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The Justice
System Is Criminal
By Paul Craig
Roberts
January 31,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- On January 23, 2017, I asked, “Are Americans Racists?”
I pointed out examples where racist explanations prevail
over empirical fact. I did not write that there is no
racism in America. I said that racism is not the be-all
and end-all explanation of American history and
institutions. The point I made is that racist
explanations are often inadequate and both work against
racial harmony and blind us to more general and more
serious problems.
Perhaps the
worst of America’s failed institutions is the criminal
justice system. The US has the largest prison population
in the world, not only as a percentage of the population
but also in absolute numbers. “Freedom and democracy”
America has an absolute larger number of incarcerated
citizens than “authoritarian” China, a country with four
times the US population.
Many
factors contribute to this result. One is the
privatization of prisons, which has turned them into
profit-making enterprises ever needful of more labor to
exploit, which adds to the pressure for convictions.
Another factor is the disregard of the protective
features of law in order to more easily pursue demonized
offender groups, such as the Mafia, child abusers, drug
dealers and users, and “terrorists.” Lawrence M.
Stratton and I describe the transformation of law from a
shield of the people into a weapon in the hands of the
state in our book, The Tyranny
of Good Intentions.
This
transformation did not occur because of racism. It
occurred because chasing after devils and convicting
them became more important than justice. Today the
criminal justice system is largely indifferent to a
defendant’s guilt or innocence. This is a far worst
problem than racism. It is the main reason that there
are so many false convictions in the US and so many
wrongfully convicted Americans in prison. Indeed, even
the guilty are wrongfully convicted as it is easier to
frame them than to convict them on the evidence.
To be clear:
The primary reason for wrongful conviction is that the
success indicator for police, prosecutor, and judge is
conviction, not justice. Crimes are solved by wrongful
convictions. High conviction rates boost the careers of
prosecutors, and high profile convictions boost their
political careers. The key to rapid and numerous
convictions is the plea bargain. And plea bargains suit
judges as they keep the court docket clear. Today 97% of
felony cases are settled with a plea bargain. This means
police evidence and a prosecutor’s case are tested only
three times out of 100. When the evidence and case are
tested in court, the test confronts a vast array of
prosecutorial misconduct, such as suborned perjury and
the withholding of exculpatory evidence. In America,
everything is loaded against Justice.
In a plea
bargain police do not have to present evidence,
prosecutors do not have to bring a case, and judges do
not have to pay attention to the case and be troubled by
a growing backlog as trials consume days and weeks.
In a plea
bargain the defendant, innocent or guilty, is told that
he can plead to this or that offence, which carries a
lighter sentence than the crime that allegedly has
actually occurred and on which the defendant is
arrested, or the defendant can go to trial where he will
face more serious charges that carry much harsher
penalties. As it has become routine for police to
falsify evidence, for prosecutors to suborn perjury and
withhold exculpatory evidence, for jurors naively to
trust police and prosecutors, and for judges to look the
other way, attorneys advise defendants to accept a plea
deal. In other words, no one expects a fair trial or for
real evidence to play a role in the outcome.
The short
of it is that the pursuit of justice is not a feature of
the American criminal justice system. Justice does not
matter to the police, to the prosecutor, to the jury, to
the judge, and often not to the hardened defense
attorney who has witnessed so much injustice that he
believes justice is a fairy tale.
The only
exception to this is the justice introduced from outside
the justice system by innocence projects and pro bono
attorneys, such as Bryan Stevenson, director of the
Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama.
In 2014
Stevenson published Just Mercy, a fascinating
collection of case histories of wrongful convictions
that he and his colleagues managed to have overturned. A
book such as this benefits from a main case, and the one
that Stevenson delivers is that of Walter McMillian. It
required six years for Stevenson to overturn what must
be the most obvious, blatant frameup of a completely
innocent man in US history. There were a large number of
witnesses who testified that they were with McMillian at
a fish fry during the time that a murder for which
McMillian was indicted and convicted took place. The
only “evidence” against McMillian was the suborned
perjury of a man who retracted his coerced testimony
three times, once in the courtroom of Alabama Judge
Thomas B. Norton, who simply ignored it.
McMillian is
black, and the sheriff, prosecutor, judge, and jury that
framed him are white. This fact, together with the fact
that the ignored witnesses whose testimony cleared
McMillian were black and McMillian’s sexual affair with
a white woman in a small Alabama town, seem to convince
Stevenson that McMillian was convicted because of
racism.
Using
Stevenson’s own account, I am going to show that many
other factors in addition to racism played roles in
McMillian’s wrongful conviction. Stevenson’s emphasis on
a racist explanation of Alabama justice deflects
attention from the fact that human corruption and
evil go far beyond mere racism. McMillian was
wrongfully convicted, because the justice system has no
concern with justice. Letting the system off as merely
racist doesn’t nearly go far enough. The problem is much
worse.
McMillian was
falsely convicted, (1) because sheriff John Tate was
under community criticism for the failure to solve the
murder case of a young woman and needed someone to
arrest for the crime, (2) because Ralph Meyers gave
false testimony against McMillian for confused reasons
that did not work out for him, (3) because the local
newspaper, as newspapers are wont to do, convicted
McMillian in the press, which meant that the jury had to
convict or be accused of letting off a murderer, and (4)
because the judge, Robert E. Lee Key, not only is
unworthy of his name but most certainly did not have the
fortitude to run a fair trial when the only possible
outcome for his career and reputation in the community
was conviction. Neither did his successor, Thomas B.
Norton, have fortitude for the same reasons.
I am convinced
that all of these representatives of the justice system
are racists, but they would have convicted McMillian for
the same reasons if he had been white. If the justice
system was concerned with justice, he would not have
been convicted irrespective of race or gender.
What
the emphasis on racism blinds us to is that the justice
system is corrupt because justice does not play a role
in it. Justice has to be
brought into the system from outside by people such as
Bryan Stevenson. And for people such as Stevenson to
bring justice into the justice system, they must have a
high tolerance for death threats and for witnessing
justice fail again and again.
I want to
emphasize that I am not being critical of Bryan
Stevenson. He is very intelligent, overflowing with
integrity, determination, ability and empathy for
others. He has a moral conscience second to none. He is
someone everyone would love to have as a friend and
colleague. If Stevenson does not see what his own work
reveals, that injustice prevails irrespective of race
and gender, it is because he grew to maturity during a
time when the victimization of identity politics is the
prevailing explanation. Victimization has expanded to
its limit: everyone is the victim of white heterosexual
males. I wouldn’t be surprised if white heterosexual
males have now been shown by identity politics to be the
victims of themselves.
Stevenson
describes the convictions of white women by white women.
In the aftermath of hurricanes and tornadoes that
wrecked coastal Alabama, Marsha Colbey gave premature
birth to a stillborn son. She came to the attention of
police because her busybody neighbor Debbie Cook had
noticed the pregnancy but saw no child.
Colbey’s fate
was sealed by the media craze set aflame by Andrea Yates
and Susan Smith’s murders of their children. Media
sensationalized the baseless suspicion surrounding
Colbey and turned her into another “dangerous mother.”
Forensic pathologist Kathleen Enstice testified without
evidence that Colbey’s son had been born alive and had
died by drowning. The state’s own expert witness, Dr.
Dennis McNally, and the defense’s expert witness Dr.
Werner Spitz testified that Colbey’s age alone placed
her pregnancy at high risk for fetal death and that
there was no scientific evidence that a crime had
occurred.
Irresponsible
media had communities and juries on the lookout for
“dangerous moms” who should be put in prison, and they
found one (along with many others) in Colbey. The trial
judge permitted Colbey’s fate to be decided by jurors
who stated that they could not honor the presumption of
innocence in Colbey’s case. Other jurors said that they
always believe the police and prosecutor. This failure
of justice enabled Stevenson after years of effort to
secure Colbey’s release. Clearly, Colbey’s wrongful
conviction had nothing to do with racism. Identity
politics would want to say she was convicted by
misogynists, but Colbey was the victim of other women.
Justice is so
absent in the criminal justice system that Victoria
Banks in order to avoid capital punishment was coerced
into a plea bargain carrying a 20-year sentence for
murdering her child after her pregnancy despite the fact
that there was no pregnancy and no child. Stevenson was
able to win her release by establishing that she had had
a tubal ligation five years prior to her alleged
pregnancy, which made it biologically impossible for her
to conceive and give birth to a child.
A woman whose
tubes were tied, for which conclusive medical evidence
existed, five years before she was accused of having
just had a child that she murdered is forced into a plea
bargain carrying 20 years in order to avoid the electric
chair. Perhaps only Alabama could produce something this
absurd, but this is a faithful picture of American
“justice.”
Stevenson’s
legal work for wrongfully convicted women brought him
into contact with more horror. At Alabama’s Tutwiler
prison for women, women prisoners were raped and made
pregnant by prison guards. Stevenson reports: “Even when
DNA testing confirmed that male officers were the
fathers of these children, very little was done about
it. Some officers who had received multiple sexual
assault complaints were temporarily reassigned to other
duties or other prisons, only to wind up back at
Tutwiler, where they continued to prey on women.” In
other words, rape is not a crime if you are a prison
guard at a women’s prison.
This is a
faithful picture of justice in America.
The justice
system needs victims, and is focused on ruining people’s
lives whether they deserve it or not. The more American
lives ruined, the greater the success of the justice
system.
There is a
current case in Alabama of a US Marine honorably
discharged who suffers from PTSD. To help out a family
friend, who needed a car for work but could not obtain a
loan, the Marine sold him a car of his own, which the
family friend was to pay off monthly. When payments
stopped, the former Marine inquired. Payments were
promised, and the family friend offered his cell phone
to be held until payments caught up, as an indication of
his good faith to pay.
It turned out
to be the wrong cell phone, not the debtor’s personal
phone but a company-issued one. The company regarded it
as a theft by the Marine, and the family friend had to
report it to the police. The fact that it was all a
misunderstanding has not caused the justice system to
drop the case. Instead the prosecutor is demanding a
misdemeanor plea. In other words, another person with
something on his record who can be a suspect for the
next burglary. As everyone in the case is white,
injustice is occurring despite the absence of racism.
It is a paradox
that child protection laws in the hands of police and
prosecutors have become weapons with which to ruin
children.
A father whose
son is being ruined for life over nothing sent me the
story with his permission to publish it as a warning to
others about the heartlessness with which the justice
system irresponsibly ruins even the immature young. This
story again demonstrates that the function of American
justice is not justice, but to ruin as many people as
possible and as early in life as possible. The
gratuitously ruined lives that the justice system
achieves is the monument to the success of justice.
I decided not
to publish it, not because I disbelieve it, but because
the son has not been sentenced, and protestations of
innocence in media, as Stevenson says, can prejudice
authorities against the defendant, especially in
Virginia where this miscarriage of justice took place. I
do not want to expose the son to risk in the event that
the father is wrong, as I suspect he is, in expecting
publicity to elicit compassion and empathy that would
moderate an unjust event.
Instead, I will
tell the gist of the story, which illustrates the
tyranny of good intentions. Child protection laws were
passed by legislators ignorant of the unintended
consequences. Consequently, the laws have done far more
harm than good.
Let’s call the
son Zach. Having just turned 18, he was visiting a young
woman his age whose younger sister introduced him via
social media to a 13 year old female who shared his
interest in dragons and animation. The two never met. As
their shared interest developed via the Internet, so did
their friendship.
As the natural
process that turns a girl into a woman progressed, the
cyber relationship developed a romantic aspect. The
girl/woman sent Zach five photographs of herself in her
underwear.
Later the
girl/woman developed emotional problems due to the
impending divorce of her parents and was admitted to a
mental health facility. At some point she confided her
cyber relationship with Zach to a counselor. The “child
protection” laws required the counselor to inform the
police, who seized Zach’s computer and found chat logs
and the five photos.
The consequence
was that Zach was charged with 20 felony indictments
carrying 350 years in prison. As they always are, the
charges were vastly overstated. For example, the five
photos sent to Zach of a torso in underwear (apparently
the girl’s face was not shown) got Zach charged with
distribution of child pornography.
No charges were
filed by the parents of the girl. The charges were
entirely the idea of the prosecutor’s office, and the
350 years produced a plea bargain to lesser offences.
American criminal justice had secured another victim.
In the
absurdity that is American law you can be guilty of
“indecent liberties with a minor” without ever having
seen the girl in person or ever having been close enough
to touch. The advent of virtual reality and video
screens means that crimes can have happened in virtual
reality that did not happen in real reality.
In my days it
was almost impossible to be guilty of indecent liberties
with a minor, because the age of female sexual consent
was 14. But as females sexually matured earlier, the age
of sexual consent was irrationally pushed higher. Today
the legal age that a male may have sex with a female is
18. In other words, the absurd American legal system
pretends that women do not have sex until after they
graduate from high school. Who can imagine college dorms
full of virginal women?
When America
had a livable legal system, law was based on the common
ordinary behavior of people. This is known as the Common
Law, the foundation of law in England and the United
States.
Today the law
is so uncommon as to be absurd. Yet absurdity is
enforced with vengeance.
The video age
means that crimes can be committed by looking at a video
screen, and that is what happened to Zach. Neither his
attorney nor the judge told Zach and his parents that
his coerced plea meant that there was no appeal and that
he was registered for life as a sex offender. Zach had
committed a “violent sex offense” online! It was the
girl who sent the photos, but the offense was Zach’s for
having them on his computer.
We owe these
crazed results that destroy our youth to “child
advocates” who have pushed through in total ignorance of
unintended consequences laws that criminalize the normal
sexual exploration and testing that accompanies the
teen-age years that begin with puberty. Child advocates
think that when a kid enters puberty at age 12 or 13
nothing is supposed to happen until the kid is 18. Then
at this magic age, everything illegal at 17 becomes
legal. People who produce laws like this ruin people.
Laws pushed by child advocates have broken up families
and taken children from their homes and placed them in
foster care where they are often abused. By providing a
bounty to Child Protective Services for seizing
children, the federal government provides an incentive
for CPS to break up families on the slightest pretext.
And they enjoy
the ruin that they inflict. When you read Bryan
Stevenson’s Just Mercy, what you encounter are
Americans who enjoy ruining other people. What
Stevenson is revealing is not racism but evil unleashed.
When the liberals destroyed religion as a moral
restraint, they released evil. Evil is now everywhere in
the West and seldom held accountable—Abu Ghraib,
Guantanamo Prison, the CIA Black Site torture prisons,
women’s prisons where inmates, most of whom are
wrongfully convicted, are routinely raped by guards, and
American courtrooms in which sit judges whose function
is to defend justice but who accept coerced pleas from
innocents in order to save themselves work.
This is
America, a country totally devoid of justice, a hapless
country forced to suffer injustice except for those few
cases that heroes such as Bryan Stevenson are able to
overturn.
If only
Americans in their so-called democracy had the power to
make Bryan Stevenson Attorney General for life and give
him the power to write and enforce the laws would
justice return to America.
God help a
country as totally devoid of justice as the United
States of America.
It is important
to understand that very few of these wrongful
convictions are mistakes. They are done willfully,
because the overriding incentive of the American
criminal justice system is to produce convictions at all
cost.
Police,
prosecutorial and judicial misconduct seldom bear any
cost. Just so you understand how “law’” completely
protects the police, prosecutors and judges who
routinely violate it, as Stevenson reports, “state and
federal courts have persistently insulated prosecutors
from accountability for egregious misconduct that
results in innocent people being sent to death row.” In
2011 a Republican Supreme Court ruled that a prosecutor
cannot be held liable for misconduct in a criminal case,
even if he intentionally and illegally withheld evidence
of innocence.
In plain words,
criminal actions against the innocent are now the
legalized policy of the American criminal justice
system.
Are the
American people moved by these extraordinary injustices
and their legalization by the Supreme Court of the
United States? Are the Alabamans in the same county who
egged on the frame-up of Walter McMillian ashamed of
their willing complicity in a gratuitous act of
injustice? Absolutely not. They reelected sheriff Tate,
and he remains in office today.
In 2003
Illinois governor George Ryan, citing the unreliability
of evidence on which capital punishment is based
commuted the death sentences of all 167 people on death
row. His reward was to be convicted on false corruption
charges and sentenced to five years in prison. Ryan was
convicted by the coerced testimony of Scott Fawell who
received in exchange for his testimony reduced prison
time for himself and his fiancee.
On the stand
Fawell said that the prosecutor had his “head in a vise”
and that he was testifying against Ryan to save his
fiancee from a long prison sentence. He said his
testimony against Ryan was “the most distasteful thing
I’ve ever done.” That jurors believe such compromised
witnesses is the reason defendants avoid jury trials.
This is the
face of justice in America, a hapless country totally
devoid of justice where law exists solely for the
economic benefit of those whose careers rise with
conviction rates, whether of the innocent or the guilty.
Law professors,
such as Harvard’s Charles Fried, have shown their
indifference to wrongful conviction. Fried came up with
the argument that “finality” was more important than
justice. Fried was annoyed by appeals. He argued that
ending a case had its own importance and that at some
point appeals based on fresh evidence had to be cut off
even if it meant an innocent person was executed or
spent life in prison.
Conservative
legislators showed their indifference to wrongful
conviction in 1994 when they took over Congress and
promptly eliminated federal aid for legal representation
of the wrongly convicted on death row. The conservatives
were more comfortable with the deaths of innocents than
with admitting the willful mistakes made by “law and
order.”
The
indifference of Americans to injustice has spread
outside US borders. The Clinton, George W. Bush, and
Obama regimes are responsible for millions of dead and
displaced persons in 10 countries—Serbia, Somalia,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria,
Ukraine, and Palestine. None of those responsible have
expressed any remorse and neither have the American
people.
Dr. Paul
Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the
Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the
Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week,
Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He
has had many university appointments. His internet
columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts'
latest books are
The Failure of
Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the
West,
How America Was
Lost,
and
The
Neoconservative Threat to World Order.
The views
expressed in this article are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of
Information Clearing House. |
