Category: Crime

Posted on

The Worst Attorney-General in U.S. History: Janet Reno

You have to consider the fact that John Mitchell, Attorney-General under Richard Nixon, was essentially a thug who was convicted of perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice and probably allowed his own wife to be assaulted in order to protect the Nixon Presidency. Pretty impressive for the nation’s top law enforcement officer. His loyalty was rewarded. Mr. Nixon, who promised, in the 1968 election, to restore law and order to America, greeted Mr. Mitchell with a party after he was released from prison.

Even so, Janet Reno has assembled a personal history that certainly puts her into the hall of shame for attorney generals.

Janet Reno’s political star began to rise with the prosecution of several “Satanic Ritual Abuse” cases in Miami, Florida. The most celebrated of these was the Frank and Ileana Furster Case. This is a very strange story. Ileana Furster, a 17-year-old native of rural Honduras, and her 36-year-old husband Francisco (Frank) ran a day-care centre in the affluent suburb of Miami called Country Walk. Ileana was a native of rural Honduras, where mothers and other care-givers thought nothing of kissing male babies on the genitals.  To them, it was no more weird or unusual then men kissing each other on both cheeks, or even on the lips in some cultures.  It was a considered a gesture of affection, something we may find as strange to us as the way Eastern European men will kiss each other in greeting, or the way women in some areas of Africa do not cover their breasts, or the way some Americans celebrate state executions with “tailgate parties”.

When one little boy reported the genital kissing to his mother, she called the local child welfare authorities who called the police who called the prosecutors– including head prosecutor Janet Reno. Ileana was arrested, placed in solitary confinement, and subjected to a continuous barrage of interrogations and dubious psychoanalysis. Reno’s strategy should be familiar to us from subsequent history. Ileana was offered a plea bargain: implicate her husband and get off with a light sentence, or continue to deny that anything happened and spend the rest of your life in prison. Meanwhile so-called “experts” on child abuse tried to convince her to “recover” repressed memories of her own possible abuse at the hands of her husband. Even so, it took more than a year before she caved and testified against her husband. She was then deported to the Honduras, where she immediately recanted her confession.

One of the little boys who, under the usual manipulative interrogation techniques used at that time, implicated Frank Furster also recanted as soon as the police were unable to continue to intimidate him. He maintains to this very day that no abuse occurred at Country Walk.

The children at Country Walk told the prosecutors that they had been made to drink urine and eat feces, and that some of the children had been tossed into the ocean to be eaten by sharks, and that Mr. Furster had video-taped the acts of abuse. Ms. Reno conveniently chose only the credible accusations to bring to court, disregarding the possibility that all of the accusations were fantastical, and the result of leading questions.

Frank went to jail for 165 years. He’s still there. Ileana remains in the Honduras surrounded by women who kiss baby’s genitals, and she probably thinks the United States is the wackiest, most bizarre country in the world.

The sharks got off scot-free.

Janet Reno, well, went on to contribute her savvy management to the Waco disaster. If you recall, a group of Branch Davidians were holed up in a large club house outside of Waco, Texas. The Bureau of Firearms and Tobacco and the FBI wanted to take away their guns. Kind of odd in a nation that markets and distributes guns like lollipops, especially in the State of Texas. But the Branch Davidians were, well, not like you or me. They were weird. They had to be controlled. And that was the real dynamic at play. The government allowed the confrontation to intensify into a control issue, thereby virtually guaranteeing a violent conclusion.

The strategy here was, once again, idiotic. Police and officials from the Bureau surrounded the building– even though no one inside was in imminent danger from the Branch Davidians– and terrorized the Branch Davidians and their leader David Koresh until they were able to create a crisis, which then, of course, “justified” violent police action. On April 19, 1993–after a 51-day standoff!– they assaulted the compound with explosives, tear gas, and incendiary devices, a fire broke out, and 75 people were killed. It appears that Koresh’s followers may have set some of the fires.

Darn.

If only they had had the good sense to walk out into a sea of automatic rifles, tanks, and tear gas!

The issue is not whether the Branch Davidians were responsible for the disaster or not. We know they had some very strange ideas and attitudes about the civil authorities. The issue is simply one of management. You have a bunch of allegedly crazy religious fanatics holed up in a compound with a large number of women and children. Is your goal to show them who’s who, or is it to ensure the safety of as many people as possible?

It was obvious from the actions of the government that they lost sight of the real issue and became absorbed in a power struggle with a group of highly unstable, unbalanced people. They had had the opportunity to arrest Koresh in the town of Waco, but they elected to wait until he returned to the compound and then demand that all of the persons inside surrender, unconditionally. In other words, they created the optimum conditions under which a disaster was likely to happen.

Afterwards, the courts got involved in the absurd argument of whether or not the FBI and ATF started the fires that killed most of the Branch Davidians. Why did no one ask if the FBI and ATF should have surrounded the building and applied as much pressure as possible to a group of unstable religious fanatics for 51 days?

You have to think that Reno is one of those naïve people who honestly, earnestly believes that innocent people have nothing to fear from the police.

Incidentally, a “motivational speaker” from Waco, Bill Powers, stood on a hill 3.5 miles from the compound and sold t-shirts to tourists as the place burned to the ground. I am not making this up. There are some very sick people in Texas, although most of them are shielded from us by holding comfortable positions in the government.

And he wasn’t alone. Another souvenir salesman, Hector Antuna, was also doing a booming business. He actually made jokes about it, intentionally and unintentionally: “I hate it. It’s awful. I feel for the people bad,” said Mr. Antuna. “But someone has to sell something. It’s just an honest living.” He addressed the 24 customers crowded around his tables: “Everyone, we are having a fire sale. Dishwasher, microwave safe,” he shouted, holding aloft a mug commemorating the standoff. “ATF, FBI approved.”

Reno’s adventures continued. She initiated the Whitewater investigation, which cost $50 million and yielded nothing of substance, and she appointed Kenneth Starr to slime Clinton.

Now, I know everyone feels that she was caught in a quandary. She was appointed Attorney General by Clinton. Had she suppressed the Whitewater investigation, the Republicans would have screamed like a pack of hysterical hyenas. To the Republicans, Whitewater was payback time for Watergate, which this generation of Republicans, apparently, really believes was just a Democratic putsch.

Reno didn’t have the guts to withstand that kind of pressure, so she caved. She wanted to look non-partisan, stately, and wise. Instead, by any objective measure, the Whitewater investigation was a colossal waste of resources and money. It came up bone dry. It found nothing.  It is one of the great congenital faults of the Democratic Party that they can be bullied into doing stupid, self-destructive things like this.

Now, when a man like Kenneth Starr, a passionate enemy of Bill Clinton, is unable to come up with the goods after three years and $50 million, you have to ask yourself if anyone but Janet Reno would have allowed the investigation to go that far in the first place.  You have to ask yourself if a man like that is going to admit that he spent $50 million of tax payer money on a wild goose chase.  You have to ask yourself if man like that can admit he is stupid.

Then there was the Cisneros Affair. Henry Cisneros had an adulterous affair with a woman, Linda Jones, while he was mayor of San Antonio. He admitted the affair. He broke it off and moved back in with his wife. For some reason, he didn’t tell the FBI exactly how much money he paid in support of his mistress after he left her to move back in with his wife. Reno ordered an investigation (after Cisneros was appointed head of the Housing and Urban Development Department) which cost $9 million to find out what everybody already knew.

If the issue was the money paid to Jones, why not just give her a check for $1 million and save the taxpayer $8 million? Because Reno has no sense of proportion. She has no common sense.

Then we have Elian. Reno had Elian Gonzalez kidnapped and returned to Cuba– doing the right thing, the wrong way. Here again, she chose a method that almost seemed calculated to bring confrontation. This is one macho attorney-general lady!

And now she is unrepentant about harassing Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who was charged with selling the “crown jewels” of nuclear weapons to the Chinese. The pattern is similar to the Country Walk case. The prosecution lays a large number of absurd charges. When it finds that it can’t actually prove any of the charges, it tries to bully the defendant into a guilty plea on one or two of the least significant charges, thus “proving” that there must have been something going on. Reno is kind of saying, hey, trust me— we know he’s guilty. She can’t believe we won’t just take her word for it. And those judges! Actually demanding evidence for everything! How inconvenient!

It would almost be worth seeing George Bush Jr. win the presidential election if that’s what it would take to get rid of this megalomaniac Attorney General. Fortunately, Al Gore isn’t likely to reappoint her either.

Yes, even John Mitchell pales by comparison. Janet Reno is the worst Attorney-General ever.

Posted on

Nixon and the FBI

One of the great mysteries of recent political history– by “recent”, I mean the last 30 years– is the relationship between Richard Nixon and the intelligence community and the FBI. Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s right-hand man, is quoted on a Watergate tape as saying something like “we don’t control” the FBI, in response a question Nixon had asked about the investigation of the Watergate break in. Nixon famously suggested Haldeman get the CIA to tell the FBI to back off– because they would compromise a secret intelligence operation. Neither one mentioned that the CIA, at the time, was expressly prohibited from any intelligence activities within the borders of the U.S.A.

This was a serious compliment to the FBI… in a back-handed way. That is, if you could imagine that because the FBI was not controlled by Nixon, it was therefore accountable and lawful and diligent. In fact, the FBI had long been corrupted by J. Edgar Hoover’s weird personal control, and was famous for claiming that there was no organized crime in America, before Bobby Kennedy went after the mob.

[2008-11-01]

The FBI also later helped discredit the Satanic Ritual Abuse hysteria– they assigned an agent to look into allegations that thousands of children were being abducted and ritually sacrificed by Satan’s pawns. The FBI agent concluded that the claims were nonsense. [Added November 2008]

Posted on

The Curious and Unfortunate Fate of Wen Ho Lee.

Without the big bad Russians to kick around any more, what is the U.S. military-industrial establishment to do? There must be somebody out there scary enough to drum up another $300 billion or so for preposterous defense schemes. Cuba? Pretty scary, you must admit, but with Castro getting a little long in the tooth and a population of only about 4 million of which 3.999 million are more interested in baseball and mariachi bands, there’s not much to muster there.

Well, hey, you don’t have to look too far. There’s the red devil himself, China, just sitting there with about two billion people, and a communist government.

Of course, China hasn’t even been able to scare Taiwan into submission yet, so first you’ve got to puff them up a little. What if they had nuclear bombs? Oh dear! Oh my! The Chinese with nuclear weapons! But how did they get nuclear weapons? They already had them? They must have stolen them from us! They must have been spying on us. They probably have spies everywhere. Just look around you. Just look at those scientists working at the Los Alamos Nuclear Research Laboratory. Hey… look at that guy....

This week, a U.S. District Judge, James Parker, apologized to Wen Ho Lee for the idiotic persecution of the 60-year-old Taiwan-born scientist for allegedly selling nuclear secrets to the Chinese. Attorney General Janet Reno– possibly the worst attorney general in the recent history of the United States– refused to say she was sorry. She said, in essence, that if only Mr. Lee had cooperated as he should have he never would have been in so much trouble. How nice to know that the chief law enforcement officer of the United States has officially pronounced that innocent citizens have no need to fear incarceration as long as they “cooperate”.

Not much is known any more about what really happened to start this mess, but it is clear that there was never any significant reason to believe that Lee had sold vital nuclear secrets to the Chinese. But prosecutors claimed that Lee had downloaded thousands of megabytes of information about nuclear weapons onto his laptop computer without permission. They figured he was ready to pack them all off to China.

Lee, and others who work in the field, immediately insisted that though downloading the files was technically against the rules at the Los Alamos Research Laboratory, “everybody did it”. Everybody did it, but not everybody looked Chinese.

Wen Ho Lee was the victim of a right-wing paranoid fantasy. Prosecutors and politicians chose Lee to bear the brunt of their irrational hysteria that somehow the Chinese were getting ready to take over the world. Chances are that many of the individuals involved in persecuting Mr. Lee actually thought he was born Chinese. After all, he had slanty eyes, didn’t he? I’d love to be able to lay this exclusively at the feet of the Republicans but the truth is that high officials at the Department of Energy and the Executive– eager to be more paranoid than thou when it came to military security– were at least equally responsible. Clinton, playing the centrist, did nothing to help Lee even though most sane observers were very quick to point out the absurdities in the prosecution’s case. Al Gore hasn’t said a single decent, respectable thing about the case. Bush would like to have you believe that he is so smart that all spies will be caught under his administration.

The Republicans, meanwhile, after encouraging the prosecution with their paranoid hysteria, are now trying to politicize the case by demanding an inquiry into the investigation!

Lee was held for 278 days in solitary confinement after being charged with 59 counts of espionage. The prosecution’s case fell apart when an FBI official named Robert Messemer admitted that he had distorted an interview he had with Lee. In other words, he lied— to a judge– about Lee’s responses to questions he had asked him before last December.

But even before Messemer’s confessions, reputable experts and analysts were insisting that none of the “secrets” Mr. Lee is alleged to have copied to his laptop computer were actually “secret”. In fact, virtually all of the information was already available in trade documents and on the internet.

As usual, grossly incompetent lawyers know how to protect themselves. They argue that Lee probably really is guilty, but they just can’t prove it. So while asserting, on the one hand, that he really did intend to sell “the crown jewels” of U.S. nuclear research to some other country– a capital offense– they admit that they have such a weak case that they will release him after time served already.

There is an ugly dynamic here. The prosecutors, possibly dimly aware of looking like idiots, are now desperate for any kind of vindication, no matter how meager. They got it with this perverse deal with Lee: he pleads guilty to a very minor charge, and they call off the hounds. This is called bullying, harassment, extortion, when it is performed by anyone but the police or the government or lawyers.

You can’t have it both ways. Either he’s guilty and you’re incompetent and you bungled the investigation, or he’s innocent and you are cold-blooded liars, as well as incompetent.

Clinton should do the right thing for a change. All the persons involved in persecuting Mr. Lee should be summarily dismissed. Mr. Lee’s good name should be cleared and he should be restored to his position at Los Alamos.

Last minute note: I just read that President Clinton did at least part of the right thing. He has chastised the Department of Justice for the way they handled the investigation and indicated that he believes Mr. Lee’s rights were violated. Meanwhile, Attorney-General Janet Reno continues to insist her department did nothing wrong. But then, Janet Reno’s initial claim to fame (and stepping stone into a political career) came from the dubious prosecution of a Satanic Ritual Abuse case in Florida in the 1980’s. And we all know what THAT was about….

More on Janet Reno’s colourful past.

Posted on

Drug War Sponsors

The United States is going to give the government of Columbia $1.5 billion of aid in their war against drugs.

Now, on the surface, this might sound to you like a bad idea. You don’t think some of Columbia’s military and political leaders might get the idea that the more drugs Columbia supplies to the United States, the more money they are going to get for new equipment, training, and fringe benefits, do you? Or do you think that their reputation for honesty, integrity, and diligence is such that after a few years of aid, they will announce to the world that the program has been a success and therefore no more American money is needed?

It is pretty well documented that the small successes early on in the war against drugs contributed to the over-all failure of the same war. When the FBI and other government agencies cracked down on the most visible agents of drug trafficking in the early 1980’s, the prices of many of these drugs went soaring, which caused a huge number of new sellers to appear. Furthermore, the really smart dealers went deeper underground to avoid detection and became ever more entrenched and sophisticated, and almost impossible to stamp out. The result is that drugs are now far more profitable and widely available than ever before.

Isn’t that kind of shocking? If a private business set out to accomplish something that cost hundreds of billions of dollars over more than twenty years, it would probably have the good sense to sit down at some point and try to answer the question of whether it was moving closer or farther from it’s goal. If it found that, after twenty years, it was farther away from its goal than ever before, I tend to think they would stop wasting their money and come up with a new plan.

But this is a government plan of course. Ironically, the very people who most decry government waste in other areas of the economy– conservatives and Republicans– are the most enthusiastic about spending a few hundred billion more on the same self-defeating program.

And now they are pouring $1.5 billion into a corrupt Columbian government to ensure that even worse results can be obtained. You see, when the Columbian army is not busy stamping out drug dealers, or fighting an entrenched guerrilla movement, it tends to spend a lot of time and effort assassinating human rights activists and peasants.

Nice to know that now they will be able to violate human rights with state of the art equipment.

Posted on

Gush Bore: The 2000 Election

The Difference Between Al Gore and George Bush Jr….

As everybody seems to know, this election is about purity, innocence, and fidelity. God knows, we could have 15% unemployment, a –4% growth in GDP, riots in the streets, and war in the Middle East, but what we really care about is whether the President loves his wife.

So Al Gore kisses Tipper passionately on stage at the Democratic National Convention. The steam hissed from both their ears as the astounded press corp dropped their pens and microphones and gasped.

Clever, don’t you think. Instead of saying, “I will never screw around with any interns, no matter how doe-eyed and lovely and naïve”, which sounds like, “No, I don’t still beat my wife”, Al Gore plants a passionate kiss on his wife. Message: hey, I don’t need to fool around. I’m passionate about my wife.

Well, the Republicans could not let that stand, by golly, no. They had to be equally subtle, equally insidious. So they leak this story about George Bush Jr. dealing with a flirtatious staff member during his father’s 1988 presidential campaign. It seems that the stalwart George Bush Jr. got sick and tired of all this flirtation so he just marched right up to this woman and told her off, right then and there. When another staff member remonstrated with him about treating a loyal staff member so harshly, George Junior barked out, “Good. I’m a married man!”

There. This proves that George Bush Jr. is just as honorable and faithful as Al Gore.

Maybe this is a good illustration of the difference between the two candidates. Gore believes that marriage is a good thing because you get to spend your whole life with a beautiful sexy person that you really care about. Bush believes that marriage is a good thing because the Bible darn well tells us that it is and you just better get that straight.

Now I understand.

Well, I thought I did. The trouble is… can you tell me which candidate supports which position on any of the following issues?

  • Military build up
  • Less regulation and government intervention
  • Lower taxes
  • Capital punishment
  • Spending billions on the war on drugs
  • Persuading Hollywood—with logic instead of laws—to tone down the sex and violence
  • Improving education
  • Campaign Finance Reform
  • Welfare “Reform” (read “slash welfare programs”)

You’re right. They both have pretty well the same positions. So what’s the difference?

Well, in all fairness, Gore probably won’t set out to break all records for executions the way George Bush Jr. did in Texas. Of course that is at least partly because the Federal Government in the U.S. has very little responsibility for capital punishment: that is a state issue. But I can see Gore saying something like, “by golly, we ought to make sure these guys are guilty before we execute them,” whereas George Jr. would probably say something like, “if they weren’t guilty, what the heck were they doing on death row?”

Gore is probably a little more environment-friendly than Bush, but probably not very much. Like Bush, he tends to give business interests, including the oil and forestry industries, pretty well everything they want.

Gore claims to be serious about campaign finance reform. We have not seen a leader yet, however, who is dumb—or smart—enough to cut off the very branch upon which he is sitting. Will Gore bring in serious campaign finance reform and cut off the very moneyed interests that have sponsored his campaign to an unimaginable degree? Not very likely.

Gush/Bore. Take your choice.

Chromehorse.net officially endorses Ralph Nader for President.

Posted on

Memory is not Reliable

Thirty-four years ago, some U.S. scientists asked a group of 14-year-old males a number of questions on a variety of subjects and events.

Those men are now 48. The scientists caught up to them recently and asked them a series of questions aimed at discovering how accurately they remembered those same facts.

The result? Not very impressive. Apparently, the men would have scored about the same had they simply guessed at the answers.

There are still a fair number of psychologists and social workers out there who believe in “recovered” memories. There are many, many men on death row in the United States because they were identified by someone who claimed to remember specific details about their appearance. There is Bill Gates “remembering” that he invented DOS.

Some scientists rightly ask, how can recovered memories be trusted when our normal conscious memories, which didn’t need to be “recovered”, are not trustworthy?

The answer that some psychologists give is that recovered memories about sexual abuse are trustworthy because they are associated with traumatic events, which imprinted them upon the mind with unusual intensity. They have to give this explanation because they know as well as anybody that normal memory is not very reliable. So, somehow, they not only assert that memories can be “recovered”, but that they are likely to be more reliable than your normal conscious memory.

So then, you should be able to prove it. You should be able to demonstrate that details of memories of traumatic events are more accurately remembered than normal memories. The location of an event, the clothing worn by the people involved, the words that were said… unfortunately, so far, no one has been able to do it.

Big HMMMMMMM.

What these people have not shown is why a memory of an intensely emotional experience can be any more accurate than other memories. The fact is, according to their own logic, we are more likely to alter or repress memories that cause us emotional discomfort. The fact is that humans rather readily alter their memories to accommodate the imperatives of self-image.

You have heard about the numerous cases of wrongful convictions now being routinely discovered through DNA testing. In many of these cases, eyewitnesses swore in court that they saw the accused commit the crime, or fleeing the crime scene, or whatever. Researchers now know that these witnesses altered their memories in order to harmonize them with the assurances of the police that a particular suspect was certainly guilty. Sometimes the police tell the witness that they have evidence that decisively proves guilt, but can’t use it in court because of a technicality. Very often, a jail-house snitch claims to have over-heard a “confession” and testifies and then receives a lighter sentence himself. Nice system.

The witness thinks, well, he must be the guy. Over the years, her “memory” of the suspect’s appearance becomes hardwired to the photo of the police suspect. When the suspect is proven innocent, they are often deeply troubled. They have a very hard time adjusting their “memory”. Tells you something, doesn’t it?

You can’t trust your memories. That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy them, such as they are. But you can’t trust them.

Posted on

The Lawyers of Walkerton

The Robin Sharpe case, the Walkerton water scandal, the church-run residential homes scandal, the tobacco lawsuits, the Columbine shootings…. all, and many others, in their aftermaths, are linked by one dominant thread: after the initial catastrophe, the lawyers quickly stepped in…. to ensure that a multitude of new catastrophes will follow.

Bankruptcy, despair, and personal destruction aren’t as dramatic as school bombings or water poisoning, so they don’t get as much extensive coverage in the media. But they are equally real and sometimes more disastrous for people than the initial misfortunes that first brought the litigants to the courthouse.

The Survivors of “Survivor”, the tv show, did well to leave the island alive– but they foolishly voted a lawyer, Stacey Stillman, off the island in the third round. She’s now suing two of the contestants and the executive producer. Did she not agree to the basic rules of the game when she signed on? Sure, but no person should be forced to honor an agreement that relates somehow to his or her personal integrity.

I have to take you back on a brief side-trip to Roald Dahl’s childhood. Roald Dahl, whose father died when he was very young, was shipped off to a British residential school by his mother. At this residential school, misbehavior– real or imagined– was punished with the rod. The miscreant was ordered to drop his pants and bend over and then was thwacked repeatedly with a wooden stick until he was bruised or bleeding. The flogging was performed by upper-class boys or the head-master– the scions of British upper-class snobbery, the flower of all that was civilized in the Western World, in their own estimation. The same people who looked down upon the native peoples of Africa as “savages”.

I have never heard of any of these men being sued, years after the fact, by any of their students, least of all Roald Dahl. Why not? Isn’t this abuse? Roald Dahl’s mother, a lovely woman by all accounts, certainly didn’t approve. Roald Dahl didn’t approve. Who gave them the right to do this? In a court of law, would any reasonable person believe– today– that this kind of discipline is justifiable?

Do they still do this? Seems impossible, don’t you think? Certainly, no teacher of any school, private or not, in North America, could get away such singular brutality today. Or could they?

But a 13-year-old girl in a high school in Toronto can ruin a teacher’s life by asserting that he spoke the word “breast” in front of her and nudged her once as he passed her desk and looked at her in a “lewd and inappropriate way”. His name appears in the papers. He is suspended from his job. He is shunned by his friends and colleagues. His wife leaves him. It is later found that the girl was lying– but no matter. The man must spend the rest of his life under a cloud of suspicion that is named “was once charged with sexual abuse”.

And what shall we do with the girl? Not a blessed thing. A verbal warning, perhaps. I assume that might have been done, but the official record is that nothing was done. Our society, down on it’s hands and knees examining every crack in the floor for the slightest sign of a pin of sexual harassment, stands aside while the elephant of personal destruction does headstands on the ottoman.

A woman gets drunk at an office party. Her employers offer to pay for a taxi to take her home. They offer to call her husband. She turns them down, heads off in a car and goes drinking at another bar somewhere. Then she gets into the car again and smashes into a pickup truck. She suffers permanent brain damage and can no longer work. A court awards her $300,000 from the employer– the same employer that tried to stop her from driving home by herself– on the reasoning– if you could call it that– that they were one-fourth responsible for her accident. But if she is 3/4 responsible, then she owes herself $900,000, money which she does not have. It appears that the logic of the law, in this case, is that he who has deep pockets will pay, one way or the other.

And Roald Dahl’s teachers– one of them went on to be the man who put the crown on the head of Queen Elizabeth– a man who made a young boy expose his buttocks so he could whack him so hard with a birch stick that the boy couldn’t sit down without pain for weeks– Roald Dahl’s teachers…. probably thrive in doddering retirements in the countryside of England, proud of their contributions to civilization.

Back to the law– the problem is, I don’t think our society really does think the law makes sense anymore. Most people seem to find many of these ruling bizarre. Not all of them really are bizarre. The newspapers do like to exaggerate. But we do seem to have completely lost sight of the purpose of the law– to provide the rules for justice and fairness– because the law has become a tool in the hands of schemers to extract wealth from vulnerable parties. It’s become a game that consists completely of technicalities. The schemers are not necessarily the litigants– they are the lawyers, who usually end up with most of the settlement anyway. It is indeed not unusual for the lawyers to end up with all of the settlement, or even more than the settlement, as in the tobacco cases in the U.S.  [A court later lowered the fees.]

In the case of Walkerton, the law should have provided that the injured parties received compensation for pain, suffering, and inconvenience caused by the mismanagement of the water purification system. Instead, every party, regardless of injury, is going to receive $2,000. And the six lawyers who partnered in the class action suit will receive $5 million.

What? How can this possibly make sense? How can the only party not injured by the actions of the Walkerton municipal water utility end up with more money than any of the injured parties?

The situation was thus: the genuinely injured parties stood to gain much more than $2,000 each, since any right-minded jury would award the family of one of the dead or seriously sick children much, much more than that. But this would require years of litigation, expert witnesses, medical records, motions and counter-motions, suspensions and delays, and so on, all of it fought with the utmost vigor by the party with deepest pockets, the province (and the province’s insurance companies).

The province was not necessarily primarily responsible for the water disaster: the town of Walkerton was. But the province has some indirect responsibility– and deep pockets.

It doesn’t make sense. The people of Walkerton are still free to demand more than $2,000, by proving hardship above the average, I suppose, to an arbitrator appointed by a judge. I suppose this will result in smaller, more reasonable settlements, and appears to cut the lawyers out of the equation. It is quite possible that the conduct of the lawyers in this case was quite reasonable. Except for the $5 million.

What has really happened is this: the lawyers, taking advantage of their position as gate-keepers of the legal system, were empowered to go into the treasury together (both sides, holding hands and singing “tra-la-la-la”) and decide how much money should be given out to the residents of Walkerton, and, while they were there, with no one other than fellow lawyers to look on, they stuffed their own pockets full. These lawyers purportedly represent the two adversaries in our legal system. But the real adversaries in our legal system are the clients and the lawyers. The lawyers have figured out a way to do their business that guarantees benefits to themselves regardless of who wins the actual case.

“Here, you take some.”
“But do you have enough?”
“Well, I could take a little more, perhaps…”
“Please do!”
“Oh, but only if you do.”
“Well, if you insist….”

As in most cases, you have lawyers for one side sitting down with lawyers for the other side. And they say to each other– your clients are slimy bastards who committed horrible acts that resulted in incalculable pain and misery for my clients and you will have to pay enormous sums of money to them because even though money can’t buy love, it is necessary to make a symbolic gesture of culpability. But first, lets take care of each other. We’ll tell our client that they are getting piles of money and that our services are free. We’ll make it clear, in devious, subtle ways, that if they don’t accept the agreement we recommend to them, they’ll be in court for decades and never get a cent after the legal bills. In return, you get to charge your client enormous sums for pretending to have saved them millions of dollars by negotiating the lesser of two evils in return for which they pay our outrageous legal fees as well as yours.

But won’t your clients say, shouldn’t all those millions going into legal fees be going to us? Why are you making it look like it doesn’t come out of our settlement by saying that you are getting paid directly by the defendant, instead of billing us? Why do you guys get a percentage anyway, instead of a decent fixed rate for the number of hours you actually worked?

Ha ha ha ha! Okay? Done.

The law has become so arcane and complex that lawyers function like priests, interpreting the will of an omnipotent but unknowable God who periodically lashes down from his mountain top with random acts of wanton destruction and misalignment.

We live in a democracy. You would think that our legal system represents the will of the people, popularly expressed. But the lawyers have succeeded in establishing an exclusive cooperative monopoly on access to “justice”.

The government should do three things.

1. Review all of the laws and get rid of the ones that obsolete, irrelevant, or more than 30 years old, unless a really compelling case can be made for keeping it. (I expect that “homicide” should stay on the books.)

2. All the retained laws must be simplified and rewritten so that an average Grade 6 student can clearly understand them.

3. Lawyers fees should be regulated. I don’t mind so much if they are paid a decent wage, but “decent wage” should be defined as “less than a million dollars” and “not a percentage of the settlement they negotiated with other lawyers”.

Lawyers don’t have to dig holes in the ground in the winter or handle garbage or toxic sludge. They don’t have to change diapers or clean toilets. Why should they make more than $30 an hour?

Posted on

Reconstructed Memories

By now it is well known that ‘Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood’ — put forward as the recovered memories of a child’s Holocaust experience– is a fraud. But at the time it was published, ‘Fragments’ was widely hailed as a masterpiece of Holocaust writing, and the author, then known as Binjamin Wilkomirski, became an emblematic hero: the victim who survived.” NY Times, Feb 26, 2002

You may have noticed all those cases of child sexual abuse by priests in the United States. Nothing new. Ireland and Canada have also had major scandals, and I’ll bet Australia and Poland have had theirs as well.

But now you are going to have to draw a reasonable conclusion about “recovered” memories. Either they don’t exist at all — they are constructions provoked by emotional instability or something– or they only happen to women.

Not a single one of the men pressing the charges against the priests — and there are hundreds of them– is claiming to have “recovered” the memories of the sexual abuse. Not one. The memories were always there. They never lost them. They were vivid, because the experiences were awful.

I suppose one could argue that women experience abuse more intensely and thus have stronger urges to “repress” the memory. But you realize that that would open doors, don’t you? That women really are different. That women’s testimony in court should be regarded differently, about things recalled from memory, then men’s testimony. That women are weaker emotionally.

I don’t think we want to go there. So we should do the sensible thing and start treating “recovered” memories as “constructed” memories. They are strange creatures of imagination and anxiety and perceptual dysfunction.

Posted on

Robin Sharpe and the Supreme Court of Canada

The Supreme Court Handles a Tough One

Is it possible to consider this issue, soberly, and intelligently?

You are probably familiar now with the Robin Sharpe case that is now before the Supreme Court of Canada.

Nobody is saying that Robin Sharpe is a nice man. Sharpe was arrested by the police in Vancouver for possession of child pornography, an offense punishable under the Criminal Code of Canada– Federal Law. Newspaper accounts are rather sketchy about the details of the arrest, but we know what it is that the law said was illegal: he had, in his possession, images and texts describing sexual acts involving children.

Sharpe did not argue that people should be allowed to create child pornography and sell and distribute it. Most people don’t care about the distinction, but I do. He did argue, in court, that the law as worded was too broad. He argued that the law appeared to make it a criminal offense to even think about having sex with children. The law certainly made it a criminal offense to record such thoughts on paper, even if nobody else ever reads them, or sees them. Robin Sharpe, and his lawyers, and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Union, believe that this part of the law restricts his freedom to think and imagine. It infringes on an individual’s right to have an unfettered imagination. It opens a Pandora’s box of interpretation and analysis that cannot possibly result in just actions by the police. It is not the business of the government, or anyone, to make thoughts illegal.

You have to think carefully about what the law is trying to prohibit here. It prohibits the expression, in any form, of specific imaginary experiences (as well as real experiences). In this case, we are talking about a man who likes to fantasize about having sex with very young boys. But the law is never specific. It doesn’t tell you in advance what kind of person to arrest. Conceivably, a girl having dreams about being molested by a teacher could be arrested for writing them down. Well, we know that we would never arrest such a person, would we? For one thing, in practice, we always assume that the girl, in this instance, is the victim, even if they are her fantasies.

The law, however, should never make assumptions. And the law doesn’t help us make the kind of distinctions that might be required: what is imagination? Who is the victim? What is a dream? What is poetry? What is documentation? What is fiction? What if the girl imagined herself as the teacher that was molesting her? There is a raft of issues that could complicate the process of deciding if possession of this particular document or image is a crime. Is there a way to ensure that all of these issues are addressed in a consistent, convincing manner, to ensure that the right person is always punished? In a society that can’t even agree on what the rules are for political secession?

Two lower British Columbia courts have ruled in favor of Sharpe. They have ruled that the law goes too far. They have argued that if the principle is allowed to stand, then it will also be legal to arrest people for thinking and writing other things. It is a bedrock principle of our legal system that all of our citizens have the right to hold personal opinions no matter how unpopular they are. You cannot disobey most laws, but you can criticize them all you want, and advocate for changes to them.

The problem with discussing the issue with anyone is that people find the very idea of child pornography so repugnant that they react very emotionally to the issue and quickly pronounce themselves in favor of any law, no matter how ill-considered, that makes child pornography illegal. The courts, of course, cannot afford to be so cavalier.

Ironically, some of the groups most enthusiastic about keeping the law are the ones who also constantly rant about getting the government off our backs. They claim the government plays an excessive role in our society, when they advocate for the poor, or homosexuals, or other minorities. In this instance, however, they want to give the government extraordinary latitude in dealing with a particular type of activity.

You may recall the hysteria surrounding allegations of Satanic Ritual Abuse in the 1980’s. Similar emotions were at play. The result was a massive “witch-hunt” of mind-boggling proportions, in which dozens of innocent men and women were imprisoned, and hundreds of innocent lives were destroyed. After a few years of sober, second thoughts, and a re-analysis of the way the investigations were conducted, almost all of these cases were tossed out of court. Just a few months ago, charges against Bob Kelly, who was at the centre of one of the most infamous of these cases (the Edenton “Little Rascals” case) were finally dropped. (In spite of the fact that superior courts consistently ruled that these investigations were almost criminally sloppy and ill-conceived, no one, to my knowledge, has apologized for destroying the lives of the innocent men and women caught up in these events.)

Why did these cases go forward in the first place? For the same reason many people wish to see the Supreme Court uphold the child pornography laws: because they hate child pornography and they are willing to make compromises in order to believe that we are actually doing something about it. These people, including the Reform Party, believe that if the Supreme Court upholds the lower court appeal decisions, then Parliament should invoke the “notwithstanding” clause of the Bill of Rights and enforce the law anyway.

But if the Supreme Court rules that it can be made illegal to possess images and texts that describe illegal acts, it will have established that, in principle, the government can arrest people for what they think and say, instead of only for what they do.

In fact, that principle is already at play in Canada in our hate laws. A person can be arrested for publishing documents that promote hatred or contempt for people based on their race, nationality, religious beliefs, or ethnic origin. Many people think that these are good laws too. I don’t. I despise racism, but I believe that freedom of expression is the very foundation of freedom and democracy and should never be compromised for any other principle. Without freedom of expression, we cannot even guarantee that discussions about the law, including the pornography laws, will be allowed to take place.

For the same reason, I abhor the language laws in Quebec. Yes, it would be a tragedy to see the French language in North America die. But it is a greater tragedy that people can be arrested for saying something in the wrong words. It is absurd. If French deserves to survive, it will survive for the right reasons. If not, we should mourn it’s passing.

Right now, most of us think we have a reasonably fair and just government. But if we didn’t, the government could use this case as a precedent to justify arresting people who disagree with them on other things.

It is always a challenge to persuade people that it is important to fight for the rights of people we don’t like. We’d rather, often, just bash them in the teeth. We are short-sighted and stupid sometimes. We forget that every time we chisel away at these rights even a little, we establish the conditions under which our own freedoms can eventually be suppressed.

The Supreme Court should uphold the appeals courts and invalidate the child pornography laws. Then Parliament should enact a new law that omits the offending portions. It’s really no big deal. The law can continue to make it illegal to create or sell or distribute child pornography. The police can still arrest molesters and abusers. No stores will be allowed to display, for sale, the forbidden items. We will still be able to read the Bible (which, under certain circumstances, could fit the definition of “pornography” that some would like to see enacted into law).

I don’t know if people imagine that this one particular part of the child pornography law goes very far in terms of prevention anyway. It doesn’t.

It merely allows the police to arrest people for thought crimes.

Posted on

Attica

I just read that about 400 of the 800 victims of the ultra-violent repression of inmates at Attica State Prison in New York in 1971 will receive an $8 million settlement.

Well…. maybe $4 million.

I am not kidding: lawyers will take the other $4 million.

Bastards.

This is the American way of justice, circa 1970. A disproportionate number of blacks are sent to jail. They are allowed one shower a week and one roll of toilet paper a month. The prison is vastly over-crowded because the governor, Nelson Rockefeller, believes it would be unpopular, politically, to raise taxes to pay for more prisons (sound familiar?). The prisoners, driven to frustration, seize hostages and start a riot. The police, fortified with state troopers, attempt to regain control, killing 45 of the prisoners and seriously wounding 89.

Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller gave the orders. Mr. Rockefeller, who ignored all the demands that the deep corruption among the prison guards and administration of Attica be addressed. For years, he did nothing. He sat on his hands. Then the prison exploded and he approved aggressive counter-measures.

After the tear gas had cleared, the police reported to the complicit media that the prisoners had killed 10 hostages by slitting their throats, and that they had even castrated a man. The public was outraged. Of course the police are right to use the most brutal methods available. Of course the police were right to kill 30 prisoners.

Then the autopsies and the coroner’s reports came back. None of the victims had their throats slit. No one was castrated. All of the victims, including the hostages, died from bullets fired by State Troopers.

Yes, every single one of them.

Did you read this at the time it happened, if you can remember that long ago? I remember that long ago. I don’t remember reading about the coroner’s report back then. It was not something the media thought the public wanted to read.

The inmates were forced to strip and crawl, naked, through fields filled with broken glass. They were assaulted, beaten, abused, and terrorized by the angry police and guards. Why were the police angry? Possibly because they knew that their assault had been badly managed and messy and brutal. Because they had been shown to be incompetent and stupid.

It took 30 years— 30 years!– for the real victims of this outrage, the prisoners, to get compensation. And then what happens? Their lawyers walk off with half of the settlement.

I know a few lawyers. They get upset when they hear lawyer jokes. They say it’s not fair to tar everyone with the same brush. I suppose you could argue that not all professional athletes are greedy and not all television evangelists are liars and not all Amway distributors are suckers. In each case, though, it seems like the exception proves the rule.

On the other hand, you could simply argue that there are serious structural flaws in a legal system that essentially provides two version of “justice”: one for those with money, and quite another for those without. Why do lawyers always seem to walk away with the money in lawsuits like the Attica case? Because the only way the poor can afford a good lawyer is to sign an outrageous “contingency” agreement that gives most of the settlement money to the lawyers. Why? Because lawyers cost too much. The system needs to be drastically changed.

The police brutally violate the civil rights of 800 prisoners in Attica State Prison– who were protesting the inhumane living conditions in the prison– and the slug-like legal system takes 30 years to make a judgment, and then the lawyers jump in and grab all the money. The victims get almost nothing. The police pay no penalty. Nobody is fired. Nobody goes to jail. Just hand the money over to the lawyers.