Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz, discusses in “America on Trial” several dozen cases that have indeed shaped the United States, transforming the country and its legal system from the colonial period to the present corrupt system of injustice. He provides a broad historical sweep simplifying events that are complex in legal terms, down to laymen’s terms. The trial of the famous Rosenbergs for treason is just one of the cases described. The prosecutors KNEW that his wife was innocent, but charged her in an attempt to put pressure on her husband to turn over evidence. Perhaps he did not have what they thought and the jury found her guilty, so she was executed as well.
Now we have the latest scandal. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project are going over decades of false convictions on what the government now finally admits. Out of 28 examiners within the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95% of the 268 trials reviewed so far. There were 32 defendants wrongly sentenced to death, 14 of which have been executed or died in prison.
The famous Guantanamo prisoner, the only one put on trial, was acquitted by a New York jury of 223 counts out of 224, and found him guilty of conspiracy of which anyone can be convicted, since it is just an agreement or claim that someone knew about something yet did not participate in the crime. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was the best case they had. Obama reiterated his first campaign promise to close Guantanamo Bay and end torture back in 2008. Why has nobody else been placed on trial? Because they have no case. When they tried to secretly release some prisoners, they sent them back in jeans and t-shirts. They were killed because others assumed that they had been brainwashed by the Americans.
This system is inherently corrupt. We seriously need major structural reform or our children will never be safe. It was Sir William Blackstone who wrote one of my favorite history accounts: “Commentaries on the Laws of England“, written between 1765 and 1769. I read the full four volume set, but this was the legal bible upon which the Founders of the United States wrote the Constitution. In my opinion, this was the dignity and honor that law once stood for, that once upon a time we called “justice”. My knowledge of law was formed by this work. Everything else was constructed upon this foundation. Indeed, Blackstone’s famous quote from this book remains: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.” This was the dignity of the law that has been erased from our memories. Another one of my favorite passages:
Of great importance to the public is the preservation of this personal liberty; for if once it were left in the power of any the highest magistrate to imprison arbitrarily whomever he or his officers thought proper, (as in France it is daily practised by the crown,) there would soon be an end of all other rights and immunities. Some have thought that unjust attacks, even upon life or property, at the arbitrary will of the magistrate, are less dangerous to the commonwealth than such as are made upon the personal liberty of the subject. To bereave a man of life, or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole kingdom; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government. (Blackstone 1765)
The abuse we are suffering from the civil asset forfeitures is another serious undermining of the entire economy. It turns people against police and government. When a friend came here from Ukraine, they saw a police officer and immediately tried to move the other way. In Ukraine, that is what led to the revolution that the nut jobs called a CIA plot. The people revolted and the West seized power of the government. Now, the people are told that they cannot address the reforms they wanted to because of the war. Blackstone on property remain relevant to this day.
There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe. And yet there are very few, that will give themselves the trouble to consider the original and foundation of this right. (Blackstone 1766)
