Blog Introduction: SPOTLIGHT ON INJUSTICE IN THE U.S. DOJ

This Blog is focused on Injustice perpetrated by the U.S. Department of Justice and other arms of law enforcement that overreach or abuse their positions of power and trust. While many officers of the law seek to perform an honest job for the greater good, this Blog is not about those decent individuals.



Rather, we seek to spotlight a darker side of Federal law enforcement in which we can see a pattern of abuse by some federal prosecutors who use dishonest, unfair and sometimes illegal tactics to win at all costs and advance their careers. Too many of such prosecutors have been known to hide exculpatory evidence, lie and mislead federal judges and juries, pressure their witnesses to twist testimony beyond any resemblance of the truth, intimidate defense witnesses from coming forward, conspire with others in law enforcement to present misleading testimony in trials, coerce other witnesses with improper tactics to obtain misleading testimony and otherwise obstruct justice.


Since no one usually prosecutes these prosecutors for their misconduct, they get away with the injustice that they shepherd through an accommodating legal system. Meanwhile, the lives that these unchecked prosecutors terrorize never fully recover. By way of example, if we examine the consequences for prosecutors who obtained wrongful convictions through misconduct in the Innocence Project, the Project's sponsors, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, reported that such prosecutors are almost never punished for their role in injustice. As other examples, the case involving KPMG tax accountants had Federal Judge Kaplan reporting that federal prosecutors were "economical with the truth" in statements made to the judge, yet such lying went unpunished. An ordinary citizen faces up to five years in prison for such conduct. Chief Judge Wolf in Massachusetts was so disturbed by a pattern of misconduct by Federal prosecutors that he complained in a letter the U.S. Attorney General that the Justice "Department's failure to be candid and consistent with the Court has become disturbingly common in the District of Massachusetts." Martha Stewart and Lil' Kim each lost a year of their lives to prison and home confinement for a supposed lack of candor during government investigations. Meanwhile, Mike Nifong, who misled the judge about exculpatory evidence he tried to suppress in the Duke Lacrosse case, was sentenced to just one day in jail for lying to the Court. This eggregious double standard is not justice.


Something is very wrong when those responsible for enforcing our laws are not held accountable for abiding by those same laws. When federal or other prosecutors are free to break laws with no more than a slap on the hand while prosecuting our citizens, a stealth but lethal cancer begins to grow within our justice system, and it will tyrannize and terrorize those whom the justice system is suppose to serve.


We look forward to comments from those who want to share their experiences of coerced plea bargains of the innocent, wrongful convictions and any other form of unjust treatment by our system of justice. While we encourage anonymous and pseudonym posts for obvious reasons, we only ask that you otherwise be as honest as possible in describing your encounters with injustice, without giving up details that would reveal your identity, if you fear retaliation by those in position to do so.

Highly recommended reading:

Harvey Silverglate, "Three Felonies a Day, How the Feds Target the Innocent;" Encounter Books; 2009; available on Amazon.

Barry Scheck and Peter Neufield, "Actual Innocence;" New American Library; available on Amazon.