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The murder of Lord Black

July 24, 2007 on 4:35 pm | In Social & Political Issues | No Comments

By Frank Touby

It is said the lowest form of legal life is the ambulance-chasing lawyer. That’s certainly low. But there are lower forms and they set out to destroy people for their own aggrandizement. Nobody can be more evil than they are.

Many prosecutors fall into this category of low-life human beings with law degrees. Given the power and resources of the state, especially in the U.S., they can trump up charges by seducing a grand jury they control to indict, deny the accused access to his or her own money for legal defence, blackmail witnesses into testifying for the prosecution, then mislead a jury into convicting where no crime has been committed by the defendant.

We saw that in the trial of Conrad Black, et al, but Canadians are in some cases also victimized by grandstanding prosecutors looking for glory and conviction stars on their career report cards. You see that all the time in Canadian courts where bullyboy prosecutors refuse to review or retry cases of wrongly convicted defendants despite new and indisputable evidence that would reverse convictions.

Part of the problem is that prosecutors are litigation lawyers and to that breed of lawyers, winning is everything. Yet they are supposed to seek justice and defer to the rule of that blindfolded lady holding the scales. But tell that to a pugnacious street brawler with a law degree who sees his career highlighted by some high-profile successes against the wealthy.

Then show that prosecutor an arrogant, puffed-up (sorry Conrad) foreigner—a Thesaurus-sucking English lord thumbing his nose at the notion he could be guilty of wrongdoing—and he gets his hackles up. When that same lord of all but good manners insults the prosecutor’s own bailiwick, it’s killing time. To hell with justice. Convict the sexagenarian sonofabitch! Let him die in detention! Let him croak in confinement! Take away everything he owns and leave his wife penniless!

At the press conference after Black’s wrongful conviction, his main persecutor, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, told reporters this isn’t a “basketball game.” He didn’t want his team’s victory to be considered like a sporting event. But that’s exactly what it replicates, complete with statistics like 97% convictions, all reflecting on the great-but-humble Fitzgerald himself. In ancient Rome it might have been finished off in the coliseum with a cage full of lions and Fitzgerald and team wearing laurel wreaths.

Under American law, despite the much-ignored but heavily proclaimed doctrine of innocent until proven guilty, occasionally justice occurs. But the state, represented by prosecutors, has every instrument to insure justice is rarely achieved unless the state wins the case. The state gets the last word.

In Conrad’s trial, an entire court day was taken up after the weekend with the prosecution laying out the entire set of accusations. Two days had passed since jurors had heard from the defence and now the last long words they would hear would be from the prosecutors. It is blatantly unfair, but prosecutors are allowed final say because of the pretense of innocence before conviction.

To balance the scenario even more toward the state, anyone declared guilty suddenly becomes guilty and must act that way or at least pretend to. Punishment for not immediately assuming a contrite posture includes even harsher sentencing, black marks against early release and other tortures a legalistic bureaucracy can invent.

For a guy like Conrad whose reputation as a proponent of truth is on the line, that’s an impossible posture for him to assume. It means accepting that the state didn’t do wrong, which it so clearly did. He will be in the same pickle as other innocent convicts: officially viewed as unrepentant and thus not deserving of any breaks or sentence reductions unless he abandons his principles.

The prosecutors so befuddled the jurors with their sleight of hand and mouth to contrive crimes where none existed, jurors ended up convicting Mark Kipnis when, according to juror Monica Prince quoted in Toronto Star, they realized he was innocent. Yet they were so caught up in prosecutorial bullshit that they lumped him along with everyone else and made the man they called “Saint Mark” a felon along with the rest. (Kipnis refued to let the prosecutors extort a plea from him to turn coat and thus was lumped in among those who actually did receive millions of dollars in absolutely above-board transactions.) That’s U.S. justice? It’s not justice at all, since the very concept is perverted by such notions as “sending a message” to other potential violators in similar straits by draconian punishments that don’t fit the crime. Sending a message to others has nothing to do with the individual justice that is supposed to be meted out in each separate case.

Now those Conrad called his tormentors, the U.S. attorney’s office, a.k.a. Fitzpatrick, get to scream and shout that Conrad should never be released from prison alive and should forfeit every penny he has.

You’d think Conrad had insulted the Emir of Batashland or some other such third-world cesspool instead of attracting the ire of a Chicago prosecutor whose team of young turds managed to lose most of the charges they laid. Nine of the 13 charges were acquittals for Black and 10 were acquittals for his co-accused.

The average murder term served by U.S. killers is 8.5 years. Black’s prosecutors didn’t present a single victim in all those weeks of trial.