How the Feds Imprison the Innocent

If you are targeted by a U.S. Attorney, you are pretty much out of luck. Innocent? That's no defense.

Just ask Wisconsin's Keith Roberts and Georgia Thompson.

From Paul Craig Roberts' How the Feds Imprison the Innocent:

Harvey Silverglates’ Three Felonies A Day focuses on how federal prosecutors invent creative interpretations of statutes, sometimes creating new felonies out of vague language or thin air, felonies never legislated by Congress. Federal criminal law is today so vast and so poorly worded that Silverglate reports, truthfully, that each of us, every American, commits three felonies every day without knowing it. ...

Federal judges, an increasing number of whom are former federal prosecutors, permit the prosecution of Americans for crimes that the defendants did not know were crimes, crimes that never before existed until the federal prosecutor brought the charge. The invention of crimes by prosecutors violates every known legal principle in Anglo-American law. Yet, it has become commonplace. Defense attorneys, a group that also increasingly consists of former federal prosecutors, as Silverglate accurately reports, have lost confidence that it is possible to defend a client from a federal prosecution and see their role, not as the defense, but as negotiators of a plea bargain that reduces the charges and prison time of the defendant, no matter how innocent. Silverglate shows that many of the plea bargains create precedents that prosecutors can exploit to trap more innocent victims. ...

This is the way America works today. Just as state and local police cannot stand up to the FBI, elected state and local officials are powerless in the face of their pursuit by corrupt federal prosecutors.

Silverglate himself was the attorney in some of the landmark cases that he reports. The reader, even one with the usual illusions and delusions that blind Americans to their predicament, will be scared by Silverglate’s documented account, case by case, of how easy it is in 'freedom and democracy' America to frame the totally innocent.

In Silverglate’s concluding chapter, 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' the answer is obvious even to a naif: 'It tolls for all.'

Rice to Confront Authoritarian Afghan about Man Sentenced to Death for Printing Women’s Rights Docs

Imprisoned and sentenced to death for reading and downloading women's rights documents, Sayed Pervez Kambaksh life hangs on international pressure brought to bear on this hell hole of a country where life and liberty are held cheaply.

The Independent has made a cause of the 23-year-old Sayed's wrongful jailing and death sentance, gathering over 61,000 signatures on a petition, causing the British government to register official protests, and pushing Condi Rice into promising to talk to the Afghan strongman, Hamid Karzai.

From the Independent:

Ms Rice, who was in London for talks with Gordon Brown and David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, on the West's Afghanistan strategy said: "I do think that the Afghans understand that there are some international norms that need to be respected. Of course, one has national laws and they're national laws that are in accordance with traditions and religious practice. But there are international norms, and I'll certainly talk to President Karzai about this case." ...

He shares a cell meant for four people with 30 others at the prison in Balkh province where he has been held for more than three months. In that time he has been attacked by Taliban prisoners who have been told by officials that Mr Kambaksh is guilty of blasphemy. His food has been contaminated by guards, he has lost weight, and is traumatised. ...

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Wrongfully Jailed Face Apathetic Gov and Long Road to Normalcy

Taking away more peoples' liberties than any other country speaks clearly about the putative aspect of the political-legal American culture.

Politically ambitious or corrupt prosecutors scoff at the notion of prosecutorial discretion.

Unfortunately, for those proven innocent after spending years in prison, the road to a comfortable, normal life is elusive.

The New York Times has two excellent piece this morning reporting on the issue of 100s of innocents robbed of their liberty by unscrupulous prosecutors.

by JANET ROBERTS and ELIZABETH STANTON

Christopher Ochoa (an innocent man convicted of murder, and who served 12 years before being proved innocent, freed through the work of the Wisconsin Innocence Project) graduated from law school five years out of prison and started his own practice in Madison, Wis. He has a girlfriend and is looking to buy a house. ...

The men are among the more than 200 prisoners exonerated since 1989 by DNA evidence — almost all of whom had been incarcerated for murder or rape. Their varied experiences are typical of what The New York Times found in one of the most extensive looks to date at what happens to those exonerated inmates after they leave prison.

The Times worked from a list of DNA-exonerated prisoners kept by the Innocence Project — widely regarded as the most thorough record of DNA exonerations. The Times then gathered extensive information on 137 of those whose convictions had been overturned, interviewing 115.
The findings show that most of them have struggled to keep jobs, pay for health care, rebuild family ties and shed the psychological effects of years of questionable or wrongful imprisonment.

Prosecutors issued no apologies for the inflicted harm on the innocent. It's difficult to shame the shameless.

See also FERNANDA SANTOS's Vindicated by DNA, but a Lost Man on the Outside.

As a boy, Jeffrey Mark Deskovic could swim the length of a pool underwater without coming up for air. On sultry days at the Elmira state prison, where he spent most of his 16 years behind bars for a rape and murder he did not commit, Mr. Deskovic would close his eyes under a row of outdoor showers and imagine himself swimming. ...

In September, he filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the police, the medical examiner, a prison guard and the governments of two counties, alleging that detectives falsified reports and coerced his confession, and that the prison guard groped and beat him. A separate lawsuit in the Court of Claims is planned seeking payment from the state for the wrongful incarceration.
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Nuclear Whistleblower Vanunu Appeals Jail Sentence for Speaking, Free on Appeal

Via Reuters:

Nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu is contesting a new jail six-month sentence received for maintaining unauthorized ties with foreigners after he completed an 18-year prison term for treason (blowing the whistle on the development of nuclear weapons), his lawyer said on Monday.

The unauthorized ties were specifically speaking with reporters and writing in Internet chatrooms on the topics of human rights, freedom and a nuclear-free world, communications violating the terms of his parole from an Israeli prison.

Most of his prison sentence was spent in solitary confinement, conditions that human rights organisations have condemned on humanitarian grounds.

The government's refusal to let Vanunu leave Israel is not popular with many citizens of Israel. See Haaretz' Let Him Go Already.

Attorney Avigdor Feldman said that Vanunu had filed an appeal on Sunday with the district court in Jerusalem, where a lower court sentenced him to six months behind bars in July.

"The immediate significance is that my client will not be going back to jail any time soon," Feldman told Reuters, adding that he expected a decision on the appeal within three months.

Vanunu was first imprisoned in 1986 after giving a tell-all interview to a British newspaper about his work as a mid-level technician at Israel's main atomic reactor outside the southern desert town of Dimona. The disclosures all but blew away the iron-clad secrecy around Israel's assumed atomic arsenal.

Vanunu was freed in 2004 but barred indefinitely from leaving Israel by order of defense officials who argued that he had more state secrets to spill. Vanunu, 52, has denied that.

Under the terms of his release, Vanunu was also required to seek official permission for contacts with foreigners. Several unauthorized interviews he gave to international media about Israel's nuclear program landed him back in court.

Israel neither confirms nor denies having the Middle East's only atomic weapons under a policy of "strategic ambiguity" billed as warding off enemies while avoiding arms races.

Should the Jerusalem District Court rule against Vanunu's appeal, he could turn to the Supreme Court, Feldman said. However, the Supreme Court has already rejected a petition by Vanunu to overturn the travel ban imposed on him by the state.

A Jewish convert to Christianity, Vanunu argues that by refusing international inspections at the Dimona reactor Israel inflames regional tensions and risks a "second Holocaust".

Jerusalem District Court had held off implementing July's sentence pending a decision by Vanunu on whether to appeal.

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Israel Refuses to Let Mordechai Vanunu Leave Country

Nice. After spending 18 years in an Israeli prison for blowing the whistle on Israel's secret program to develop atomic bombs, Israel, taking its cues from the Soviet Union and the United States, refuses to let this man leave the hell that is Israel.

[27 April 2006: from Haaretz: Let Him Go Already]

Vanunu's 18 years in an Israeli prison, most of it spent in solitary confinement in a small, windowless cell, came to a temporary end when he was released in April 2004.

Now he is appealing a further six-month sentence handed down on his new charges. As Jerry Levin writes:

Specifically he is charged with:
1) maintaining contacts or exchanging information with foreign citizens especially journalists, and
2) coming within 500 meters of places from which it is possible to leave Israel, including the West Bank.
The charges detail 21 interviews with "foreign journalists" and "chat room" conversations and with trying to go to Bethlehem on Christmas Eve 2004.

What the hell is Israel trying to do?

Letters and cash can be sent to:

-Mordechai Vanunu
Waiting In East Jerusalem
To Be Free, To Leave
P.O. Box 20102
Salah Adin St' - post office
East Jerusalem 91384

Writes Vanunu:

I WANT TO BE FREE.
I WANT TO LEAVE THIS COUNTRY.
21 YEARS IN ISRAEL PRISON IS ENOUGH.

Mordechai Vanunu's site is at: http://www.serve.com/vanunu/ .

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