No long post from me, this time. Some of the posts in Herk's <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=129443">Police - An Evening in America</a> thread, spurred me to wondering if for most of you, there could come a point where, "enough is enough", as far as your personal support for law enforcement and prosecutors. That is...a point where you took in enough about their betrayal of the public trust, where you withdrew giving them "the benefit of the doubt".
A sign of this change of opinion could be your support for the death penalty. You believe the death penalty is warranted as an appropriate punishment for some crimes, but, because of police misconduct and prosecutorial abuse, you no longer can cede authority to these institutions to reliably determine the guilty, or to conduct fair trials in all cases.
I recently viewed a screening of the film "American Gangster". I exited the theater wondering, for the first time, if law enforcement and the judicial system detracts more form American society, than it adds. That thought surprised me, because I had never contemplated that question before.
As Americans, we have viewed police and other institutional corruption as a pervasive problem, only in "other countries". We read reports of the ineffectiveness of Iraqi police departments that American civialian and military authority "reconstituted" and retrained after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, due to rampant corruption and secular bias. We are led to believe that this is an "Iraqi problem", that it stems from "their way of doing things".
Is that an accurate assessment? I look at how our own federal DOJ has been compromised recently. It conducts selective, partisan prosecutionsand it withholds prosecutions based on political bias. It refuses to cooperate with congressional oversight. One of the first "experts" sent to Iraq to set up and train new, US influenced Iraqi police was former NYPD commissioner, Bernard Kerik. When Kerik returned to the US, a short time later, the president of the United States announced Kerik's appointment as "head" of the new, and very important, Department of Homeland Secuirty. Kerik's appointment was almost immediately withdrawn by the president....because his background had not been checked before he was offered the job!
Last month, Kerik was indicted on serious, mulitiple federal felony charges of bribe taking while he was NYPD commissioner, and on evasion of income tax on "income" from the bribes he accepted.
I'm going to offer a couple of examples here, and later in the thread to help with consideration of the questions, is their a point where you would withdraw your support for police and other legal institutions, what would have to happen for you to do that? Are you nearing that point, how do you know?
I used to work in the town in NY state where the local police were accused of abuses described at these two links:
http://archive.recordonline.com/arch...01/19/nhag.htm
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache...lnk&cd=1&gl=us
The local state police barracks also experienced the compromising of the integrity of one of it's investigations unit detectives, as I described, and at the neighboring barracks, a ten years long pattern of planting false evidence was proven in court and it involved all of the investigators in the unit at that barracks:
<a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpost.php?p=2369922&postcount=5">Scars in a Proud Police Force, Troopers come to Terms - With Evidence Tampering Scandal</a>
With scandals of a pattern of abuse rocking both police departments during the same period of time, in the town where I worked in NY state,would it have been appropriate to withdraw my personal support of the police there?
Is it appropriate to withdraw the "benefit of the doubt" regarding your opinion of the FBI, because of this example?
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...701681_pf.html
FBI's Forensic Test Full of Holes
Lee Wayne Hunt is one of hundreds of defendants whose convictions are in question now that FBI forensic evidence has been discredited.
By John Solomon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 18, 2007; A01
Hundreds of defendants sitting in prisons nationwide have been convicted with the help of an FBI forensic tool that was discarded more than two years ago. But the FBI lab has yet to take steps to alert the affected defendants or courts, even as the window for appealing convictions is closing, a joint investigation by The Washington Post and "60 Minutes" has found.
The science, known as comparative bullet-lead analysis, was first used after President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963. The technique used chemistry to link crime-scene bullets to ones possessed by suspects on the theory that each batch of lead had a unique elemental makeup.
In 2004, however, the nation's most prestigious scientific body concluded that variations in the manufacturing process rendered the FBI's testimony about the science "unreliable and potentially misleading." Specifically, the National Academy of Sciences said that decades of FBI statements to jurors linking a particular bullet to those found in a suspect's gun or cartridge box were so overstated that such testimony should be considered "misleading under federal rules of evidence."
A year later, the bureau abandoned the analysis.
But the FBI lab has never gone back to determine how many times its scientists misled jurors. Internal memos show that the bureau's managers were aware by 2004 that testimony had been overstated in a large number of trials. In a smaller number of cases, the experts had made false matches based on a faulty statistical analysis of the elements contained in different lead samples, documents show.
"We cannot afford to be misleading to a jury," the lab director wrote to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III in late summer 2005 in a memo outlining why the bureau was abandoning the science. "We plan to discourage prosecutors from using our previous results in future prosecutions."
Despite those private concerns, the bureau told defense lawyers in a general letter dated Sept. 1, 2005, that although it was ending the technique, it "still firmly supports the scientific foundation of bullet lead analysis." And in at least two cases, the bureau has tried to help state prosecutors defend past convictions by using court filings that experts say are still misleading. The government has fought releasing the list of the estimated 2,500 cases over three decades in which it performed the analysis.
For the majority of affected prisoners, the typical two-to-four-year window to appeal their convictions based on new scientific evidence is closing.
Dwight E. Adams, the now-retired FBI lab director who ended the technique, said the government has an obligation to release all the case files, to independently review the expert testimony and to alert courts to any errors that could have affected a conviction.....
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In post #43 here:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...=129399&page=2
Quote:
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Originally Posted by roachboy
......but you know, you assemble a sense of that abstraction from wandering around in public spaces and just taking in what people say---and it's pretty grim for the most part--but even so, there's generally enough noise about that one can maintain one's spirits and not simply get trashed because there seems no alternative.
and then an article like the salon piece host bit from above comes along and makes you wonder what you do this for.
so you have problems with the article.
maybe the same thing obtains for me: i dont want to see what this america place has become, is becoming, and it's polyanna of me to imagine that people hold the idiocy--and i mean that---of the ideological bubble apart from themselves----maybe it's the case that many many people simply replicate it, that they see the world in terms shaped by it. that is, they do not see it as stupid or even as a bubble: they see it as given........
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roachboy was reacting to this articel:
Quote:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature...ice/index.html
....The spreading insurgency, the surging violence, the descent into chaos -- all have been thoroughly documented by journalists and others, and public support for the war has steadily ebbed as a result.
Yet even amid this information glut, the public remains ill-informed about many key aspects of the war. This is due less to any restrictions imposed by the government, or to any official management of language or image,
<h3>than to controls imposed by the public itself. Americans -- reluctant to confront certain raw realities of the war -- have placed strong filters and screens on the facts and images they receive..... so it sets limits on what it is willing to hear about them.</h3>
The Press -- ever attuned to public sensitivities -- will, on occasion, test those limits, but generally respects them. The result is an unstated, unconscious, but nonetheless potent co-conspiracy between the public and the press to muffle some important truths about the war. In a disturbing twist on the Orwellian nightmare, the American people have become their own thought police, purging the news of unwanted and unwelcome features with an efficiency that government censors and military flacks can only envy.
Sometimes the public defines its limits by expressing outrage. The running of a story that seems too unsettling, or the airing of an image that seems too graphic, can set off a storm of protest -- from Fox News and the Weekly Standard, bloggers and radio talk-show hosts, military families and enraged citizens -- <h3>all denouncing the messenger as unpatriotic, un-American, even treasonous.</h3> In this swirl of menace and hate, even the most determined journalist can feel cowed...
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<h3>Is it possible that our collective non-reaction to an increasingly corrupted police and judicial system is "the iceberg" under the "tip" described in the Salon article?</h3>
Would your withdrawal reasonably begin with changing your mind about official administration of the death penalty, because, if official misconduct or lack of uniformity of fair trials is later proven, the target of capital punishment cannot seek or receive "relief" form the effect of false or flawed justice?
I suspect that the folks most resistant to reacting to the corruption I've described as a "crisis of confidence" in these institutions, are likely to be the "holdouts" for giving continued authority to these same institutions to administer the death penalty. They require so little of authority in exchange for granting it "so much", because their "granting" is not linked to conduct, reliability, or accountability. It is part of a "world view" that defies compartmentalization. It's a "law and order" philosophy with no perceived need for "watching the watchers". Those who "mete out" justice were granted authority, a "long time ago", and it is irrevocable, so let them carry on...to question their motives or conduct undermines their "mission".
Have enough signs of corruption and misconduct occurred for this to be a relevant topic? If so, what would "reform" look like, in your opinion?
In the US, we imprison more residents, per capita, than in any other country in the world. Does it follow, then, that we should maintain a law enforcement and judicial system with unmatched integrity, and commitment to the law?
Do you think that we do, or that we even are trying to, or that citizens even demand it?