On Thursday, September 20, 2018 at 3:14:18 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
On Thursday, September 20, 2018 at 2:18:28 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Thursday, September 20, 2018 at 1:43:47 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 9/19/2018 7:26 PM, Radey Shouman wrote:
jbeattie writes:

On Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 10:02:04 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 4:40:32 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:

I don't even get why the lunatic right would hate on Janet Reno.
If she was a tyrant who tortured prisoners, she should be the
poster-girl of the hell-fire and brimstone set.

-- Jay Beattie.

You should ask a member of the lunatic right to explain that to
you. Don't forget to report here so we can all have a giggle.

If you doubt that Reno tortured prisoners, I've already given you a
vivid, uncontested example in this thread. If you think you know
better, disprove it. Where one finds one example of such brutality,
there are usually many more examples to be discovered by any
competent investigator. It's not my problem if your media has
betrayed its obligation to truth, and to you.

Well, your media is betraying you, too:
http://blogs.brown.edu/pols-1821t-20...Walk_Myths.pdf

And why are we debating the past -- and particularly a past that was
well-known when Janet Reno was unanimously confirmed by the Senate?
Was the FBI not doing its job? The Senate Judiciary Committee not
doing its job? The Office of Government Ethics? The staff of every
senator of both parties? Even the IRS is part of the vetting
process. She was vetted more thoroughly than El Presidente Trump. Why
does every internet ****** think they know more than two branches of
the federal government?

The demonic preschool moral panic of the 80s and 90s was not one of our
brighter episodes, with all of the craziness of the Salem witch trials
and much less excuse. I'm not sure whose job it was to prevent the use
of public money to prosecute nursery school operators for sodomizing
kiddies with butcher knives on the moon, absent any physical evidence
whatsoever, but a voice of reason from somewhere in government would
have been nice.

What actually happened is that a number of those fine, upstanding, law
school graduates siezed on it as an opportunity for advancement. When I
first moved to Massachusetts I was amazed to discover that Scott
Harshbarger, the DA who prosecuted the ridiculous Fells Acres case, was
running for governor. Fortunately he was defeated, but narrowly.

More recently Martha Coakley tried to parlay her experience in witch
hunting into a run for governor. She cut her legal teeth on the Fells
Acres case and continued to work, as AG, to keep Gerald Amirault, a man
convicted in it, behind bars long after it should have become obvious
what lunacy it was. Happily, she lost as well.


Dorothy Rabinowitz blew the crazy prosecution cult wide
open. But not for her it would have never ended.

http://www.famous-trials.com/mcmartin/940-daycareabuse

Justice was never served; innocents were abused down to
death and until today as the wrongs resisted righting.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

There's a National Registry of Exonerations at the U of Michigan Law School that makes frightening reading. You can get a sampling by clicking anywhere on this interactive guide:
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/ex...tates-Map.aspx
and find your way from there to deeper discussions.

Every human endeavor has an error rate, and errors are usually determined in hindsight and often after the science has settled. That was the situation in some of the child abuse cases. The prosecutors believed what their experts were telling them, what parents and children were telling them and what the public was demanding. It's not hard to believe that abuse occurs -- the Catholic Church proves the point, and a prosecutor could in good faith purse an abuse case later determined to be a hoax.

You have to differentiate between prosecutions that were mistaken and those that were pursued with knowledge that the defendant was innocent or without regard to guilt or innocence. I think the latter are very, very rare. I've seen plenty of the former in the civil context -- entire waves of lawsuits based on bad science regarding breast implants, EMF, Bendectin, etc.

-- Jay Beattie.

I came across another stunning statistic, that in about one in twelve cases, of 11,000 examined, that is around 8%, a judge punished the prosecutor involved -- in one case, adding insult to injury, with 12 days in jail for falsely incarcerating a man for 25 years... -- and in quite a few cases the relevant Bar disbarred the prosecutor. But I'm not in the business of condemning whole classes of people, not even lawyers (some of my best friends, etc, and, there but for the grace of God -- I chose my original college course by letting the prospectus fall open and sticking a pin it because I had enough points for anything, and it could easily have been law...); class condemnations are too stalinist for my taste. I was merely making a point about systemic corruption in Federal prosecutions (97% conviction rate! -- it's patently abusive) and wouldn't even have provided personalized examples if the response had been more responsible. So I am not going to look up the source and provide chapter and verse unless some clown is dumb enough to doubt my word.

In fact, I think we've gone as far as we should with politics and should drop it now, or at least as soon as everyone has had another turn so it doesn't look like I'm trying to claim the last word.

Andre Jute
Sense and sensibility