OFF THE WIRE
agingrebel.com
A news story published yesterday in the Columbia, South Carolina
State raises ethical questions about the incestuous relationship between
journalists and official sources. You can read that story, written by Andrew Dys here.
Essentially, journalism has two components, one artistic and the other
mundane. The mundane component involves collecting and brokering information
obtained from public documents and human sources. Ideally, a reporter will find
a story to tell in the information he has collected and then tell it cogently.
Dys is a cogent writer but his statements are often so wrong than the
State does a disservice to the people of South Carolina by publishing
them.
The State’s Story
Dys and the State newspaper have lied to their readers and the lies
are so careless and misleading that at least some of them must be answered.
In his lead, or as journalists usually write it “lede,” Dys states that five
“bikers connected to the Rock Hill Hells Angels” will be sentenced today. In
fact, two people were to be sentenced today and one of them was a woman accused
of delivering 50 legally obtained Percocet pills to a paid FBI informant and
agent provocateur named Joseph Dillulio. The transaction was illegal
and the woman, named Johanna Looper, would never have profited from it except by
subterfuge. Dillulio engaged Looper in conversation after she made the delivery.
He asked how she was. Looper who was indigent and desperate replied honestly and
Dillulio presented her with a gift of $40. On that basis, Looper was charged
with narcotics conspiracy, a crime which carries a penalty of 20 years in
prison. In January, Looper threw herself at the mercy of the court and pled
guilty. Federal justice is so blatantly unfair that about 92 percent of all
federal prisoners plead guilty to something whether they are factually innocent
or not.
Looper pled guilty because the United States no longer has an adversarial
system of justice but rather an administrative system of justice in which the
key question is not about guilt or innocence but about how to speed accused
persons to prison in the most efficient manner. Cooperative defendants always
fare better in the federal courts that uncooperative defendants who insist on
their innocence. In the words of David O. Carter, a former Marine and a U.S.
District judge in Orange County, California, “If the people knew what goes on
here (in federal court) they would burn the courthouse down.”
The State couldn’t find news in that.
Dys then wrote, “The Hells Angels were a gang, federal prosecutors proved at
trial earlier this year in U.S. District Court in Columbia. A gang that was no
different than black or Hispanic street gangs, the Mafia gangs of Italian
whites, that police and courts in America repeatedly prove maim and kill and
sell drugs and intimidate those who try to stop them, prosecutors argued.”
In fact, no such thing was proven even after five of the defendants insisted
on a trial.
Plyler
After a month-long trial, one of the defendants, named Thomas Plyler, was
found not guilty. Plyler beat the odds. About 90 percent of all federal
defendants who insist on a trial are convicted anyway. The conviction rate in
federal court exceeds 99 percent for three reasons. First, prosecutors play
pernicious games in federal court including the hiding of evidence of actual
innocence and strategies that include “evidence dumps.” A legal scholar named
Bennett L. Gershman writing in the Case Western Reserve Law Review probably
coined the term “Games Prosecutors Play” to describe the entrapments, “sentence
entrapments” and discovery strategies that prosecutors usually describe as
“stings.” One federal prosecutor in Los Angeles in another motorcycle club case
memorialized the term “guerilla street theater” as an alternative to sting. An
attorney named Andrew Carlon writing in the Virginia Law Review
described what goes on in federal courts as a manifestation of “The Sadistic
State.”
It is, Carlon wrote, “a system where…incentives and motives have short
circuited: The emergence, irreducible to its individual components, of a state
run amok. It is a state that has decided that, since its unique function is the
power to punish, it must pursue punishment as an intrinsic good, independent of
desert (or, indeed, of the other, more consequentialist aims of punishment),
transforming itself into a ‘punishment machine.’ But as we have seen, punishment
without desert reduces to sadism. We get the ‘sadistic state,’ which wields
power, most fully realized through the infliction of pain, as an end in itself,
the human beings in its power merely means to that awful end.”
One of the most sadistic facets of this case, which was originally titled
U.S. versus Daniel Bifield et al., was a strategy of blackmailing
defendants into plea deals by criminally charging their significant others. Two
wives (Somying Anderson and Lisa Bifield) and one girlfriend (Looper) were
charged with participating in what Dys thinks was a Hells Angel conspiracy.
Charges were dropped against Anderson just before the beginning of trial because
the case against her was always nonexistent. After the prosecution rested in the
trial, Judge Cameron McGowan Currie dismissed all charges against Looper’s
boyfriend, Donald Boersma. But the strategy did work on the lead defendant,
Daniel Bifield, who pled guilty last December 27th in order to spare the woman
who is clearly the love of his life. “I fell on my sword and did the right
thing” the romantic Bifield said. It did not work. Mrs. Bifield still faces at
least seven years and up to life in prison. Dan Bifield thought he had been
double-crossed and attempted to renounce his plea agreement. He failed because
it is a particularly decadent agreement. In that document Bifield waived “the
right to contest either the conviction or the sentence in any direct appeal or
other post-conviction action.” It was, in short, a pact with the devil signed in
blood. Bifield also “agreed” to frustrate the sort of work Dys should be doing.
He waived “all rights, whether asserted directly or by a representative, to
request or receive from any department or agency of the United States any
records pertaining to the investigation or prosecution of this case, including
without limitation any records that may be sought under the Freedom of
Information Act….”
RICO
Dys also misrepresents the federal statue that allows defendants accused of
state crimes to be charged with federal crimes that carry penalties that are ten
to twenty times more severe than those in state court – RICO.
The Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations law was the centerpiece of the
Organized Crime Control Act of 1970. It was written by a Senatorial aide named
G. Robert Blakey, who is now the William and Dorothy O’Neill Professor of Law at
Notre Dame. And, it is named for the fictional character Rico “Little Caesar”
Bandello who was inhabited on film by Edward G. Robinson. Robinson’s Rico
character, in turn, was a parody of Alphonse Gabriel “Scarface” Capone. Shortly
before he went to jail for tax evasion, Capone tried to get out of rum running
and into the milk business. RICO was intended to prevent future gangsters from
using criminal funds to infiltrate legitimate “enterprises.”
The original intent of RICO was lost when the Supreme Court redefined the
meaning of the term “criminal enterprise” in a case titled United States
versus Turkette. After Turkette, enterprise no longer meant a bar,
bowling alley or dairy that had been corrupted by a “mob.” Turkette
changed the meaning of ‘criminal enterprise” to any group of three or more
people who among them committed two or more crimes in the previous decade. The
Columbia Law Review excoriated the decision for creating “the crime of
being a criminal.” Practically, the redefined RICO allowed federal prosecutors
to federalize any crime.
Dys tells the State’s readers that RICO is “used to prosecute the
worst criminals. Sentences for RICO require the razing of forests of trees to
print all the pages of numbers of years in a prison” and he quotes a former
prosecutor named Miller Shealy who says, “RICO is what people remember is used
in Mafia trials. RICO is the huge hammer for the prosecution. RICO is about the
worst punishment there is.” Dys’ recounting of whatever Shealy actually said is
both dissembling and perjorative.
Dys goes on to claim that “prosecutors proved the case against 15 of 20 Hells
Angels members and associates” which is also inaccurate. What prosecutor Julius
Richardson did was convince a majority of the defendants to sign plea and
sentencing agreements which is entirely different than proving guilt. Coerced
confessions in plea deals are considered heresay.
Journalism And Propaganda
Dys work on this case represents the seedy underside of reporting in the
autumn of print journalism. Federal cases like Bifield are increasingly
secretive. Prosecutors hide great chunks of cases in order to gain a competitive
advantage over defendants and to frustrate the press from telling citizens “what
goes on here” lest citizens “burn the courthouse down.” Consequently reporters
often depend on police and court house sources to tell them what the story is.
There is no getting around that for most of what is still left of the working
press. Unscrupulous prosecutors can simply refuse to talk to reporters who don’t
cooperate. So gutless reporters, as opposed to Woodward and Bernstein, cooperate
and keep their jobs. The State should not be condemned because it is
gutless. Nobody expects the State to be the Washington
Post.
However, even gutless reporters can remain cynical and skeptical in their
hearts. Even today, there is a bright and clear line between collaborating with
injustice and cheerleading for it. That is the line Dys and the State
have crossed.
Twice in the last month Dys has vilified defendants in this case. On April
15th Dys wrote: “The Hells Angels must have forgotten the page in the codebook
that says the United States government does not allow selling methamphetamine,
cocaine and assault rifles to be used in crimes, money laundering and ongoing
criminal enterprise kept alive by intimidation and fear.” Dys seems to assume
that “the Hells Angels” Motorcycle Club was on trial because, he also seems to
assume, members of that club are all soulless thugs rather than fellow
passengers on the sinking American boat. The prosecution tried to promote that
fiction but that was not what the Bifield case was about. The case was about
spending millions of dollars to entice innocent people to break the law on
hidden camera – like Candid Camera in hell.
About the lead defendant, Dys wrote: “He did not say whether he approved of
himself, his associates and other outlaw bikers selling narcotics and guns that
end up in the hands of school kids who get shot or turn into junkies or go to
prison later as dope dealers.” It is completely untrue that the Hells Angels as
a group or the defendants in this case are responsible for the death or
corruption of school children and it is irresponsible to say so.
Dys also says: “It was proved in court: Rock Hill Hells Angels and associates
sold drugs and guns and laundered money as part of a crime ring that reached as
far as New England, with leadership of the group getting kickbacks from all the
criminal activity.” None of that was proven at trial. The “crime ring” to which
Dys refers was a fairy tale.
In yesterday’s story Dys claims “the final outcome” of the case was what “the
public demanded and prosecutors delivered.”
The final outcome of this corrupt and completely invented case was that
people still don’t know what goes on in federal court. Dys is not a journalist.
He is a propagandist. The
State should apologize to its readers and
reconsider its coverage of the case.
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