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Hated attorney thinks he’ll get a biased jury

When he’s on the stand for illegal-campaign-donation and obstruction of justice charges. Article from the Detroit News.

As much as he probably deserves some kind of punishment for all the defendants whose rights he’s violated over the years, any charge relating to “excessive” campaign donations and almost any charge relating to obstruction of justice are completely bogus. There might very well be some fraud committed by him and his law firm if they fudged their accounting records to slip “excessive” donations to the John Edwards presidential campaign, but there should be no such thing as excessive campaign donations per se. People have the right to spend their money on whatever they want. Edwards and every other candidate spend exactly as much of their own money on their own campaigns as they want. Large businesses donate millions of dollars to the RNC and DNC. There is no difference in principle between those expenses and someone else donating millions of dollars to one particular campaign. If you don’t want big businesses and multi-billionaires to have undue influence on the election process or the the legislative process, the proper solution is to remove any incentive for multi-billionaires and corporations to attempt to influence government officials in the first place—by preventing the State from interceding in the affairs of people or businesses, rich or poor. As P.J. O’Rourke said, “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” And as Ron Paul said, “The only true solution to the campaign-money problem is a return to a proper Constitutional government that does not control the economy. Big government and big campaign money go hand in hand.”

I am very skeptical of any charge of “obstruction of justice.” As I don’t recognize any moral authority that lawyers, judges, police officers, or anyone else claims to have over me, this pretty much goes without saying. Their demands that a witness or a defendant answer their questions have no more authority or propriety than if you or I demanded the same. Now, most people charged with obstruction of justice believe the State is legitimate, so they couldn’t really use that as an excuse for not divulging information to agents of the State, but just because they are wrong doesn’t mean that the State’s illegitimacy can’t be used to defend their choices.

Unfortunately, obstruction of justice is an even more bogus “crime” than most of the other things the State criminalizes. As William Anderson and Candice Jackson wrote,

The idea behind laws criminalizing perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to federal investigators, is to ensure the integrity of our legal system by giving targets and witnesses incentives to be truthful. However, when prosecutors use broad, vague laws to entrap people into becoming criminals solely on the basis of their words and actions during an investigation, deeply-rooted constitutional rights are eroded. The Fifth Amendment protects a criminal defendant from being forced to testify against himself. The rationale behind this constitutional right is that if the government prosecutors are permitted to require a person to testify against himself, he faces a Cruel Trilemma—the choice between telling the truth under oath and implicating himself, lying under oath and committing perjury, or refusing to testify and being held in contempt of court. Thanks to ancillary crimes like obstruction of justice and making false statements, if you find yourself embroiled (as a witness or a target) in a federal criminal investigation, you now face a new version of the Cruel Trilemma. If you cooperate with federal investigators, everything you say will be used against you to indict and prosecute you. If you refuse to cooperate, you risk indictment and prosecution for ancillary crimes like obstruction of justice. If you speak at all to federal investigators, your words can be twisted into ancillary crimes of perjury or making false statements. It’s a no-win situation against which our Constitution was intended to protect us.

(Hat tip: Overlawyered.com)