whoknew
Footballguy
I don't know if we have a general government corruption thread, but this should probably get its own thread anyway. Any southern Californians who know more about this?
Link
In March, Judge Thomas M. Goethals recused the entire office of District Attorney Tony Rackauckas from a murder case “because of repeated government cheating.”
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Laura Fernandez of Yale Law School, who studies prosecutorial misconduct, says it’s amazing that both the sheriff’s office and the DA’s office worked together to cover up the misconduct: “From my perspective,” she says, “what really sets Orange County apart is the massive cover-up by both law enforcement and prosecutors—a cover-up that appears to have risen to the level of perjury and obstruction of justice. Law enforcement officers and prosecutors in Orange County have gone to such lengths to conceal their wide-ranging misconduct that they have effectively turned the criminal justice system on its head: dismissing charges and reducing sentences in extraordinarily serious cases, utterly failing to investigate unsolved crimes and many murders (by informants — in order to prevent that evidence from ever getting to defense lawyers), while simultaneously pushing forward where it would seem to make no sense (except that it conceals more bad acts by the state), as in the case of an innocent 14-year old boy who was wrongfully detained for two years.”
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For a quarter of a century, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD) operated one of the nation’s longest frauds on the criminal-justice system through a secret, computerized records system called TRED.
The few TRED records that have been pried free are a treasure trove of exculpatory evidence hidden from trials that resulted in prosecution victories over hoodwinked defendants. The records also clearly reveal that Southern California law-enforcement officials run a jailhouse-informant program that habitually tramples the constitutional rights of pretrial defendants.
With the aid of the county counsel’s office, OCSD officials employed exaggerations, half-truths, circular logic and legally inane gobbledy#### to keep judges, juries and defense lawyers clueless about TRED since 1990. They’ve even been willing to tell fibs under oath in a death-penalty case.
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It’s far too late for that now. This isn’t a case of a few bad actors. This is systematic corruption involving dozens of police officers and prosecutors that went on for well over two decades. At a minimum, there should be mass firings of cops and disbarments of prosecutors, past and present. A system that still retained some integrity would also have the worst offenders in handcuffs.
Link
In March, Judge Thomas M. Goethals recused the entire office of District Attorney Tony Rackauckas from a murder case “because of repeated government cheating.”
--
Laura Fernandez of Yale Law School, who studies prosecutorial misconduct, says it’s amazing that both the sheriff’s office and the DA’s office worked together to cover up the misconduct: “From my perspective,” she says, “what really sets Orange County apart is the massive cover-up by both law enforcement and prosecutors—a cover-up that appears to have risen to the level of perjury and obstruction of justice. Law enforcement officers and prosecutors in Orange County have gone to such lengths to conceal their wide-ranging misconduct that they have effectively turned the criminal justice system on its head: dismissing charges and reducing sentences in extraordinarily serious cases, utterly failing to investigate unsolved crimes and many murders (by informants — in order to prevent that evidence from ever getting to defense lawyers), while simultaneously pushing forward where it would seem to make no sense (except that it conceals more bad acts by the state), as in the case of an innocent 14-year old boy who was wrongfully detained for two years.”
--
For a quarter of a century, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD) operated one of the nation’s longest frauds on the criminal-justice system through a secret, computerized records system called TRED.
The few TRED records that have been pried free are a treasure trove of exculpatory evidence hidden from trials that resulted in prosecution victories over hoodwinked defendants. The records also clearly reveal that Southern California law-enforcement officials run a jailhouse-informant program that habitually tramples the constitutional rights of pretrial defendants.
With the aid of the county counsel’s office, OCSD officials employed exaggerations, half-truths, circular logic and legally inane gobbledy#### to keep judges, juries and defense lawyers clueless about TRED since 1990. They’ve even been willing to tell fibs under oath in a death-penalty case.
--
It’s far too late for that now. This isn’t a case of a few bad actors. This is systematic corruption involving dozens of police officers and prosecutors that went on for well over two decades. At a minimum, there should be mass firings of cops and disbarments of prosecutors, past and present. A system that still retained some integrity would also have the worst offenders in handcuffs.
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