Home » Not So Fast! \ Tags: capitalism, criminal justice, Law, Liberty
Federal Criminal Law: How the Government Fights Capitalism
Last weekend, I visited a young woman in Charlotte, North Carolina, once a successful real estate attorney, but now facing the prospect of spending the rest of her life in federal prison. The young woman is very pleasant, not one who a visitor might think is a criminal “kingpin” who federal prosecutors want to serve more time than often is dished out to murderers and rapists.
Last Saturday was July 4, a day in which Americans celebrate the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. However, in the centuries since Thomas Jefferson penned those wonderful words of freedom, the United States of America has embraced a system of criminal law that King George himself would have decried as tyrannical and unfit for any Englishman.
As I investigated her case, I came to realize that not only is this woman not a criminal, but that she was railroaded into a conviction. This hardly is unusual today, and because many Americans have lost their capacity for outrage or are likely to believe whatever prosecutors declare to be true, most people are not going to share my point of view on this or any other federal criminal case.
I won’t go into the details of this particular case except to say that as one who has devoted much of his research and writing time over the past seven years to the subject of federal criminal law, even I am shocked at what the prosecutor was able to do. She secured the services of a competent attorney for her sentencing hearing and appeal, and he has told her that he can only read her trial transcript for a couple of hours at a time. After that, he said, he becomes too angry and must stop.
In the past seven years, I have written articles and papers on this subject and I must say that I still find myself surprised at what the courts allow to happen. This is a system in which federal prosecutors are able to engage in double jeopardy, regularly breach the attorney-client privilege, and generally do away with the entirety of the Bill of Rights. Prosecutors can take legal acts by individuals, bundle them into a fictitious “crime” of “fraud” or “racketeering,” and criminalize them.
Many targets today are businesspeople, as prosecutors now are able to use the law as a means to fight capitalism. That was the original dream of the man who coined the phrase “white-collar crime,” a sociologist and socialist named Edwin Sutherland. He believed that all private economic transactions were inherently criminal, but because the United States had a relatively free-market economy, people were able to get away with committing acts that should have been labeled as crimes. Sutherland set out to change that state of affairs, and as U.S. law schools became more socialist and radical in their teachings, a new generation of lawyers was trained to put into law what Sutherland could not.
During the 1980s, as the U.S. economy began to grow in the wake of financial and economic deregulation, others sulked and named that time the “Decade of Greed.” Investment banker Michael Milken became a household name as his financial innovations enabled companies like Cable News Network and MCI Communications to grow in a way that would have been impossible in earlier times.
Rudy Giuliani, who then was the U.S. attorney in New York City, saw an opportunity to score political points, and he aimed squarely at Milken and others on Wall Street. He had his Greek Chorus in the New York Times, Time, and Newsweek, all of which saw Giuliani as a potent weapon in their never-ending battle against capitalism. In the end, Milken went to prison, pleading guilty (after Giuliani threatened to indict most members of his family) to “crimes” that the courts later ruled were not crimes at all.
As the U.S. economy continues to implode, federal prosecutors are finding that juries are all-too-eager to assign blame to those capitalists who allegedly caused this recession. Of course, the real culprits in the Federal Reserve System and elsewhere in the government have nothing to fear.
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I’d like more facts on the case, otherwise it is too vague…
8 July 2009 at 10:56 am