Reply #31: 2007.09.10 == Exposing a Corrupt Prosecution and Trial "Like tin-horned Central American dictators"

[L. Coyote]

TITLE Exposing a Corrupt Prosecution and Trial in Alabama
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED September 10, 2007
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/09/hbc-90001166

In Oakdale Federal Detention Center in central Louisiana sits America’s most prominent political prisoner: former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to serve 7 years and 4 months in prison. His crime? At this point, it’s reasonably clear that the crime of which he was charged and convicted, and for which he was sentenced with unprecedented severity, was being a successful Democratic candidate in a state which Karl Rove had slated for a G.O.P. makeover. The charges against him, on a handful of which he was convicted, disintegrate in nothingness under inspection. No independent, objective prosecutor would ever have brought them.

But the Siegelman case is one of the hallmarks of the Bush Administration’s justice concept. Like tin-horned Central American dictators of old, the Bush crew believes that it can and should use the criminal justice system to take out its political enemies. It does this in a brazen way. And it has no shortage of ostensibly independent helpers to see its schemes along on their merry way. ..............