[Peace-discuss] What are courts for?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Last night's successful forum on the Patriot Act needed to
draw one more conclusion, I think: the real purpose of the
Patriot Act and its extension is to provide the government
with tools to cap protest against its "global war on
terrorism." The administration announced from the beginning
that the war would be endless, and it repeated the point this
week when it asserted that therefore Guantanamo prisoners
could be kept "in perpetuity."  The corruption of the courts
and media (and of the "social police") was on display in a
celebrity case this week, described in today's Counterpunch.
--CGE]

   June 15, 2005
   Juries and Lynch Mobs
   What If Jackson had been on Trial in Massachusetts?
   By ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

There's at least one man recently convicted of homosexual
misconduct with a minor, now serving a twelve to fifteen-year
sentence, who surely received news of Michael Jackson's
acquittal with a sigh of envy at the quality of Jackson's
defense team and the sturdy independence of a jury that
refused to be swayed by the lynch mob atmosphere that has hung
over the Jackson trial like a toxic fog. We'll return
forthwith to that convicted sex offender, Father Paul Shanley,
but first, what lessons should we draw from Jackson's
acquittal on all counts?

The not-guilty verdict for Jackson shows once again what can
happen when the prosecution and defense are on at least an
equal footing. Jackson had a top-flight lawyer with an
unlimited budget. The prosecutors did what most prosecutors do
in America: pile up the charges, on the calculation that the
defendant will plead out.

In most criminal cases the over-charging is accompanied by the
allegations of jail-house snitches and by lies on the witness
stand from cops. The defendants have either no budget at all
or only modest resources. They can't afford expert witnesses,
or private investigators to pick the prosecution's case apart.

When a defendant can afford a good lawyer, top-flight
investigators, expert witnesses and kindred firepower, very
often the prosecution's case simply falls apart, starting with
sloppy handling of evidence, compromised forensic work and
contradictory testimony from the police.

In Jackson's case the piling up of the charges led the
prosecution into the "conspiracy" disaster. They had to put
the mother of the boy with cancer on the stand to elicit
testimony about her supposed kidnapping on the Jackson estate.
Every minute that mother stayed on the stand, the prosecution
took a terrible beating.

The twelve did exactly what jurors should do and offered a
magnificent example of the abiding importance of the jury as
the fundamental bulwark of freedom in this Republic. In their
press conference the jurors laid waste the disappointed lynch
mob with dignified and articulate responses.

Their bottom line was simple: the prosecution had simply
failed to make its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Such
outrageous prosecutorial strategies, okayed by the judge, as
allowing the jury to hear previous allegations (many of them
not even first-hand accounts) against Jackson -- on which he'd
not been convicted -- had cut no ice with these jurors. "He
may have molested one of those kids, but they never proved he
molested this kid", one juror said.

Nor were the jurors ever jolted from common sense. Those
stacks of lurid porn, which the prosecution spent more than a
week projecting in front of the jury on a giant screen in an
attempt to further sully Jackson's reputation? So what, said a
juror. Jackson's an adult. So what if the magazines were
called "Barely Legal"? The key word is "legal", offered
another juror.

It was a great day for the jury and a gratifying blow against
the lynch mob, including outfits such as CNN which averted
their gaze from photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib, while
stigmatizing Jackson as the supreme abuser.

The jury in Santa Maria also dealt a much deserved blow to the
social police, the cabal of psychologists, "victim's rights"
lawyers and therapists who, through a kind of modern-day
mesmerism, yanked and manipulated tales of molestation from
poor teens who had roamed the playgrounds of Neverland.

This gang of self-appointed termagants, lead by Gloria Allred
and child psychologist Carol Lieberman, has been hounding
Jackson since 1993, filing complaints with child welfare
offices across southern California and ultimately bullying the
DA's office into bringing this failed case. Allred even went
so far as to try to have the state seize Jackson's own children.

But that jury in Santa Maria sent them all packing.

Contrast this process in Santa Barbara County to the
disgraceful trial of Father Paul Shanley who was convicted in
Massachusetts earlier this year, based on testimony far, far
flimsier than what the jury rejected in the Jackson case.

Shanley was found guilty on the uncorroborated testimony of
one man's "recovered memories" of abuse at the hands of
Shanley many years before. Paul Busa claimed Shanley had
pulled him out of religious classes and sexually abused him
for years starting when he was six. Not a single witness from
those who had worked at the school could corroborate these
memories in any way.

These days "recovered memory" has been thoroughly discredited.
The judge should have thrown the case out. The jury was caught
up in the hysteria. A skilled defense attorney could have
mounted as deadly an assault on the recovered memories as
Jackson's lawyer did on the "kidnaped" mother. But Shanley's
lawyer was not up to the challenge.

So the 74-year Shanley drew a 12 to 15 year prison sentence in
a case where the lynch mob atmosphere generated by the Boston
Globe and other media had a chilling effect on both judge and
jury. The prosecutors must have known how lucky they were.
Aware of the weakness of their case, last year they'd offered
Shanley two years' house arrest. He refused the deal,
insisting he was innocent.

It shows that culturally and intellectually Santa Barbara
County is a hundred times more enlightened than that home of
the witch trials, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. But what
county in America isn't?

   ###