Forgotten, Man Sits In Jail For Two Years

by Robert Patrick - August 31st, 2008 - St. Louis Post Dispatch

Shepard, 53, is a man the system forgot, apparently ignored by his own attorney — and the prosecutor and judge — as days ticked by in a municipal lockup where he was confined to a cell 23 hours a day.

[snip]

Shepard has mainly communicated with Kelly, his lawyer, through family. He said Kelly visited him July 17 to tell of a potential plea deal for a four-year sentence. Shepard said he wanted to take the deal.

But prosecutors said Kelly turned it down the next day.

All the while, it appears Kelly did nothing to try to secure his client's release on bond.

Kelly, who has a private practice and also is a municipal court judge in Potosi, has not responded to repeated phone calls and e-mails from a Post-Dispatch reporter over more than two weeks.

I think the fact that his lawyer is also a Judge is the problem in this case. Judges in America come in two types. Decent people who hate the system. Or arrogant know-it-alls who act like Gods. I bet even money that Kelly is one of the latter. They are the kind of judge that has destroyed our court system.

They are the ones who replaced the rule of law with the rule of judges.

Ex-Marine Decries Prosecution In Civilian Court

by Chelsea J. Carter - August 17th, 2008 - Breitbart

Nazario is the first military service member who has completed his duty to be brought to trial under a law that allows the government to prosecute defense contractors, military dependents and those no longer in the military who commit crimes outside the United States.

"They train us, and they expect us to rely back on that training. Then when we use that training, they prosecute us for it?" Nazario said during an interview Saturday with The Associated Press.

"I didn't do anything wrong. I don't think I should be the first tried like this," said Nazario, whose trial begins Tuesday in Riverside, east of Los Angeles.

If Nazario, 28, is convicted of voluntary manslaughter, some predict damaging consequences on the battlefield.

"This boils down to one thing in my mind: Are we going to allow civilian juries to Monday-morning-quarterback military decisions?" said Nazario's attorney, Kevin McDermott.

Like the insanity of using our courts to punish those who sold tobacco, a perfectly legal product that is still being sold today, the insanity of allowing our courts to after the fact try and hold soldiers guilty for actions they took on the battlefield, is simply beyond belief.

Our courts are not just corrupt. They are insane.

How The Mighty Lerach Has Fallen: Power Lawyer To Prisoner

by Quin Hillyer - August 17th, 2008 - D.C. Examiner

When he was on top of the world, flamboyant class-action plaintiffs lawyer William S. Lerach made more than $100 million during the 1990s for himself and even more for his now-disgraced firm, Milberg Weiss.

Silicon Valley tech executives shuddered and Fortune 500 chief executive officers reached for their checkbooks at the mere mention of being "Lerached." At one point, Lerach boasted that he had won more than $4 billion in damages for shareholders in 400 class-action securities suits.

Lerach is the epitome of the problems with our court system. Though he took advantage of its ability to be used as a system of extortion, his excesses are merely symbols of how the system actually works. No one can rely on following the law. Acquire any wealth and the extortionists in our court system will find some way to take it away from you. Abiding by the law is no excuse. Look at tobacco. The courts decided it was immoral and they extorted hundreds of billions of dollars from the tobacco companies and farmers who grew this legal crop. Please note, tobacco is still a legal product today. The irony is that the same corrupt lawyers who practiced this scam against tobacco, and against corporations for the outrage of making money, are today predicting that they will bring down the evil McDonald's for making you fat. The new argument is that McDonalds wants to make you fat so they can sell you a product that is popular.

Lawyers like Lerach made hundreds of millions of dollars, in most cases exaggerating the idea that if you smoked and had health problems, they were presumed to be the fault of evil tobacco moguls. Evidence that many non-smokers suffered from the same maladies as mokers was ignored. Some who had problems with cancer before they started smoking were still awarded judgments on the assumption that smoking some how or other retroactively caused the cancer. The logic was simply absurd. And yet that is typical of the absurdity of our court system today. It is a system of extortion that immorally enriches evil abuses like Lerach's. Just as they now plant to close down McDonalds to stop you from buying the hamburgers they are selling with such (according to the lawyers) evil intent. Oh yeah, before they close them down they want them to pay huge penalties for ever having wanted to sell a good tasting product. How dare they.

Please note that the courts have not taken away the illegally extorted millions from Lerach. When he gets out of prison, he will still be rich beyond belief, thanks to a system that anyone with a conscience would find contemptible.

What Happened To Justice In America?

by Dana Rohrabacher - August 4th, 2008 - Human Events

What happened to justice in America? It certainly wasn’t served on July 28 when the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the unjust convictions of Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean. As it stands today, these two brave border protectors must now serve out their full 10-plus-year sentences for shooting and wounding a Mexican drug smuggler they encountered while he was carrying a million-dollar payload of narcotics along the Southern border in Texas. What started off as simple procedural mistakes by the agents has turned into an unimaginable travesty of justice unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my 30 years in Washington, D.C.

It’s difficult to reconcile why U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton would choose to seek out drug smuggler Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, in Mexico to offer him immunity, unconditional border-crossing cards and free medical care in exchange for his testimony against the border agents. Ramos and Compean did not wake up the morning of Feb.17, 2005, with the intention of committing a crime, unlike the illegal alien drug-smuggling “victim.” They put on their uniforms, strapped their weapons around their waists and pinned on their badges, as they had for five and 10 years respectively, with the intention of patrolling our borders to protect America.

The answer to the title of this article is obvious though not simple. Justice in America has become the rule of judges to replace the rule of law. Our system is a system easily abused by aggressive corrupt prosecutors, like Mike Nifong in the Duke situation, and Johnny Sutton in this case. Both care little for anything but political power. Nifong got away with his abuse many times before he stepped over the line and got caught. The system protects these powerful and abusive egomaniacs. Justice is not the goal of our system.

A verdict under the rules, without regard for actual innocence or guilt, is all our system seeks. That is not what the people of America think our system is supposed to be. However that too is rapidly changing. As an example, you need only look at this case:

The jury was never told Davila was more than a one-time offender; smuggled drugs while under immunity, was in possession of a border-crossing card our government gave him four months before testifying against Ramos and Compean and that he potentially violated his immunity agreement by not giving up any information about the cartel he was working for. Sutton’s office was well aware of these facts. It successfully petitioned the trial judge to seal that information from the jury and, to the chagrin of most reasonable people, the appellate court ruled that the protection of the Davila’s 5th Amendment rights outweighed the relevancy of his additional smuggling activities.

This is typical of the modern abuse of justice in American courts. Little concern is actually given for the truth in a case. It is all a game. As more and more injustice becomes the standard, fewer and fewer Americans maintain any respect for the tyrants who rule our court system. Maybe Sutton will get his own justice someday. For now he is proudly strutting his win in this case. The appeals court is now complicit in this injustice.