Prosecutors have practically untrammeled discretion in deciding what to charge, how many counts to allege, and a very wide latitude in sentences sought. Grand juries are just a rubber stamp for prosecutors, and contrary to the spirit of the Fifth Amendment, provide absolutely no assurance against capricious prosecution. But complicity in or direct causation of the lengthy incarceration of falsely accused and convicted people, not to be confused with honest error and misplaced zeal, is a terribly serious offense and is so treated in every other serious jurisdiction except the U.S.
– Huffington Post and elsewhere
Dominant Social Theme: Ignore former media mogul Conrad Black. He's been convicted of corporate corruption and his articles are just sour grapes.
Free-Market Analysis: Conrad Black, the former Canadian publisher of numerous prestigious mainstream newspapers, was apparently unjustly imprisoned for corporate corruption and as a result he has discovered the injustice of the current Western industrial-penitentiary complex.
He's writing about the increasingly insane paradigm of Western "justice" and, ironically, is one of only a few of his mainstream stature (diminished as it may be) to do so. He didn't previously, but his current travails have apparently concentrated his mind.
In a series of extraordinary articles, some of them apparently written from jail, the fallen media magnate makes significant points about how the system has strayed from justice – and not just in his case. We've always maintained that the Western "justice" meme was the most stubborn and would be perhaps the last to come under attack in this Internet era. Black is certainly engaging the battle.
It turns out that after numerous appeals, Black stands accused, perhaps, of embezzling some US$250,000 in corporate funds from the company he built and headed. For this, he has apparently paid some US$32 million in fines and seen the utter destruction of his media empire – or so we have read.
Black, it would seem, has a right to be bitter. But no matter what one thinks of Black – and for much of his career he was a kind of card-carrying socialist and social-climber of the most unbearable type – he has shown considerable courage in fighting his case and writing increasingly passionate articles even as he has joined the fight to prove his innocence.
In this case, what stimulates Black's pen is a case that occurred in Texas where an individual named Michael Morton was found guilty of murdering his wife and spent 25 years in jail before being released when it turned out that prosecutors had apparently withheld exculpatory DNA evidence.
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