Editorial: The empire strikes back — against progressive prosecutors
One of the most disturbing developments in the justice system in the U.S. in the past couple of decades has been the number of cases where prosecutors have decided not to prosecute cases in which they think that the evidence is not strong enough to convict. In other words, the government just gives up — sometimes even going so far as to drop the case once they can’t prove the person was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And they’re not just talking about cases in which the person was later acquitted.
For example, the U.S. government lost one of its most famous criminal cases, that of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, in a federal court jury following a five-week trial.
The trial, which lasted just over two weeks, showed that although the government’s case was strong, there was enough doubt in the jury’s mind to give the defendant, Timothy McVeigh, a “not guilty” verdict.
McVeigh was tried in 1995 as part of the federal government’s bombing investigation of the OK-City Federal Building, which housed the U.S. Branch of the World Trade Organization, and the federal prosecutor, Stephen J. Ediger, was later found to have given prejudicial information to a defense attorney who, in turn, fed this info to the jury. (See: “Oklahoma City prosecutors lost the key evidence in bombing trial,” on Yahoo.com, December 13, 2012.) McVeigh was later sentenced to death.
The Justice Department tried and convicted the co-conspirator (and former Oklahoma City Police Chief, William Higgins), Timothy McVeigh, who was caught in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, OK, on April 19, 1995. He was sentenced to death. Photo: AP; Wikimedia Commons
In 2011, at the age of 62, James McJunkin, the defendant who was convicted in 2003 for killing three people in a case where he was arrested while armed with a hunting bow in Alabama, was found to have lied about his military service in his trial testimony, and to have committed perjury when he lied under oath in an earlier trial about having served with
