Coakley's Such a Law-and-Order Gal She Vigourously Locks Up the Innocent, Just to Make an Example Out of 'Em

Read the whole thing. Seriously.

The guy -- innocent as a lamb on everything, but kept in jail by career-conscious Coakley just the same -- was just on a radio show an hour ago. Give him a listen.

How on earth is this woman even in the race.

Coulter Was, Of Course, Already On It. From December:

The allegations against the Amiraults were preposterous on their face. Children made claims of robots abusing them, a "bad clown" who took the children to a "magic room" for sex play, rape with a 2-foot butcher knife, other acts of sodomy with a "magic wand," naked children tied to trees within view of a highway, and -- standard fare in the child abuse hysteria era -- animal sacrifices.

There was not one shred of physical evidence to support the allegations -- no mutilated animals, no magic rooms, no butcher knives, no photographs, no physical signs of any abuse on the children.

...

It's one thing to put a person in prison for a crime he didn't commit. It's another to put an entire family in prison for a crime that didn't take place.

...

Coakley wasn't the prosecutor on the original trial. What she did was worse.

At least the original prosecutors, craven and ambition-driven though they were, could claim to have been caught up in the child abuse panic of the '80s. There had not yet been extensive psychological studies on the suggestibility of small children. A dozen similar cases from around the country had not already been discredited and the innocent freed.

...

In July 2001, the notoriously tough Massachusetts parole board voted unanimously to grant Gerald Amirault clemency. Although the parole board is not permitted to consider guilt or innocence, its recommendation said: "(I)t is clearly a matter of public knowledge that, at the minimum, real and substantial doubt exists concerning petitioner's conviction."

Immediately after the board's recommendation, The Boston Globe reported that Gov. Jane Swift was leaning toward accepting the board's recommendation and freeing Amirault.

Enter Martha Coakley, Middlesex district attorney. Gerald Amirault had already spent 15 years in prison for crimes he no more committed than anyone reading this column did. But Coakley put on a full court press to keep Amirault in prison simply to further her political ambitions.

By then, every sentient person knew that Amirault was innocent. But instead of saying nothing, Coakley frantically lobbied Gov. Jane Swift to keep him in prison to show that she was a take-no-prisoners prosecutor, who stood up for "the children." As a result of Coakley's efforts -- and her contagious ambition -- Gov. Swift denied Amirault's clemency.

Thanks to Martha Coakley, Gerald Amirault sat in prison for another three years.

And he's still a registered sex offender, commenters tell me, and still confined to house arrest for part of the day, and has to pay for his own GPS monitoring.

But, you know, Coakley's on the side of "the children" or something.

Liberal prosecutors scare me. Because they're worried about the soft-on-crime charge (because they are, in fact, soft-on-crime), they seem to overcompensate in "Worthy Victims" cases -- See the Duke Lacrosse Team. They wind up throwing innocent people in jail just to show how tough-on-non-crimes they are.

This is repulsive.

Incidentally, this idiot Jane Swift deserves just as much scorn for her cowardice. (And she's a Republican -- well, of the Boston variety.)

But Jane Swift isn't on the ballot. This knuckledragging "Tea-Bagger for Jailing the Innocent" Coakley is.

Putting the "Author" In Authoritarian: Simply no discernment -- or, should I say, nuance -- for the critical difference between proper and improper prosecutorial conduct. Between being hard on crime and being hard on citizens.

Last year, Coakley chose to personally argue her state’s case before the Supreme Court in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts. Despite the recent headlines detailing forensic mishaps, fraudulent testimony and crime lab incompetence, Coakley argued that requiring crime lab technicians to be present at trial for questioning by defense attorneys would place too large a burden on prosecutors. The Supreme Court found otherwise, in a decision that had Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia coming down on Coakley’s left.

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Wall Street Journal reporter Dorothy Rabinowitz, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of bogus sex abuse cases, recently told The Boston Globe of the Amirault case, “Martha Coakley was a very, very good soldier who showed she would do anything to preserve this horrendous assault on justice.” According to journalist Mark Pendergrast, Coakley herself prosecuted another questionable child abuse case in 1993, using the same recovered-memory testimony and now-discredited methods of questioning children to convict Ray and Shirley Souza of molesting their grandchildren.

It’s probably not surprising, then, that as DA in Middlesex County, Coakley opposed efforts to create an innocence commission in Massachusetts, calling the idea “backward-looking instead of forward-looking.” Of course, that’s sort of the point — to find people who have been wrongfully convicted. So far, there have been at least 23 exonerations in Massachusetts, including several in Coakley’s home county.

For the record, "innocence commissions" are conservative (assuming they're not shams, and simply tools for the wack-a-doodle left to pardon everyone; which, in practice, they haven't been).

The notion that the state cannot err is... well, let's just say that idea has its roots in a decidedly anti-freedom theory of governance.

Thanks to Craig A. for the original tip, Vic for the Coulter column, and Edward R. for the Politico piece.

posted by Ace at 10:18 AM

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