers as a prosecutor, seem never to elicit any particular public response or gain any traction for review or reform.

It is an achievement just to pierce the eagerness of most of the media to be a stentorian Hallelujah chorus for law and order paranoia.

The latest such incident is the lamentable affair in Texas in which Michael Morton was accused and convicted of murdering his wife, spent 25 years in prison, has been exonerated because of DNA evidence that was withheld from the trial by prosecutors, and another suspect has now been arrested and charged. Mistakes happen, are not rare, and provide one of the strongest arguments against the death penalty. 

What makes this more worrisome than a sad story of a no-fault miscarriage of justice, are strong allegations that the prosecutors, Ken Anderson, now a state judge, and Mike Davis, deliberately sandbagged Morton by unlawfully withholding evidence.

It is alleged that Anderson withheld police notes that someone else committed the murder, did not provide the full police report, including evidence of activity on Mrs. Morton's credit card after Mr. Morton had been taken into custody; and that Anderson advised his successor as prosecutor "to oppose all of Mr. Morton's post-conviction motions for DNA testing."

Morton and his counsel have been assisted by the Innocence Foundation, which specializes in using DNA evidence to seek the exoneration of convicts. It and like-minded groups have sometimes been harassed by prosecutors and threatened with charges of obstructing justice. Innocence and Morton's own counsel claim that in this case Anderson disobeyed "a direct order from the trial court to produce the exculpatory police reports from the lead investigator," (a claim the investigator himself corroborates). Morton and his counsel have asked for a "court of inquiry" to determine whether Anderson and Davis should be charged criminally for abetting what they knew to be a false conviction.

For the purposes of determining wrongdoing, the Texas attorney general became the special prosecutor, and the spokesman for the attorney general declined to reply to questions about a possible conflict of interest. Anderson and Davis at first refused to give depositions or answer subpoenas, but when overwhelmed by decisions validating Morton's right to know more, Anderson said he felt "sick" about what had happened, but explained, as if it mitigated responsibility or the gravity of what occurred, that "prosecutors are under a lot of pressure to convict." Davis claimed to be only an "innocent bystander" between Morton and Anderson, an unusual posture for a prosecutor in his own case.

The issue is whether prosecutors are under any requirement at all to comply with defendants' constitutional rights to due process and a fair trial, or if there is no sanction at all for their violation of those rights. In a well-publicized Arkansas case last year, three men who had been in prison for 17 years, one on death row, for a murder for which they were ultimately exonerated, could only negotiate themselves to freedom by pleading guilty to a lesser offense for which they were released for time served. But by pre-arrangement, they recounted to the court that it was a false plea, that they were not guilty of anything, and that they were only going through this charade to restart their lives as free men as quickly as possible. The episode was reported almost without comment even in the liberal national media.

Prosecutors have practically untrammeled discretion in deciding what to charge, how many counts to allege, and a very wide latitude in sentences sought. Grand juries are just a rubber stamp for prosecutors, and contrary to the spirit of the Fifth Amendment, provide absolutely no assurance against capricious prosecution. But complicity in or direct causation of the lengthy incarceration of falsely accused and convicted people, not to be confused with honest error and misplaced zeal, is a terribly serious offense and is so treated in every other serious jurisdiction except the U.S.

The Brady Rule, enunciated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963, requires prosecutors to disclose evidence favorable to defendants. But failure to do so is rarely discovered and almost never punished when it is unearthed. In the infamous case of Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, it was revealed that the prosecutors had withheld evidence that they knew to be exculpatory, causing the senator's conviction and narrow electoral defeat, before the whole case was blown up as unjust.

Yet the court-appointed inquiry did not recommend criminal proceedings against the prosecutors for professional misconduct because the trial judge had not told the prosecutors that they had to obey the law. This is utterly spurious, of course, but especially so as the transcript reveals that the prosecutors responded to a request from senator Stevens' defense team for a motion so ordering them, that it was unnecessary because they would of course not break the law. (The report expressed no opinion about charging the prosecutors with obstruction of justice.)

The legal profession in the United States is a professional cartel where legislating lawyers and regulators produce thousands of new enforceable laws and regulations every year; judges, prosecutors, and private sector counsel lock arms to ensure that legal invoices, (which total almost 10 per cent of GDP -- almost $1.4 trillion annually), are paid as a priority surpassed only by the claims of government.

Unlimited incidences of what other legally serious countries would consider frivolous or vexatious litigation clog the civil courts, and prosecutors enjoy a stacked evidentiary and procedural deck which gives them a success rate in prosecutions of over 90 per cent. (The corresponding figure in Canada is about 65 per cent, and only about 40 per cent of those receive custodial sentences.)

The United States has just five per cent of the world's population, 25 per cent of its incarcerated people, and 50 per cent of its lawyers. The U.S. Supreme Court is unvaryingly proud to try law and not fact, and is thus ostentatiously uninterested in a just result as such, in the unutterably irritating and desiccated way of people who profess indifference to the control they exercise over the fate of real people.

Last year, in the case of John Thompson, a man who spent 14 years on death row for a crime of which he was eventually exonerated, after a shocking sequence of prosecution acts of deceit, the Supreme Court conferred what amounted to an absolute immunity for prosecutors from civil recourse for their actions. Justice Thomas, for the court majority, explained that the "attorney (including a prosecutor) who violates his or her ethical (obligations) is subject to professional discipline, including sanctions, suspension, and disbarment." The justice knows what a fatuous bit of dissembling this is, as the legal cartel locks arms to assist its members to escape responsibility for all but the most egregious crimes. (Justice Ginsburg's opinion for the dissenters was very cogent.)

In any other legally serious country, the Morton-like cases would incite public outrage. In the Morton case, Judge Sid Harle, in releasing Morton after 25 years of wrongful imprisonment caused by prosecution dishonesty, expressed his "sympathies" for Morton, but said his release proved that the United States "has the best justice system in the world."

In fact, it is a frequently evil and generally defective system that thrives on complacency. Republicans have even delayed Senator Jim Webb's proposal to establish a blue ribbon commission to review stratospheric American incarceration rates.

In the United States, even the staggering 48 million people with a "record" seem not to care. The media, in their lust to amplify the publicization of crime and incite paranoia, have brain-washed from public memory the ragged bourgeois, constitutional, heirloom of the presumption of innocence.

Next to the electoral accountability of government officials, the two greatest pillars of democratic civilization are the rule of law and a free press. By giving the press, in theNew York Times and Sullivan, an almost absolute immunity against defamation actions, and the prosecution service an almost absolute immunity from responsibility for its own lawlessness, the Supreme Court has detonated high explosives under the foundations of American civilization.

Needless to add, the justices enjoy life sinecures in their August offices, and have generally avoided the well-earned public contempt that now largely attaches to the Congress and most of the administration. The law is a very spavined ass, and the sooner the public realizes this and determines that something must be done about it, the better it will be for everyone.

WHAT TO DO AND NOT TO DO IF STOPPED FOR DRUNK DRIVING

1.      Do not flunk the attitude test; be civil and polite, because being otherwise will never help you, and it will generally always hurt you in the eyes of the jury and judge.

2.      Do NOT ever say that you have had any alcoholic beverage to drink, nor when, nor where, nor how much.  Indeed, do not talk to the police at all, other than to give your name: any statement, before or after an arrest, will be taken down, possibly twisted, and always used against you.  It NEVER, EVER HELPS to talk to the police in such circumstances, NEVER.  They are not there to help you; they are there to put a case together against you.  There are powerful grant money and penalty assessment incentives for government to press DUI through arrest to conviction; there is no similar incentive for the cops to be good or helpful to you.  And this is not a Miranda-based cautionary note, because Miranda applies only when you are in custody and then only when they are interrogating you.  The rule about not talking to the police about anything applies at all times, before and after custody, and whether or not you are being interrogated.  Keep your mouth closed [except to blow into the breath device].

3.      Do NOT agree to take any field sobriety test, no matter if you have been drinking or not, and your explanation for declining to do such is that you have been advised [because I am doing so right now] that there is no established correlation between the performance on any such test and impairment by alcohol. [You should give some such reason to preempt a later claim that you refused because you sensed you were guilty.  You are, instead, politely declining because you know it is a stacked deck in which the police want to give the false impression that you could not perform things because you are drunk.]

4.      Do NOT agree to take the pre-arrest breath test [preliminary alcohol screening device, or PAS], unless you are under 21 or on probation for drunk driving, whether or not you have been drinking.  Your explanation for refusing this test is that you have been informed [because I am doing so right now] that they are inaccurate and can be tampered with in the field to give false high readings, and if you are still absorbing alcohol [which for some people can be anywhere between 20 minutes and 6 hours after drinking stops], they always give false high readings any way..

5.      If you are arrested for drunk driving, you will be given a choice of blood or breath test.  Choose the breath test.  You do not have an “absolute right” to a choice [any attorney who says you have “absolute” rights to anything generally does not know what he or she is talking about and should be avoided at all costs], but you have a statutory right to a choice under most circumstances and there are things that can be done if you are not given that right.  If you choose the breath test, they are supposed to tell you that you have a right to a back-up test of blood or urine for retesting.  They generally only tell you that you have a right to back-up test of blood, if they tell you any such thing.  Tell them you want a back-up test of urine.  The cops will generally lie to you and tell you that you do not have such a right.  Lies by cops don’t bother judges, but they often bother the more concerned jurors.

6.      After you submit to whatever test you have chosen [always breath], then be quiet until they release you.  Never, ever talk to the cops, never try to explain, never try to get them to help you, never ask for a break, because your pleas just embolden cops to harass you more.  They are not going to help you, so just be quiet.

7.      After you get out of custody, make sure you call the DMV number on the pink form you have been given within 10 days of the arrest and tell them you want a hearing, or you will lose your chance for a hearing with the DMV.  If you are hiring an attorney within 10 days, he will make that call for you. 

8.      And you should always hire an attorney for these sorts of things.  If you needed brain surgery, you would not start drilling on your own skull, but would instead hire an expert, and DUI is no different.  A properly experienced DUI attorney can do more about these sorts of charges than you can imagine, because DUIs are prosecuted based on a presumption that they will not be fought, and based on a hope that jurors will be part of the neo-prohibitionism regime which has promoted the “Salem Witch Trials” public and fiction-based hysteria about DUI, and based on junk/voodoo science that would not be admissible in any other sort of criminal case, and which can accordingly be attacked, if you have an attorney who knows what he is doing and who has brought on a forensic expert who knows what he is doing.

9.      Do not drive under the influence of alcohol, but do not fall for the propaganda of “no drinking and driving,” because it is not illegal to drive after you have been drinking, nor for the exhortation of “Call 911 if you see a drunk driver,” because you cannot see a drunk driver.  The system wants to turn the populace into government-loving stoolies against each other as was the practice in the ‘30s Germany, finger-pointing/phone-dialing at every vehicular weave.  I weave all over the road and don’t drink alcohol.  Don’t become a stoolie – that is the lowest of the low.

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS RUMINATIONS ABOUT CRIMINAL DEFENSE

There is a growing crisis the realms of criminal defense, or rather constitutional defense that arises out of incidents wherein people are charged with crimes.

We are increasingly a police state, yet none dare call it such.  But things are out of kilter and the systems installed by the Framers are having diminishing effect in protecting liberties.

First off, it is interesting to note that the Federalist Papers contain no discussion of setting up a national policing operation; the focus there, and elsewhere with the Founding Fathers, was how the structure and substance of the Constitution, and the three branches, and federalism would protect people from overweening government.  The focus was always on protecting individuals.

In those days, it was implicitly understood that most criminality would be the focus of the states, although a proactive constabulary was considered anathema to the regime of liberty being installed here.  Executive agents running hither and yon, searching, snooping, investigating to justify and finance their existence was nothing the New Order, the Marvelous Experiment in Philadelphia, would ever tolerate, on the national or state level, because liberty was the goal and power the exception.

Along comes the Civil War, where Abraham Lincoln [the wealthy railroad lawyer pretending to be a poor defender of the impoverished] discovered and exploited the notion that cries of “war” and “emergency” could invite [to extremist minds “justify”] executive forays outside of the intended boundaries of the Constitution, and it became a short step from there to proactive constabulary and imperial presidency.

Thereafter, we started seeing the spread of city and county and state police forces with anticipatory patrolling, instead of reactive assistance, functions, all of whom had to rationalize their existences by “finding” crimes to report, investigate, solve, prosecute.  The populace increasingly and naively came to think of these executive snoopers and invaders as having something to do with preserving, instead of obliterating, liberty, so the bizarre hero worship of the zealous gendarme rose up.

Leaping forward, that great architect of liberty Richard Nixon studied the lesson of Lincoln and announced a “war on crime,” because the Great Emancipator taught that the clarion call of “war” causes the legislature to cede power and the judiciary to blink – it’s a political question, the judges say, if your invasion of individual liberty is accompanied by a “war” cry.

Nixon’s chief justice, Burger, was largely crying in the wind of his desire to eviscerate liberty in the presence of “war” on crime until the other three Nixon justices took office, Rehnquist, Blackmun, and Powell.  The 4 of them, usually with the conservative White, invited a rewriting of individual liberty, with “balancing tests” [when the Framers actually had already done the balancing, with liberty the unquestioned default], and with the fiction that the court “created” the “exclusionary rule,” which they lied about as having no constitutional basis [Holmes and many others realized and had held quite the opposite].  Those two heresies, balancing and the false claim that the exclusionary rule was manufactured [and hence could be cut back], started to give birth to the current craziness where power is the default and liberty the exception.  And the incorporation doctrine caused there to be little difference in the focus as between federal and state policing, from a standpoint of governmental philosophies hostile to liberty.

Well, so what, we still have the civilian jury to ultimately protect us, don’t we.  Uh…., No.  The citizenry increasingly perceives government as its friend, the accused as a dirtbag, and the shiny badged cops as their heroes.  We have turned the criminal justice system on its ear, with judges too flaccid or constabularial to protect us, and with jurors all too eager to placate their cop pals by convicting us.

The result of that is that the conscientious constitutional defense attorney needs to tread carefully when preparing and setting up his cases, because the system is on anti-liberty attack mode most of the time.  Some things need to be hit aggressively; some things need to be hit gingerly or not at all.  The courts, state and federal, are no longer in the business of skepticism about the government case [which is the real but misunderstood essence of the burden of proof being on government, whether at preliminary hearing or at trial, etc.], but instead are hostile to defendants who want to put their cases to the test, or who just plain, feel, or know, they are not guilty.

People who are not a part of the system cannot enter any court these days with a feeling that the system will protect them.  They walk into the courthouse and are immediately searched, having to disprove that they are a threat, while the cops from whom they seek protection and a remedy saunter in and out without interference or harassment.  When the court is moved to suppress evidence or otherwise forced to grudgingly side with an accused against a cop, the court always reluctantly gives the defendant his remedy, often apologizing to the cop for having had to suppress the illegally seized evidence, or whatever; the court never apologizes to the defendant for his constitutional rights having been violated.  Never.  And the Constitution violating cop is never scolded.  Never.

If there are sweet-looking little girl “victims,” or pitiable elderly “victims,” or female abuse “victims,” the defense attorney needs to be careful, lest aggressive attempts to vindicate one’s client at a preliminary hearing come back to haunt the client.  Attack a sympathetic “victim” at a prelim., and the full wrath of the court will descend on you…, or rather, on your client, even though the “victim” has been aggressively propped up [and sometimes schooled in what to say and how to say it!] by the government’s victim-witness machinery.  That kind of case requires what is left of the jury to hear a carefully engineered defense, because no judge is going to dismiss sympathetic victim cases. Never.

Of course, there are reactionary and foolish attorneys who would bulldoze ahead, taking such witnesses head-on, but that would be counter-productive to the clients’ interests and would simply embolden the victims to press their possibly hyped or manufactured claims and to get those attackable positions fixed in stone.  It’s a minuet right-thinking attorneys dance daily: how aggressive, how passive, how assaultive, how diplomatic need one be to give ultimate protection to a client.  If you get too thoughtlessly aggressive too early, all will be lost.

But that games playing would not be necessary, if we could count on judges being neutral, on burdens being consistently and faithfully assigned to the government, and on both of those existing in a dynamic where it is understood that the juries hearing this stuff would be balanced, neutral, unbiased, and devoted to the doctrine of distrust of government which was the intended hallmark of due process, with burdens fully on government, and with beyond reasonable doubt proof before there could be guilt.

Either everyone is protected, or ultimately no one will be.  And not everyone is right now.  And it is sad and ominous.

Jurors need to have guts and insight....

As we approach the now iconic date of “9/11,” it is important to take stock of who and where we are and how enduring we are going to invite and allow our values to be.  The real danger of talking of dangers, real and imagined, is that liberties become eclipsed by cries of “security,” and when cries of security trump liberties, the marvelous experiment in Philadelphia becomes for naught: we become no better than the banana republics that we pretend our self-decreed “exceptionalism” has allowed us to rise above.

Exploiting the hysteria associated with 9/11, the Bush administration purposefully engineered and presided over the most sustained period of constitutional decay in our history, and we have to reverse that before constitutional gangrene consumes the body politic.  Terrorism and alarmism by our own government against our own people is far worse than any attacks on our buildings by outsiders.  

Two of the many original and founding notions that we must restore with vigor are the presumption of innocence and the necessary doctrine that prevents one from having his liberty taken by government by criminal conviction unless a civilian jury, embracing that presumed innocence, is convinced beyond a reasonable doubt about the truth of the government’s claims. And even when there is sufficient evidence, a jury is not required to find a person guilty, in contrast with the inverse standard that when there is insufficient evidence, a jury is mandated to vote not guilty.

What seems too often lost in such discussions is the fact that government has enormous incentives for convictions, and no true devotion to objective, neutral justice.  The yearning for justice is just that, a yearning.  And the claim that such is the goal of government is a civics book nostrum increasingly divorced from truth.  Government is to justice what cancer cells are to health, and that is why the Framers announced that government is evil, sometimes a necessary one, sometimes an intolerable one, but always evil, if liberty and justice be the goal.

Time and again, in the courts in this and other areas, one hears prospective jurors voice various police state sentiments such as “if he weren’t guilty, he wouldn’t be here,” or “where there is smoke, there is fire,” or “I would always tend to believe what a policeman says,” or “if the case has been around this long, there must be validity to the charges,” or other similar Sieg Heil!-type idiocies that reveal only that we fought our Revolution in vain, and that people are increasingly ignorant of our own history and of the news all around about government and police corruption.

We will lose it all if the citizenry does not wake up to the fact that liberty, not power, is the necessary foundation of this Republic, and that the citizenry, speaking robustly through jury pools, is the ultimate protector of that liberty.
Every time a juror presumes their government is telling them the truth, we inch ever closer to the abyss.  Jurors need to have guts and insight, or all will be lost.

Red Light Camera Traffic Court Scam

A cherished friend [who shall remain anonymous unless he speaks up] reminded me of the immortal epigram of the American sage Will Rogers, who said "We are all ignorant, only on different subjects." That was in the context of my distress expressed to him that people want me to help them with appeals of their patently unlawful traffic court outcomes, but about which they did not voice an objection in the trial court. And the particularly outrageous stuff going on in a generally corrupt traffic court system is the red light photo enforcement scam that, if such a money-making scam were practiced by a private individual instead of government, it would land them in the cell next door to Bernie Madoff.

Let's begin at the unfortunate beginnings. At the dawn of recent time, the voters, fed up with run-away government and nanny state programs that kept raising our taxes while diminishing our individual responsibilities, passed Prop. 13, which limited the government's ability to pass taxes. The thinking was that if government had a hard time passing taxes, and that came about because of popular finger-wagging at government about its ovrereaching nature, government would heed the voters' call and cut back programs. The voters were naive about the voarcious appetite of rapacious government.

Instead of cutting back programs, government hacks started looking for ways other than "taxes" to fund their bloat. From that search evolved assessments, fees, and other euphemisms for taxes, but which could get passed by simple majority votes of state and local deceivers. And the greatest opportunity for bypassing the electorate's message in Prop. 13 has become the penalty assessments associated with traffic infractions and DUI offenses: DUI and traffic offenses are the golden goose for corrupt and out of control government.

So, the Vehicle Code exponentially exploaded with nattering offenses of all sorts, which exist in no other state, because a statutory fine of, say, $100, now translates to around $500 going into governmental coffers from hapless motorists. And the politics of traffic court are that if the shiny badged cop says you did something and you say you didn't, the cop always wins, even though the fiction is created that the factual proof [including the cop's credibility] to be carried by government is beyond a reasonable doubt. But our traffic court judges never seem to have any doubt about their cop friends' credibility, and no wonder: part of the penalty assessment from the conviction goes to the courthouse construction fund! The judges get a piece of the illicit action!

Now, the thought is "why should we inconvenience the poor, overworked[!] cops by having them come to court; let's just take a picture of a car, assert that it is the motorist's, and most motorists will pay the mailed fine without contesting the matter." Heinrich Himmler would approve.

And the overwhelming majority do simply pay the mailed fine, it being too time-consuming for most working stiffs to play the traffic court arraignment and trial game. And there has grown up a little, perverse, and unconstitutional twist to the game if you want to contest such things: the judges in many courts, at least in Riverside County [most other counties do not], will demand you pay the fine in advance, labeled "bail," if you plead not guilty and want a trial. Of course, you have a statutory and constitutional right to court trial on such things, and you can never be required to post "bail" in this Republic if you are not a flight risk [and if you showed up for arraignment, you are not!], and you can never constitutionally be required to pay a fine in advance of conviction, but that does not deter traffic court judges in this county from extorting pre-payment of the "fine," labeled "bail," to "let" you enjoy your constititional right to trial. All convictions from such trials are illegal!

Then the Red Light camera scam comes trotting in. I have argued on the radio and elsewhere that those are generally illegal, as processed, and that they should be fought. But by "fighting" them, I mean you have to make objections to the evidence that the self-interested cop tries to introduce: "hearsay," "multiple hearsay," "confrontation," "foundation." You cannot let the stuff come in without voicing objections and then expect to win on appeal, because the appeals panel must look at what came in without objection, not whether it should or should not have come in had there been the proper objection. It is most telling that the judge will ask of you [grill you!] the government's questions [even though courts are supposed to be neutral], but he will not voice the objections for you against the government position that should be made if you knew the law. And your not knowing the law and its complexities is not your fault; there are all sorts of things all of us are ignorant of in others' realms: "We are all ignorant, only on different subjects."

So, to stop this corruption, first, demand a traffic trial and refuse to pay any "bail" to get that trial, and do not waive time for trial. If they have not given you a trial, due to this illegal "bail" garbage, within 45 days of your arraignment, the case must be dismissed. Then, if it is a Red Light Camera case, object to all stuff coming in other than by a percipient [on scene, visually observing, human] witness on the grounds I listed above.

We must stop running around the globe to self-righteously fight governmental corruption, because in this supposedly "exceptional" country we have quite enough of such to deal with and to try to cure ourselves.

Eyewitness Testimony is Patently Unreliable

Although I have written and argued this matter many times over the years, this Reason Magazine article on the subject so effectively and clearly encapsulates the issue that I need not reiterate my own points, but I shall simply bring you this cogent piece. This is a further example of why jurors need to look skeptically at things their government is presenting to them in trials, because things are rarely what they seem to be - or rarely what self-serving government wants people to think things are.

 

Injustice, In Plain Sight

The trouble with eyewitness testimony

Steve Chapman | August 29, 2011

In 1989, a Waukegan, Ill., woman was raped after three men invaded her apartment. She told police the rapist had a tattoo, wore an earring in a pierced ear, and spoke English. Two days later, the cops took her to an office and said, "Watch the one sitting on the chair."

Alejandro Dominguez, age 16, had no tattoos or pierced ears, and he reportedly could speak only Spanish. The woman, however, said he was the attacker, and largely on the strength of her testimony, he was convicted. Not until 2002 did DNA analysis prove Dominguez was innocent.

It's a dismally familiar tale: a victim making an eyewitness identification that later turns out to be horribly mistaken. This type of mistake is universally known as the most common cause of false convictions. Yet law enforcement authorities, courts, and juries continue to treat it as pure gold.

But change is on the way in New Jersey, where last week, the state Supreme Court ran out of patience with a method that puts so many innocents behind bars. It mandated new rules that will help to prevent errors while giving defendants more avenues to expose them.

The justices said that "courts must carefully consider identification evidence before it is admitted to weed out unreliable identifications" and "juries must receive thorough instructions tailored to the facts of the case to be able to evaluate the identification evidence they hear."

Like other evidence, it must be subject to careful scrutiny and challenge. The burden of disproof will still fall on the accused, but it will be easier to meet. Chances are good that, as a result, some blameless individuals will be spared.

It's the least the courts can do, and it's something the U.S. Supreme Court will get to consider this fall, hearing the first major case on the issue since 1977. Since then, the fallibility of eyewitness evidence has been confirmed by a mounting pile of data.

In one experiment, a "customer" went into a convenience store to buy a soft drink with a traveler's check, which required him to provide an ID and spend a few minutes conversing with the clerk. Later, the clerks were asked to find the person in a group of photos. Forty-one percent made a wrong pick.

Errors don't happen because crime witnesses choose to lie. Most of them sincerely believe what they say. But their memories may be addled by shock, colored by a desire to punish the villain, or led astray by police suggestions.

The palpable certitude of someone who was present during a crime makes for powerful evidence to a jury. But as the New Jersey court opinion noted, "accuracy and confidence may not be related to one another at all."

Jennifer Thompson can vouch for that. In 1984, as she was being raped at knifepoint, she forced herself to study and note "every single detail on the rapist's face" so she would be able to identify him.

At the police station a few days later, Thompson found her attacker in a gallery of photos. She picked him again out of a physical lineup. She took the stand in court to point him out, and he was convicted.
But 11 years later, DNA evidence pointed to someone else. "The man I had identified so emphatically on so many occasions was absolutely innocent," she wrote later.

Thompson had many minutes to get a closeup view. Often, arrests are made on the basis of brief glimpses, sometimes in dim light or at a far remove. But even in these instances, eyewitness testimony can obliterate other evidence, as well as common sense.

In 1990, a jury convicted David Dowaliby of suburban Chicago of killing his 7-year-old daughter, largely on the basis of a witness who, on the night of the murder, saw someone in a parking lot where the body was later found.

He was 75 yards away, the lighting "wasn't that great," and the witness wasn't sure if the person was male or female, or black or white. All he knew was that the "nose structure" matched Dowaliby's. A jury voted to convict. It took an appeals court to throw out the case.

But many times, mistakes go undetected and uncorrected. We all know it's dangerous to believe everything we hear. The criminal justice system ought to acknowledge that the same holds for what we see.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire! When the Police Lie, the System Die

There are many, many examples, in the literature and in published cases and in daily court activity, where the police lie, and a sound criminal justice system would then discredit everything else the officer said [and maybe prosecute that officer for perjury], and a responsible prosecutor would not even try to get the court to rely on it. That's if we had a "sound criminal justice system." We do not.

In a case this past week, the officer testified: "Based on what the victm told me, I approached the defendant, commanded her to raise her arms and to turn around, and I searched her and found [       ]." On cross-examination I inquired "Now, Deputy, Ms [         ] was not free to leave when you approached her and searched her, was she?" "Oh, yes." I exploded: "Are you telling me that when you commanded Ms [       ] to raise her hands, turn around, and you started searching her, she could have told you to 'pound sand' and walked away?" "Yes!" "You know darn well, if a cop commands a person to raise her arms and turn around, and that person were to ignore the order and walk away, especially around here, that person would be shot!" DA: "Objection!"

The DA then went on to argue the substance of the officer's testimony on that and other things, and his "credibility" was the pivot point on a suppression motion and on the substance of the matter. And the judge, a dutiful recent graduate from a DA's office, had no problem with the perfidy and perjury.

When the government credits and relies on and argues lies, the system has died.  For shame, for shame!

Ask not why the Youth of today has diminishing respect for law and for the system; simply visit the criminal courts in any county of this State, and you will be faced with your answer.