Journal orthogonal's Journal: Justice perverted -- is this really America? 3
I am angry and depressed today.
I've always been a patriotic American, I've always loved my country. Some of my earliest memories are of reading the Declaration of Independence and children's histories of the War for Independence.
As part of that patriotism I've also tried, from a young age, not to blind myself to my country's failures to live up to its ideals: slavery, Jim Crow, internment of the Japanese, Joe McCarthy are all thing I've spent a lot of time abhorring -- my list of "never agains".
Today is another day that history will see as a black mark on the conscience of America: Thomas Butler was sentenced to two years in prison today.
Thomas Butler -- Doctor Thomas Butler -- was one of this country's foremost researchers into Yesina pestis, better known as the "Black Plague". When 30 vials of Black Plague went missing from his laboratory, Dr. Butler informed the FBI and cooperated with the investigation. When the FBI and prosecutors decided they needed a scapegoat -- possibly because the disappearance was widely publicized -- Dr. Butler was arrested.
When Dr. Butler refused to lie by accepting a plea bargain, the prosecutor, apparently in order to force a plea bargain and save face, piled on 57 charges, most of them having nothing to do with the missing vials of Black Plague. The other charges involved Dr. Butler's compensation for work outside his university; the prosecutor alleged these contracts deprived the university of money, even though such contracts are commonplace at the university.
In January, Dr. Butler was convinced. The jury acquitted Dr. Butler on the main charges of smuggling Black Plague. The charges for which he was convicted were incorrectly filling out a Federal Express form by characterizing plague samples as "laboratory materials" rather than "commercial merchandise", and charges related to the contracts. Incredibly, the jury convicted Dr. Butler on 44 of those charges, but found him not guilty on 10 others -- for precisely the same kind of contracts. Clearly, we have a case here where the jury was trying to split the difference.
And again, no one has ever been prosecuted before for these very common contractual arrangements -- this is purely a case of the prosecutor piling on charges in order to get a conviction on something even if that conviction has nothing to do with the original grounds for the arrest.
If you consider yourself a patriot -- if you plan to exercise your right to vote this November -- you owe it to yourself and you owe it to your country to read Dr. Thomas Lehman's account of Dr. Butler's trial and conviction. Dr. Lehman, a university scientist himself, is familiar with the contracts over which Dr. Butler was convicted -- and make sit clear what a horrifying farce this has been.
And then you need to get angry. Angry that one of the best researchers into bio-terrorism will spend the next two years in prison -- and will be barred from research the rest of his life. Angry that that makes you not more safe, but far less safe, because Al Quida's researchers are not in jail.
But more fundamentally, angry that the American "Justice" system is a farce that send innocent men to jail in order to save face for overzealous cops and prosecutors.
No offense.... (Score:2)
But this has been going on for a long long time, and this is HARDLY the first example. Perhaps it's a more sympathetic example than the usual "throw away the key on a few kids in the ghetto" approach, since such kids usually are not the most innocent people overall, but they are more frequently victims of this kind of garbage, and that's been
Re:No offense.... (Score:1)
I've put up a Journal entry about this (Score:2)
I'm also sigging your journal for a while - hope that's okay!