By John Seiler

Don’t talk to the police. And in testimony before a grand jury, take the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination.

That’s the lesson we get from so many unjust prosecutions — really persecutions — of people famous and otherwise, from Martha Stewart to Barry Bonds.

Whether or not Bonds should have used performance-enhancing drugs should be a matter for himself, Major League Baseball and baseball fans — all private entities. It should be none of government’s business.

Yet government has gotten involved. It prosecuted Bonds and convicted him of “obstruction of justice,” supposedly for lying to a grand jury in 2003. The L.A. Times reports:

“Bonds was asked in the grand jury session whether his personal trainer had ever given him a substance that required a syringe to inject. In his response, Bonds rambled on about his childhood and his friendship with the trainer before finally telling the grand jury that he had not received an injectable substance.

“The grand jury eventually indicted Bonds, and he was tried in 2011 on three counts of perjury and one count of obstruction. The trial jury convicted him of obstruction of justice, based on that meandering answer, but it deadlocked on the perjury charges.”

See? He should have taken the Fifth.

The new development:

“SAN FRANCISCO — A federal appeals court wrestled Wednesday with whether to overturn slugger Barry Bonds‘ felony conviction for obstruction of justice.

“The three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals weighed whether Bonds broke the law by being evasive in a 52-word answer he gave a federal grand jury in 2003. The grand jury was investigating illegal distribution of performance-enhancing drugs….

“How the three-judge panel was leaning after Wednesday’s hearing was nearly as difficult to parse as Bonds’ answer. Judge Michael Daly Hawkins appeared troubled by the fact that Bonds eventually answered the grand jury query: ‘Can a grand jury witness obstruct justice by giving a series of evasive answers and then giving a direct answer that is not evasive?’ Hawkins asked.

“Assistant U.S. Atty. Merry Jean Chan, however, said Bond’s rambling response was intended to deceive. She argued that the obstruction conviction was not limited to those 52 words but reflected evasion throughout Bonds’ testimony.”

Actually, the whole prosecution/persecution of Bonds is a massive injustice worthy of the Soviet show trials of the 1930s. And remember that Bonds is not in prison only because he’s wealthy and can afford high-priced attorneys. If something like this happened to you or me, we’d be in some hellhole prison for years by now.

Let’s hope the 9th Circuit dumps this case in the Pacific Ocean. The U.S. “Justice” System has become a mockery of real justice and leaving Bonds alone would be a step toward restoring some sense of fairness.

By JOHN SEILER

One thing I’d like to know is how many millions of our tax dollars the government spent to convict beautiful actress Lindsay Lohan of petty theft. You know they spent that much because the government didn’t want an O.J. Simpson situation in which they lose a high-profile case involving a celebrity.

Lindsay was sentenced yesterday. In a sensible system, she would only have to give back the stolen goods, which she already did, and pay the aggrieved party some compensation. Instead, here’s what she got, as reported by the L.A. Times:

* “three years’  probation. Any violations could land her in jail.” This is just slavery.

* “Lohan has applied to be part of a home electronic monitoring program. That will be decided June 17, when she is scheduled to surrender to authorities.” This is a high-tech version of putting a ball-and-chain on you.

The only reason she might not be sent to the slammer is because of jail overcrowding and shrinking state and local budgets. So we can thank California’s effective bankruptcy for keeping a pretty petty thief from being locked up in one of the state’s hellacious jails.

The United States incarcerates more people than any country on earth — nearly 1 percent of the whole population is behind bars. Its “justice” system gives long sentences to petty thieves and minor drug users. And taxpayers, of course, foot the bill.

This nonsense started about 40 years ago, after the crime wave of the 1960s. Typically, things were taken too far. As the L.A. Times noted in another article…

the number of inmates grew from 76,000 in 1988 to nearly 170,000 today.

The number of incarcerated Californians had surged in the two previous decades, as voters and lawmakers approved tough-on-crime measures such as the “three-strikes” law. The costs of state prisons has soared as well, doubling since 2000.

Robbing Taxpayers

Obviously, we want violent offenders locked up. But almost everybody else should be dealt with in other ways. About $8 billion a year goes to California’s prisons, 10 percent of the state budget. It costs about $133 a day to house one prisoner — in prisons with brutal conditions.

The real victims here are taxpayers robbed by government.

The reason is the police-prosectuors-guards complex of power that scares people into providing massive pay, perks and pensions to the “law enforcement community.” And more people incarcerated means more “product” for their sick business. Not surprisingly, the prison guards’ and police officers’ unions are among the most powerful in the state.

It’s like in the Soviet Union of Stalin’s day. When the government need slave labor to build a canal or some other labor-intensive project, the  NKVD/KGB would round up hundreds of thousands of people on false charges and ship them to the slave labor camps of the Gulag.

In the case of Linsday Lohan, she’s a high-profile “example” made to show the rest of us that “even the rich must follow the law” — meaning, obey the dictates of the government.

Another high-profile case was Martha Stewart, who was framed by the government and sent to prison. William L. Anderson and Candice E. Jackson wrote about what happened at the time of Martha’s prosecution. They described the federal “justice” system. But their analysis applies also to state and local systems, which have been subsumed into the federal system. They wrote:

We hold that the federal criminal system that convicted her is an abomination to justice and is the destroyer of those precious “Rights of Englishmen” that this nation inherited from Great Britain (and especially the famed jurist William Blackstone) more than two centuries ago. What exists today in the federal courts is nothing less than a shadow justice system, an evil twin of the common law that served us so well for so long, a system that keeps the trappings of common law, but is more like Stalin’s Soviet Union than Blackstone’s England.

Born of political expediency and of the Progressive Era of the late 19^th and early 20^thcenturies, the federal criminal system is nothing less than a mechanism that permits prosecutors to do an end run around the Constitutional protections that the framers of that document believed were the natural rights of individuals. While we know that many readers will disagree with the following statement, we hold that it is true and will demonstrate why we believe such a thing: modern federal criminal laws and policies hold much more in common with Josef Stalin’s U.S.S.R. in the 1930s than it does the Constitution of the United States….

While we have linked this page before, we remind readers of the powerful 10-part 1998 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette series on federal prosecutorial misconduct written by Bill Moushey. One of us spoke on the telephone recently to one of the prosecutors named in the series (who allegedly tried to frame one of his targets), and it was clear from our conversation that he believed he could do what he wanted, when he wanted, and that he was above the law. (Jurors complained that they thought Stewart to be “arrogant.” This prosecutor’s arrogance made Stewart’s alleged haughtiness look like the demeanor a humble peasant.)….

In the end, we see a shadow set of laws that are written not to protect anyone, but only to improve the probability of prosecutors gaining convictions. William Blackstone, who coined the term “Rights of Englishmen,” declared that the law was to be a “shield” to protect the innocent and to put firm boundaries around the workings of government agents.
Blackstone’s shield in the federal system now is a weapon that the state uses against everyone else. The “Rights of Englishmen” are now dead. The federal courts have the looks and trappings of that once-magnificent system of laws that was part and parcel to the very meaning of the United States of America. But while it may seem that the modern system is a continuation of that system we inherited from Great Britain, the system inside is rotten. It does not protect citizens from the state; instead, it gives the state all of the weapons (federal prosecutors like to call them “tools”) it needs to declare everyone a criminal.

Lohan Making Nice

Lindsay now is making nice to the system that has tormented her. In the place of her previous refreshing insolence toward the “justice” system, she said in a statement:

I am glad to be able to put this past me and move on with my life and my career. I support the judge’s decision and hold myself accountable for being in this situation.

I have already started my community service at the Downtown Women’s Center and thank everyone there for their warm welcome. I hope to be able to fulfill my obligation without any press attention. I think the media spotlight should be on issues such as homelessness and domestic violence instead of on me.

That’s understandable. But I hope that, when Lindsay finally gets the Soviet-style “justice” system off her back in about three years, she’ll become a force for restoring Americans’ rights and liberties. She has felt first hand the iron fist of tyranny smashing down on her.

Free Lindsay Lohan!