The U.S. criminal justice system is collapsing


By Paul Craig Roberts
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Dec 18, 2008, 00:48

The Christmas season is a time to remember the unfortunate, among 
whom are those who have been wrongly convicted.

In the United States, the country with the largest prison population 
in the world, the number of wrongly convicted is very large. Hardly 
any felony charges are resolved with trials. The vast majority of 
defendants, both innocent and guilty, are coerced into plea bargains. 
Not only are the innocent framed, but the guilty as well. It is 
quicker and less expensive to frame the guilty than to convict them 
on the evidence.

Many Americans are wrongfully convicted, because they trust the 
justice system. They naively believe that police and prosecutors are 
moved by evidence and have a sense of justice. The trust they have in 
authorities makes them easy victims of a system that has no moral 
conscience and is untroubled by the injustice it perpetrates.

Lt. William Strong, son of a military family, tired of his wife’s 
unfaithfulness and filed for divorce. The unfaithful wife retaliated 
by accusing Strong of rape. There was no evidence of rape, but Strong 
was deceived into a plea bargain. Once Strong entered a plea, he was 
double-crossed and given 60 years.

Christophe Gaynor took an adolescent skateboard team to New York City 
for a competition. One of the kids attempted to buy illicit drugs. 
Gaynor threatened to tell the boy’s parents, and the boy preempted 
Gaynor by accusing him of sexual molestation.

Gaynor was openly framed in the Arlington, Virginia, court system.

Americans, or perhaps more accurately some Americans, were horrified 
by the photographs showing the torture of Iraqi detainees in Abu 
Ghraib by the US military. The Senate Armed Services Committee has 
issued a report which concludes that the torture policy originated at 
the highest level of the Bush administration. Those Americans with a 
moral conscience have reeled under further revelations -- the torture 
of Guantanamo detainees, the transport of people seized by US 
authorities to Third World countries to be tortured.

We have to ask ourselves why American service men and women and CIA 
operatives delight in torturing people about whom they know nothing? 
It has been well known since the Stalin era that torture never 
produces accurate information. Yet, US soldiers and CIA personnel 
jumped at the green light given to torture by President George W. 
Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and 
the US Department of Justice. Why weren’t our soldiers shocked 
instead at the immorality of their leaders?

One answer is that the US military no longer operates according to a 
code of honor. Military discipline in the traditional sense does not 
exist. The ethos of the US military has degenerated into kick-ass 
macho. Major General Taguba, who, instead of covering up the Abu 
Ghraib scandal, attempted in his report to hold the US military to 
its traditional principles, was forced to resign from the US Army.

Another answer is that the work of torture, like police work and 
prosecutorial work, attracts brutal people who enjoy inflicting harm 
on others. The two Republican female US attorneys in Alabama who 
framed Democratic Governor Siegelman enjoyed ruining Siegelman and 
bringing grief to his family.

Deborah Davies of the BBC’s Channel 4 undertook a four-month 
investigation of the torture of American prisoners inside American 
prisons. Videos taken by sadistic prison guards and videos recovered 
from surveillance cameras reveal horrible acts of torture and even of 
murder of prisoners by prison guards.

An American prison reformer told Deborah Davies: “We’ve become immune 
to the abuse. The brutality has become customary.”

Few Americans seem to be disturbed as these inhumane and illegal 
practices continue unabated. Americans continue to see themselves as 
the salt of the earth, the “indispensable people.”

“Law and order conservatives” have a great responsibility for this 
evil. Just as “law and order conservatives” created hysteria among 
the people about crime, they created hysteria about terrorists. 
Hysterical people condone great evils and arm government with power 
in the mistaken belief that it will protect them.

What kind of people have we become when we exercise no oversight over 
a criminal justice [sic] system that destroys the lives of innocent 
people and locks them away in prisons to be tortured by sadistic guards?

Paul Craig Roberts  was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during 
President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall 
Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including 
the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International 
Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover 
Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor 
by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-
Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; 
Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet 
Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The 
Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are 
Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for 
Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the 
recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.
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