Other essays on this theme
Essay: "Information"There are two poor border guards who shot up a drug smuggler, then obstructed justice by first trying to cover it up, then by lying about it in their incident reports, then by creating a gun in his hand. For all these deceits and corruptions, a jury declared them guilty. They got about ten years each. Ever since then, CNN's Lou Dobbs has made it his personal quest to get them out of prison. His excuse for wanting this is that the prosecutor didn't tell the jury about his drug-switch/smuggler's latest smuggling operation while on bail, wanting to testify on the border guards. Lou Dobbs has had a parade of powerful politicians on his show to agree with him that these border guards should be pardoned because the jurors did not have this latest information on the smuggler. Now, the information that ordinary citizens do not have that makes Dobb's and the politicians' bright ideas here seem logical, is this: in the real world of the lawyers' system, prosecutors and cops conceal information all the time, especially when it is trivial information, such as how many times a smuggler has smuggled. Every judge on the planet would deny the appeals of border guards Ramos and Campean based on this trivial concealment of information. Yet politicians like Ted Poe, Dana Rohrabacher, and Duncan Hunter get on TV and feed their political ambitions by pretending that this trivial excuse is worthy enough to throw out a jury and beg Bush II for a pardon for each border guard. More information that the citizens do not have is the fact that nothing protects us from this common practice of police and prosecutors stealing or concealing evidence from jurors except Brady V. MD: a mere judge's opinion from 4H years ago that has steadily been gnawed away by subsequent judges' opinions. The correct way to fix this problem of evidence-theft-by-police-and-prosecutors is for these powerful legislators to create a law that tells police and prosecutors (and judges) "You conceal evidence, you lose your conviction!" In the 435,000 current cases where DNA and other innocence-proving evidence routinely vanished out of police vaults, police and prosecutors who "lost" this evidence should have a law that tells them, "You 'lose' the evidence, your victim gets to prove his innocence the next best way: FMRI brain-scanning lie-detection technology, which is now 90-95% accurate." Instead of fixing this problem for everyone, as statesmen would do, our politicians are hot to pass out golden ejector-seat pardons to their favorites. More information missing from citizens' access is the fact that citizens are forced too often to depend on elites getting trapped by our rotten system of law because this is the only way it ever gets fixed! E.g., Pattie Hearst's family's millions got us an actual (120 day) time limit for a constitutionally "guaranteed" speedy trial. Prior to this, a speedy trial was whatever an appeals judge told us it was, which could be 18-24 months, easily. (More examples of this information appear on my website, www.jamesbauhaus.org in my letter to Senator Tom Coburn and my letter to Senator Duncan Hunter, titled "How Politicians Juke Justice.") Our politicians screw us all every time they race to save their favorites with pardons instead of fixing their broken law machine, and they do this on purpose, too. Look at all of them talking out of 3 sides of their mouths about the CIA destroying two of their torture tapes, in direct defiance of their congressional orders. First, nobody did it. Then everyone was "out of the loop." Then nobody is sure if any law was broken by deliberate destruction of evidence. Finally, the lame excuse of "We wuz just protecting our torturing sadists and their families from terrorist's retaliation." (See "That's not normal!") Now, even very young children know that there is only one reason for sadists to destroy information that depicts them torturing people. Obvious as the sun-in-your-eye is that, if the public ever got to see a CIA torture session, the public would take away the politician's self-given privilege of torture. Same with executions: They have to be held in secret, for viewing by specially-selected, bloodthirsty audiences only, because if sane people saw this, we would shut it down! Information is power, which is why so little quality information reaches us, and why prisons are filled with the mindless yappings of uneducated children, radios, and televisions. The more educated people are, the harder it is for our betters to trick us and stampede us in directions that benefit our rulers, bosses, cops, guards, "counselors," and "friends." You screw us all, and yourself, when you juice the idiots by spreading bogus information. Spreading misinformation is what the government, politicians, and cops do. Don't be cops. Keep quality information flowing. Or shut up! |