Today’s Contemporary Americana!
AOL News
Many times being a “nation of laws” doesn’t help the accused when the prosecutor’s office is run by political animals who only care about winning cases, any cases with any evidence, to keep their cushy jobs. Witness the so-called “breast implant killer” now released from over two years of incarceration:
Cynthia Sommer, 34, said she barely slept herself on her first night of freedom after a San Diego Superior Court judge Thursday dismissed charges that she poisoned her husband in 2002.
She was convicted of first-degree murder in January 2007 after initial tests of Sgt. Todd Sommer’s liver showed levels of arsenic 1,020 times above normal.
But prosecutors found no traces of poison in previously untested tissue as they prepared for a second trial. A judge had ordered a new trial in November after finding she had ineffective representation from her former attorney.
At her trial, prosecutors argued that Sommer used her husband’s life insurance to pay for breast implants and pursue a more luxurious lifestyle.
With no proof that Sommer was the source of the arsenic detected in her husband’s liver, the government relied heavily on circumstantial evidence of Sommer’s financial debt and later spending sprees to show that she had a motive to kill her 23-year-old husband.
Sommer criticized prosecutors for questioning her behavior after her husband’s death, saying, “I did what I did.”
She was set free within hours of the judge’s ruling and emerged from the Las Colinas Detention Facility in suburban Santee.
“The only question I have for (prosecutors) is how they sleep at night?” Sommer said.
You have to remember something very fundamental about how American law works: being a prosecutor (or in the Texas polygamy case, a CPS official) means NEVER having to say you’re sorry.
And in this case, of course, they didn’t.
San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis defended her handling of the case Friday, saying that justice was served and that her office acted appropriately.
“We did what we were supposed to do,” Dumanis told KFMB-TV. “We’re all looking backwards now and second-guessing everything.”
A recently retained government expert speculated that the earlier samples were contaminated, prosecutors wrote in a motion filed in court. The expert said he found the initial results “very puzzling” and “physiologically improbable.”
snip
Dumanis said Thursday there was no proof of contamination but offered no other explanation. She said she didn’t know how the tissue may have been contaminated.
“We had an expert who said it was arsenic and no reason to doubt that evidence,” Dumanis said. “The bottom line was, ‘Was there arsenic in Mr. Sommer causing his death?’ Our results showed that there was.”
I’m sure that Ms. Dumanis, like her colleagues in the so-called criminal justice system including the cops that lie on the stand, the bought off judges and the sadistic jail officials, sleep very very well at night because they know that out there are a seething mass of frightened and stupid Americans who will vote them back into office based on two things:
1. Public pronouncements about being “tough on crime” and
2. Jimmied up conviction rates.
Not only do we get the government we deserve, we get the judicial system we deserve as well.
Too bad Ms Sommer lost two years of her life she’ll never get back but, hey, that’s the breaks. The system ALWAYS works - even when it doesn’t. And if you have a badge or an office, you almost never have to be held accountable.
Oh, the Duke rape case? The families were wealthy and could afford far more “justice” than the average slob. And that’s a rare, rare case and most prosecutors know it.
After all, its not what you do in office that really makes much of a difference anyway. Most people who aspire (and I use the term advisedly) to top positions in the Criminal Justice Industry, Inc., do so out of ravenous ambition and a desire for power and status - NOT the public good. Believe me, in my years as a journalist I got a front row seat watching the sausage being made. The vast majority of people have no idea how corrupted the entire system is. And as a generally merciful person, I would hope most of them never find out.
Because it’s so easy and intellectually lazy to say ‘if you weren’t guilty you wouldn’t be in court.’ Most people go through their entire lives never interacting with lying cops, lying prosecutors and disinterested judges and dumbed down juries. They never see the defendants get worked over by the Sheriff’s deputies out of sight after a contentious court hearing. They never see how evidence can be compromised or dummied up. They don’t understand the political implications of so much that goes on in the Criminal Justice Industry.
So it’s easy to assume as long as you don’t have to face the beast as Ms. Sommer did. It’s easy to fall back on the platitudes about America and the system we were taught in school. They require us only to recite rote verse about “and justice for all” when “justice” in so many cases is illusory and corrupted. Ms. Sommer’s case is one of the few you will ever get a chance to hear about. I assure you there are many, many more innocent people locked up in our prison gulag who lack the resources ever to have their stories heard. And the Bush administration, under the guise of fighting terrorism, is making writs of habeas corpus even harder to file and appeals even more difficult to obtain.
I’m sorry to have to disabuse people of their fairy tale beliefs about our justice system but life is NOT television. In real life, innocent people do get screwed and go to prison, sacrificed for the political ambitions of petty men and women who play God in our courtrooms every day. But one aspect of television’s portrayal of our Criminal Justice Industry is true: if you are a prosecutor, wear a badge, or a judges robes, you almost never, ever have to account for your actions.
Daniel David:
So what I’m getting is that in order to placate the ignorant American masses we should cashier the absolute evidence that innocent people are executed because there are so many other ‘important’ issues that we need to ‘win’ on?
And that, perhaps, a human system could be devised that would lower (but never eliminate) the number of innocent people that get executed?
Am I getting this right?
Because if I am, then one has to question, given your paradigm, whether America is a country worth saving. If we can’t make the argument that no human system can reasonably assure that all executions will be carried out on people that are demonstrably guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt, then we do not live in a civilized or educated country.
If all it takes is a “Willie Horton” type ad to sway enough voters to defeat progressives than, again, what is the point of trying if our best arguments fall on deaf ears?
You really want to cashier a fundamental tenet of civilized society to that you can rule an uncivilized society? Think about it.
Or should we really face facts here. Americans are raised to be violent and brutal killers. War and revenge are in our national DNA and no serious and honest student of American history could conclude otherwise.
And in saying that, I would move to Denmark if I could but I can’t.
It makes no sense whatsoever to hold that we can reform the electorate after an election if said electorate cannot be reasoned with prior to an election. You and many others in the ‘pragmatic progressive’ camp make this fundamental error of logic.
The bottom line if you accept your premise, then the country is not worth saving.
So I say let the beasts have their executions - by the thousands if that’s what the masses want.
But on one condition.
EVERY execution should be carried out by firing squad. Every rifle in the firing squad has a bullet AND the firing squads would be chosen, like juries, from ordinary people who are healthy enough to shoot a rifle. No exceptions.
After all, if this is what the majority of our society really wants, then it only stands to reason that members of that society should do their civic duty and stare down the condemned person in the eye - look them in the eye - and pull the trigger. And watch them die.
That would be fitting, don’t you think? After all, if we can order 17-year-olds to shoot down entire Iraqi families in cars for ‘running roadblocks’ it’s not too much to ask the average citizen to participate in one of the most substantive exercises of our nation’s laws and creeds, isn’t it?