The invitation came right on the heels of my having seen most of the 60 Minutes report on appalling and flagrant prosecutorial misconduct in the Duke lacrosse case.
As the Stimson incident demonstrates there is among our leadership a disregard for the rule of law and the principles of fairness shocking to all Americans who regard them as the bedrock of our society. It is not ethnicity or religion which makes us Americans, but our abiding belief in the principle that all are created equal and the laws should apply equally to all. It is our inherent suspicion of power which gave us our system of checks and balances, and our belief that all accused persons should have the right to confront their accusers and examine the evidence and test the witnesses which makes our system great.
The Duke lacrosse case shows that in the face of abiding prosecutorial ambition, incompetence, and outright dishonesty even the rich and privileged in this country may find themselves branded as criminals and prosecuted, despite proof of innocence. Does anyone seriously think this was an isolated instance? What would cause an experienced prosecutor to so casually hide exculpatory evidence and manipulate the findings in the case? A pervasive culture of corner-cutting and lax ethical standards, that's what. He did it because where the defendant is not a rich white kid with dedicated and determined parents and aggressive and competent legal representation he gets away with it. The Duke case demonstrates why we have to have standards of evidence and discovery in criminal cases. What would have happened to these boys if their lawyers had not been able to scrutinize the evidence, the reports, and hire their own expert?
Then there is Adel Hamad. He is described as a father of four from Sudan who was working at a hosptial run by an NGO called World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) in Pakistan, distributing food and clothes, etc. WAMY is alleged to possibly support "terrorist ideals". Mr. Hamad was arrested in his bed in the middle of the night and sent to Gitmo, where after several years of incarceration without charge he was given an administrative review hearing, at which he denied that WAMY is a terrorist organization and asked why he, an employee, would be arrested rather than the CEO or administrators. The review panel voted to keep him, but with a lone dissenter:
The U.S. Army Major, who dissented in his case, concurred: "Even if elements of certain NGOs provide support to terrorist ideals and causes that is insufficient to declare an employee of said NGO an enemy combatant; to do so would lead to unconscionable results: one would have to declare all physicians, nurses and aid workers of any suspect NGO as enemy combatants; the ramifications of such logic would lead to unforeseen and unconscionable results."Article 20 of the 4th Geneva Convention states: Persons regularly and solely engaged in the operation and administration of civilian hospitals, including the personnel engaged in the search for, removal, and transporting of and caring for wounded and sick civilians, the infirm and maternity cases, shall be respected and protected.
The report goes on to state:
The dissenting [Major said] "The fallacy of logic that seeks to classify Hamad as an enemy combatant because he many have come in contact with al Qaida member in the course of providing aid to refugees, or teaching at a school, would also provide support that a local merchant who 'came in contact' with al Qaida members could be detained as an enemy combatant."... Interviews with Dr. Sailani, and Dr Roghman (both WAMY hospital physicians) and Dr Najib (the hospital director and general surgeon) reveal that Hamad never spoke about politics, that there was no anti-American activity at the hospital and that Hamad did not have contacts outside the hospital grounds.
So far, no other evidence aside from a possible tenuous guilt by association has been leveled against Mr. Hamad. There is no evidence that he's ever picked up a weapon, been on a battlefield, or even expressed approval of terrorist activity. However, Mr. Hamad does not have the right to bring a petition for a writ of Habeas Corpus because the Administration, with the connivance of Congress members who appear to fear this ancient curb on arbitrary and capricious detention as much as they fear terrorists, gutted this essential writ and made it unavailable to him.
Do we really want guys like Stimson making the decisions about who should be incarcerated indefinitely? Are we that afraid of our own system of justice that we cannot use it to sort out the good from the bad? Can we not even extend some form of protection against fear-based and fear-mongering prosecutorial excess against the defenseless, whether they be good or bad? If Mr. Hamad is a terrorist then show me, and I'd be happy to lock the door on him permanently, but give the man the right to know what evidence exists against him. It's basic fairness.
Cross posted to Catzmaw's Commentary
I don't think anyone should be surprised that strippers have troubled pasts and trouble with present reality. It tempts fate to expect a guilt-free, drug-free, problem-free encounter. The students paid a high price for their stupidity. However, throughout the segments I couldn't help thinking that if they were poor, the price would've been much higher. The prosecutor would be running for governor on his "tough on crime" platform.
Most people at GitMo are there because neighbors in their home countries, filled with either hate or hunger or both, pointed them out for the $10,000 bounty the US was paying. Ambition, incompetence and dishonesty drove those arrests.
This opportunism in NC and on the national level happens too often in the US, also. You may remember the case of the New York jogger almost killed by 6 wilding teenagers? The teens were denied sleep and a lawyer until they were so tired they just confessed to it all. The actual culprit raped and killed again before he was caught. So much for a prosecutor who was "tough on crime." She was writing books at the time, and works in TV.
When we dump so many resources into monitoring and persecuting the innocent as at GitMo, in dragnets of personal information, and by sending soldiers in the wrong country, we miss the real criminals and we create even more.
The trailer: http://www.imdb.com/...
It's available on DVD and VHS. It's a poignent reminder of overzealous prosecution then and should be a "heads up" notice to understand what is happening now.
Back in the early 90s there was a particularly egregious case of the police, with the connivance of eager-to-convict prosecutors and a self-described "footprint analyst", arresting and prosecuting three young men for the brutal rape and murder of a 10-year old girl in her home -- I think in Illinois. One was badgered into a false confession and his testimony put the other two on death row. Later, it developed that the footprint analyst's work was pure fiction and not supported by any standards of scientific objectivity. She was taking cases across the country, with footprints and suspects' shoes being sent to her, and inevitably she found correlation, even of height and weight based on the depth of footprints, which no other forensic scientist claimed to see. Another man on death row then confessed to the murder and gave details which could only have been known to the murderer. The witness against the two men recanted and said he'd been threatened with death row if he didn't testify and was fed details of the crime by investigating detectives. The senior detective on the case committed suicide. A tragedy for all concerned, and two innocent men almost lost their lives.
As to forced confessions, you don't even have to use real force. Sleep deprivation and fear are very effective and work in just a few hours sometimes.
All that being said, these boys were too smart and too rich to have to hire a stripper from a "service" so disreputable that it didn't even provide security for the girls. The studies are far from perfect, but most studies show many of these workers are troubled and have been abused; few are completely sane and drug-free. They should have known that, yet they were prepared to use her. Now, if stupid were a crime, we'd all be in jail for a little while or longer. But that was really folish.
As for the whole stripping thing, it's a shame that the coaches chose to turn a blind eye to the hijinks at the team house rather than take the time to educate these young men about their responsibility to act responsibly in their community rather than to think of the local people as resources for tawdry behavior and females ripe for exploitation. Even taking away the specious rape charges hearing about what really went on in that house leaves me wanting a shower.