Every week seems to bring new revelations of the need for reform of the U.S. criminal-justice system. The most vivid recent example has been a flurry of warnings from the bench in California against corrupt and lawless prosecutors. A panel of three judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in January, in Pasadena, Calif., erupted when California’s deputy attorney general asked the judge to uphold two murder convictions from 1995 against a man, Johnny Baca, despite lower courts’ having concluded that prosecutors had secured the convictions with false evidence. Judge Alex Kozinski said that if the state’s attorney general, Kamala Harris (a candidate for the U.S. Senate), did not abandon the case, the court would "name names.” The hearing was posted online, under a new court policy, and lawyers circulated the video until it became a statewide cause célèbre, as the facts were laid bare to show a brazen use of admittedly false evidence to secure a conviction, and no resulting investigation of the prosecutors or disciplinary action against them. Kozinski claimed that the source of the problem was that state courts, to which federal courts normally defer in state-originated prosecutions, would not overturn or rebuke lawless prosecutors because state judges are elected and voters generally have given prosecutors a blank check to convict unlimited numbers of accused regardless of the shabbiness of the prosecutors’ methods. This is Nancy Grace’s America.





Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/414682/nancy-graces-america-conrad-black