Ain't no rules, ain't no vow, we can do it anyhow

Official: Justice Dept. slowed probe into phone jamming

The Justice Department delayed prosecuting a key Republican official for jamming the phones of New Hampshire Democrats until after the 2004 election, protecting top GOP officials from the scandal until the voting was over.

An official with detailed knowledge of the investigation into the 2002 Election-Day scheme said the inquiry sputtered for months after a prosecutor sought approval to indict James Tobin, the northeast regional coordinator for the Republican National Committee.

Oddly enough, voter fraud cases against rethuglicans that ended up being successful were delayed until after the election, but voter fraud cases against Dems, that ended up being unsuccessful were rushed before the election.



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

Judge, Jury and Executioner ... or ... Son, we're gonna give you a fair trial ... and then we'll hang you.

Gonzales to Get Power In Death Penalty Cases
Rules Would Expand Fast-Track Authority

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, under political siege for his handling of the U.S. attorney firings and other issues, is to get expanded powers to hasten death penalty cases under regulations being developed by the Justice Department.
[...]
Such powers were previously held by federal judges, but a provision of the USA Patriot Act reauthorization bill approved by Congress last year hands the authority to the attorney general.
[...]
Some Democratic lawmakers have questioned Gonzales's judgment about the death penalty, including his refusal to hear the concerns of a federal prosecutor in Arizona, Paul K. Charlton, who argued against pursuing a death sentence in a case in which no body had been recovered.

Charlton and several other U.S. attorneys were fired last year in part because of clashes with Gonzales and his aides over death penalty issues, according to documents and testimony.

Why, why, why would a prosecutor EVER be given the right to 'fast track' killing someone? The system of justice in this country is based on an adversarial process. DAs try to convict, defense attorneys try to acquit/mitigate and judges and jurys decide.

Not to mention that when Gonzo previously had the job of clemency petitions for then Governor Bush he constantly left out exculpatory evidence.

And with Gonzos' help Bush executed more people in America than any other natural born killer. I guess that's why they call them 'texacutions.'

And Bush's callousness involving killing folks is documented, just ask Karla Faye Tucker ... oh, that's right you can't, she's dead.

And it's not like a 'fast track' doesn't already exist:

Courts are restricted from hearing new evidence due to a 1996 federal law, intended to limit the number of appeals in death penalty cases and thereby expedite executions.

So enough of my rant, let's look at some numbers:

two out of three sentences were overturned on appeal, mostly because of serious errors by incompetent defense lawyers or overzealous police officers and prosecutors who withheld evidence.
[...]
75 percent of the people whose death sentences were set aside were later given lesser sentences after retrials, in plea bargains or by order of a judge. An additional 7 percent were found not guilty on retrial.

Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

Another Victim of Sgt Schultz' Disease

Ex-Justice Dept. lawyer can't recall his role in controversial policies

Another former Justice Department lawyer went before Congress on Wednesday with few answers for his Democratic interrogators and a spotty memory.

Hans von Spakovsky, who's seeking a full six-year term on the Federal Election Commission, deflected questions about whether he undermined voting rights laws, saying, "I was not the decision maker in the front office of the Civil Rights Division."

Time and again during his confirmation hearing, he cited either the attorney-client privilege or a cloudy memory for his purported role in restricting minorities' voting rights.

Von Spakovsky couldn't remember blocking an investigation into complaints that a Minnesota Republican official was discriminating against Native American voters before the 2004 election.

Under oath, he also said he didn't recall seeing data from the state of Georgia that would have undercut a push by senior officials within the Civil Rights Division to approve the state's tough new law requiring photo IDs of all voters. The data showed that 300,000 Georgia voters lacked driver's licenses. A federal judge later threw out the law as unconstitutional.
[...]
Nearly the entire two-hour hearing focused on von Spakovsky and on allegations from [six former senior officials of the Voting Rights Section's] career Justice Department lawyers that he was the administration's "point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division's mandate to protect voting rights" of minorities during his more than four-year tenure.

Citing a scathing letter from six former senior officials of the Voting Rights Section, Committee Chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told him bluntly: "It is really a problem for this body to vote for someone with this letter on the record."
[...]
Asked about the Georgia ID law, von Spakovsky declined to disclose the legal advice he gave his superiors, saying it was privileged, but he maintained that the department took the correct position because the courts didn't find that the law violated the federal Voting Rights Act. In overturning the law, the federal courts cited the 14th and 24th Amendments to the Constitution, he said.

Read the last paragraph again ... his excuse is that it wasn't against the law, it was just unconstitutional!

And where does OUR lawyer, (yes, theoretically the DoJ represents the government ... of the people, by the people and for the people), get off saying it was attorney client privilege?

Does anyone else see a pattern? Apparently everyone in the Bush admin has terrible memory lapses and is incapable of making a decision.



(Cross posted at Vidiotspeak)

Come on little miss and do the twist

Doug Kmiec does his best Mary Lou Retton impression in the LATimes, trying to twist his brain into position around the whole Abu Gonzales 'human resources' thingy:

There is no basis to remove the attorney general so long as no evidence has been brought forth—and none has— that any U.S. attorney was asked to resign for partisan or corrupt purpose.

Okeydokey.

Alberto Gonzales is the second of eight children of migrant farm workers, Pablo and Maria Gonzales. A former justice of the Texas Supreme Court and Texas secretary of state, Gonzales has a calm and deliberative manner that listens more than it imposes. I know the man to be a person of integrity.

Sure. And that nice young Dahmer boy seemed a pretty swell fellow. Oh, wait . . ., he's Latino, thus a victim.

Because of this over-delegation, in my judgment, Gonzales under-appreciated the problematic nature of removing selected U.S. attorneys and was overly trusting of the removal recommendations made to him. Gonzales has conceded in public testimony that this over-delegation was a mistake.

Really? Sounds like a manager who's not on top of his gig.

But these are management mistakes that do not overshadow the conscientious manner in which the general work of the Department of Justice has been performed, or by which it should be measured.

Really? He was doing a bad job, but in a conscientious manner? That's a good thing?

In this, I am not overlooking the recent testimony of former Deputy Attorney General James Comey. Comey, too, is a man of great ability who served the Department of Justice well. Apparently—and this is hardly unusual in the law—there was disagreement between then-White House Counsel Gonzales and Mr. Comey over the legality of a program of great salience to meeting the ongoing terrorist threat. Apparently, Mr. Comey had refused (the program is classified so we cannot know for sure and Mr. Comey was careful not to be too explicit) to recertify the terrorist surveillance program.

Ya think? Comey, a serious conservative, had issues with a super secret spying program?

To some legal scholars, this program is a vindication of the President's constitutional authority to undertake military intelligence in a time of war as every other wartime president has done; to other scholars, the program disregards statutory limitations that were created to prevent spying on U.S. citizens engaged in protected speech activity during the Nixon administration.

Well that's it. To John Yoo, Gonzales, and other administration apologists, the ((secret)) program was super cool. To actual, you know, Constitutional experts, the program would be Nixonian in its depth of lawlessness.

But that's not important right now. What is important is what Kmiec's co-debater says:

There is abundant evidence that Iglesias was removed at the prodding of important Republicans in New Mexico who had unsuccessfully pressured him to indict a political corruption case against a Democratic state senator (among others) in advance of the November election.

. . .This is the worst crisis for the Department of Justice in at least a generation, and it is highly unlikely to abate as long as Attorney General Gonzales remains in office. This institutional damage is not uppermost in the calculations of the White House, and perhaps that is to be expected—but how, if at all, do you think it should figure in to the calculations of whether Gonzales should resign? Or is the attorney general's duty in your view confined to considering the political interests of the president at whose pleasure he serves?

Indeed.