Power Corrupted and the Struggle for the Rule of Law
By: Houston Criminal Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair
Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos recently announced that local defense attorneys will be provided with copies “offense report(s)’ prepared by police in criminal cases. This new policy in Harris County, which should have been standard practice for years, is slowing making its way to the court rooms. Of course, the policy comes with caveats such as confidentiality agreements, redactions etc. This disclosure policy removes another corrupt vestige from the era of former District Attorney Charles “Chuck” Rosenthal—an era when suppression of favorable evidence, perjured testimony, manufactured evidence, and corruption of forensic evidence passed for the “rule of law” as his assistant district attorneys competed in a “conviction at any cost” prosecutorial environment.
There is no way to gauge how many innocent people were sent to prison, or possibly executed, during the administrations of the two previous Harris County District Attorneys: Chuck Rosenthal and Johnny Holmes. What can be gauge, however, is that both district attorneys, especially Rosenthal, operated with such a “hang ‘em high” prosecutorial mentality that a sense of “above the law” entitlement existed in all ranks of the district attorney’s office. That “above the law” sense of privilege became so ingrained that Rosenthal himself saw nothing wrong with using his office computers to carry on an inner-office romance and share racist and pornographic emails with friends.
We recently opined in an article (posted Feb. 25, 2009) about how an unbridled exercise of judicial power led to federal district court judge Samuel Kent pleading guilty of an obstruction of justice charge and Court of Criminal Appeals Chief Judge Sharon Keller being charged with judicial misconduct. Both of these judges were renowned in the legal community for not only their disrespect of judicial decorum but their disregard for the established rule of law.
Power is indeed a dangerous thing in the hands of the wrong people.
This was made clear by the recent disclosure that five days before George Bush left the Oval Office and departed for the exclusive Dallas neighborhood where he now rides his bicycle, his Justice Department rescinded a 2001 legal memorandum prepared by one of its attorneys, John Yoo, advising the president that the military could search any home in America without a warrant if the homeowner was designated as a “suspected terrorist.” The Yoo memo essentially conveyed to President Bush that he, as the nation’s commander in a time of war, had the unlimited power to treat terror suspects as an “invading army.” (more…)
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