Justice - Ahmaud Arbery

While others are crowing about the convictions for Ahmaus Arbery's murderers, you won't find me among them.  The case went through two local prosecutors before the state took over.  Arguably, the first prosecutor actively tampered with the case to prevent these men from standing trial.

For my friends on the right that are using this case to suggest that racism doesn't exist - please stop.  This trial might never have happened if the video had not been leaked.

For my friends on the left that maintain that America is a racist nation - please stop.  When given a chance, a jury of mostly white jurors convicted these men based on the evidence at hand  This is not the exception, it is the rule.

Shoot The Bastards Instead

The NYTimes has this recent report indicating that the government will....finally....press charges of fraud against some of the architects of the 2008 fiscal meltdown.

The federal agency that oversees the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is set to file suits against more than a dozen big banks, accusing them of misrepresenting the quality of mortgage securities they assembled and sold at the height of the housing bubble, and seeking billions of dollars in compensation.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency suits, which are expected to be filed in the coming days in federal court, are aimed at Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, among others, according to three individuals briefed on the matter.

I have been contemplating a much larger essay on the causes of the 2008 meltdown.  There were many.

It is now patently clear that the size and scope of the meltdown would have been far less were it not for outright fraud on the part of elements of the banking industry.  I read a piece in Vanity Fair a couple years back that made it clear that Goldman Sachs, innovator of the credit default swap form of securities, had the internal position that those securities were bad risks while simultaneously selling those same securities [to] investors.

Were I of a less temperate nature, I might suggest that stringing Goldman Sachs executives and managers up by the balls and letting the crows feast on their rotting flesh is a fit punishment.  Similarly, I might suggest that distaff Goldman Sachs executives and managers be subjected to forcible sex change operations so that they can be strung up by their balls so that crows might feast on their rotting flesh.

I am too much of a lesbian to ever want to hurt a vagina.

Unfortunately, securities fraud cases are notoriously hard to prove.  The second difficulty is that many of the more obviously instances of potential fraud were committed by companies that no longer exist.  Via Megan McArdle:

Securities cases are hard to prove in the best of circumstances--even Eliot Spitzers' famous crusade against Wall Street consisted of getting fairly minor settlements from most of the big fish he went after . . . and losing every case he took to court.  The first mortgage securities case to go to trial, with two Bear Stearns bankers, likewise returned a "not guilty" verdict.  Many of these same banks got themselves in serious financial trouble by gorging on their own toxic mortgage securities, which dims the fraud angle.  Unfortunately, being arrogant idiots with the risk appetite of a coked-up skydiver is not a crime.

On the issuance side, most of the knowing, obviously provable fraud seems to have been at the mortgage broker level, or in mortgage mills that are now out of business.  Proving that someone ought to have known that they were being scammed is harder--especially since they can argue that if they ought to have known, so should the GSEs.

Shooting them where they stand seems a cleaner solution.  I am open to suggestions involving tar and feathers.

Not Guilty Is Not Necessarily Innocent

Courtesy of Day by Day Cartoon comes this appropriate observation.

As others have pointed out, the difficulty of having a witness of poor character is the difficulty in presenting a credible case.  It does not mean that she wasn't raped in the first place.

The law can indeed be a bitch.  So can karma.  At the very least, it seems to me that karma paid a timely call on Mr. Strauss-Kahn.

The Death Penalty From A Lawyer's Perspective

David Dow is a law professor.  He is also a lawyer that devotes most of his non-teaching time to defending death row inmates.  Terry Gross' interview of Mr. Dow was recently replayed on NPR.  The page on NPR's site includes a brief passage from his book "The Autobiography Of An Execution".

The audio should be up in the evening of April 8, 2011.  I have no idea when this post will be published at this point.

At one point, Ms. Gross demonstrates why I dislike her show.  Rather than asking Mr. Dow what sort of people he imagined meeting on death row and how did reality square with his preconceptions, she fills in the blanks so that the only thing he has left to say is "yes".  I was really more interested in hearing his thoughts rather than having her spoon feed him during the interview.

An anachronism reared its' ugly head while reading the excerpt from his book.  He writes:

Maybe, I said, we had called something by the wrong name. You might think that when a life is at stake, formal legal rules would not matter so much, but you would be wrong. People die when their lawyers neglect to dot the i's or cross the t's. I decided we would refile what we had already filed, and just call it something different. Because I couldn't think of any other explanation, I convinced myself the problem was with the title. Necessity's eldest child is invention; her second-born is rationalization. Gary's the fastest typist. I asked him to get started working on it.

Yet during the interview, he revealed how judges become sloppy in their execution of the law when it comes to the prosecution of irredeemable defendants.  He perceives that those judges decide that issues regarding the administration of our laws (i.e. evidentiary rules, due process, etc.) simply matter less when someone who is clearly a person of malintent stands before them in court.

Considering that a life hangs in the balance, shouldn't our courts ensure that every lawyer is dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's?  Not just the lawyers for the defendant?  For the one act of punishment that cannot be undone, shouldn't our courts be particularly cautious instead of being more cavalier?

Not unlike other issues, I am conflicted when it comes to the death penalty.  There are some murders where we know that the accused is truly guilty.  In many of those cases, it seems to me that taking the life of the murderer is a just and appropriate punishment.

At the same time, it seems to me that we have too low a standard for prosecutorial conduct when it comes to pursuing the death penalty.  And apparently we have too low of a standard for judicial conduct in such cases as well.  Perhaps their lives should hang in the balance as well.

I do not want to preclude the imposition of justice on the truly worthy.  The death of Timothy McVeigh comes quickly to mind when thinking of the truly worthy.  At the same time, I do not want to see the innocent die, nor do I want to see mitigating circumstances, evidentiary rules, and rules of judicial conduct ignored in a head long rush towards the unjust imposition of capital punishment.

The interview with Mr. Dow is indeed enlightening and interesting.  I hope you will enjoy listening to it.