By Dave Lindorff
When it comes to justice in America, the scales definitely badly need a visit by an inspector from the Department of Weights and Standards.
Consider the recent decision by Federal Judge Ricardo Urbina tossing out the federal indictment of five Blackwater (Now Xe) mercenaries for the 2007 slaughter of 14 innocent Iraqis in Baghdad.
The judge found that federal prosecutors had improperly used incriminating statements which he said had been "compelled" from the Blackwater personnel under "threat of job loss."
Let's compare that to how the courts have handled other cases. We might start with John Walker Lindh, the young American captured in the first days of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Indicted on charges of conspiring to kill Americans, Lindh, currently serving a 20 year sentence after a plea agreement reached with the government, never had his case thrown out, though the government's main evidence was a statement allegedly made by him (this on the word of an FBI agent) that he had been a member of the Taliban and Al Qaeda--a statement that even if actually made, had come at a time that Lindh was being kept duct-taped to a gurney and held in an unheated, unlit metal shipping container, with an untreated bullet wound in his leg, and denied access to an attorney....
Or compare the Blackwater case to the case of Philadelphia journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has been on Pennsylvania's death row now for 27 years for the 1981 killing of a white Philadelphia police officer, Daniel Faulkner. Abu-Jamal was convicted largely on the basis of testimony by two alleged "eye-witnesses": an African-American prostitute named Cynthia White and a white taxi driver named Robert Chobert. White gave wildly different accounts of what she had "seen" from her position on the sidewalk several car lengths away from the shooting. ....
...
Although it is clearly anathema to any kind of fair trial, coercion is commonplace in American "justice." Whether a judge will decide that the coercion of confessions or of witnesses requires the tossing out of an indictment, or the overturning of a conviction, though, appears to have more to do with the political connections of the defendant than with the merits of the case.
...
There is really no doubt that Blackwater "security guards" working for the US military and State Department, perhaps fearing they were under attack, went on a shooting rampage in a Baghdad intersection, mowing down 14 civilians, including women and children, and wounding many more. One of the group initially charged even confessed and is currently serving jail time for his actions. But in the view of a federal judge, the fear on the part of his colleagues that they might lose their jobs if they didn't tell investigators what had happened makes their initial confessions "coerced," and since those statements were used by federal prosecutors as a basis for their indictment of the men, the indictment was flawed and had to be tossed out.
American justice at work.
The scales are not balanced.
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