A transplanted Midwesterner puts down roots in Alabama and shows how Karl Rove & Company have corrupted the state's justice system.
(Note: Taking the advice of several DK readers, I've decided to post under my real name. I'm now able to post under "RogerShuler," so the "Bama Blazer" diary has gone into mothballs.)
On the same day that I read in the newspaper about the death of Russian author and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, I received a letter from a political prisoner--in America.
Just proves that irony is alive and well in the Age of Rove.
Solzhenitsyn was known for casting light on the gulag prison camps that flourished under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Millions of political prisoners died in the gulags, and Solzhenitsyn wrote about the horrors, undercutting any moral standing that Soviet Communism might have claimed.
Many Americans, I suspect, think of Solzhenitsyn as a fellow who wrote about events that could only happen in another time and place. Perhaps that is why so many Americans are blissfully unaware of the political prisoners among us--in the United States, in 2008.
I received an old-fashioned letter--the kind that comes in a mailbox--from one of those political prisoners last week. His name is Wes Teel, and he is a former state judge in Mississippi.
Wes and I have never met; we've never even talked on the phone. But we became friends via e-mail last fall when I started writing about the Paul Minor case on my blog, Legal Schnauzer.
The Minor case is not nearly as well known as the Don Siegelman case in Alabama. But the two cases have much in common, and they grew from the same Deep South political soil--an environment that became toxic when Karl Rove entered the scene in the 1990s.
My research indicates that three defendants in the Mississippi case--well-known and wealthy plaintiff's lawyer Paul Minor and former state judges Wes Teel and John Whitfield--were convicted of crimes they did not commit.
Another defendant, Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz (a Republican), was tried and acquitted twice.
How could three men be held political prisoner in the United States? It's quite easy, actually, when you have a corrupt prosecutor (Bush appointee Dunn Lampton) and a corrupt judge (Reagan appointee Henry Wingate). It also helps that a large percentage of the citizenry is sleepwalking through history. And the mainstream press is not about to wake them up.
I chronicled the massive wrongdoing in the Minor case in a series of posts titled "Mississippi Churning."
The Minor case drew my attention mainly because it involved charges of honest-services mail fraud (18 U.S. Code 1346). I had never heard of that crime until I saw a small item about the Minor case in the Birmingham newspaper. When I began to study the statute and the case law, I said to myself, "Good grief, this is what state judges in Alabama have been committing in my case. But because they are Republicans, the Bush Justice Department lets them get away with it."
As I learned more about the Minor case, I realized just the opposite was happening next door in Mississippi. The four defendants had not even come close to committing honest-services mail fraud. But because three of them were Democrats (and one a moderate Republican), they were being prosecuted anyway.
This is the sad--and stunningly criminal--story of the Bush Justice Department.
Through our e-mail exchanges, I came to know Wes Teel as a man of keen intellect, common sense, and good humor--even as he awaited the date in December 2007 when he was to report to a federal prison in Atlanta.
I came to know the kinds of dreams and concerns that were on Wes' mind. I learned about his wife, Myrna, who has multiple sclerosis. I learned about his grandchildren. I learned about his trusted and charmingly whacky friends, the Simones.
So it was with a mix of anticipation, sadness, and anger that I opened Wes' letter. Not surprisingly, Wes didn't pull any punches. He is angry about being in federal prison. He is ashamed of a profession, the law, to which he has devoted 30-plus years of his life. He is worried about his wife, who needs close care. And he wonders what his grandchildren will think about a country that could imprison a man simply for doing his job--for ruling on a case correctly, based on the facts and the law before him.
Wes also has thoughts about what ails our country, and what it will take to get us through this dark moment in American history. I would like to share those thoughts with you:
Message From a Political Prisoner