The Chris Moeller Archives

The fifth quarter winds down?

The billionaire senior executives at Countrywide Financial, Washington Mutual, and IndyMac were responsible for a system of collectively making hundreds of thousands of fraudulent mortgage loans, then effectively betting against them with subsequent investments. This scam wrecked the American housing industry and caused a global financial crisis in 2008. We are still recovering. Regulators at the Office of Thrift Supervision, then the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and then the Federal Reserve, made no criminal referrals in the case. A Frontline report found that the FBI didn't even talk to whistleblowers that had offered information during the investigation. Not only did the criminals at the top of the industry get away without prosecution, but systematically, most took home fat parachute bonuses as well, some in the range of hundreds of millions. Nobody seems to care about this, though. There were no pitchforks, no riots, no posses. People still express their everlasting support for the political icons that permitted the perpetrators to skate.

But O.J. got off because he's rich. And that is a bridge too far.

At last, O.J. Simpson is out of prison and not a moment too soon either. The former professional football player and actor, now 70, is somebody that did get prosecuted in 2008. He was sentenced to 33 years in prison for a robbery and kidnapping case involving his friend, a man who had robbed him of his own possessions, and a man that just testified in his defense at his parole hearing after nine years of prison time. Many are outraged of course. They couldn't give two craps about the details of the Nevada case. They want Simpson put away forever because of his acquittal and widely-assumed guilt in a separate murder case that occurred 14 years previous to the night Simpson stormed into a Las Vegas hotel room and a man that didn't go to prison held the only gun. On the ESPN documentary O.J.: Made in America last year, former Simpson defense lawyer Carl Douglas described the connection as such: "This was the fifth quarter. They got us back for winning our case." The judicial system of the United States also permitted "double-jeopardy," in this case by trying Simpson a second time for the Brown/Goldman murders in a civil trial that handed down a $33 million penalty. Hmm, that number again... a $33 million judgement, and then a 33-year prison sentence in a separate case. But there was no link between the two, right? I promise Americans that support this garbage that while it's frightening to consider a so-called "murderer" on the loose, it should be even more frightening to live in a country where criminal sentences are handed down for perceived offenses entirely peripheral to those on trial. There's nothing in the Bill of Rights that suspends for "make goods."

If you're still hung up about what you perceive as a subversion of justice in the Brown/Goldman murder case, target your ire. This was a criminal case during which one of the detectives, the first on the scene, was caught on tape not only slurring African-Americans after he claimed under oath that he hadn't, but, lest we forget, and most importantly, admitting that he planted evidence in cases he had worked and believed that lying was sometimes a necessity on the witness stand. (I've never been sure how this planting evidence disclosure qualifies as "the race card.") The Simpson jury was not even allowed to hear the most inflammatory recordings, ones in respect to the officer's boasts to having done violence against "niggers" and committing police misconduct on multiple occasions. As a result of the audio presentation of his deceit under oath in this same trial, he returned to the stand and asserted his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination when asked if he had planted evidence in this case-- and then was subsequently convicted of perjury over his false testimony. And you believe that the jury delivered an improper verdict in the Brown/Goldman trial?

posted by CM @ 10:34 AM