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Black’s prosecutors are a disgrace
November 29, 2007 on 3:39 pm | In Social & Political Issues | No CommentsBy Frank Touby
The only thing worse than the taxman is a U.S. prosecutor hot to make a name for him or herself.
That’s the case with showbizzy U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, persecutor of Conrad Black and his three co-accused in the case where no crime was committed.
Not to worry. Fitzgerald, who is making a name for himself by bringing down the super rich and CEOs, doesn’t require actual guilt in order to make a case stick.
Using the obscene powers of his office, along with taxpayers’ money, he and his band can trump up enough of a case to get a conviction from a jury on nearly anything he wants.
He did that in the case of Black, et al. He even went one farther with Black and got him wrongly convicted of obstruction of justice, which could put him away for 20 years…in essence, a life sentence.
Get a load of this presentation Fitzgerald and gang made before the sentencing judge to try and put Black away for life: “the relevant-conduct analysis should consider not only convicted conduct, but also acquitted and uncharged criminal conduct that is proved by a preponderance of evidence.”
What chutzpah! Just being acquitted isn’t enough of a signal to Fitzgerald that his case fell short. He wants to imprison Black for things he was acquitted of doing or wasn’t even charged with doing!
Unbelievable? Not in George W. Bush’s America.
Fitzgerald and crew have no discernable consciences and continue to rail at the judge to throw the book at Black and friends.
This is despite the fact that no crime was committed. The defendants sold their personal pledges not to compete with companies purchasing newspaper assets from the pubic company they headed, Hollinger International.
Nothing wrong with that. Hollinger shareholders aren’t entitled to revenue from such a transaction any more than they would be if Black and the others moonlighted with the purchasers for wages.
And the obstruction of justice? Utter bullshit. Black was nailed for removing documents the prosecution had already seen and copied. And that was in Canada. Further, he says hadn’t seen a fax sent to him that day by the U.S. prosecutors insisting he not remove the documents.
Prosecutors have the big advantage in the U.S. of being the last voice a jury hears before deliberating.
In this Chicago farce of a trial, the defense concluded on a Friday. That was a bad tactic because the prosecutors had all weekend for the jurors to forget much of what they were told. Thus, on the Monday, jurors got an earful all the long day from prosecutors.
On most of the charges, they found the defendants not guilty. But because the nice young people who were so intently proclaiming that crime had been committed seemed so sincere, the jurors did convict on some minor points.
No crime had been committed. Conrad Black has been persecuted because he’s often portrayed as a bombastic and arrogant rich guy.
Maybe he is. Maybe not. I don’t know him. But it’s not crime. Still, the poor bastard who has already been brought to the possible brink of bankruptcy is very likely going to be imprisoned.
Death penalty back on the table?
November 15, 2007 on 8:19 pm | In Social & Political Issues | No CommentsOnly the lowest form of life would advocate a penalty imposed by flawed courts that can’t be reversed if it’s later discovered to have been wrongly imposed.
That’s all you need to know for any debate on the death penalty.
It is advocated by such murderous swine as George (Dubya) Bush and his deadly little brother Jeb. While nobody can accuse Dubya of being smart—mitigating perhaps some of his evil—it certainly doesn’t excuse smarter advocates of such legalized murder. The older Bush brother sent over 130 people to their deaths in redneck Texas during his five years as governor. A third of them had been represented by lawyers who were later disbarred or otherwise sanctioned. The law of averages would hold that some innocent people were wrongly killed by Dubya Bush.
The boneheaded creep even mocked a woman he put to death, pursing his lips in imitation and saying, “Please, don’t kill me.”
Brother Jeb in Florida merely killed 17 or so.
In Canada we have a man much smarter than Dubya—and thus more to be dreaded—who wants to bring back the death penalty which, like most civilized nations, Canada has abandoned.
That villain is Steve Harper. He refused to seek clemency for a Canadian on death row in the U.S., which traditionally is done by Canadian prime ministers to support our nation’s revulsion over the death penalty.
As author Arthur Weinreb writes in canadafreepress.com: “At a time when we can see, with a scientific certainty, that some convicted killers could not have done the crime, it is hard to believe that the death penalty will ever make a comeback.”
But Steve and his ideological bedfellows are quite comfortable, it seems, with killing innocent people as collateral damage.