Two Examples Show How The Legal System Is Stacked In Favor Of The Rich

This is what happens to people at the bottom of the justice system. Reported today at VOX.

This is what happens to the people at the top. Reported today in the New Yorker.

A 75 year old disabled man in Mississippi who did time many years ago for robbery is tried for marijuana possession. He is convicted and sentenced to life in prison, a mandatory sentence because of his 20-year old conviction for robbery. The Supreme Court refuses to consider his appeal. Apparently life imprisonment for marijuana possession is not cruel and unusual punishment. Or the Supreme Court can’t be bothered. This is what happens to people at the bottom of the system.

Meanwhile the SEC, the agency charged with investigating and bringing charges against the largest financial companies, hesitates to prosecute individuals who made billions by defrauding millions of ordinary Americans during the financial crisis.

Why?

Because the man at the SEC who was in charge of the case had seen the “devasting [sic] impact our little ol’ civil actions reap on real people more often than I care to remember. It is the least favorite part of the job. Most of our civil defendants are good people who have done one bad thing.”

People at the top level of massive multi-billion dollar frauds that ruined thousands of ordinary people’s lives are “real people” who “have done one bad thing” but a sad old disabled onetime felon who possesses pot is nobody.

The poor man in Mississippi is nobody that anybody running the system knows personally. Nobody the prosecutors care about. Prosecutors mingle with “real people” who earn massive fortunes, sometimes by fraud. The fraudulent seem very plausible, that is how they are able to commit the fraud. The larger the fraud, the more plausible and real they seem. Prosecutors don’t enjoy mingling with people at the lower end of the criminal spectrum where their misfortune and desperation makes them less plausible and less deserving.

Successful criminals who have massive fortunes and fabulous Manhattan apartments plus expensive homes in various luxury enclaves are real people but ex-cons who live quietly on a farm in Mississippi are not real people––at least in the eyes of the law. There have been multiple cases rejected by the right hand side of the Supreme Court, cases where a man has been proved innocent but is still facing the death penalty. The conservatives on the court shrug and say No. But the criminal who has stolen massive amounts of money from millions of unsuspecting Americans gets a pass. Someone who seems that real and that plausible must not have meant any harm. He can keep his houses and his money.

This is what Americans are angry about. This is what Bernie Sanders is listening to. This might be the kind of non-violent marijuana "offender" President Obama pardons. But we need to repair the system, not simply hope that occasionally a hand reaches down from the sky and corrects one or a handful of the terrible injustices. This is why electing a Democrat president is so vital this year. It would begin to redress the harm and rebalance the scales in favor of regular people.

Victimizing the Poor and Vulnerable Has Become the American Way.

Ever wondered about injured individuals who receive large payouts after suing the corporation that harmed them? Turns out there is a very busy area of lawyering devoted to scamming the injured of their compensation. The more vulnerable the person the easier the taking.

In Today's Washington Post, this article about the area of lawyering devoted to scamming people horribly injured of the payouts made by the corporations who harmed them.

Why does this go on? Because there will always be people who see vulnerability as opportunity. Other people’s vulnerability/their opportunity. Our society allows predatory business to succeed. The successful are admired and emulated. The vulnerable are ripe for sport and amusement.

Simple trusting people can be manipulated for profit. Sometimes for entertainment. TV is full of this.

Here’s a neat example of how to torture poor children for entertainment.

We guilt the poor. We teach the poor they deserve their poverty. We teach them that an austere life is a just life, the system that aids the efficient funneling of money to people with money is right and proper.

The system by which this is done is elaborate and carefully constructed. Economic trickery has become part of government policy, not because the public wanted it but because the public was persuaded to accept it. By the same kinds of legal minds who earn their living by scamming the vulnerable. Austerity policies justify the permanent poverty and vulnerability of a large segment of the public.

How do people rationalize this behavior? It’s easy: whatever pays you money must be right. Whatever pays you the most money must be the rightest thing you can do. This is taught in our media and in our business schools, where the ethics classes are poorly attended. Victimizing the vulnerable is one of the easiest ways of making a comfortable living.

To justify your having the money and the poor not having it it helps to believe that they deserve comfort, security and happiness less than you do. That they actually deserve to be ripped off. That they are beyond undeserving of a good life, that they deserve a life of punishment.

The ultimate form of this rationalization is the criminalization of the poor. The Washington Post recently published this column about the criminalization of the poor.

To profit from this criminalization is the ultimate good. Thus preying on the poor becomes a killer business model. For-profit prisons are a fast growing business category.

The Fine Print We Just Signed Has Nullified Our Legal Rights

A very disturbing article in the New York Times explains how corporations have nullified our legal rights. It's all there in the fine print at the bottom of the agreement we just signed.

I can’t decide if this is Orwellian or Kafkaesque. Maybe it’s both.

Why don’t corporations write contractual language saying we agree to allow them to commit crimes against us? If it’s written into a contract’s fine print which we must sign to complete a purchase of something we need, I guess the corporation whose product we need owns us body and soul. They can do with us as they wish.

If something is in a contract we sign is it automatically legal? Can a lawyer legalize murder in a properly written contract? Can a contract absolve a company of all responsibility for its deeds or its products? Apparently. There are arbitrators, but arbitrators need the corporations’ business. They are bound to them as firmly as we are, and will do as the corporations wish.

Our grandparents used to say “they have you over a barrel.” You’re helpless to resist. You can’t say No. You can’t fight it. Surrender. Give up. Give in. The contractual language of everyday life has put us over a barrel.

Somewhere in the fine print our corporate masters have nullified our legal rights. They have deleted their legal responsibilities for anything that might happen, for anything they might do. They have blocked our access to the justice system forever, nullifying one of the three branches of our constitutional government, at least as far as ordinary citizens are concerned.

How can this possibly be legal?

The point is, it’s not for us to say what is legal. We are nobodies. Our legal rights were suspended when we signed the agreement on our last online purchase.

If the document said we were now the legal property of the lawyer who wrote the fine print would we even know?

(One step toward removing arbitration clauses from consumer agreements.)

Unequal Justice

First off, a brilliant accusatory letter to Antonin Scalia from the Miami Herald's Leonard Pitts Jr., which I will insert in full. Emile Zola couldn't have done it better.

To the Honorable Antonin G. Scalia, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States:

Dear Sir:

Twenty-one years ago, your then-colleague, the late Justice Harry Blackmun, wrote what became a famous dissent to a Supreme Court decision not to review a Texas death-penalty conviction. In it, Blackmun declared that he had become convinced “the death penalty experiment has failed” and said he considered capital punishment irretrievably unconstitutional.

The death penalty, he wrote, “remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination...and mistake...From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.”

You mocked him for this stance in an opinion concurring with the majority, invoking as justification for capital punishment the horrific 1983 case of an 11-year-old girl who was raped then killed by having her panties stuffed down her throat. “How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection,” you wrote, “compared with that!”

A few months later, the very case you had referenced came before the court. Henry Lee McCollum, a mentally disabled man who was on death row in North Carolina after having been convicted of that rape and murder, applied to the court for a review of his case. You were part of the majority that rejected the request without comment.

The demagoguery of your response to Justice Blackmun is pretty standard for proponents of state-sanctioned death. Rather than contend with the many logical and irrefutable arguments against capital punishment, they use a brute-force appeal to emotion.

Certain crimes, they say, are so awful, heinous and vile that they cry out for the ultimate sanction. For you, Sabrina Buie’s rape and murder was one of those, a symbol of why we need the death penalty.

As you have doubtless heard, it now turns out McCollum was innocent of that crime. Last year, he and his also mentally disabled half-brother Leon Brown (who had been serving a life sentence) were exonerated by DNA evidence and set free.

A few days ago, McCollum was pardoned by North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory.

The case against him was never what you’d call ironclad. No physical evidence tied him to the crime. The centerpiece of the prosecution’s case was a confession McCollum, then a 19-year-old said to have the mentality of a child 10 years younger, gave with no lawyer present after five hours of questioning.

“I had never been under this much pressure,” he told the News & Observer newspaper in a videotaped death row interview, “with a person hollering at me and threatening me...I just made up a false story so they could let me go home.”

But he didn’t go home for over 30 years. You and your colleagues had a chance to intervene in that injustice and chose not to. Not incidentally, the real culprit avoided accountability all that time.

The argument against the death penalty will never have the visceral, immediate emotionalism of the argument in favor. It does not satisfy that instinctive human need to make somebody pay — now! — when something bad has been done. Rather, it turns on quieter concerns, issues of inherent racial, class, geographic and gender bias, issues of corner-cutting cops and ineffective counsel, and issues of irrevocability, the fact that, once imposed, death cannot be undone.

Those issues were easy for you to ignore in mocking Blackmun. They are always easy to ignore, right up until the moment they are not.

This is one of those moments, sir, and it raises a simple and obvious question to which one would hope you feel honor-bound to respond. In 1994, you used this case as a symbol of why we need the death penalty.

What do you think it symbolizes now?

Leonard Pitts Jr., Miami Herald


The problem we have in this country is too many public duties are handled in a "businesslike" way, as cheaply and superficially as possible. But complex matters like criminal justice shouldn't be managed the same way we manage a fast food restaurant.


There's also this story, from Texas Monthly. A prosecutor loses his job after a man spends 18 years on death row only to be exonerated.


And meanwhile (in case you didn’t think our justice system kicks down and kisses up) there are these stories:

From TIME, a story about a rich kid getting off after using the excuse that he suffers from being rich.

From Alternet, a perp walks free and an innocent goes to prison.

It gets hard to tell satire from reality.

The Founding Principles of Kiss Up, Kick Down.

I came across an interesting article from the Economic Policy Institute. Look at the graph. 1. Reaganomics killed the middle class 2. Productivity rose by a greater percentage when workers were paid better.

The business end of the Reaganomics tool sees need and vulnerability as a business plan and profit opportunity, an opportunity to exploit people. The Washington Post describes ways hospitals exploit the uninsured by jacking up their costs.

That was the hospital/healthcare business, here’s how they exploit need in the judicial/penal business. John Oliver explains. (Funny and true as hell.)

The poster child for pure Reaganomics is the state of Kansas, where Governor Brownback hoped to prove lower taxes would increase revenue like Papa Reagan promised. I’ll let Doonesbury explain how well that works out...

And SLATE reports that if the Kansas courts rule against him, Brownback “has a way of shutting that whole thing down.”

If Reagan was the messiah, who wrote the gospels? (Ayn Rand. Here are some interesting conclusions we're meant to draw from Atlas Shrugged.)

A purer libertarian and Republican world functions on a mixture of wishful thinking and “I don’t have to if I don’t want to.” This one's from The Onion, which is nearly as hilarious as Ayn Rand herself.