Third Time's the Charm for Fake Terrorism Case?

Way back in June of 2006 we reported that the Sears Tower terrorism case was a joke. This was pure entrapment by the feds as these guys were about as threatening as the Apple Dumpling gang. Here is what we said in 2006:

Despite the indictment mentioning Al Qaeda several times and Bin Laden for some reason, neither were involved in this alleged plot. There was a law entrapment, errr…enforcement officer who somehow convinced these boneheads they he was really part of Al Qaeda. He got them to swear allegiance to Al Qaeda and even got them to believe they would have a chance to blow up the Sears Tower.

They are so laughable inept that the idea they could be a threat to the Sears Tower is absurd. By the end of the indictment it is clear that this group has probably seen too many movies (just look at their materials list) and that even getting boots was a multi–step process that they could barely accomplish.

Unable to admit defeat, the US is dragging these guys to court for a third time, according to today’s New York Times. The story is here, and the best quote from it is below:

“These are the types of prosecutors Las Vegas is built on,” Mr. Turley said. “They keep returning to the table with the same losing hand.”

Sleaze in LA Federal Prosecutors Office

Since bureaucracies do not operate with free market incentives, there is no objective way to measure their success or failure. Instead of being measured by profits, bureaucracies measure success by their size and reach. Unlike a profit maximizing business, a bureaucracy wants bloat. Efficiency is a dirty word to a bureaucracy. If they get too efficient they might cease to matter, or, even worse, they might not get to suck up as many tax dollars as before.

So a bureaucracy – any bureaucracy - will rely on proxies for efficiency and end up with workers gaming the measured metrics.

In this case, the prosecutors office concentrated on easy cases to hit their numbers. It remains unclear how many weak cases were pushed through for the sake of quotas:

U.S. Atty. Thomas P. O'Brien is facing sharp criticism from prosecutors within his office who say he is pressuring them to file relatively insignificant criminal cases to drive up statistics that make the office eligible for increased federal funding.

The prosecutors said O'Brien's effort to increase filings amounts to a quota system in which lawyers face possible discipline and other career consequences if they fail to achieve their numbers.
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The disgruntled prosecutors in Los Angeles say they are now spending an exorbitant amount of time working on less significant cases -- mail theft, smaller drug offenses and illegal immigration -- to reach quotas. They cited the recent disbanding of the office's public integrity and environmental crimes section, a unit with a history of working on complex police corruption and political corruption cases, as evidence of a shift toward high-volume, low-quality prosecutions.

"It's all about the numbers," one prosecutor said.

One former supervisor put it this way: "I can't remember how they sugarcoated it, but the feeling around the office was, if you got your quota, then you could work on your real cases without being hassled."

"Lawsuit challenges prosecutors' immunity"

The Supreme Court has ruled that "absolute immunity" is needed so that prosecutors -- and judges -- can do their jobs without fear of legal retaliation.

But a California case that the high court is considering taking could open a back door for such lawsuits.

It’s about time!

These are the same people who will not hesitate to aggressively prosecute a questionable case for their own ends. This is the same group who will rail against the integrity of their targets in the press to try and force a settlement before trial. These vindictive people will go out of their way punish those who exercise their right to a trial by jury or who refuse to become an agent of the state.

And they do this with immunity that only rewards and encourages this behavior.

It’s about time they are held accountable for their actions, just like they demand of everyone else.

"We need to be more skeptical."

A great interview with Dallas DA Craig Watkins in Reason. Read the whole thing, but the best quotes are below:

We need to guard against being a rubber stamp for every case the police department sends our way. We need to be more skeptical. We also need to train prosecutors to think about their jobs in a different way. We shouldn’t be judging young prosecutors by how many convictions they win, or by how many people they put in jail.
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But take eyewitness identification. It’s been proven time and time again in studies that eyewitness identification is extremely unreliable. Yet police, prosecutors, and juries still tend to put a lot of faith in them. And these same studies show there are some basic steps you can take make eyewitness identifications more reliable, but that also would result in fewer identifications, and fewer prosecutions. But if there are procedures available to increase the validity of a form of evidence, and police and prosecutors aren’t using it, then they’re deliberately increasing the chances of a wrongful conviction in order to get more convictions. And defendants aren’t getting a fair trial.

Judge Weinstein Supports Informed Juries

This post and a mess of others on Volokh discuss the new trial granted in US v. Polizzi due to the fact that the jury was not informed of the penalties of the crime. Good.

As we have argued in the past, ignorance is not a basis for law. If a conviction can only be made by keeping juries in the dark then the law is probably not a good one.

(“[M]any disagreements [between judges and juries] are explained by the fact that compared to judges, juries appear to require a stronger case by the prosecution to convict the defendant; or by the fact that juries infuse community notions of justice into their verdicts.” (citing, inter alia, Kalven and Zeisel, supra)). Above all, the experience of trial judges is that the jury is among our most conservative institutions. When in doubt we should trust its judgment, as did those who adopted the Sixth Amendment.