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March 8, 2007

On Patrick Fitzgerald's Game And Just Who In The Hell Selected Jurors Like This

Topics: Political News and commentaries

It's a fact that good guys don't always win and for many prosecutors, especially ones like Patrick Fitzgerald, justice is little more than a game:

PATRICK FITZGERALD IS A PROSECUTOR. He came to the Valerie Plame affair with his typical agenda - get someone thrown in jail. It was Scooter Libby's misfortune that he was the one without chair when the music stopped. It was his greater misfortune that there wasn't a bigger fish nibbling on prosecutor Fitzgerald's line. If there had been, Scooter Libby would still be a mostly anonymous public servant today.

Did Scotter Libby break the law and perjure himself before a Grand Jury? As a legal fact, yes. A jury has said so, and that's that. Of course, juries make a lot of things legal facts that shouldn't be.

But I'm willing to play along with the jury and agree that Scooter Libby did commit the crimes that they convicted him of yesterday. This is one of those instances where the adversarial system should indeed have produced a proper result. Fitzgerald is a great lawyer; Libby could afford equally stellar counsel for himself. There's no reason to believe that if the facts weren't on his side, Fitzgerald could have still so handily outfought Libby's counsel to nevertheless win a conviction.

And yet there's something about this case that still strikes me as unsettling and unnerving. For political reasons, the purportedly aggrieved parties of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame got their own private prosecutor whose entire job was to make sure someone went to jail because of the scandal in which the Wilsons were the featured players. Even as the main charges turned out to be unfounded or at the very least un-provable, an undeterred Fitzgerald fought on, determined to get someone, anyone, thrown in jail.

In other words, someone had to go to jail, even though a crime was never committed in the first instance, and what we have is nothing more than a Scooter Libby convicted on what could arguably be just a poor memory juxtaposed with a willingness to tell the FBI and the grand jury his best recollection. He should have simply pleaded the 5th and told them to go to hell.

Read more at Hugh Hewitt.

Oh yes, about the jury. Blue Crab Boulevard points to Bryan over at Hot Air who has the latest insanity over the Scooter Libby conviction. A member of the jury who voted for coviction and now wants him pardoned - Because it would be "fun"???

Posted by Richard at March 8, 2007 6:51 AM

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