- Dear Grads, I am a daughter of the Class of '22. Yes,
I know there are ten-year-olds walking around who are slated for the Class
of '22, but I mean the previous one. And the school I am referring to is
the Veritas one, not the Lux et Veritas one. (Dad may have lacked lux but
he had veritas down pat, believe me.)
-
- The time has come for you old greats to take a bit of
a disciplinarian view toward some of your schoolmates. I am referring to
the ones that sit on SCOTUS. Eight of the current nine all but Ruth
are either from Veritas or Lux et. The latter are Clarence Thomas,
Sam Alito, and Sonia. The former are the Chief, plus Scalia, Breyer, Kennedy,
and Elena. Why, even Ruth started out at Harvard, and has an honorary
degree from there!
-
- They seem to have 'forgotten who they are.' Maybe you
haven't been paying attention, but you'll be embarrassed when you learn
some of the really sad tricks they have gotten into. I am asking you to
make a few phone calls tonight and see what you can do about a court case
that is sooo pathetic. Natürlich, I am referring to that of Troy Davis,
who is due to take the exit pill, non-voluntarily, this Wednesday, September
21, 2011 at seven pm.
-
-
- The execution will be preceded by an enema. I mean we
all need to be enemized before we die, don't we? It's such an important
touch. Just mentioning that to indicate the total lack of freedom of any
person in an American jail today. (You're aware that the privatized prison
system now uses stun belts to save on guard payroll, right? It's ol' Jeremy
Bentham's Panopticon come true.)
-
- So what did the Ivy-League-burthened court do? It met
a prisoner's extremely valid plaint with extreme cynicism. Diogenes would
roll over in his grave, and that's the god's honest. Oh, and to make the
matter really icky, the big guys didn't put their John Hancockaroonies
on it. They assigned the task to a federal district court judge, to act
as magistrate. (You know, like Bush assigned the torture memo to Bybee
and then rewarded him with a seat on the Ninth Circuit, that sort of thing.)
-
- The offending 'magistrate,' in Savannah, beautiful savannah,
right next to Hilton Head, is Judge William T Moore, Jr. Poor guy. He
was asked to look at Troy's plea which Troy had been shouting to
the wind, in a sort of Demosthenesian way, for a decade. The plea consists
of the fact that 7 of the original 9 witnesses-for-the-prosecution started
to sing a different tune after they realized that maybe, just maybe, the
police were not totally in their rights to feed them a story to give the
jury.
-
- Here are some excerpts from their 'recantations.' I'll
put more at the end, but you've seen one you've seen them all unfortunately.
Oh, and I am no bleedin' heart. I think the death penalty is a necessary
invention. In fact I am an extreme conservative. Ran for Congress out
of the NH Republican Party in 2006 I did. Now here they are:
-
- 1. Antoine Williams: "They asked me to describe
the shooter and what he looked like and what he was wearing. I kept
telling them that I didn't know. It was dark, my windows were tinted,
and I was scared. . After the officers talked to me, they gave me
a statement and told me to sign it. I signed it. I did not read it
because I cannot read."
-
- 2. Kevin McQueen: "The truth is that Troy never
confessed to me I made up the confession from information I had heard
on TV."
-
- See what I mean? So this judge was told to deal with
this absolutely in-your-face, open and shut case of police coercion and
come up with a negative finding. Took him a hundred pages or so but he
did it. He found that Troy Davis failed to prove innocence. Come on, even
at 4th tier Law Schools they know that we here in the Great Republic do
not have a concept called "prove your innocence." And he found
the recantations to be "mostly smoke and mirrors". That's Orwellian
and I won't have it! There aren't any smoke and mirrors in those recantations.
Show me some and I'll I'll ... I'll recant my statement!
-
- That's not all. Judge Moore said that the state had
bootstrapped the murder-in-question to another shooting the same night
(think Boston Strangler), presumably to increase the baddiness of the accused.
But this, Moore said in his 2011 ruling, didn't matter. Never mind that
the victim of the other, non-fatal shooting, Michael Cooper, has said 'tweren't
Troy that shot him.
-
- Wait, I'm just warming up. This magistrate for SCOTUS
(ahem, Harvard 6, Yale 3):
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-
-
- pointed to "live, credible testimony"
from police and prosecutor!
-
- was mum about the threats, with guns (!) to witnesses
-
- never acknowledged the legal risks taken by those
who recanted (I faint!)
-
- failed to say that some witnesses accuse a different
man, namely one of the non-recanting witnesses (Sylvester Coles) of being
the killer
-
- -- misrepresented (I'm putting that charitably) the effort
of the defense to subpoena the said Sylvester Coles.
-
- Ah, I forgot to announce: in my dotage I have just graduated
from law school, in Australia. Thus I do know that we mustn't use the adjective
'said' anymore in law, owing to complaints from the public, but I still
like it.
-
- There's more to the misbehavior of the Luxes and the
Veritases, but why continue?
-
- It was an inside job, and when people find out about
it (and I do try to help them find out about this, that, and the other
thing in my book Prosecution for Treason) there will be a decrement of
real estate value around the Cambridge and New Haven area. So to speak.
-
- Please, please, remember your high ideals, and know that
without your supporting 'em we ain't got 'em.
-
- Mary Maxwell, PhD (Politics), LLB can be reached as: mary.maxwell
@ alumni.adelaide.edu.au
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- Some of the other recantations:
-
- 3. Monty Holmes: I told them I didn't know anything
about who shot the officer, but they kept questioning me. I was real young
at that time and here they were questioning me about the murder of a police
officer like I was in trouble or something. I was scared... [I]t seemed
like they wouldn't stop questioning me until I told them what they wanted
to hear. So I did. I signed a statement saying that Troy told me that he
shot the cop.
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- 4. Robert Grizzard: I have reviewed the transcript of
my testimony from the trial of Troy Davis... During my testimony I said
that the person who shot the officer was wearing a light colored shirt.
The truth is that I don't recall now and I didn't recall then what the
shooter was
- wearing, as I said in my initial statement...
-
- 5. Michael Cooper: I have had a chance to review a statement
which I supposedly gave to police officers on June 25, 1991. I remember
that they asked a lot of questions and typed up a statement which they
told me to sign. I did not read the statement before I signed. In fact,
I have not seen it before today. ...What is written in that statement is
a lie.
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- 6. Benjamin Gordon: I just kept telling them that I
didn't do anything, but they weren't hearing that. After four or five hours,
they told me to sign some papers. I just wanted to get the hell out of
there. I didn't read what they told me to sign and they didn't ask me to.
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