Posted on 06/08/2012 7:40:50 PM PDT by marktwain
An unsolicited memo to State Attorney Angela Corey: You are a public official, and people have the right to express an opinion about how you are doing your job.
When those opinions are negative, throwing a hissy fit and making threats do not reflect well. With Corey, there's a pattern of that.
Last December when I wrote a column critical of how she handled the Cristian Fernandez case, she fired off a two-page, single-spaced letter on official state attorney letterhead hinting at lawsuits for libel.
In the letter, she called me out for my "lack of knowledge and objectivity about the workings of the criminal justice system." Ouch. I think she called me stupid.
I seem to remember that during a stint in law school, I made an A in criminal law, but did I threaten a libel suit? No. As a columnist, I'm in the public arena, and folks have a right to express an opinion about me.
Then there's Corey's spat with Sandy D'Alemberte.
D'Alemberte is a former president of the American Bar Association, a former president of Florida State University and a law professor — not too shabby in the legal credentials department.
When Corey was appointed to head up the investigation into the shooting death of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, D'Alemberte had this to say:
"I cannot imagine a worse choice for a prosecutor to serve in the Sanford case. There is nothing in Angela Corey's background that suits her for the task, and she cannot command the respect of people who care about justice."
Earlier, D'Alemberte had criticized Corey in the Fernandez case. The reaction then: A public records request from her office to FSU seeking all emails, text messages and phone messages involving D'Alemberte related to Fernandez.
Then there was this:
(Excerpt) Read more at jacksonville.com ...
Doesn’t sound like Sandy.. I could be wrong...
Shades of the Duke lacrosse prosecutor (Mike Nifong).
She'll be fine for the mob. They want a hanging.
I think they guessed wrong. I think they appointed her, knowing that she would overcharge and scare Zimmerman into a plea bargain to a lesser charge. Didn’t happen and now they are stuck with her. I don’t think justice, impartiality, facts, integrity, truth, or anything like that entered her mind.
I wouldn’t mind if she ended up with egg on her face. She is a heel who deserves wounding.
Angela Corey?
I suggest those who’ve not seen it, watch Corey in action below.
Instead of a brief news conference, this government idiot proceeds to give a speech, and talks to those in Florida as if they are 8 year old children, and she an angel of justice.
One of the most disgusting news conferences I have ever witnessed, as she winks and nods to her media friends and government hacks in the audience, as if she’s a red carpet celebrity at academy awards.
I have never seen anything like this..
Government arrogance only grows.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r-idmJTK3I
If Mike Nifong had a daughter, she’d look like......
D'oh -- that's gonna leave a mark! From what I've seen of Corey, a well deserved one.
Maybe when all this works itself out, she can share a cell with Mike Nifong and between commiserating about how the system shafted them both, they can compare notes and put on seminars for the other prisoners about how to frame innocent white people.
Seems like a good way to waste a perfectly fine egg.
lol!
Corey seems to have some serious mental problems.
Wow, she makes Nifong sound like a piker.
She tells one story in her charging document. Then a few days later releases the forensic evidence that tells a different story. To exacerbate it, Corey's lead investigator admits under cross examination that they have no evidence for the story she is telling.
This is her MO and she is proud of it. She gets people thrown into the clink for 20 years who deserve only 3. And she sees nothing wrong with it but then threatens others who criticize her for it.
I can't wait for the 29th. I think she is close to losing it.
But it seems clear as a bell to me that we need to get rid of the present "adversarial(TM)" system of justice, like yesterday/ASAP, and replace it with something entirely like the French "inquisitorial" system in which the common motive of all government workers involved in any sort of a judicial process is a determination of facts.
In particular, NOBODY should have any sort of a money/career incentive to simply put people in prison, and the job of DA should not exist. The job in its present formulation has gigantic powers and almost nothing resembling accountability; it's an absolute magnet for psychopaths and people like Nifong, Corey, Janet Reno, Ronnie Earle, Scott Harshbarger, and the list goes on and on.
How many people are sitting around in prisons because one of these people, with infinite funding, was able to put on a better show on a given day than some lawyer working with finite means?
How many Frank Fusters are there? I.E. how many people are there sitting around in prisons for **** which not only never happened, but which isn't even physically possible? How many Grant Snowdens who the WSJ never adopted, or Bobby Fijnjes who didn't have the resources of a large regional church to take on one of our Janet Renos? How many Gerald Amiraults.....
I could only make it through about 20 seconds of that video.
One of the problems is that Florida law [and others no doubt] permits a prosecutor to exclude exculpatory evidence from an indictment. This should be changed. If the forensic evidence had been included in the indictment, Corey would have appeared to be an idiot before the judge and the judge an idiot for accepting it. We all knew what was up when she refused to take this to a grand jury first.
We need to keep some sort of a jury system as part of whatever we come up with but even that has become dysfunctional of late. A reasonable jury system for the present age would be a national pool of qualified jurors, say a few hundred thousand people, select 12 of them with a random number generator for any particular trial, and require 80% agreement or something like that to convict somebody of anything, I mean it’s not rocket science and something reasonable could be arrived at, humans aren’t the outright dumbest animal on the planet...
That’s disgusting isn’t it? Franz Kafka’s worst nightmares never imagined anything that freakish.
And what the hell is with optional grand juries anyway?? The entire purpose of the grand jury system is to get buy-in from the public non-legal-professional community on the possible guilt of the party being indicted. It's a check on a government power subject to misuse. How the HELL can that be optional for the very people it's supposed to supervise?? This very case shows why it's bad to be able to skip that step. Just like jury nullification, it's there for a reason, yet they sit there and lie without consequence to tell you it isn't.
Yep --
The problem is not that we have an adversarial system of justice, but rather that the prosecutors have lost sight of the fact that their job is to prosecute people who actually commit crimes, and not merely those whom they can--by hook or by crook--convict a jury to convict.
The proper state of affairs would be for prosecutors to be slightly biased in favor of conviction, but for jurors to perceive them as being massively biased. A major danger with an inquisitional system is that it may reduce the extent to which jurors recognize the prosecutor's bias, without eliminating the actual bias that exists. Having prosecutors properly recognize that not everyone who comes before them actually committed a crime, and their job is only to convict the ones that did, would be much better than pretending that prosecutors are impartial.
BTW, in certain cases such as those involving government personnel as defendants, I would like to see a means by which private individuals could hire private prosecutors as an adjunct to the state-sponsored ones. To avoid double jeopardy, the public and private prosecutors would participate in the same trial, with the private prosecutors being allowed to ask any questions or call witnesses that the public prosecutors "missed". Too often, even when a cop's conduct is so egregious that he finds himself on trial, he'll get a lap-dog prosecutor who effectively throws the case (e.g. IIRC Kathryn Johnston's murderers were freed on appeal because the prosecutor "forgot" to prove that the crime was committed within the court's jurisdiction). Alternatively, at least for certain types of government personnel, it should be possible for a later prosecutor to re-charge them if they could first convince a jury that the original prosecution was a sham, the defendant was never really in jeopardy (but would have been with an honest prosecutor), and thus the double-jeopardy rule is inapplicable.
Having the grand-jury stage be optional might make the justice system more efficiently if (1) the stage was only skipped in cases where a prosecutor could be certain that an indictment would be forthcoming if it were sought, and (2) prosecutors were held personally accountable (including being fired and/or sued) in cases where it can be shown retrospectively that a grand-jury indictment would not have been a slam-dunk. In other words, prosecutors would be entitled to skip the grand jury step only in those cases that were sufficiently strong that they would not mind being held personally accountable if their judgment wasn't correct.
The fundamental problem today is not lack of procedural safeguards, but rather a lack of accountability for government personnel who act in bad faith. Adding procedural safeguards won't help if those in charge of applying them don't act in good faith. And if government personnel do act in good faith, most of the problems the safeguards are supposed to prevent won't occur anyway.
Be patient, It will happen. As they say "Time wounds all heels"
CC
I have watched that video 3x...
It’s one of the most disgusting government news conferences I have ever seen.
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