The Freedom Bulletin

In last week’s Herald, Peter Gelzinis wrote a great column about the death of former Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi (Qaddafi? Kaddafi? However you want to spell it). He contrasted Gadhafi’s brutal death at the hands of an angry mob with the decision of Chief Judge Mark Wolf of Boston’s federal courthouse to throw out the death penalty against convicted spree killer Gary Sampson after a juror lied on her questionnaire.

I agree that no one deserves to die the way Gadhafi did a couple weeks ago. He was captured alive, beaten, dragged, kicked, taunted, verbally abused, shot multiple times, possibly sexually assaulted (warning, link is somewhat graphic), and then his body was displayed in a shopping mall. No matter what Gadhafi did, it isn’t right to treat anyone like this. There are plenty of public figures I strongly dislike, and that I think never deserve to hold any elected office or position of power ever again, but I don’t wish death upon them, let alone a death as barbaric as Gadhafi’s.

“It is appalling that anyone can express joy at the death of a man executed without a fair trial, dragged along the street, paraded on a truck, and displayed to the public in a meat shop,” wrote Raymond Hu in a letter to the editor in the Toronto Star, putting it better than I could. Christopher Hitchens at Slate and Andrew Meldrum at the Global Post make good points about why Gadhafi should have been tried in the International Criminal Court, and Hamid Dabashi at Al Jazeera explains why his body should have been treated with dignity.

I don’t oppose the death penalty, but because it is such a severe and irreversible punishment, it should only be used in as humane a way as possible and after careful, unbiased deliberation. I appreciate that Judge Wolf, knowing that he would elicit outrage from victims’ relatives and the public, made sure to stick to this standard. The rebel fighters who killed Gadhafi did not, and at the absolute least the media should be paying attention to this failure of justice, and an impartial investigation should be conducted.

Yesterday, final arguments took place on Thomas Mortimer’s suppression motion. Mortimer, the Winchester man accused of murdering his mother-in-law Ellen, wife Laura, and children Finn and Charlotte, is trying to get the court to throw out evidence that police seized from his home after entering without a warrant to perform a well-being check.

I couldn’t be in court for yesterday’s hearing because it was the first day of my new job, but according to news reports, Judge Leila Kern indicated that she will probably deny the motion. ”It’s very hard for the court to find that there was no ample evidence that either the entry was OK at the time or there was an inevitability of discovery,” she said, adding that Laura’s concerned sister would have eventually broken into the house and discovered the bodies anyway.

Mortimer’s attorney, Denise Regan, argued that the police and firefighters “had no bad intentions, but they did enter the home. For that reason, their misconduct is severe.” But prosecutor Adrienne Lynch said, ”It would contradict the response of an emergency if they were to do a full investigation before entering the home.”

The judge won’t make her decision official until January 13.

Sources: Winchester Patch and Winchester Star

Remember when I was abruptly forced to stop blogging about the Salvatore DiMasi trial? Well, I am now free to explain why, and also to blog about that case and others that I was not able to. I don’t share a lot of information about myself or my life on this blog, but I feel that writing nothing about the final outcome of a trial that I had covered in detail each day was so out of character for me, and so different from what I would have done if I had any choice in the matter, that I owe my readers an explanation.

Without going into any more detail than I need to, suffice it to say that my former employer, in June, instituted a policy banning all employees from blogging, tweeting, posting, or mentioning online anything about any case that they were handling. I now have a new job that is not as closely related to the topics that I blog about. This means that I will not be able to go to trials as easily, but I will not be restricted from sharing my opinions and information about criminal cases and criminal justice issues, which I think is a good trade-off.

Below are some blog posts that I wrote since June but did not post because I was not allowed to…until now. Obviously, it would have been better if I was able to post these at the time the events in question were actually going on, but I figured better late than never. Here they are, in chronological order:

• Whitey Bulger and Catherine Greig back in Boston
• J.W. Carney is Whitey Bulger’s new lawyer
• Whitey Bulger pleads not guilty
• Catherine Greig’s bail hearing
• Catherine Greig’s bail hearing, part 2
• Aaron Swartz is a hero
• Catherine Greig pleads not guilty
• Sal DiMasi gets 8 years in prison
• Catherine Greig’s trial date set
• Whitey Bulger & Catherine Greig: 2 hearings

Every day on the way to work, I pass not too far from the tent city created by the Occupy Boston protesters. It covers an entire block of the Greenway, a public park, and contains a food tent, logistics tent, legal tent, media tent, Gandhi statue, fire alarm, security volunteers, and of course countless signs and banners. I decided to pay it a visit on a couple of occasions, and it’s an interesting place – except for one person who yelled at me for taking a picture (maybe a bit of hypocrisy given Occupy’s enthusiasm about the First Amendment?).

The residents of the tent city were certainly diverse. There were lots of teenagers and young adults, many middle-aged and older people, and even a little kid or two. Some people fit the grubby hippie stereotype, while others looked like the average person you’d see on the street. On one occasion, a man addressed a large crowd of protesters. On another occasion, people marched with signs and flags down a nearby street. And on another, a large group of people sang while others played drums. Protesters held signs by busy Atlantic Ave during the evening commute, a man on a bicycle distributed apples, staffers of the food tent doled out supper, people took part in religious ceremonies, and at all times various people just milled around, sitting alone or conversing with each other.

It’s hard for me to decide what I think of the Occupy movement, because they don’t have any official leader or official platform. They are generally considered a left-wing movement due to some of their widely held beliefs, such as higher taxes on the rich, forgiving student loans and other debt, health care for all, and a stronger social safety net. But the Occupiers do have some things in common with the Tea Party movement. Neither is fond of the Federal Reserve, and in general both are all about the rights of everyday people and against the status quo and centralized authority, whether that be big banks or big government. I even saw a Gadsden flag, widely regarded as a Tea Party emblem, in the Occupy Boston tent city.

WikiLeaks noted these similarities, tweeting, ”Grass roots Tea Party, Republicans, Libertarians must continue to join #occupy. Keep it central: 99% vs corrupt institutions, patronage” and then added, “#occupy Don’t fall into the trap of more taxes. The security state will just spend it on their pals. We need accountability, local taxation.”

Regardless of what you think of Occupy, it’s never right to argue against a political movement by insulting its members with offensive stereotypes. But that’s what far too many commentators, many of whom I usually agree with, are doing. Howie Carr called them “spoiled rich kids,” and “trust-fund hippies,” and ridiculed their names, ages, hometowns, and occupations. Michael Graham dubbed them “clueless college anti-capitalists” and accused them of “stealing all the soap in the South Station bathrooms.” How exactly do they know these things?

Even if I don’t agree with them 100%, I’m glad that the Occupy movement is around and welcome their contributions to political discourse across the world.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

Check out the Plan to Restore America if you haven’t already. What I love about Ron Paul is that he doesn’t just talk about balanced budgets, freedom, and the Constitution; he actually has has concrete, bold ideas to change America for the better. Paul’s budget plan would…

• Cut $1 trillion in federal spending in one year
• Eliminate the departments of Energy, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, and Interior
• Eliminate the TSA
• End foreign aid
• Repeal the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare)
• Audit the Federal Reserve
• Allow people to opt out of Social Security

None of these things is surprising if you are familiar with Paul and his libertarian brand of Republicanism, but it’s great to see them all spelled out together in one report, with graphs and tables to support them. Bruce Fein wrote a great column explaining the plan.

Congressman Ron Paul, photo by Gage Skidmore

Yet another Republican presidential debate took place tonight, this one in Las Vegas, Nevada. The candidates included Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum. Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman skipped the debate, and the awesome Gary Johnson, libertarian and former New Mexico governor, was left out, as usual. Ron Paul Flix has a roundup of everything Paul said, which I would highly recommend watching.

The low point of the debate, in my opinion, was Santorum’s argument against Cain’s 9-9-9 plan. I’m still not sure exactly what I think of the plan, but Santorum didn’t make a good argument against it. He said that Cain’s plan ”doesn’t have anything that takes care of the families,” such as child tax credits. But this should be an argument in favor of the 9-9-9 plan. First of all, population growth is not a good thing for the environment or for people’s quality of life as natural resources and open spaces become scarcer. How can anyone think it is a good idea to have the population keep growing and growing, as the amount of land stays the same? Plus, to use the tax code to reward people for having children is essentially the same thing as punishing people who do not have children. Taxing people the same, regardless of their marital or parenthood status, is much fairer.

Later, Santorum added, ”The basic building block of society is not the individual, it’s the family.” What a completely wrong idea, and completely contrary to the principle of individual liberty.

On a more positive note, here are my favorite quotes from Paul, who is definitely my favorite of the candidates who got to be in the debate:

“I don’t think that we should even things up by raising taxes.” (on the 9-9-9 plan)

“He asked the question, what are you going to replace the income tax with, and I say nothing, that’s what we should replace it with.”

“If you want better competition, better health care, you should allow the American people to opt out of government medicine. And the way to do this is to not de-emphasize the medical savings account but let people opt out, pay their bills, get back to the doctor-patient relationship.”

“Too long, this country has always put people in groups. They penalize people because they’re in groups, and then they reward people because they’re in groups…We need to see everybody as an individual, and to me, seeing everybody as an individual means their liberties are protected as individuals, and they are treated that way, and they’re never penalized that way. So if you have a free and prosperous society, all of a sudden this group mentality melts away.”

“I think Mr. Cain has blamed the victims. There’s a lot of people who are victims of this business cycle.” (on the Occupy protests)

“Foreign aid, that should be the easiest thing to cut. It’s not authorized in the Constitution that we can take money from you and give it to particular countries around the world…I would cut all foreign aid. I would treat everybody equally and fairly.”

“To cut military spending is a wise thing to do. We would be safer if we weren’t in so many places.”

I just realized I never blogged about the Amanda Knox case…probably because I never followed the trial too closely. Even though it’s been a little while since she won her appeal and returned home to America, I figured I would post my thoughts after reading up on the case.

Knox, an American exchange student, and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were convicted of sexually assaulting and murdering Knox’s roommate, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy. A drifter and drug dealer, Rudy Guede, was also convicted of playing a part in her death; he says he was there but Knox and Sollecito did it.There appeared to be DNA evidence linking Knox and Sollecito to the crime, but it turned out to be contaminated and unreliable. Knox also looked suspicious when she tried to pin the murder on her employer, Patrick Lumumba, who ended up not being at the scene of the crime. And it didn’t help when she initially told police she was present in the apartment when Meredith was killed, but later said she wasn’t. But due to the unreliability of the evidence, an appellate judge and jury overturned the convictions of Knox and Sollecito and set them free.

Andrea Peyser at the New York Post compared Knox to Casey Anthony, saying that both young women were “too pretty to convict.” These two cases do have similarities, the main one in my opinion being that while both defendants lied to investigators and behaved suspiciously in some ways, there just isn’t quite enough evidence to be sure they are guilty. Peyser, who sure seems to be anti-Knox, even admits, ”the truth is murkier than a Florida swamp,” and writes, “it’s never been clear that Guede acted alone.”

Perhaps, but it’s never been clear that Guede didn’t act alone, either. If the truth could go either way, then the legal system needs to err on the side of giving the defendant the benefit of the doubt. Knox was convicted of defamation for her statements about Guede, for which she received credit for time served, just as Anthony was sentenced to time served for misleading investigators about what happened to her daughter, Caylee. They were both freed not for their looks but because there wasn’t sufficient evidence to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. I was happy to see Knox and Sollecito regain their freedom – especially after reading about how horribly Amanda was treated in jail – for the simple reason that no one should have their freedom taken away when there is a pretty good chance they are innocent.