U.S. Attorney Paul Curran swearing in Mr. Flannery
When I was a kid in the South Bronx, if the cop on the beat was your uncle, you wouldn’t have spoken to him. That may seem harsh to some despite the fact that you have a right to remain silent. But the fabric of a street culture is fragile and cautious.
When I was studying criminal law at Columbia, I spent years in the stacks (before Lexis) reading Supreme Court cases of corrupt law enforcement officials breaking into houses, putting taps on phones without court orders, and tricking and coercing confessions without advising the Accused .
When I became a federal prosecutor and was confronted with the first phalanx of agents from the various federal law enforcement services, seeking to arrest, charge or indict someone, I was suspicious whether I could trust them.
I found, however, that there were exemplary public servants who struggled as much as I did to get it right, to follow the facts where they led, to guilt or exoneration.
In my days in what Main Justice in DC called the “sovereign district of New York, “ we accepted the constitutional rules elaborated upon by the Warren Supreme Court, protecting individual rights and liberties, as they were the righteous rules of the road.
In truth, I couldn’t believe I was being paid to chase bad guys while my friends sat at home broadening their posteriors watching phony cop shows while we got to do the real thing.
Sometime between my young career as a federal prosecutor and today we have lost our way.
The Chief Assistant prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, Sylvio J. Mollo, a legend, literally wrapped himself in the flag, at a corner of his office, the day I was sworn in by the U.S. Attorney, Paul Curran; pointing to the flag, he said that our client was mute, that when we stood up in court for the government, that winning a case meant getting it right, doing justice, what was right and fair.
There are good people in the system but not all are so good and the current system is compromising those who are good and upright with careless and corrupt practices that compromise a system that wasn’t perfect to begin with.
The worst thing about the state of our criminal justice system today is that the general public doesn’t get to know how it’s broken until they are in the system themselves – and they suffer it themselves.
We daily prosecute the innocent or charge them for more than they actually did and impose sentences that are disproportionate to whatever they did wrong – and prosecutors have fewer restraints, constitutional and otherwise, than when I cut my teeth as a prosecutor.
When you make a decision, do you want advocates exaggerating their positions, as arguably occurs in a system that favors zealous advocacy by all parties?
Can one fairly reach the truth when witnesses lie, especially those cooperating witnesses who seek to save themselves, and jail house snitches who claim to overhear things helpful to the government they may have never heard, and then there is the evidence that is withheld by prosecutors and investigators that proves or tends to prove the accused is innocent?
We know from DNA evidence that innocent people have been sentenced to death - though absolutely innocent.
Junk science permeates our court system. One good example is eye witness identification that is of proven unreliability but we use it as if it’s trustworthy – even when studies and DNA have proven otherwise. Fingerprinting is hardly as conclusive as CSI TV shows would mislead you to believe. In your own experience, would you consider you were drunk because you could not walk on a straight line, heal, toe? Do you really trust waving a pencil in front of your eyes to see how your eyes move can determine impairment? We now use statistics to “predict” guilt under some statutes (for predatory behavior) – although guilt is supposed to be “individual” and not amenable to calculations by statistical averages, medians, or standard deviations.
For those who are interested in hearing more about the flaws in our “system” of “justice,” I’m hosting a FREE discussion titled, “Injustice in America – the Raw Deal,” at the Balch Library, at 208 West Market Street, Leesburg on July 17, 2012, Tuesday, from 630 PM to 8 PM and, get this, in addition, Palio’s Ristorante Italiano, 2 West Market Street, just down the street, has offered a 20% discount on any food you might like to eat after the lecture (I’ll tell you how to get the discount at the lecture)(they serve until 10 PM).
We are squandering the rights that our forbears died to create and that generations fought to preserve; we must decide as a people how we may reassert our rights and liberties before they’re lost.
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