Prosecutors and Wrongful Convictions

Responding to the Duke LaCross case exonerations, Eric Zahnd says prosecutors strain to convict only the guilty and "virtually always get it right."  (Prosecutors want justice, not just a victory, 4/15/07 Kansas City Star B8). For a pretty convincing alternative view, however, every American should read “Win at all costs; Government misconduct in the name of expedient justice,” a series that appeared a few years ago in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It’s online at http://www.post-gazette.com/win/day1_1b.asp

Also, Zahnd was defending prosecutors doing business in state courts, where cases are commonly tested by juries. But what about federal prosecutors, who typically leverage their breathtaking powers and other advantages to “win” all but a relative handful of their cases in plea agreements.

Take, for example, the charge of choice these days for federal prosecutors in

Kansas City

and elsewhere in the nation, mortgage fraud. “Targets” face seemingly insurmountable odds of prevailing, regardless of guilt or innocence or mitigating circumstances.

Armed with the draconian federal sentencing guidelines, prosecutors can plausibly threaten those who are reluctant to confess with three or more decades in prison as the alternative to “light sentences” of “only” a year or two in prison. If that fails, prosecutors often threaten to charge members of the targets’ family. Given the expansive, sweeping nature of fraud statutes, those threats are plausible, too.

Federal prosecutors routinely punish the rare suspects who opt for trials by stacking additional charges against them.

The hearty few who still insist on a trial then face legal costs of up to half a million dollars or more. And while recent scandals have cast new shadows on the FBI and Justice Department, it still falls to defense attorneys to overcome jurors’ TV-drama images of agents and prosecutors as straight-arrow stalwarts of justice.

Not surprisingly then, none of the scores of area citizens charged with mortgage fraud in recent years have gone to trial. And about 96 percent of those charged with federal crimes end up negotiating for the least ruinous sentence possible.

So who really knows how fair or honest or descent federal prosecutors are, since most of their work takes place in interrogation rooms where they enjoy lopsided advantages over suspects even as wealthy and famous as Martha Stewart and as powerful and connected at Scooter Libby.

Beyond that, Zahnd’s comments fly in the face of a 2004 University of Michigan Law School study that reported 328 prisoners were exonerationed by DNA and other exculpatory evidence between 1989 and 2003. It noted another 135 cases in which innocent suspects were victimized by rogue cops and compliant, career-driven prosecutors. It characterized these numbers as “the tip of the iceberg” of the “false conviction” phenomena.

MSNBC Fires Imus?

Further proof, if more were needed, that absolutely everything is about the Benjamins came with the decision Wednesday evening to fire Imus.

Imus had a huge, loyal audience. They've been fired, too.

It's time to mark the victory of political correctness over free speech. It's time to mourn the death of irreverance and edgy humor.

The victim in all this, ultimately, will be the kids with cancer who benefited enormously from the Imus Ranch and the way he used his program to raise money to help them.

MSNBC is a chickenshit organization. And shame on Imus' friends like Ed Schultz of Air America who were on the air Wednesday night saying, yeah, it was right that he be fired.

I only wish we could stop all the silly jabbering about "land of the free." We are becoming a country of, by and for corporate America and whatever "advertising sponsors" declare is OK to say.

The Imus, Rutgers Press Conference

Jesus! Imus got a bit carried away with one of the comedy dialogues they do on his show. It was a cruel thing to say. But he didn't commit murder.

The show is about irreverence. The pattern is for one of the crew to say something "out there" so another member of the crew can protest. It's how it works. It's what every one of the millions of people who watch the show routinely expect each time they tune in.

I can't recall seeing many things more ridiculous than the mellowdramatic press conference the girls baskeetball team put on Tuesday evening.

My god. We have gone completely insane.

Imus Didn't Invent 'Bitch-Ho' Culture

Should Imus be fired? C'mon.

Anybody who tunes in Imus knows what they're getting. Edgy humor is the nature of the program and being edgy poses risks. So how about this: instead of killing a show a lot of people, me included, find entertaining, just change the channel/station. Watch/listen to something else.

What we're seeing is more fake outrage from the oh-so-sensitive among us.

Imus devotes time, money and energy to helping kids with cancer and their families. So I find it somewhat easy to forgive him for saying things that reflect the "bitch and ho" brand of humor/music that was introduced to our culture by mostly black musicians and comedians.

Political U.S. Attorneys and Mortgage Fraud

Buy low, sell high, go directly to jail.

Major newspapers around the country repeatedly regurgitate the Justice Department’s mortgage-fraud story dressed up to look like investigative reporting.

The Kansas City Star rediscovers the horrors of mortgage fraud every couple of weeks or so. It did it again on Sunday's front page in a story headlined "Real Estate and Mortgage Ventures; Deal Maker Cuts a Path of Financial Anguish."

What they don't tell their readers is the other side of the Bush Administration’s ballyhooed mortgage-fraud crusade and its costly implications for ordinary homeowners hoping to someday realize a profit on the sale of their homes.

First, some lenders routinely portrayed as victims in mortgage-fraud stories were more like collaborators with loan originators who ended up going to prison. Most problems leading to fraud convictions could have been eliminated had lenders conducted appraisal reviews and checked (underwritten) loan applications before approving them.

Appraisal reviews are relatively cheap, only $100 or so. Sub-prime lenders routinely use them to insure appraisals haven't been falsely “inflated.” Major lending companies apparently rely instead on federal agents and prosecutors acting as strong-armed collectors after loans fail. Criminal prosecutions typically result in property seizures and restitution, which effectively make carelessly approved loans far less risky...at least for lenders.

One “victim lender” in some recent mortgage fraud cases around the country (ABN Amro of

Holland

) was fined $41 million in 2005 after acknowledging its employees had forged underwriters’ signatures to thousands of loan documents in four states. Any underwriting lapses in the other 46 states were forgiven as part of the settlement. Neither Amro nor the employees involved in the forgeries was criminally prosecuted.

Truth is, lots of lenders were looking the other way and making shaky loans in the hot markets of the late 1990s and beyond for the same reason loan originators were cutting corners and pushing loans: to make lots of money.

Yet only the mortgage brokers, appraisers, real estate agents and closing attorneys have incurred the wrath of awesomely powerful federal agents and prosecutors.

As an aside, most Americans might be stunned to learn how agents and prosecutors use the draconian federal sentencing guidelines and other built-in advantages to make wrongly accused and even innocent “targets” of fraud prosecutions eager to sign plea agreements.

The stakes are terrifyingly high. Federal agents can plausibly threaten virtually every “target” with three or more decades in prison if they don’t “cooperate.” And it's not unusual for targets who end up with home detention or prison sentences of a year or less to have signed plea agreements as an alternative to threats of virtual life sentences.

Legal expenses are ruinous for all but the wealthiest defendants. Fighting the government in a complicated fraud trial typically costs upwards of a half million dollars. And the straight-arrow reputation federal agents and prosecutors enjoyed until recently made going to trial look like an impossibly steep mountain climb.

It helps explain why about 96 percent of mortgage fraud cases are settled out of court. It also makes a sinister farce of the Justice Department’s ratings of U.S. Attorneys based on the number of prosecutions and convictions they achieve.

Targets of fraud charges subjected to the modern equivalent of rubber-hose beatings by agents and prosecutors are then effectively silenced by a plea-agreement clause threatening further punishment for failing to “accept responsibility for the crime.” Presumably that’s why Martha Stewart ultimately went quietly to prison for, in effect, lying to a bureaucrat about a stock trade.

It’s worth remembering, too, the mortgage fraud crusade was a Bush initiative to divert media attention from his own white-collar troubles: his close financial and personal ties to former ENRON CEO Ken Lay and his dumping of Harken Energy stock two weeks before the company tanked. As such, the mortgage-fraud crusade stands as a politically inspired prosecution effort virtually all U.S. Attorneys eagerly embraced.

To be sure, the crusade has taken down some operators who were knowingly committing serious crimes. But the Justice Department's wide, tight net has almost certainly netted as many ordinary business people "working gray areas" or "doing business as usual" as it has actual criminals.

For average home owners, the upshot of sweeping serial prosecutions of nearly everyone engaged in significant property-selling networks in virtually every metropolitan area in the nation could be the loss of thousands of dollars when it comes time to sell.

Appraisers have been thoroughly spooked. So more and more sellers must accept less money for their homes than buyers are willing to pay as appraisals fall short of asking prices.

Too Dumb for Democracy?

So 50 to 80 American soldiers and Marines must continue dying each month into the foreseeable future because Democrats in Congress have calculated, accurately in all likelihood, Republicans could successfully convince voters "supporting the troops" means funding Bush's endless, pointless war. Whew!

From here it looks like America is simply too miserably stupid to sustain a democracy.

keywords: war funding, Bush veto, support the troops, Karl Rove, Bush Congress show-down, trooop withdrawal, redeployment, deadlines, benchmarks

Sen. Hatch for Attorney General?

Why didn't Russert just give Sen. Hatch the keys to the studio and ask him to turn off the lights when he was through talking?

And then to further Hatch's long-time quest for a seat on the Supreme Court or the Attorney General's post? Jesus! Hatch is the worst kind of political hack. Might as well keep Gonzales as to have Hatch as AG.

Russert is so far and balanced it makes my hair hurt.

keywords: Tim Russert, Meet the Press, Sen. Orin Hatch, Alberto Gonzales, Attorney General,