Free Republic

In the absence of reasonable belief that a crime was committed, there never should have been a Special Counsel appointed. A Special Counsel is not supposed to be the equivalent of Lavrentiy Beria’s secret police, someone who finds the man and then tries to find the crime. The reason that’s so dangerous is that the federal (and state) criminal laws, in the hands of an aggressive prosecutor, can be abused. Someone who is an expert on that problem is Harvey Silverglate, a Boston civil liberties attorney who, among other things, was co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education....

The now-infamous Gates story has gone through the familiar media spin-cycle: incident, reaction, response, so on and so forth. Drowned out of this echo chamber has been an all-too-important (and legally controlling) aspect: the imbroglio between Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley has more to do with the limits (or breadth) of the First Amendment than with race and social class. The issue is not how nasty the discourse between the two might have been, but whether what Professor Gates said--assuming, for argument's sake, the officer's version of events as fact--could by any stretch...