Sheridan: Con-Law

SPY ACCUSATIONS AND WITCH-HUNTS

One of these days I'm going to put up my accusations blog in which I plan to treat of accusations that arise in different contexts.

One  of them will have to be where a person is accused of siding with the enemy but where the accused is also closely related to us.

How do you sort out which side the person is on when s/he may be working for both?  Or just have a 'bad class background,' as the Chinese under Mao liked to say.

There's a saying for this, too.

It originates during the Crusades, when, according to what I've read (no, don't bother asking for the cite, if I could recall everything I've heard or read that makes sense I'd be the world's greatest combination computer storage device and search engine) when the question arose as to whom to kill, the pope is said to have replied, "Kill them all; let God sort out the innocent."

I saw the modern variant on a T-shirt in a military goods store outside Camp Pendleton years ago:  "Kill them all, let God sort them out."

The Marines are a fighting organization in which ordinary American boys who were taught not to hit, and especially not to hit anyone smaller, are taught to kill.  After they come back from war, American soldiers are sometimes messed up.  They've killed, and not necessarily only enemy combatants, but sometimes, women, children, and old men, who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  The soldiers have few people they can share their feelings with and they can't sleep well at night.  A drink seems to help.  The spiral goes downhill from there.  It is a shame.  No, I don't know what to do about it.  Killing harms the killers, sometimes, as it does those killed.  This is a good reason to condemn the death penalty as an anti-crime measure.

In the account below, a woman with friends on both sides of the Cold War, in  Korea, got way too close to the fire and paid with her life.

As accusations go, and trials, there seems to be something missing.  Let no one call it justice.  The facts may not have been all in before the woman was executed..

FALSE ACCUSATIONS, LAW AND POLITICS

Law and politics are entwined, of course, in the making, the administering, the adjudicating and especially in the prosecuting. Usually, however, politics doesn't rear its ugly head above the background noise level. But when it does, it's a doozy.

Check the article, below, by Adam Cohen, of the New York Times, on a federal prosecution that seems hand-dovetailed to fit the Bush administration's political needs. The appeal, to the Seventh Circuit, was too much for even the case-hardened appellate bench, which ordered the woman released from the federal penitentiary forthwith, as in right now, even before we take the time to write an opinion. Appellate judges see a lot of injustice, in appeal after appeal, which they routinely describe as not being sufficient to overturn a conviction in light of all the evidence of guilt. Harmless error, this is called. Not in this case. They sprung her soonest, a rarity, indeed.

Note also how well Mr. Cohen tells the story. This is legal writing at its best, boiling a complex set of facts over a long period of time into a few column inches.