 |
 |
|||||||||||||
Gov. Don Siegelman
|
||||||||||||||
|
Carl W. Lemieux
Blogatier |
||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||
By Scott Horton
Special to The Star
08-05-2007
Today former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman is interned at the Oakdale Federal Correctional Institution in Louisiana, where it is said he is being given routine chores including cleaning floors. He was dragged away from his sentencing hearing bound in handcuffs and manacles on orders of federal judge Mark Fuller, who was appointed by the current President Bush and is a former member of the Executive Committee of the Alabama Republican Party.
The scene was sufficiently shocking that even staunchly conservative Republican Rep. Spencer Bachus of Birmingham questioned the treatment given the former governor. Forty-four former attorneys general from around the country, a good many of them Republicans, taking note of the often-crude irregularities in the prosecution, trial and sentencing proceedings, petitioned Congress for a special probe of the case. Congress, in the form of the House Judiciary Committee, decided to act, issuing as a first step a demand that the Justice Department supply documents relating to its prosecution of Siegelman.
Nothing quite like this has ever happened before, and it reflects a very high level of skepticism on the national stage about the quality of justice meted out by the Bush Justice Department generally, and particularly in federal courts in Alabama.
Two Fridays ago, the Department of Justice missed a deadline for compliance with Congress’ demand that it turn over documents related to its case on Siegelman. So far, the Justice Department appears to have directed its efforts not to compliance with the congressional mandate but to the issuance of crude and ethically dubious propaganda volleys in the media. This only reinforces the public’s growing impression that the entire process has been politicized.
Instead of investigating her claims, the prosecutors have attacked a Republican attorney who decided to blow the whistle on the political conspiracy that underlies this prosecution. They have also leveled harsh attacks against major media, such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Time Magazine. But curiously, they then turn and single out for praise two major Alabama newspapers, The Birmingham News and The Mobile Press-Register. The prosecutors have made many statements that do not withstand scrutiny, including suggestions that the career prosecutors handling the courtroom case in Montgomery have complete control and discretion. In fact, the cases have been guided by senior political appointees in Washington from the beginning. -more-
additional links to this tragic American federalist injustice: