RIGHT - November 12, 2009

I was stunned last week to hear that the prosecutor in Council Bluffs has made the defense in a legal action that there is no constitutional bar to framing a defendant in a legal case, and I understand that prosecutors around the nation are alleging that they are protected by something like the sovereign immunity of States from being charged with deliberately denying a defendant a legal trial by keeping secret evidence of innocence. I have always been impressed by the supposed rights conferred by the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, no doubt taken in by the immense brouhaha about the perfection of democratic law in this country, but to hear lawyers state that they have no constitutional obligation not to frame a defendant is more than even my cynical mind can bear. And yet I know that in Wisconsin the Attorney General’s office can connive in firing a professor out of tenure, which means out of the profession, with no evidence whatever except for the public reaction to a planted story in the local press. That and the Attorney General’s belief that he is a bad man. Even the law’s explicit requirement is defended on the claim that the State government can give the prosecutor leave to secure the firing even when the legal committees, both faculty and in the Regents, have spoken in explicit terms that there is no evidence against him. But if one can jail an innocent man for decades on forged evidence and claim that the Supreme Court should and will say that he has no remedy against deliberate fraud on the Court by the prosecutor puts the actions of State functionaries above the provisions of constitutional bars against State takings of life, liberty and property without due process. Opportunism of this magnitude makes a complete mockery of US prattling about democracy and the rule of law, operating very close to the rule that might makes right. Is the Supreme Court so openly corrupt?