Kooky Liberals Let Another Criminal Go Free

So there is this guy on my block; lets call him Pete.  Pete looks to be in his late 50s, skinny, sour-faced, never talks to you but always nods, smokes, lives with his mom, always wears a white tee shirt and work pants, and drives a truck that he's obsessive about parking right in front of his house. From the getup and the truck, I figured he was in the trades. And from his appearance, gait and mannerisms, I figured he was an alcoholic or drug addict or both.  Or more simply, he was in the trades.

So on Wednesday - this is all secondhand - Pete assaulted his neighbor's kid, who was visiting.  I bet the kid parked in Pete's space. I actually walked by as the kid was giving the cop the report, wondered briefly what that was all about, and moved on.  That night, Pete comes back with a gun and fires a few shots through the neighbor's front window. The SWAT team arrives and pulls Pete out of his house, where they confiscate an impressive arsenal of guns. 

Pete goes before the bail judge. The judge has the report on the assault, but somehow between Philadelphia's finest and the DA's office the memo on the guns has gone astray. The guns - that would have been important to know about. So instead of being denied his liberty, Pete is back on his stoop and smoking by Thursday night.  And soon thereafter someone carved a cryptic message into the hood of another neighbor's car which was parked in front of his house. If his mom didn't live with him, maybe the neighbors would handle it the traditional way, but as it is they have to wait and worry until Monday and then raise hell with the D.A.

So it was a police or prosecutorial fuckup, not a liberal activist judge, that put this violent man back on the street. Sure, the judge was the one who set bail, but you can't blame him for following the law. But that's exactly what happens when a judge lets someone go on a "technicality." Usually it starts with a police or prosecutorial fuckup: a cop searches a house without a warrant, or a cop lies unconvincingly on the stand to back up his brother officer, or someone mishandles the chain of custody, or a zealous assistant district attorney finds it convenient not to disclose a potentially exculpatory piece of evidence to the defense. I classify these as mistakes - fuckups - rather than serious misconduct because I think they usually happen spontaneously as a result of  well-intentioned, understandable motives. Nevertheless, they are serious fuckups that require serious consequences.

In this country, we don't put cops or prosecutors in jail for run-of-the-mill violations of civil rights or obstruction of justice; what we do is exclude evidence or toss the charges with prejudice and let the political process handle personnel decisions.  (Occasionally, citizens can sue civilly for being abused by the authorities, but it's governments, not individual officials, who pay the judgments, and anyway in today's political climate such cases are hard to win; I once saw a Pittsburgh jury award a guy $1 after he was roughed up and imprisoned 24 hours without even a phone call, all because he told a cop he should use his turn signal.)  Naturally, since the D.A. or chief of police is ultimately responsible for the fuckups, they want to shift the blame. So part of that political process includes a puffed-up D.A. or chief of police coming out in front of the cameras to denounce the hippie faggot judge who let some murderer go, when all the judge did was follow the law. Unfortunately, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and since most Americans can't tell the Bill of Rights from their cable bill, that some is getting bigger all the time.

Comments

[roy edroso]

Any developments on this wastecase?

[Mithras]

Well, I am out of the gossip loop until everyone gets home. But he did just limp past my window and - I swear to Christ, I am not making this up - a mom pushing a stroller saw him and *ran*.