On the topic of begetting wrong results Bill O'Reilly has a new book, Culture Warrior (Get this from my Amazon store at right and, at no cost to you, support the Z blog). Being of Irish descent, he fancies himself a modern day warrior and while he has a remarkable story of “success” he admits he really means financial success. Making a pile of money is pretty much all that he has done. His success has come at the expense of truth in my opinion. He tells the regular American guy what he wants to hear: “liberals” gays and godless activist judges are changing the world and not for the better. He claims this is not about liberals v. conservatives, so he uses S-P “secular progressive” -- in other words sans religion and not just liberal but wildly so. Disingenuously, he has written that the culture war is “much more complicated than that” but from the every day examples he talks about it is obviously, precisely, clearly about liberals and conservatives. There is simply no other nametag that fits. Using the term S-P doesn't change the facts.
So what does this have to do with wrongful convictions? A recent article by Professor Angela Davis of the Washington College of Law at The American University (my alma mater) explains that reviewing courts have created a climate in which prosecutorial “discretion” has become almost complete, the line has been blurred between what is legal and what is not legal as to what prosecutors may do or not do in order to win convictions, including subornation of perjury, fail to disclose evidence of innocence and other facts and evidence tending to show defendant's innocence, or that may be used to impeach, and on and on.
You'll have to tune in to the Monthly, (November issue at bottom of this post) coming in a few more days, for the rest of the connection between O'Reilly and Davis, "Culture Wars" in action. The suspense is already killing me.
As always, comments are welcome all the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment