The prosecution, led by Martens, convinced a jury that Sprouse knowingly signed forged and fraudulent documents and other legal papers that had false information which would permit the buyers of houses and property to obtain those things without having the required income or down payments or other things that the lender required one must have. The buyers were planning to “flip” the properties, that is, sell them quickly and make a profit.

In bringing these charges, Martens and his staff agreed that Sprouse had received no payoffs or other quid pro quo compensation, her office receiving only the standard $500 fee for closing (with perhaps $40 to $50 actually accruing to Sprouse as income after she paid her staff and other office expenses). However, that fact did not stop Martens from repeatedly telling the jury and the press that Sprouse “made millions” from illegal sales, although even the most optimistic prosecution math did not come close to that figure.
[...]
It is important to understand, however, that the outcome was fixed long before the trial, and not by any criminal or regulatory violations on behalf of Sprouse. Martens arranged for the government to forbid Sprouse from selling, disposing, or mortgaging any of her property in order to raise money to pay for her attorney, Pete Anderson. Because all her assets were forbidden to be sold or mortgaged she did not have any other funds by which to pay, the judge declared her “indigent” and then permitted a maximum of $25,000 for her legal fees.

The prosecution’s strategy was obvious. If Sprouse could be denied adequate counsel, as $25K is not going to buy anything more than an attorney who wants to plead out right away, then a conviction was as good as done.

What happened afterward is most important—and sealed the outcome. [Sprouse’s original lawyer, Pete] Anderson told the judge at a hearing in which she petitioned to have one of her properties sold so she could raise legal fees that he still wanted to represent Sprouse, given his knowledge of the case. That is where Martens dropped a bombshell.

Martens told the judge that it would take four-to-six weeks to present the government’s case. Anderson argued that since it would take his firm five months to prepare for trial with another month to six weeks in a trial would mean his firm would have to spend six months for a relatively tiny fee, which the firm could not afford. Thus, he begged off the case and the judge appointed two attorneys who then tried to force Sprouse to plea to a deal that would have given her 20 years. Sprouse, believing she had not committed any crimes and wanting her Constitutional day in court, refused, and from then on, she and her counsel were at odds.

There are a number of reasons why this development was significant, and why Martens had orchestrated it. First, and most important, when Martens actually presented the “evidence” during the trial, he took less than four days. One does not boil four-to-six weeks of material into four days; instead, Martens—an officer of the court and one who is bound to tell the truth while carrying out his duties—had not told the judge the truth.
[...]
A key issue in this case was whether or not Sprouse knew the documents were fraudulent and that she was knowingly signed off on transactions that were different than what was on the paper. The only prosecution witness to declare that Sprouse “must have known” about the fraud stated in a deposition under oath in a civil case saying that he never told Sprouse about what he was doing because he believed she was honest and would have refused to sign anything she thought was fraudulent and stopped the closings.

Now, one would think that this would be a key piece of evidence in the trial, and that is correct. The key was to make sure that this document never would be presented during trial, and Martens and Sprouse’s court-appointed attorneys did just that.

First, the man who made that original statement under oath was a key witness for the prosecution. In exchange for leniency (Martens offered him a plea bargain to serve two years in prison), the man gave very different testimony in Sprouse’s trial than what he had given before.
[...]
Why would [Sprouse’s] attorneys be so passive, especially in the fact of a prosecutor who clearly was railroading someone? To fight would not be to seen as “cooperative” with the prosecution, and the opportunity to gain easy money by cutting future deals with Martens and his staff.

There were other incidents of outright incompetence and worse. The counsel did not interview their own witnesses until just before trial, they rarely objected to anything, and they pretty much let Martens run the proceedings. During the breaks, Martens’ investigators harassed defense witnesses and threatened them, but Sprouse’s attorneys did not object or tell the judge.
[...]
In summary, the prosecution managed to make sure that Sprouse could not have the representation she wanted, an attorney who saw through the tactics of the prosecution and believed strongly in the innocence of his client. Martens falsely told the judge that the presentation of the evidence would take four-to-six weeks when it did not even take six days.

Martens used a witness who had testified under oath in a civil case that Sprouse did not know that the documents in question that she signed were fraudulent. To get past this obvious problem, Martens was able to use the prospect of a lighter prison sentence to entice the witness to change his testimony. To put it another way, Martens suborned perjury and the jurors swallowed the lies whole, as did the local media.

[italics in original; bold mine]

What does this wretched creature that calls itself Matthew Martens get from ruining an innocent woman’s life by breaking the law and using every immoral tactic at its disposal? Does it get more money? More fame? A better chance to climb the ladder in the federal show-trial system? It is unnerving to fathom what depths a being’s soul must sink to and what darkness must cloud its mind that it would not only pursue the ruination of an innocent person’s life but do so repeatedly and derive immense satisfaction from it each time. There is no good left in such a being. It is nothing but a monster now. I was wrong in my past assertions that everyone is a mix of good and evil; Matthew Martens is 100% evil. There seem to be more and more like it every year.

But, on the bright side, Statists everywhere should be eminently proud of their Cardassian-like court system and this verdict in particular. A mere $25,000, which is only a single year’s after-tax salary for me, is not enough to acquit an obviously innocent person. And, even better, the local and national media, the jurors who convicted Sprouse, and future jurors in federal cases will probably remain completely ignorant of these underhanded dealings and of their commonplace nature! To put the icing on the cake, Martens and the wholly incompetent judge will never suffer so much as a difficult interview, an investigation, or a slap on the wrist! The system works!

But who could have predicted that? Create a single legislation/investigation/trial/punishment system whose monopoly status and ultimate authority are backed by violence; then conscript ignorant, uninterested, untrained, malleable citizens to serve as jurors in all your cases (a duty also ensured by explicit threats of murder); observe what travesties this system visits upon its innocent captives; and then brainwash everyone into believing that without our monopoly criminal-justice system, those injustices would be happening to people.

If Sprouse’s appeal is successful and a single Statist moran says, “See, the system worked, in the end,” I might hemorrhage and collapse in a vortex of boiling rage so large that it will endanger the entire planet.

As if electing complete idiots with no economic knowledge and no regard for individual rights to the presidency every four years for the last several decades weren’t proof enough: A jury ruled in favor of the RIAA, against the Minnesota woman it sued, requiring her to pay the RIAA $1.92 million, or $80,000 per song she downloaded “illegally.” Those jurors will never suffer karma as bad as they deserve. Neither will anyone who works for the RIAA (mainly, their executives and attorneys). They are going to burn in a very special level of hell, a level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.

Radley Balko has exposed and railed against dozens and dozens of crimes committed by Dr. Steven Hayne, a Mississippi-state certified forensic pathologist whose testimonies in civil and criminal cases have helped put literally thousands of people in prison, some of them for life. The culmination (so far) of his investigations of Hayne and his colleague Dr. Michael West is this story in Reason magazine. Quoting from the summary in his blag post:

Several months ago, I was able to obtain a pretty shocking video of one of Dr. Michael West’s infamous post-mortem “bite mark examinations.” This particular exam was performed on a 23-month-old Louisiana girl named Haley Oliveaux. As with most cases, Dr. Steven Hayne performed the initial examination on Oliveaux, claimed to have seen bite marks no other doctors saw, then called in West to perform his quackery bite mark analysis. West claimed to have traced the bite marks to Jimmie Duncan, the boyfriend of Oliveaux’s mother, and the man police suspected of murdering the girl. Duncan was convicted of capital murder, and has spent the last 10 years on death row.

The smoking gun video damns West and Hayne in two ways. First, as it opens, West is performing his initial examination. The video clearly shows that when the body of Haley Oliveaux was handed over to West and Hayne, her face was free of any abrasions or bite marks. Her cheek is clean.

The second portion of the video, taken the following day, then shows a striking abrasion. That abrasion could only have been inflicted by someone in Hayne’s office. The video also shows that Hayne must have been lying when he testified at trial that he found bite marks on the Oliveaux’s cheek, then called West in to do an analysis. The first portion of the video, taken after Hayne’s initial exam, shows no such bite marks.

The more obvious thing the video shows is Michael West repeatedly jamming, scraping, and pushing a mold of Jimmie Duncan’s teeth into Haley Oliveaux’s body, actions experts to whom I’ve shown the video say amount to criminal evidence tampering. The excerpt posted at Reason is only 30 seconds long. But the full video spans 24 minutes, during which West uses the mold to desecrate Oliveaux’s body at least 50 times.

The results of West’s “analysis” were then used to help convict Jimmie Duncan of raping and murdering Haley Oliveaux.

That is truly sickening and horrifying. It is difficult to imagine such evil taking place outside of Josef Mengele’s lab or a Stalinist torture chamber. As I already commented after Balko’s post, people like Steven Hayne and Michael West belong in the Special Hell—a level of hell reserved for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.