I blogged about this yesterday at Hit & Run. But the article I linked to doesn’t even include the worst of it. Via Instapundit:

“FBI officials up the line allowed their employees to break laws, violate rules, and ruin lives, interrupted only with the occasional burst of applause,” said Gertner, berating the FBI for giving commendations and bonuses to the agents who helped send the men to prison for the killing in Chelsea of Edward “Teddy” Deegan, a small-time hoodlum.

Pardon my Frennch, but why aren’t the agents who covered this up in fucking jail?

This isn’t just something that happened 35 years ago and got swept up and forgotten. The campaign to keep these innocent men in jail remained active well into the 1990s. And the argument from the Justice Department attorney that the federal government is under no obligation to share information with state and local prosecutors that could prevent an innocent man from going to jail ought to horrify you. In this case, the FBI let four innocent men rot in prison, initially in order to protect a mob investigation, but eventually to protect the fact that the FBI had allowed this to happen in the first place.

That someone from the Justice Department would argue such situational ethics chills the blood, and draws natural questions about other federal investigations and prosecutions. Should the federal government allow innocent people to go to prison to protect terrorism investigations? To protect the identity of drug informants (we already know the DEA is willing to look the other way while murders transpire in order to protect its informants) ?

What other “greater goods” are worth robbing innocent people of their freedom?

And while I don’t have a problem with taxpayers footing part of the bill, here, every FBI agent complicit in this cover-up ought to lose everything he owns, and it all ought to go to these men and their families–similar to the way, say, FBI and DEA agents seize the property of drug suspects, and siphon the proceeds back to their respective agencies.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 28th, 2007 at 10:17 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Police Informants, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.