It has been common knowledge among the astute for several decades that the criminal justice system in the United States is corrupt. True, it is much worse almost everywhere else. But the situation in America has deteriorated to the point that true fairness and justice within the system as it now stands are rare.
In order to get a 'fair shake,' you must have a ton of money to spend on expensive lawyers. If you are not so fortunate, you are forced to rely on the dreaded 'public defender' system where incompetence is widespread and your chances of being adequately represented in court are nebulous at best.
It has also come to the attention of many justice system observers that the disturbing trend of framing innocent persons for crimes they did not commit has spiked upward in recent years. Dirty cops on the take, state's attorneys who need a reputation for 'putting away the bad guys' at any cost--whether the person is actually a 'bad guy' or not--in order to get reelected, and corrupted judges who have an agenda, are all too common.
But this is not even half of it.
Since the Presidential election of 2008, something has been happening right under the noses of Americans, with no attention, no fanfare, no publicity, and outside the realm of consciousness for most citizens. And that is the imprisonment of innocent citizens using an obscure term in the legal community known as 'Honest Services Fraud.'
The law concerning 'Honest Services Fraud' is so vague that the Department of Justice and Eric Holder's cabal of Chicago prosecutorial henchmen have used it to charge citizens with the most outlandish and unheard-of 'crimes.'
For example, have you ever taken longer for your lunch break than the company allows? Have you ever made a personal phone call at work on company time? Have you ever used your computer at work to send personal email? Have you ever had a contract dispute with someone?
If so, you could be charged with a federal crime under 'Honest Services Fraud.'
And that is precisely what Obama, Holder, and company have been doing. Here is a most disturbing description of the process:
At the federal prosecutor's office in the Southern District of New York, the staff, over beer and pretzels, used to play a darkly humorous game. Junior and senior prosecutors would sit around, and someone would name a random celebrity – say, Mother Theresa or John Lennon.
It would then be up to the junior prosecutors to figure out a plausible crime for which to indict him or her. The crimes were not usually rape, murder, or other crimes you'd see on Law & Order but rather the incredibly broad yet obscure crimes that populate the U.S. Code like a kind of jurisprudential minefield: Crimes like "false statements" (a felony, up to five years), "obstructing the mails" (five years), or "false pretenses on the high seas" (also five years). The trick and the skill lay in finding the more obscure offenses that fit the character of the celebrity and carried the toughest sentences. The result, however, was inevitable: "prison time."
This dark 'game' was played 25 years ago in the prosecutor's office of the southern district of New York, long before there were any broad legal tools at their disposal for carrying out their sordid schemes. In time, it was discovered that 'Honest Services Fraud' was a law vague enough to do exactly what the junior prosecutors had envisioned 25 years ago.
The statute itself is quite simple--'a scheme or an artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of "honest services."' But what, exactly, is an honest service, and who is the deprived?
The vagueness and the lack of defined terms have given prosecutors a field day. They can essentially construe any activity as the deprivation of an honest service and the deprived can be anything or anyone they determine.
Further, the law was written so that federal prosecutors could go back and criminalize an act that everyone thought was legal, and indeed, it was legal at the time. This creates a hideous state of affairs in the criminal justice system in this country. As William L. Anderson states,
There is another huge problem with this law (if we can dignify it as such by even calling it "law"): its vagueness and broad interpretation permits federal prosecutors to engage in tyrannical selective prosecution. When a law is so broad that nearly everyone who provides any services has broken it, then prosecutors are able to target people who might be politically unpopular.
So outrageous were some of the Obama Administration's applications of this law that numerous lawsuits were filed against the U.S. government, resulting in a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010 to strike down much of the 'Honest Services Fraud' statute. But as we have seen all too often with this Administration, court decisions are mere inconveniences. The Administration routinely ignores direct court orders, such as the order to begin oil drilling once again in the Gulf. And in this case, the Obama henchmen have gone to work to do an end-run around the SCOTUS decision.
According to the Wall Street Journal,
Since the Supreme Court limited the definition of "honest services" fraud in last year's landmark Skilling v. U.S., the Obama Administration has been looking for a way to restore essentially unlimited prosecutorial discretion to bring white-collar cases. Last fall Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer told a Senate committee that Congress should act to "remedy" the Court's decision. Three bills moving through the House and Senate would try to do so, expanding the reach of prosecutors to go after unpopular politicians or businesses whom they can't pin with a real crime.
In Skilling, the Supreme Court ruled that the honest services statute was "unconstitutionally vague" and restricted its application to clear cases of bribery or kickbacks. The new legal template of Senate bills sponsored by Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, the liberal Democrat, and Illinois Republican Mark Kirk would end run that change, transforming many state or local ethics violations into federal felonies any time there is an allegation of undisclosed "self-dealing." A related House bill would expand the reach of mail- and wire-fraud statutes and loosen the requirements for proving federal bribery.
Note that RINOS such as Mark Kirk are joining the Marxist minions of Left to push through these horrifying bills. Liberal Establishment Republicans want this sort of liberty-squelching tyranny every bit as much as the Democrats. In a free society such as ours the burden of proof is always on the prosecution, and in this case, the federal government. But bills such as these increasingly remove that burden of proof from the accusers to the accused, setting the stage for one of the hallmarks of tyranny--'guilty until proven innocent.'
Anderson sums up the clear and present danger:
Liberty is being besieged at every turn in the USA, as I have come to believe that no one – no one – despises liberty more than the very Americans who have benefitted most from it. Unfortunately, there will be no constituency to argue against the expansion of the "honest services fraud" statutes because, after all, no one wishes to defend dishonesty. So, Congress will act, President Obama will sign, Holder and his thousands of prosecutors will prosecute, innocent people will go to prison, families, individuals, and businesses will be destroyed, and most Americans will be clueless as to why fewer and fewer people want to invest in anything tied to the Land of the Free.
And the darkness engulfing America at this hour grows deeper.
(Hat tip to WRSA and The California Tree of Liberty).
Be sure to catch my blog at The Liberty Sphere.
Visit my ministry site at Martin Christian Ministries.
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