Category Archives: Criminal Injustice

Assassinations Under US Auspices?

Constitution, Criminal Injustice, Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Iraq, Journalism, Justice, Law, Media, Middle East

I hope the failed assassination attempt on Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s vice president, recently appointed to quell the unrest in that country, is not a harbinger of things to come. I am thinking of the vulgar cellphone images that circulated the Internet, in which a stoic Saddam Hussein, noose about his neck, is heckled by a hooded Shiite executioner. Even more repugnant than the hasty hanging carried out under US auspices were the US-sponsored legal proceedings that preceded it. (All the obligatory denunciations of Hussein obtain here, naturally. Bad man. Bad man. Bad man.) That Tribunal, which was branded “made-in-America,” had more in common with the French Revolutionary Assembly (See “No Due Process For A Despot”).

Similarly, such a barbaric specter in Egypt (conjuring the French, and not the American, Revolution), will have been greatly inspired, like in Iraq, by American media screeches.

I worry because the US is not necessarily averse to hasty hangings, considering that the strongmen we betray may turn around and tell all: You know; the stuff about how they helped the U.S. with its rendition and torture programs.

Sniffing For Bones, Not Drugs

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Drug War, Pseudoscience

I’ve long since maintained that drug-sniffing dogs are looking for bones, not drugs. The sight of a working police dog, nose to the ground, looking for whatever it is that humans think the dog is looking for has always seemed ridiculous to me. Sure, dogs have incredible olfactory abilities. But it’s quite a leap to imagine that a dog’s nose can be reliably harnessed to serve human needs.

What do you know? I was right.

As the Chicago Tribune reports, “state data show the dogs have been wrong more often than they have been right about whether vehicles contain drugs or paraphernalia.

The dogs are trained to dig or sit when they smell drugs, which triggers automobile searches. But a Tribune analysis of three years of data for suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia. For Hispanic drivers, the success rate was just 27 percent.”

[SNIP; or is it SNIFF]

To make a bad situation worse, sniffer dogs are racist too.

Putin Prosecution Backed By Pitchfork Mob

Criminal Injustice, Democracy, Individual Rights, Law, Propaganda, Russia

The criticism leveled at Russian justice by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for the prosecution and subsequent conviction on theft and money laundering of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. As the Russians rightly countered, the sentences Khodorkovsky and his partner Platon Lebedev received pale compared to comparable prosecutions by American justice:

Take Bernard Madoff in the United States. He got a life sentence and no-one blinked – Putin told reporters who asked him about the case during a trip to Paris to negotiate new gas pipeline and auto manufacturing deals.

You can’t argue with that come-back.

Nevertheless, the trial of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky looks a lot like a politically motivated show trial, ordered, ostensibly “by the Kremlin to punish Khodorkovsky for financing Russia’s beleaguered opposition.”

Dimitri Simes, “president of the Nixon Center, a foreign policy research organization,” takes a nuanced look at Mikhail Khodorkovsky:

“He started as a tycoon. He was a very ruthless tycoon. He took a lot of government property, paying very little, and actually using government loans, which he never repaid, to become very wealthy.
He was, politically, very ambitious. He wasn’t just supporting opposition parties, but he was entertaining the possibility of becoming prime minister himself, curtailing Putin’s power.
Having said that, once he was arrested, he proved to be a man of courage, determination, eloquence. The government wasn’t able to break him. And when he was arrested first time in 2003, I really liked Khodorkovsky personally, and I was sorry for him, but, politically, I had mixed feelings, because he was threatening the government in a very ruthless way, using the money he got illegally to mount a political challenge.
What they are doing to him now is totally beyond the pale. It is not just selective justice. It’s really no justice at all.”

Says Anna Vassilieva, “head of the Russian studies program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies”:

“What does it tell me and tells all of us is that the power belongs to someone who exercises strength, not justice, not pardon, as we were hoping until the most recent phrase that Putin announced.
What we see is history repeating itself. Russian rulers are afraid to make compromises. And, obviously, allowing Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev free would be a sort of a compromise that no one can afford, because they know they will lose the trust.
We have to remember that — the trust of the population — we have to remember that the highest ratings Putin and Medvedev enjoyed were during August 2008, during the war with Georgia. And there was no chance that they would exercise the opportunity to compromise.”

[SNIP]

Let’s remember this: Be it in the US or in Russia, the masses are foursquarely behind their governments when it comes to the zealous, over-prosecution of the rich. Putin has the support of the pitchfork-wielding Russian folks. That’s democracy in action.

My, but the convicted has such beautiful, refined features.

O.J.-Like Evidence Could Exonerate Noxious Knox

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Europe, Foreign Policy, Justice, Law

O.J.-LIKE EVIDENCE CONVICTED NOXIOUS (AMANDA) KNOX, which, due to US pressure on the Italians, could well mean that O.J.-like evidence might exonerate her of the murder of Meredith Kercher, the English girl with whom Knox had shared student accommodation in Perugia, Italy. Her throat slit, Meredith had expired in slow agony.

At the time I wrote the following:

Knox, Sollecito and Rudy Guede, a local drifter born in the Ivory Coast and known to Knox, were convicted of the murder and sexual assault of Kercher. CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, on and on—all have united in advocating for Amanda, “An Innocent Abroad.”

Going against the grain of American-style boosterism, Barbie Nadeau of Newsweek stuck with “journalism” to detail the ample evidence against the pair, downplayed or downright suppressed in the American media. For one, “Neither suspect [had] a credible alibi for the night of the murder, and both told a variety of lies about that night.” Knox changed her alibi, not once or twice, but several times. In the process, she accused Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner, of the crime. Based on the convincing yarn Knox spun, Lumumba spent time in jail before being released.

After Knox had cast her pal Lumumba aside, she tried to implicate her lover of two weeks, venturing: “I think it is possible Raffaele went to Meredith’s house, raped her, then killed her and then when he got home, while I was sleeping, he pressed my fingerprints on the knife. …

“Theatrics aside,” wrote Newsweek’s Nadeau, “the Amanda Knox trial comes down to forensics. … Among the most damning evidence against Sollecito is his DNA on the metal clasp of the bra that was cut from Kercher after she died.”

Also revealed with Luminol was a bloody footprint at the crime scene that matched Sollecito’s. “Key forensic evidence against Knox includes her footprint in blood in the hallway outside Kercher’s room. There [were] also mixed traces of Knox’s DNA and Kercher’s blood on the fixtures in the bathroom the girls shared. And a knife was found in Sollecito’s apartment with Knox’s DNA on the handle and … Kercher’s DNA in a groove on the blade.”

Like the original “Dream Team,” defense attorneys for Knox, “who at one time admitted to being at home when the murder took place,” alleged contamination (even though the crime scene was sealed off in-between searches), character assassination and insufficient amounts of DNA (it’s the type of DNA that matters, not the amount).

[SNIP]

The latest from Perugia, Italy, via CNN is that the “American … has won a major victory Saturday in her appeal of the murder conviction in the death of her British roommate when an Italian appellate judge granted approval of independent forensic reviews on two key pieces of evidence.”

“Why do you need to review the forensic evidence when this conviction is based on much more than the knife and the bra clasp?” Prosecutor Manuela Comodi argued before the court began deliberating.
She then reminded the court that Knox and Sollecito don’t have an alibi for the night of the killing, adding that there was “ample” evidence of a staged break-in.
Francesco Maresca, an attorney for the Kercher family, said he was “disappointed” with the decision, suggesting that the ruling was political in the face of pressure from the United States.