Rating: 
Summary: You Think Prosecutors Are After Criminals. Think Again!
Review: This rather unassuming book is one of great import. When the same book is endorsed by Milton Friedman and Alan Dershowitz on the same page, it is one not to be taken lightly.The book started off with the cornerstone pieces of the Anglo-Saxon law - mens rea (criminal intent), non-retroactiveness of new laws, presumption of innocence until proven guilty, sanctity of attorney-client privilege, property rights, and went on to cite laws and legal cases, some of the very high-profile, that helped chip away the these cornerstone pieces and made the law no longer a guarantor of constitutional rights. This dangerous practice of eroding the "Right of the Englishman" is, according to the authors, a result of well-intended, but poorly thought-out legislation and over zealous government prosecutors, who were driven by political ambition, pressure of revenue and even personal enrichment. It is frightening development. It is hard to believe that this country has allowed its cherished legal system to deteriorate to one that, in essence, is no different than that of a police state - one that prosecutors could at will use the full force of the government to break any individual, sometimes by threats, lies and confiscations. Most people will dismiss this notion as alarmist, until they read what this book has explained and chronicled. After 9/11, the Ashcroft regime seeks to greatly enlarge federal powers to fight terrorism, but that inevitably be at the expense of our cherished civil liberty. We should all be vigilant about what is being done. History has taught us that some really bad things that are done with good intentions are very, very hard to undo. Reading this book forces me to revise my opinion on those who had been vilified by the prosecutors and the media, like Charles Keating, Jr. Leona Hemsley and Michael Milken; as well it dims the much-heralded Rudolph Giuliani legacy. It also reconfirms that damages done by FDR's New Deal - the emergence of the administrative state, and his Court-packing initiative, not to speak of the unleashing of the welfare state. The presentation of the book, unfortunately, seems to lack clarity and force, and the organization is somewhat loose. There are anecdotes abound, but they are not backed by statistics, and the reader has no idea if the outrageous prosecutorial excesses are 10% of the cases, 1%, or less. The book is otherwise very readable. I will recommend this book if only for the seriousness of the subject matter.
Rating:
Summary: Extraordinarily Important Topic - wish it was a better book
Review: This should be a must-read for every conservative or liberal - the fundamental erosion of civil liberties and private property and the surreptitious rewriting of the contract between the government and the governed should scare the bejesus out of everyone across the political spectrum. Unfortunately, while there is an important and powerful book hidden in this prose, the editing is so abysmal that it struggles to break free. Digressions about British coal miners, russian show trials, american zoning, etc, that might have been beneficial if limited to a line or two, are allowed to go on for pages, and distract the reader from the central argument. Although I agree completely with the authors, I found myself able to put the book down repeatedly out of frustration over their meandering style. Grade A for effort, A+ for importance, and a rueful B- for accomplishment
Rating: 
Summary: Belated awareness
Review: This would have been a more timely book 15 years ago, but it is badly out of date. Its revelations have been well-known to civil libertarians for decades. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is what it reveals of how insulated some members of the Establishment can be, that it should take them so long to begin to catch on to what is going on in this country. Unfortunately, they are at the early stages of awareness. The problems they discuss are far, far worse than they appear to realize. Their awareness would benefit from getting on the Internet and reading some of the enormous flood of reports on abuses and usurpations of power at all levels of government. We are seeing a breakdown of our legal institutions, a crisis of legitimacy that will eventually affect all of us in profound ways.
Rating: 
Summary: Tragically Truthful
Review: Though I am not an attorney I have several friends who are attorneys. One of them gave me a copy of this wonderful book by Roberts and Stratton three weeks ago. After looking at the book for two weeks I picked it up and read it it two sessions. There are enough facts in the book that I am already familiar with to know in my gut that these two fellows are right on target. Their research and conclusions are troubling, but true. It takes a real piece of work to get men as diverse as Alan Dershowitz, Gordon Liddy and Milton Friedman to recommend a work like this. But this book is a piece of work, the most important book I've read this year and the Christmas present I plan on giving my thinking friends.
Rating:
Summary: Not a masterpiece, but a necessary read
Review: Though it's by no means an epic political treatise, "The Tyranny Of Good Intentions" is still a real eye-opener for those who think the government is always looking out for its citizens' best interests. Written in a straightforward style befitting its status as an entry-level text, "The Tyranny Of Good Intentions" catalogues a seemingly endless succession of governmental violations of the rights it's supposed to be protecting. Roberts is an occasional contributor to the hardcore libertarian website lewrockwell.com, and he and Stratton write with the same obvious devotion to preserving freedom that Roberts brings to that site. Their thesis is rather simple, but extremely important: Roberts and Stratton believe that the Rights of Englishmen, which have long been assumed to provide Americans a guarantee against governmental oppression, are being steadily eroded by an increasing emphasis on Benthamite utilitarianism. This shift in priorities, they say, puts us all in danger as increasingly totalitarian measures are enacted to advance such utopian crusades as the war on drugs and radical environmentalism. The authors bring a libertarian emphasis on property rights to their writing, and they dilligently catalogue how these rights are violated by an overzealous and often unscrupulous bureaucracy. In an especially ominous development, they say, government bureacrats have actually assumed the power of making laws themselves, bypassing the restraints of our legislative process entirely. As the law has ceased to be a means for protecting people from the government, the results have become disastrous for law-abiding Americans. The war on corporate crime has produced massive violations of attorney-client privilege, environmentalism has destroyed businesses that had nothing to do with pollution, and the war on drugs has led to outright confiscation of innocent people's property on a grand scale. Everywhere, traditional protections like the presumption of innocence and the prohibitions on retroactive laws and crimes without intent have fallen by the wayside. And accountability is absent, as there's nowhere to appeal for protection from the government. Although "The Tyranny Of Good Intentions" can get rather depressing, it's still obligatory for all those interested in freedom and how governments tend to restrict rather than expand it. If you really want a scholarly and important work of libertarian theory, you should check out Murray Rothbard's "For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto" (which I'm still working my way through at the moment). That said, this book is a useful companion piece demonstrating how all Americans are endangered when Rothbard's principles are ignored by power-hungry governments. Even if, as the book's title suggests, the wars on drugs, pollution, and corporate crime are motivated by good intentions, we should all question whether these intentions should be entrusted to the federal government.
Rating: 
Summary: Why do the non-heathens rage?
Review: [.... The Tyranny of Good Intentions discusses, or at least alludes to, some of the most important issues about democracy. . Public policy, evolutionary biology, economics, and management theorists, as well as ethicists, are all coming to appreciate that one of the most critical factors in a community is the degree of trust among its members. Altruism turns out to be common in many facets of life. ... I agree with the authors' nominal thesis that denying groups civil liberties and a meaningful franchise leads to tyranny. Paternalism has nearly always failed to prevent tyranny. So, I found myself reading a book I thought was raising many of the most important questions, written by authors who seemed to be well placed to make a dramatic fusion of old-style public choice theory with the modern findings about trust, and sounding a clarion call for liberty, which is my favorite overture. ... The first problem was the title; the authors aren't serious about the phrase "good intentions." Their opponents are villains, "evil incarnate." The second problem also involves the title; there is little or nothing worthy of the label "tyranny" discussed here. Overwhelmingly, the book protests white-collar crime cases against super elite Americans, environmental regulations, and the civil rights laws. The third problem is that the book ignores all of the difficult issues because it assumes away all the tensions and tradeoffs in public policy. ... Because they argue that denying these rights leads to tyranny, I waited for them to describe any of the four classic proofs from English history of this thesis. ...An explosive mixture of hate, bigotry, and fear led to periodic savagery and pervasive malign neglect and exploitation. Millions of people died and hundreds of millions of people lost their liberties due to these acts of tyranny. The authors say not a word about them. .. Why the same failure to use these terrible acts by America, which show that a denial of individual rights leads to tyranny? Their inclusion would falsify the authors' real views, that our super elites (who are exemplary) are tyrannized while "the other" is the problem. ..The irony is that this book teaches us almost nothing about tyranny through what it says, but much about tyranny through what it omits. England and the U.S. prove that nations can value freedom while enslaving others. It was not an accident that the word "slave" was not in our Constitution. The exclusion of the victim from the document made it easier to continue to tyrannize blacks. Similarly, English law simply ignored slavery in the colonies.5 Roberts and Stratton have unintentionally illustrated how real tyrannies are maintained. The victims disappear from the tyrants' histories. The fifth problem is that the book does not show that tyranny, in Professor Dershowitz's phrase, "is not a left-right issue." The authors' villains are on the left, their heroes on the right. The heroic protector of civil liberties was - J. Edgar Hoover. Franklin Roosevelt and Chief Justice Warren are villains. The book is wholly one-sided in other ways. For example, prosecutors are evil. Conclusory statements by defense counsel are treated not as advocacy, but as ultimate fact (requiring neither supporting analysis nor citation). There are no complex human beings in this book, only cartoon caricatures drawn with chunky crayons.6 [end page 227] So, how well do they deal with the important questions their book at least implicitly raises? As I will show, very poorly by any standard of scholarship. They aren't clear in their analysis, or rigorous, and they are relentlessly one-sided. Many of their facts are wrong and they rarely provide citations. They rely on ad hominem attacks on their foes and rhetoric replaces reason. Government workers do not have good intentions; the authors repeatedly liken them to Nazis. Thus, the book implicitly raises another question. Why, at their very moment of triumph, is the raging right becoming overtly hostile to our nation's government? Why do the non-heathens rage? Ironically, Mr. Roberts used to claim that the central problem in America was such pessimism and hostility towards America on the part of leftist elites (a "denunciatory ethic"7). The claim that the government is filled with Nazis is important. Attitudes like this lead to disturbed persons deciding that it would be a good thing to murder a couple hundred strangers, including their children in a day care center, because they work for the federal government in Oklahoma City. Instead of wanting to build trust between the public and government workers, the authors believe that the only hope for escape from our tyrannical government is the complete destruction of such trust. As the saying goes, if we believe absurdities, we will commit atrocities.<..I use the word in its conventional senses as involving either (or both) .. The authors' love of liberty doesn't extend to gays. Though they quote with approval the common law's enshrinement of a man's home as his castle (Id., 12), they think it a good thing to arrest gay adults engaging in consensual sex in the privacy of their own homes..
Rating:
Summary: Why do the non-heathens rage?
Review: [.... The Tyranny of Good Intentions discusses, or at least alludes to, some of the most important issues about democracy. . Public policy, evolutionary biology, economics, and management theorists, as well as ethicists, are all coming to appreciate that one of the most critical factors in a community is the degree of trust among its members. Altruism turns out to be common in many facets of life. ... I agree with the authors' nominal thesis that denying groups civil liberties and a meaningful franchise leads to tyranny. Paternalism has nearly always failed to prevent tyranny. So, I found myself reading a book I thought was raising many of the most important questions, written by authors who seemed to be well placed to make a dramatic fusion of old-style public choice theory with the modern findings about trust, and sounding a clarion call for liberty, which is my favorite overture. ... The first problem was the title; the authors aren't serious about the phrase "good intentions." Their opponents are villains, "evil incarnate." The second problem also involves the title; there is little or nothing worthy of the label "tyranny" discussed here. Overwhelmingly, the book protests white-collar crime cases against super elite Americans, environmental regulations, and the civil rights laws. The third problem is that the book ignores all of the difficult issues because it assumes away all the tensions and tradeoffs in public policy. ... Because they argue that denying these rights leads to tyranny, I waited for them to describe any of the four classic proofs from English history of this thesis. ...An explosive mixture of hate, bigotry, and fear led to periodic savagery and pervasive malign neglect and exploitation. Millions of people died and hundreds of millions of people lost their liberties due to these acts of tyranny. The authors say not a word about them. .. Why the same failure to use these terrible acts by America, which show that a denial of individual rights leads to tyranny? Their inclusion would falsify the authors' real views, that our super elites (who are exemplary) are tyrannized while "the other" is the problem. ..The irony is that this book teaches us almost nothing about tyranny through what it says, but much about tyranny through what it omits. England and the U.S. prove that nations can value freedom while enslaving others. It was not an accident that the word "slave" was not in our Constitution. The exclusion of the victim from the document made it easier to continue to tyrannize blacks. Similarly, English law simply ignored slavery in the colonies.5 Roberts and Stratton have unintentionally illustrated how real tyrannies are maintained. The victims disappear from the tyrants' histories. The fifth problem is that the book does not show that tyranny, in Professor Dershowitz's phrase, "is not a left-right issue." The authors' villains are on the left, their heroes on the right. The heroic protector of civil liberties was - J. Edgar Hoover. Franklin Roosevelt and Chief Justice Warren are villains. The book is wholly one-sided in other ways. For example, prosecutors are evil. Conclusory statements by defense counsel are treated not as advocacy, but as ultimate fact (requiring neither supporting analysis nor citation). There are no complex human beings in this book, only cartoon caricatures drawn with chunky crayons.6 [end page 227] So, how well do they deal with the important questions their book at least implicitly raises? As I will show, very poorly by any standard of scholarship. They aren't clear in their analysis, or rigorous, and they are relentlessly one-sided. Many of their facts are wrong and they rarely provide citations. They rely on ad hominem attacks on their foes and rhetoric replaces reason. Government workers do not have good intentions; the authors repeatedly liken them to Nazis. Thus, the book implicitly raises another question. Why, at their very moment of triumph, is the raging right becoming overtly hostile to our nation's government? Why do the non-heathens rage? Ironically, Mr. Roberts used to claim that the central problem in America was such pessimism and hostility towards America on the part of leftist elites (a "denunciatory ethic"7). The claim that the government is filled with Nazis is important. Attitudes like this lead to disturbed persons deciding that it would be a good thing to murder a couple hundred strangers, including their children in a day care center, because they work for the federal government in Oklahoma City. Instead of wanting to build trust between the public and government workers, the authors believe that the only hope for escape from our tyrannical government is the complete destruction of such trust. As the saying goes, if we believe absurdities, we will commit atrocities.<..I use the word in its conventional senses as involving either (or both) .. The authors' love of liberty doesn't extend to gays. Though they quote with approval the common law's enshrinement of a man's home as his castle (Id., 12), they think it a good thing to arrest gay adults engaging in consensual sex in the privacy of their own homes..
Rating:
Summary: An Indictment of the Current Legal State of Affairs
Review: ~The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice~ is a solid critique of our nation's criminal justice system, which has strayed egregiously from its fundamentals and is continuously assailing the Rights of the Englishmen and the constitutional protections of our citizenry. "Good intentions have transformed law," note the authors, "from a shield for the innocent to a weapon used by the police. Having lost the law, we have acquired tyranny." With increasing lawlessness, the nefarious tactics of law enforcement are increasingly becoming indistinguishable from those of the "criminal underworld." The Anglo-American common law tradition is losing ground to zealous prosecutors, insensitive regulators, and overly ambitious law enforcement. They are increasingly blinded by ambition and lacking any ethical sense of fairness and integrity as many seldom afford dignity or concern for those they investigate.
The onset of the book highlights the cherished Rights of the Englishmen and offers a little legal history and some jurisprudence lessons. Innocent people are increasingly caught up in a bureaucratic web where vindictive prosecutors and uncaring bureaucrats destroy lives and livelihoods. As the authors make clear, the reason for abuses which are prevalent perhaps owes to a loss of the sense of justice. "The function of justice is to serve truth." When the quest for truth is lost, the focus on justice is dispensed with, and ambition of bureaucrats and prosecutors runs roughshod over the rights of the accused. In earlier times, the honor of the legal profession compelled prosecutors to have the utmost respect for the individual: "They respected people's reputations, and English judges wanted no innocent blood on their conscience... Their abhorrence of convicting the innocent was reinforced by religious beliefs of the age, such as accountability before God and the afterlife, and bad experiences with arbitrary judicial practices, such as Star Chamber proceedings in which due process and evidentiary standards were absent." In more recent times, prosecutors "will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted," notes Robert Jackson in 1940. This U.S. Attorney General and later Supreme Court Justice offered a ubiquitous warning of the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: "With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least some technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime... it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm-in which prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of prosecuting power lies." The "real crime becomes that of being unpopular... being attached to the wrong political views" or just simply being "obnoxious" to the prosecutor. The authors too make it clear the task of the prosecutors is not to go on "fishing expeditions" or of drawing family, friends and colleagues of the accused into a web of harassment and accusations or charges. The foremost aim of the justice system was the search for truth, and it was pursued alongside the sacrosanct notion of protecting at all times the rights and dignity of the accused or the suspect of an investigation. Those that stand accused should always be given the presumption of innocence. Though, naive people in custodial interrogation are often compelled to incriminate themselves, by zealous prosecutors who make their case appear so ironclad, they have no choice. Today, as Jackson and Stratton make clear, many prosecutors are not above evidence tampering or planting, instigating instead of investigating, crafting circumstantial evidence by continual manipulation of a suspect, egregious psychological intimidation, and setting up stings to entrap suspects. The late J. Edgar Hoover considered such nefarious tactics and entrapment immoral, particularly when suspects or bystanders have no prior criminal history. For the capricious prosecutor who cares only about racking up statistics, the ends justify the means. Thus, using Stalinist tactics such as those used in the case of Nicholas Bukarin is not out of the question.
Capricious asset forfeiture laws and arbitrary regulatory takings in some states encroach upon property rights. It allows police seizure of property in some cases with mere probable cause and destroying any semblance of due process. Many asset forfeiture pursuits pay little regard to the guilt or innocence of parties. Forfeiture laws allow law enforcement agencies to utilize and divvy up seized assets. Horrendous abuses where drug stings or busts transpire with third parties on someone's property have been used to justify seizure of that property even in such cases, where the owner has no involvement whatsoever or perhaps he merely reported it to authorities. The spoils of forfeited assets are often used to finance law enforcement and regulatory agencies. Budget cuts, spending freezes, and imprudent lawmakers compel some agencies to financially sustain more of their activities not only by fines but also heavy forfeitures. This only acts as an incentive for more abuse. In California, for example, luxurious mansions have been forfeited and turned into posh police precincts. The incentives for forfeiture abuse are omnipresent.
Roberts and Stratton make light of Crimes without Intent where the mens rea (intent) requirement is being vanquished. "Foremost among the rights of Englishmen is the requirement that no one can be prosecuted for a crime without evidence that a crime has occurred and evidence that links the accused to the crime" beyond a reasonable doubt. These protections serve to guard against unintended or accidental crimes. Oliver Wendell Holmes observed "even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked." Accidents are now being criminalized by zealous regulators and prosecutors. The authors cite the Exxon Valdez tanker spill case where the rule of law is trumped. In this case, a liability for a civil wrong is criminalized effectively blurring the line between civil and criminal law. This is a most dangerous precedent and any negligence on the part of Exxon should not be maligned as a criminal act since there was no intent to deliberately pollute the waters. Exxon didn't self-consciously set out to destroy its own ship and had nothing to gain by such an act. A non-existent conspiracy on the part of Exxon to pollute the Prince William Sound was contrived. Many other startling cases are cited. Bills of attainder and ex post facto laws are banned explicitly in our Constitution, but it hasn't stopped the government from utilizing such odious devices in indictments.
A chapter on Retroactive Law makes light of laws passed after the fact that criminalize or make civil liabilities out of actions that transpired long before they were illegal. Other chapters surmise the attack on cherished legal protection, the demise of attorney-client privilege where the government seeks to turn defense counsels into government spies. Francis Bacon declared that "the greatest trust between men is the trust of giving counsel." If this unassailable right is lost, defense counsels will be scarcely discernible from impotent Soviet public defenders who were little more than handmaids of the prosecutors. Forfeiting Justice is another ominous chapter; and it recants a tale of greedy government officials seeking to foreclose on a desirable private beachfront property surrounded by a national park. The owner objected to selling his property. Trying to implicate a multimillionaire beach property owner, they contrived probable cause and lead to a multi-agency no-knock SWAT operation into Donald Scott's house. Alarmed by the noise, Scott arose with a gun in hand in self-defense and was promptly shot dead. That warrant was his death warrant. A chapter entitled Ambition over Justice cites numerous examples of prosecutorial and police misconduct. It also makes light of how ethics are frequently lost today. J. Edgar Hoover found sting operations to be morally repugnant particularly those that sought to set snares and entrapments for people (especially hapless innocents with no prior history of involvement in such crimes.) His concern was that law enforcement making use of the nefarious methods of the underworld would only act to corrupt the law and hurt the innocent. Attempting to entrap or entice a suspect to commit an unrelated crime is common. Efforts to pile charges on a suspect through sting operations can give zealous prosecutors ammunition to intimidate suspect and elicit a trumped up plea bargain. The use of the testimony of police informants and ruses who may themselves be seeking to avoid prosecution presents credibility problems as well. Some informants are driven by sense of self-importance and those that simply want to be utilized again by police may act deceptively to incriminate suspects.
Abdicating Legislative Power makes light of stunning abrogation of Congressional responsibility in recent decades. The authors bear out that Congress should not be able to delegate away its powers, with "all legislative powers" vested in elected representatives. The ancient Anglo-Saxon legal maxim Delegata potestas non potest delagari ("a delegated power cannot itself be delegated") is violated in such instances. The purpose is to maintain accountability amongst lawmakers and keep them amenable to the people. Yet the federal regulatory state has countless unaccountable agencies that create laws, execute them, and adjudicate over violations. Having an agency that is judge, jury and executioner is against every principle of free constitutional government, separation of powers and federalism. Administrative courts are little more than kangaroo courts of the bureaucracies. A convicted defendant can defer a judgment to the independent federal judiciary, but most federal judges sustain the administrative judgments ostensibly since they lack "expertise."
There are still more chapters. I've sketched a cursory synopsis of this book in hopes of capturing the gravity of the current crisis and the breadth of this work that Stratton and Roberts have produced. This book is succinct, yet multi-faceted, and highly recommended not just for aspiring jurists but anyone interested in preserving our Anglo-American common law tradition. Our cherished constitutional protections may be egregiously imperiled and vanquished if abuses go unabated and reforms are not put in place. This book is a summons for concerned citizens, legislators, and yes even government attorneys of integrity to act to uphold and restore our cherished legal protections to their proper standing. This book is more a diagnosis only offers a few solutions without much detail. As an aside, Charles Colson has offered prescriptive wisdom on possible legal reforms, establishing restorative justice, and doing away with our modern Pharisaic system of justice.
Roberts is a journalist, economist, and a former official with the Reagan administration. He is a member of the Virginia and D.C. bar and has taught at Georgetown Law. Stratton and Roberts offer meaningful prospects for reform-with a sigh at the perils of ignoring the tyranny of good intentions that has crept upon us. Moreover, preserving a fair, judicious and equitable system of criminal justice is not a conservative, liberal or even libertarian cause. This book has not surprisingly educed praise from all corners of the political spectrum from right to left-including that of G. Gordon Liddy, Milton Friedman, and Alan Dershowitz.
"Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is a force, like fire: a dangerous servant and a terrible master." -George Washington
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