Look for more of this with the continuing federalization of crime.

Federal conspiracy charges, by the way, not only allow federal prosecutors to retry crimes for which you’ve already done time or even been acquitted of in state court, they can also dredge up incidents that happened a decade or more ago–alleged crimes for which state statutes of limitations have already expired. If they can convince a jury that the incidents are linked, however tenuously, they will.

I’m working on a story on a federal conspiracy case that’ll blow your mind. Should be in the magazine in a few months.

This is all thanks to the drug war, of course. The broadening of the scope with which prosecutor levy federal conspiracy charges, the inherent unfairness of mandatory minimums, the way we measure the success of prosecutors by how they pile up convictions regardless of mercy or justice, and, in the case I’m working on, you can toss in the obvious problems with the use of jailhouse informants.

Good for the judge in the case linked above for excoriating the prosecutors. Too bad it won’t deter them a bit.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 6:27 pm by admin and is filed under Police Informants, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.