On Wed, 15 Dec 1999, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> ... I bet you a beer that the OJ jury was more concerned about
> convicting a celebrity (it borders with impossiblity in the US!)
> than with any factual evidence ... what would a large law enforcement
> ORGANIZATION (as opposed to a racist cop) gain from a costly massive
> effort to "frame" the guy?
I'm not sure that's true of the OJ jury or the LA cops. As a British jurist in a letter to the NY Times at the time pointed out, the most traditional jurisprudence holds that official misconduct invalidates a prosecution (hence the exclusionary rule). What the trial of the OJ case showed was that the LAPD tried to railroad a guilty man with "enhanced" evidence -- the article cited testifies to that's being s.o.p. in LA -- and the jury quite rightly refused to let them do it. (And so it wasn't a case of "jury nullification," either.)
On a related matter, the distinguished "Frontline" series on PBS outdid itself recently with a program called "Snitch," on the thorough-going corruption of federal prosecutions as as a result of the "War on Drugs." Republicans and Democrats have colluded in changes in federal law that mean that people are receiving mandatory drug sentences on the uncorroborated testimony of one snitch. When the federal circuit court in Denver received a well-reasoned case that reducing jail time for incriminating testimony was bribery, one judge was reduced to arguing that the federal statute against bribery didn't apply to federal prosecutors because the statute said "Whoever..." and the government wasn't a "who." (Perhaps that should be called the Horton principle.)
--C. G. Estabrook