The Justice Department Roach Motel

[L. Coyote]

July 9, 3:07 PM, 2009
The Justice Department Roach Motel
By Scott Horton - http://harpers.org/archive/2009/07/hbc-90005320


The current issue of the ABA Journal takes a close look at one of the Justice Department’s more embarrassing cesspools, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR). We’ve looked at OPR at this site several times before. In theory, OPR exists to uphold the Department’s ethical standards. In fact, OPR seems to have a double function. First, by engaging in infantile games of turf warfare, it effectively blocks the DOJ’s Inspector General from doing his job. Second, when purporting to conduct investigations of wrongdoing, it proceeds at a glacial place, rarely succeeds in uncovering any facts, and, even when it does, usually issues a soft tut-tut, almost never administering any serious disciplinary measures. The DOJ consistently holds its own lawyers to a far lower standard than it holds others. In effect, OPR has become a whitewash organ for DOJ that specializes in whistleblower intimidation and shoring up U.S. attorneys engaged in highly abusive, and sometimes criminal, practices.

“I used to call it the Roach Motel of the Justice Department,” says Fordham University law professor Bruce A. Green, a former federal prosecutor and ethics committee co-chair for the ABA Criminal Justice Section. “Cases check in, but they don’t check out.”

But as I noted in a recent article for the American Lawyer entitled “Holder’s Headache,” federal judges across the country are telling the new Attorney General, Eric Holder, that they want to see a clean break with the sweep-it-under-the-carpet ways of his predecessors. And increasingly, the judges have prudently concluded that the Justice Department lacks the political will to deal with misbehaving prosecutors on its own. That helps explain Judge Emmett Sullivan’s appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the leadership of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, and it explains why a number of other judges are now pondering similar moves. The judges are increasingly taking matters into their own hands.

The ABA Journal article recounts a case of Brady Act violations in a high-profile homicide prosecution before Judge Mark L. Wolf in Massachusetts. The convictions were overtured, and in October 2003, the case was referred to OPR for investigation. More than three years later,

Wolf had heard nothing of the OPR investigation ...........

[pnorman]

1. “Cases check in, but they don’t check out.”

I had sen other references to "Roach Hotel", but the meaning was always unclear. Got it now! The article also looks to be worth a read. Thanks.

pnorman