We’re the Only Ones Absolutely Immune Enough.

Gen­er­ally speak­ing, it is smart pub­lic pol­icy to shield pros­e­cu­tors from law­suits when it comes to deter­min­ing in which cases they’ll pur­sue charges…

But you could make a good case that absolute immu­nity takes this idea too far. Even police offi­cers are given what’s called “qual­i­fied immu­nity” from civil rights suits, which in 1983 the Supreme Court deter­mined meant, “inso­far as their con­duct does not vio­late clearly estab­lished statu­tory or con­sti­tu­tional rights of which a rea­son­able per­son would have known.”

That sets a hur­dle for law­suits against the police, but not a wall (some would argue that this hur­dle is also too high). It might be time to con­sider apply­ing that stan­dard to pros­e­cu­tors, too.

Actu­ally, it’s past time. The absolute immu­nity doc­trine should never have been estab­lished.
The sim­ple fact is, free­dom depends on respon­si­bil­ity and account­abil­ity. You just can’t have one with­out the others.

Hav­ing “Only Ones” imper­vi­ous to the laws the rest of us are bound by is the essence of tyranny.

And as for incen­tives for pros­e­cu­tors, the incen­tive ought to be to reduce pros­e­cutable “offenses.”

[Via Carl S] [The War on Guns]

Actu­ally, I think even the “qual­i­fied immu­nity” is pretty mean­ing­less today. Cops con­stantly, sys­tem­at­i­cally, and with impunity “vio­late clearly estab­lished statu­tory or con­sti­tu­tional rights of which a rea­son­able per­son would have known.” Noth­ing ever hap­pens to them for doing so. In fact, as far as I can tell it’s impos­si­ble to be a cop with­out vio­lat­ing people’s rights. What do you sup­pose hap­pens to some trainee cop the first time he refuses to search or arrest some­one for car­ry­ing a pis­tol, for exam­ple, even though doing so would be a bla­tant vio­la­tion of that person’s con­sti­tu­tional rights?

Blog­ger William Grigg has a series of posts on the mass kid­nap­ping and child abuse case in Texas:

“Your Chil­dren Are Ours” (Updated, 4/16)

Col­lec­tivist Child Abuse (Fourth Update, 4/18)

Quid Spu­ca­tum Tauri Est? (Sec­ond Update, April 22)

The Sub­ject “Peo­ple” vs. The Rul­ing “Per­sons” (Updated, April 23)

By way of con­trast, here is an account of what hap­pened to a cor­rupt Sheriff’s depart­ment at a time when there were still enough peo­ple around with a vague mem­ory of what a free coun­try was.

Seen on a poster at the Room 5 Lounge:

Pi and the Irra­tional Band

Nudge.

The New York Times reports that a bunch of ex-military on-air “ana­lysts” are in bed with both mil­i­tary con­trac­tors and the Bush administration:

Records and inter­views show how the Bush admin­is­tra­tion has used its con­trol over access and infor­ma­tion in an effort to trans­form the ana­lysts into a kind of media Tro­jan horse — an instru­ment intended to shape ter­ror­ism cov­er­age from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Ana­lysts have been wooed in hun­dreds of pri­vate brief­ings with senior mil­i­tary lead­ers, includ­ing offi­cials with sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence over con­tract­ing and bud­get mat­ters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to clas­si­fied intel­li­gence. They have been briefed by offi­cials from the White House, State Depart­ment and Jus­tice Depart­ment, includ­ing Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gon­za­les and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, mem­bers of this group have echoed admin­is­tra­tion talk­ing points, some­times even when they sus­pected the infor­ma­tion was false or inflated. Some ana­lysts acknowl­edge they sup­pressed doubts because they feared jeop­ar­diz­ing their access.

This is what gov­ern­ments do. Repub­li­can gov­ern­ments. Demo­c­ra­tic gov­ern­ments. They spend their sub­jects’ money shap­ing their sub­jects’ opin­ions, so that they can spend more of their sub­jects’ money.

No doubt most of the talk­ing head gen­er­als and colonels believe sin­cerely that they were act­ing in the best inter­ests of the peo­ple they have devoted their lives to serv­ing. It is sim­ply that we “civil­ians” do not really know what we need to know in order to decide wisely for our­selves, and so pub­lic opin­ion needs to be mas­saged a bit to gen­er­ate polit­i­cal sup­port for poli­cies that truly do pro­tect us. If the well-meaning soft pater­nal­ism of con­certed pro­pa­ganda and finan­cial self-interest hap­pen to coin­cide, then all the bet­ter. Our guardians will only be bet­ter moti­vated to guard us! (And, really, after a life­time of ser­vice, don’t they deserve to get theirs?) Cru­cially, no one here is forc­ing any­one to sup­port the administration’s poli­cies. It’s just a bit of a nudge, from peo­ple who know better.

[Will Wilkin­son / The Fly Bot­tle]

Of course the main­stream media also has a his­tory of par­rot­ing the gov­ern­ment line “because they feared jeop­ar­diz­ing their access.” I doubt the New York Times will be in any hurry to men­tion that, despite its own role in push­ing gov­ern­ment propaganda.

About a year ago there was a big fuss when Iran cap­tured a bunch of British mil­i­tary per­sonal who had intruded in Iran­ian waters. The British gov­ern­ment insisted that they had been in Iraqi waters (as if that’s bet­ter), and the Bushe­viks used the whole thing to attack Iran and try to drum up sup­port for start­ing another war.

Now, it’s finally come out that the Ira­ni­ans were telling the truth all along, and that the Evil Empire was not merely mis­taken but knew all along what the truth was and were actively lying about it. This is hardly surprising–in fact, it was pretty obvi­ous at the time. Still, The Times deserves credit for per­sis­tence in uncov­er­ing the proof. We can only hope that the next time Wash­ing­ton or one of its client states says some­thing nasty about Iran, peo­ple will remem­ber this.

More From Mis­sis­sippi.

The Jack­son Free Press wrote up the Inno­cence Project’s move for Dr. Hayne’s med­ical license. But the arti­cle also includes some info about Cedric Willis, the third exon­er­a­tion in Mis­sis­sippi this year–one we haven’t heard nearly as much about.

Exon­er­ated Jack­son­ian Cedric Willis spoke to the audi­ence about spend­ing 12 years behind bars, nine of them in Parch­man, for a mur­der he did not commit—even as Hinds County Cir­cuit Judge Bobby DeLaugh­ter made no move to exon­er­ate him dur­ing those years he spent wrong­fully serv­ing time, despite the exis­tence of evi­dence that could clear him.

“He had a motion on my free­dom for years, and I never got a response from him. The judge had a right to say, ‘this is not right,’” Willis said, ear­lier ques­tion­ing how DeLaugh­ter could “sleep at night” know­ing he’d sent an inno­cent man to rot in prison.

Here’s how:

DeLaugh­ter was the assis­tant dis­trict attor­ney at the time, work­ing under Dis­trict Attor­ney Ed Peters, who pros­e­cuted Willis. Judge Bre­land Hilburn was the judge in the Willis case; nei­ther he, DeLaugh­ter or Peters pushed to allow DNA evi­dence and wit­ness tes­ti­mony that could have proved Willis inno­cent. The real killer remains at large.

So the judge who heard most of Willis’ appeals was an assis­tant DA in the office that pros­e­cuted him. Lovely. Oh, and then there’s this:

DeLaugh­ter is cur­rently under inves­ti­ga­tion for allegedly tak­ing bribes from Peters, on behalf of attor­ney Dickie Scruggs, to influ­ence cases. The Mis­sis­sippi Com­mis­sion on Judi­cial Per­for­mance recently sus­pended DeLaugh­ter from the bench while the fed­eral inves­ti­ga­tion continues.

This is worth not­ing, too:

“When Cedric Willis was pros­e­cuted, the state of Mis­sis­sippi knew full well that they had an inno­cent man,” Maw said. “This was not a case where the pros­e­cu­tor thought he maybe had a weak case but … went ahead with the pros­e­cu­tion with some reservations.”

Maw added: “They knew out­right that Cedric Willis did not com­mit this crime and they said so them­selves in the newspapers—then they will­ingly kept out evi­dence that would have proved him inno­cent, and they let him sit in jail.”

“They should be pun­ished for that and prob­a­bly never will be because state law says that if the pros­e­cu­tor does some­thing wrong they have almost absolute immunity.”

It’s way past time to start rethink­ing absolute pros­e­cu­to­r­ial immunity.

[The Agi­ta­tor]

The prob­lem is, that won’t do any good. There’s already a law on the books that applies in cases like this:

If two or more per­sons con­spire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intim­i­date any per­son in any State, Ter­ri­tory, Com­mon­wealth, Pos­ses­sion, or Dis­trict in the free exer­cise or enjoy­ment of any right or priv­i­lege secured to him by the Con­sti­tu­tion or laws of the United States, or because of his hav­ing so exer­cised the same; or

If two or more per­sons go in dis­guise on the high­way, or on the premises of another, with intent to pre­vent or hin­der his free exer­cise or enjoy­ment of any right or priv­i­lege so secured -

They shall be fined under this title or impris­oned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts com­mit­ted in vio­la­tion of this sec­tion or if such acts include kid­nap­ping or an attempt to kid­nap, aggra­vated sex­ual abuse or an attempt to com­mit aggra­vated sex­ual abuse, or an attempt to kill, they shall be fined under this title or impris­oned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sen­tenced to death

Title 18, Part I, Chap­ter 13, Sec­tion 241 US Code

Under this law, Judge DeLaugh­ter should be fac­ing life in prison or the death penalty. But this law will never be applied, any more than any changes to pros­e­cu­to­r­ial immu­nity would be, because these are the peo­ple who apply them. They don’t pros­e­cute each other any more than cops arrest each other.

From a Photo.net post:

Inter­est­ingly, my wife does use a cam­era with flash­bulbs in clubs occa­sion­ally. It’s a Polaroid 100 that uses M3 and M3B bulbs. She’s never been thrown out, but once after tak­ing a pic­ture of a per­former at the Hotel Café in Hol­ly­wood a mem­ber of the audi­ence was over­heard say­ing “well, I’m blind now.”

The post was made in 2006. That was the year the Hotel Café banned flash photography.