A System Bereft of Justice
by Paul Craig
Roberts
by Paul Craig Roberts
While enjoying Christmas, good
food and drink with family and friends in the warmth and comfort of your home,
take a moment to remember the falsely imprisoned. Think about how your own
family would handle the grief, because wrongful imprisonment can happen to you.
In a just published book, Thinking
About Crime, Michael Tonry, a distinguished American law professor and
director of Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology, reports that the
US has the highest percentage of its population in prison of any country on
earth. The US incarceration rate is as much as 12 times higher than that of
European countries.
Unless you believe that
Americans are more criminally inclined than other humans, what can explain the
US incarceration rate being so far outside the international mainstream? I can
think of the following reasons:
1. In order to prove that they are "tough on
crime," politicians have criminalized behavior that is legal elsewhere.
2. Many innocent Americans are in jail.
There is enormous evidence
backing up both reasons.
Professor Tonry notes that
during the past three decades the number of Americans in prison has increased
700%. Imprisonment has far outstripped the growth in the population.
Subtracting children and the elderly, one in eighty Americans of prison
eligible age is locked up.
America’s privatized prisons
have to be fed with inmates in order to maintain their profitability.
Prosecutors need high conviction rates to justify their budgets and to build
their careers. Taken together these two facts create powerful incentives to put
people away regardless of crime, innocence or guilt.
Consider the case of Charles
Thomas Sell as recently told by Carolyn Tuft of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
and by Phyllis Schlafly on TownHall (Dec. 13). Mr. Sell, a dentist, has been
locked up for almost 8 years without a trial. Allegedly, Sell is guilty of
Medicare fraud, but with no evidence or witnesses against him, the virtuous,
just, democratic, moral US government tortured Mr. Sell in an effort to make
him confess. Now they can’t bring him to trial where he will talk. So Mr. Sell
is kept locked up under the pretense that his unwillingness to admit his guilt
is evidence that he is mentally incompetent.
Schlafly asks the correct
question: "Is there no accountability for this type of government
misconduct?" The answer is NO. Mr. Sell might as well be in Stalin’s Gulag
or in the hands of the Waffen SS or US captors at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. No
one will do anything about the crime that the US government has committed
against Mr. Sell.
No one will do anything to help
William R. Strong, Jr., another victim of our heartless injustice system.
Strong has been in a Virginia prison for a decade on false charges of
"wife rape." Mr. Strong has been trying to get a DNA test, confident
that the semen in the perk test is not his but that of the lover of his
unfaithful wife. But since Strong was convicted prior to the advent of DNA
testing, prosecutors argue that he has no right to the evidence.
Another innocent victim of
"Virginia justice" is Chris Gaynor, who my investigations indicate
was framed by a corrupt prosecutor with the connivance of a corrupt judge, who
intimidated Gaynor’s witnesses by jailing one of them. Only liars were
permitted on the witness stand. I brought the facts to light in the newspapers
at the time, but the Arlington, Virginia, criminal injustice system did not let
facts interfere with its show trial.
Government routinely breaks the
laws. So says Judge Andrew P. Napolitano in the current issue of Cato Policy
Report and in his book, Constitutional
Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws. Judge
Napolitano reports on cases of torture, psychological abuse, and frame-ups of
innocents that he discovered as the presiding judge. Any American naïve enough
to trust the police and prosecutors should read what Napolitano has to say.
Torture has become routine in American
prisons. The goal of the torturers is guilty pleas and false testimony against
innocent defendants. The torturers succeed. Napolitano reports that "fewer
than 3 percent of federal indictments were tried; virtually all the rest of
those charged pled guilty."
Does anyone seriously believe
that the police are so efficient that 97 out of 100 people indicted are
guilty?!
The cherished code, "you
are innocent until proven guilty," no longer holds in America. You are
guilty when charged. You will be tortured or abused and threatened with more
charges until you agree to a plea bargain.
Diane Lori Kleiman is an
attorney who has worked in a district attorney’s office and for the Treasury
Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. She says prosecutors have
little concern with real crimes, preferring to target high-profile individuals
in order to garner headlines and create a political career for themselves.
Martha Stewart is a victim of prosecutorial ambition as was Michael Milken,
whose false imprisonment created a political career for Rudy Giuliani.
Kleiman says that prosecutors look for high-profile
targets. "It isn’t necessarily an issue of right and wrong. It’s an issue
of taking the case to trial and getting the publicity. That makes your
career."
The Martha Stewart case,
Kleiman says, "is the first time in history where they charged an
individual with false statements, without her signing the statement or without
a tape recording that she even made the statement. And not under oath."
Kleiman is referring to US history, not Soviet or Nazi history, histories that
our criminal injustice system now mimics.
The
US criminal justice system is bereft of justice and accountability. It only
serves the ambitions of prosecutors. In America, criminal "justice"
operates like a Stalin-era street sweep in which hapless citizens instantly
became "enemies of the people" simply by being arrested.
December 18, 2004
Dr. Roberts [send him mail] is John M. Olin Fellow
at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former
associate editor of the Wall Street
Journal, former contributing editor for National Review, and a former
assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
Copyright © 2004 Creators Syndicate