For the week of November 5 - 11, 2003

When ‘justice’
becomes vengeance

Commentary by PAT MURPHY

---

Michael Austin is joining a long roster of others who share a shameful distinction: they were imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit.

Austin’s painful experience with criminal justice is especially contemptible: he spent 27 years in a Maryland prison for a murder he always claimed he didn’t commit. Men who could’ve freed him years ago finally agree he was right after all.

His prosecutor, Joseph Wase, said "I did not intend to ever prosecute an innocent man, as I now realize I did."

And that from the prosecutor with every tool for finding the guilty party rather than taking away half of 54-year-old Austin’s life?

Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich Jr. has fully pardoned Austin, and promised compensation for 27 years behind bars—as if any amount of money can restore lost years and erase anguish of 9,855 painful days of lost freedom.

Hundreds of other wrongly convicted and imprisoned inmates around the nation, including on Death Row, have been released by courts finally awakening to manifestly incompetent investigations, prosecutions, lackluster legal defenses and even judges caught up in the lock-’em-up mentality that began obsessing U.S. politics about when Michael Austin was convicted in 1975.

It started with state legislators writing tougher mandatory sentencing laws, ultimately resulting in the dubious for the United States—a nation with more prison and jail inmates than any in the world and the fastest growing penal culture requiring more tax dollars for more prisons, more prosecutors, more courts.

So, have we learned from the likes of Michael Austin’s nightmare and the cavalier abuses of the legal system by public officials who parade falsely under banners of justice?

Probably not.

For more than a year, the U.S. military has promised trials for 660 detainees swept up in the "terrorist" dragnet after Sept. 11, 2001, and held in cages at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. So, why no trials? Are detainees convenient political symbols of the "war on terrorism" and not regarded as worth being brought to trial?

Does this casual indifference to the precept of swift and speedy trial revive memories of Russia’s Cold War Siberian gulags, where thousands were held for years without charges?

And what of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s request to toughen the ironhanded Patriot Act even more, plus the proposal to use local police for immigration dragnets?

Is Ashcroft imposing a police state mentality with orders to U.S. attorneys in the field to keep track of which federal judges are lenient and who are tough, and his order to file only maximum charges and not plea bargain?

Has Ashcroft so cowered judges they now lack courage to overrule his refusal to allow legal counsel for prisoners being held without charges?

Those obsessed with anything-goes tactics in the "war on terrorism" and driven by slogans concocted by White House merchants of political claptrap not only dishonor a noble system of jurisprudence but risk creating a jackboot society in which vengeance, not justice, is the result.

 

The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.