MEAN JUSTICE : A TOWN'S TERROR, A PROSECUTOR'S POWER, A BETRAYAL OF INNOCENCE

Rating:
Summary: Power gone awry
Review: I've been interested in issues of criminal justice, particularly those of the witch hunts of the last several years. You know, there was the McMartin trial, a joke of astronomical proportions. Then there were "recovered memory" cases, and those of the alleged Satanic conspiracies. It seems the Prince of Darkness has emissaries here on earth abducting our kids, eating those he's forced us to abort, and on and on and on. Trouble is, as even senior FBI investigators have admitted, there's no evidence to suggest that these atrocities ever took place. No bodies, no dark rooms, no blood. Hmm. Makes a guy wonder.

Then I talked with an acquaintance who's interested in some of the same subject matter. After our discussion, I looked at Amazon.com and found this volume.

First, allow me to confess that I nearly gave the book four stars. I did so only because there is so much detail as to be almost overwhelming. But then I had to give it five (or more, if it were possible!) The detail is more than necessary for reasons which follow.

The text is ostensibly about the trial of Pat Dunn. He was a former high school principal whose wife died under mysterious circumstances. The prosecutors in Kern County, California, were so zealous that they performed what was the TRUE subject of the book: prosecutorial misconduct. That is, indeed, where the subject digressed from merely Pat Dunn. It seems the law enforcement apparatus of that county has a reputation for being "tough on crime." So tough, alas, that there were countless people going to jail. First that was the massive--yes, Satanic Conspiracy trial. Hundreds were sent to jail for a long, long time. The prosecution used dubious questioning tactics of children, social workers who should have been in the local home for the bewildered--again, on and on. Then a young black athlete was convicted under equally dubious circumstances. Then others. I could get tired of putting, "on and on" here so assume it's a phrase I'd use more if I even had to.

By the way, most of those convictions had been overturned; all, so far, except Pat Dunn's, despite the lack of any evidence to convince a sane court of his guilt.

Then there's the issue(s) of the convicted criminals whom the prosecutors made deals with to convict the accused--while the prosecutors kept details of such deals out of views of the defense and the juries. (I add something the book barely mentioned: if there are obviously innocent people in prison because of prosecutors more intent on winning then on finding the truth, then there are the guilty who are still among us! That alone is a criminal offense for which the prosecutors should be prosecuted!)

Among the conclusions of the book is that such misconduct seems to be happening all over the US. Indeed, the accused are losing their right to appeal; in G.W. Bush's Texas, the state with the greatest number of executions, exculpatory evidence was not permitted after a limited time so that evidence enough to free a convicted murderer could no longer be presented as evidence. So an obviously innocent men was put to death.

There's so much in the book I'm not even sure where to go with it. The text certainly affirms my acquaintance's observation that probably 15 percent in prison haven't done anything. (That proportion is suggested by the book too to apply to the death penalty. Many on death row have been freed over the last few years due to the misconduct of the prosecutors and the courts. And that doesn't even include the many whom the state has put to death who were not guilty.)

Who is criminal given those stats?

The second of the book's appendices consists of several pages of convictions obtained through the prosecutorial misconduct that is the real subject of the book. That itself is an eye-opener. (The first appendix, incidentally, is a list of the convictions and how many are still in prison after retrials or the cases having been thrown out in Kern County itself--many after the accused have spent incredible times in prison after bogus convictions. That information alone should cause the impeachment or resignation, and conviction of those parties to the courts of that county!)

The author concludes that the system is rigged to sustain itself. Try to find courts who've overturned convictions even when the prosecutor was exposed as a fraud who should have been jailed for his/her performance in the trial. They exist but they're few and far between.

To me the point of the book is that there MUST be a price to pay for the prosecutors and even judges for the sort of misconduct the book so amply demonstrates. I mean, these people are supposed to be public servants. Instead, they're public menaces, making a sham out of anything remotely "just." (Ironically, the Kern County DA, who claims to be a Republican, is more akin to a Soviet bureaucrat than most in positions such as his!) I think, in fact, that the most severe punishments should be reserved for those who abuse their authority like those described by the book.

Read this important book and make your own decisions as to how to punish these criminals, who are more a "lead" in the book than Pat Dunn. But be prepared to have your assumptions of American criminal "justice" challenged.

Rating:
Summary: Scare You To Death ! It Should !
Review: Several lessons I learned from Edward Humes' brilliant new book, "Mean Justice": 1) When they say, "Whatever you say, can and will be used against you in a court of law", they really mean it - literally! 2)You can save yourself tens of thousands of dollars in expert legal fees, and possibly keep yourself out of court, out of prison, and off death row if you simply Do Not Talk To The Police If There Is The Slightest Chance You Might Be A Suspect. The only four words you should ever say, if it looks like the police have their eye on you, are: "I Want A Lawyer". Mr. Humes has really outdone himself on this one. It is brilliant, incisive, appropriately detailed, and an absolute heartbreaker. Pity poor Pat Dunn and the other innocents on death row and doing time due to prosecutorial viciousness and community hysteria. I can understand incompetence, laziness, mistaken beliefs, and even wrongheadedness in prosecutors. What I'll never understand is continued deadly persecution long after the actual truth is known. What is that about? Maybe it's called evil. God help the community of Bakersfield and Kern County Calif. God help the appeals courts. God help the Supreme Court. And God help us all.

Rating:
Summary: Injustice in a California town
Review: True crime writer Edward Humes (Mississippi Mud 1994, et al) takes apart the criminal justice system in Bakersfield, California and Kern County. The main story is about Pat Dunn, convicted in 1993 of murdering his wife for her money. The evidence was slight and relied heavily on a heroin addict's testimony, a career criminal who had gotten a deal to testify. Humes makes a good case for Dunn's innocence.

Humes also devotes some serious space to some notorious child molestation/satanic abuse cases prosecuted in Kern County during the eighties and nineties. It's the Little Rascals and McMartin all over again, except worse and prior. There's the usual brainwashing of the children by social workers to get them to tell horrific tales, and a criminal justice system out to satisfy the lust of the mob at any cost. This is very readable and Humes pulls no punches when it comes to going after the prosecutors. It's an irony of our criminal justice system that sometimes in places like this there's a public so quick to convict that they end up sending innocent people to jail, while in other places-I'm thinking of Houston, Texas and the case of Cullen Davis (see Final Justice: The True Story of the Richest Man Ever Tried for Murder (1993) by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith) and of Los Angeles with you know who-we get juries that will not convict regardless of the evidence. Humes is doing the good people of Bakersfield a favor in this book, although I doubt if most of them realize it, because if the system gets too corrupt, the juries will eventually be like the jury that tried O.J.: they'll put the system on trial instead of the defendant and deliver a verdict against it.

This is top drawer true crime written by one the best in the business. In his ability to involve the reader with the story, he's on a par with Ann Rule. In his desire to expose injustice, Humes is like "Sixty Minutes" turboed.