One of the comments I heard concerning the events in the New York judicial system was made by constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University, that he was disappointed to see the New York legal system that had produced Judges Learned Hand, Benjamin Cardozo and Robert H. Jackson had fallen so low. It struck a chord. All of these justices had seen the protection of defendants’ civil rights against the power of the state as a preeminent duty of the courts.
Jackson served as U.S. solicitor general, U.S. attorney general, and an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (nominated by Franklin Roosevelt), the only person to have held all three offices. Jackson was also the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. He dissented in the Korematsu decision allowing internment of the Japanese during World War II, which ranks with Plessey vs. Ferguson (separate but equal) as a stain on the Supreme Court, thereby joining the Great Dissenter, John Marshal Harlan, who dissented in Plessey.
As a prosecutor, Jackson said: “With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a 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 and then looking for the man who has committed it, 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;” and, “The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice.”
It is truly sad that both Ms. (Letitia) James and Mr. (Alvin) Bragg, with the assistance of the New York judiciary, have chosen to do exactly what Justice Jackson correctly described as odious.
Imagine the reaction of the tens of millions of Donald Trump supporters, if you will, when the New York Court of Appeals (its Supreme Court) or the U.S. Supreme Court rule two, three or more years from now, that Judge (Juan) Merchan erred in his legal and evidentiary rulings and his instructions to the jury, as well, in denying Trump’s motions to dismiss, and they set aside the conviction.
It is hard to imagine how our friends on the left can justify this and the damage that will have been done to our Republic. It is also hard to imagine how they distinguish what happened here from the non-prosecution of Hillary Clinton when her campaign recorded the Jones Day legal bills, which included the payment for the Steele dossier, as legal expenses, or the “Russian disinformation letter” about the Hunter Biden laptop, created by the Joe Biden campaign when they knew the letter was a lie, as did the FBI. Starting with the Hillary campaign, the Democrat Party has done and continues to do irreparable damage to our republic.
Not to mention the Biden Administration’s refusal to enforce our immigration laws, and lying about it, and its continuing forgiveness of student loan debt in the face of a SCOTUS decision that Congress had not given him that authority. These are the actions of an authoritarian.
Stephen B. Maseda
Santa Clarita