In his released statement to the Senate, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales closed by saying that he hopes that the issue of the dismissals of eight US Attorneys can be resolved quickly, saying "The sooner that all the facts are known, the sooner we can devote our exclusive attention to our important work," which he said was combating terrorism, sexual predators and illegal drugs.
I can’t imagine any three things that we’d want this Justice Department to focus on less than those, but the key to some of the biggest problems in the United States is buried in the attitude that is revealed by that statement.
There may be some of you who don’t know the names of Reade Seligmann, David Evans, and Collin Finnerty. But I have no doubt that each and every one of you knows who they are. They are the three Duke lacrosse players who were pursued in a stunning display of prosecutorial excess by Mike Nifong, District Attorney for Durham County, North Carolina. A few days ago, no less than the Attorney General of North Carolina proclaimed their innocence on national television, and the North Carolina Bar is pursuing ethics charges against Mr. Nifong. Which is a good thing; clearly, those three men were victims of prosecutorial misconduct.
But, to borrow a question from Radley Balko of The Agitator, do any of you know who James Giles is?
Well, James Giles is a 53 year old black man from Dallas, Texas. On April 9, one week ago, he was exonerated by DNA evidence of having been involved in a gang rape in 1982. Mr. Giles served ten years in a maximum security prison, and another fourteen years on parole as a registered sex offender, for a crime which he did not commit. Mr. Giles is also the thirteenth man to have been exonerated by DNA evidence in the last six years from Dallas County alone. The previous person to have been exonerated for rape in Dallas County is James Waller, who also served ten years in prison. Neither of them were the lead story on 60 Minutes when they were exonerated, nor on the front page of the New York Times. What do you see that Mr. Giles and Mr. Waller have in common?
In only the last seven years, since 1999, 198 wrongly convicted Americans have been exonerated through DNA evidence alone. 119 of those were African-Americans, about 60%. African-Americans make up 12.% of the population.
I hope that Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and the crowd over at NRO’s The Corner are sincere in their desire to combat prosecutorial overreach in America, as opposed as just lucky that their defense of some wealthy kids wrongfully accused happened to coincide with the facts. I hope that those who have stated that they wish to see the furor over Don Imus’ offensive remarks about the Rutgers’ women’s basketball team become a real dialogue about the problems of racism in America are sincere in their desire to address these issues, and not simply planning on using this incident to vastly expand the power of the FCC to administer oversight and fines over what is said on television and radio. Racism in America is a huge problem, but I sincerely doubt that the pain caused to those student-athletes can compare to the pain of the 119 African-Americans who were imprisoned wrongfully, much less the thousands more (over 400 in Dallas County alone) who are awaiting their chance to challenge their convictions. I feel for the pain and loss suffered by those three men at Duke, but I think that the 24 years of imprisonment and parole suffered by Mr. Giles far outweighs that of those who spent not a single night in jail as part of their ordeal.
Clearly, however, my hope is not shared by the priorities of the man who is the foremost prosecutor in the nation. Mr. Gonzales’ desire to get the focus back onto the prosecution of terrorists, sex offenders, and drug sellers and users speaks clearly that nothing could be further from the priorities of the Justice Department of the United States government. Here are a few examples of how our government plans to address these problems:
The Federal Government has announced that it intends to retry Ed Rosenthal, a provider of medical marijuana who was charged for producing marijuana on order by the City of Oakland under the State of California’s medical marijuana law. They intend to retry Mr. Rosenthal despite the fact that since his sentence from his previous trial of a single day in prison was upheld by an appeals court, and no further legal punishment is possible, regardless of whether or not he is convicted.
The crusade to score political points through harsh laws against sex offenders has led to such idiocies as the charging of a 13 year old girl as both a sex offender and a victim for having consensual sex with her twelve year old boyfriend, who was also charged and convicted of the same crime. Similar cases are pending in Arizona and other states. Meanwhile, a Florida survey shows that the continuing and changing laws restricting the places where sex offenders who are released from prison can live and go creates added instability and stress and may increase recidivism, while in Minnesota, the proliferation of ordinances is driving sex offenders to go undergroud and to live illegally, which both negates the purpose of the ordinances and increases the risks to potential victims.
Meanwhile, there are few ways to adequately encapsulate the extent of the gross failure of our legal system to successfully investigate, try, and convict terrorists. And they have achieved this remarkable failure rate despite having thrown out the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and the declaration at the Inns of Court in 1629 that "upon their and their nations honor", torture was not permitted by the common law.
No, this is the sort of view of the proper role of the prosecutor in the eyes of our Attorney General, and the administration it represents.
If any of us intend to even give lip service to the notions that we have advanced during the scandals of the past week and years, we must not allow the ‘goals’ of the Gonzales Justice Department to be pursued. These listed events include offenses against both liberalism and conservatism, Federalists and anti-Federalists, people of every race, gender, and ethnicity, and not least of all, common sense. Someone must be held accountable for these offenses. The buck stops now.