Third Party & Independents: Archives

While I see, Misha, some differences between the state ivestigating the personal legal sexual conduct of a citizen and investigating insider trading, I am in otherwise total agreement with your position. White collar crime is all too often a crime perpetrated against millions of Americans. Yet, the punishment for white collar crime rarely if ever exceeds that of a comparable crime (theft for example) perpetrated by an individual against another individual.

Some would argue the rich and powerful are partially punished by the loss of reputation and future opportunity and thus deserve less jail time. That argument however, does not wash with me. Having worked as a counselor in a half way house for federal prisoners, I can say with some experience that the loss of opportunity to a petty criminal convicted of theft is as great or greater than to a rich and powerful person who can actually sell their adversity. The petty thief, will rarely acquire a decent income job after having a record.

We have common ground!

Andrew Filipowski, former CEO of the now-bankrupt divine, inc., stole $70 million from periodical subscription customers (including the Mayo Clinic and the Library of Congress), and not only was he not investigated, not charged, not even given a parking ticket, but he then went on and helped his brother-in-law run Blue Rhino into the dirt to where they had to sell out to Ferrellgas, which is now taking a stock his for the pile of crap Filipowski and his band of merry thieves left behind.

And they go after Martha Stewart.

Better yet, let’s investigate a blowjob.

In America, we call this our justice system! It works, often justly, but, far too often not! I grew up learning one of the great things about American law was that our system would rather see 10 guilty go free rather than see one innocent person wrongly convicted. Then I grew up and realized it was only a children’s fairy tale, like G. Washington cutting down the cherry tree and unable to lie about it.

As I understand Stewart’s case, she wasn’t even under oath when she lied to an official investigating a crime which there wasn’t evidence enough to charge her with. So this isn’t even actual purgery, and doesn’t come close to rising to the level of what Clinton did (I didn’t support the Clinton impeachment either, for the record).

I don’t like Martha Stewart’s recipes—too fatty— or her decorative sense, but it looks increasingly like she’s the victim of a witch hunt. Even if she is a bit of a witch, it seems pretty ridiculous for her to go to jail while the likes of OJ is wandering free.

Martin, the court and jury who heard all of the facts disagree. I give their opinion a bit more weight since they were privy to all of the facts and details presented.

Although the Martha Stewart case isn’t much of an argument for my idea of nationalizing the legal defense fields (making them federal public defenders with court-appointed investigative teams, etc.), other cases are, such as the Ramseys, OJ, and a number of others where a rich defendant became above the law by way of access to high-powered attorneys.

If we’re all in the same boat and the boat stinks, we’re all motivated to un-stink it.

Ciggy- so the government would both prosecute criminals AND require people to use government-appointed attorneys to defend them? What about the rights of individuals vis-a-vis the state? that, my friend, is just asking for tyrrany. The reason we have limitations like the 4th ammendment is exactly becuase we dont trust hte government with that kind of unlimited power over our lives and our liberty.

Martha Stewart lied about matters that were centrally substantive/material to many other very severe criminal charges that she and others were facing. Bill Clinton lied about matters that had nothing to do with the case he was testifying about. Many have argued that Clinton’s lie did not even qualify as perjury because the questions were not relevant or material to the case in question… and that the questions were, in fact, inappropriate and even possibly illegal to have been asked in the first place — much as if someone were asked about about their sexual behavior while testifying about tax evasion. Some argue that Starr was trying to build a case that Clinton had a pattern of sexual predation, but as I understand it that kind of “character assasination” evidence/testimony is usually considered inadmissable anyway, especially given that the Lewinsky matter was entirely consensual and legal and incomparable to the harassment charge that was the real case. His behavior with Lewinsky, even if he told the truth, would not have made a difference in the case. Remember, even with that evidence the case was dismissed.

You are comparing apples to oranges.

-Cf

It was a sexual harassment case, which I thought we in America take very seriously (or which the left take serious when its leveled against a conservative judge, but not a liberal president). A pattern of cheating on your wife certainly is relavent to Clinton’s credibility in his claim that he did not sexually herass Paula Jones. That was Clinton’s first perjury, and it was done in a case that was eventually dismissed, but which had not been dismissed at the time the questions were asked.

If the claim was frivolous on its face, it would have been thrown out by the judge on a 12(b)(6) motion well before they got to any depositions, but, as it was, they had to go through discovery. Clinton was under oath during that discovery and, as most everyone awknowledges, lied under oath. There is no two-stepping around this. We have discovery for a reason, and we have depositions for a reason. Lying during those is unacceptable- even if you are a president. Under oath is under oath.

Also, if you recall, the case against Martha Stewart for insider trading was ALSO dropped! In both cases we had serious charges (sexual harassment and insider trading), and in both cases the side with the burden of proof could not prove that either Clinton or Stewart comitted the crime in question. In both cases, however, the accused comitted serveral serious crimes to confound the investigation. They both commited purjery and obstruction of justice. Clinton got off scott-free because he happen to be president during the tech boom and the majority of the people liked him, Martha is going to jail for the same crime.

Its not apples and oranges, its more like different brands of apples. Both rotten, and in a very similar way.

> It was a sexual harassment case, which I
> thought we in America take very seriously

I hope you are not trying to suggest that I am a political hypocrite or that I don’t take sexual harassment seriously, because I haven’t said anything to indicate that. I am only guilty of defending Clinton, who is not (despite your own obvious bias) a convicted sexual harasser.

> A pattern of cheating on your wife certainly
> is relavent to Clinton’s credibility in his
> claim that he did not sexually herass Paula
> Jones.

I don’t understand this at all. How is such a pattern relevant to sexual harassment? Cheating on your wife is 100% legal and seems to me to have no bearing on sexual harassment at all.

I’m actually suprised to hear this from you. As a libertarian (and a law student, right?), wouldn’t you agree that the things people do legally and in private should have no bearing on criminal proceedings having nothing to do with those specific incidents/behaviors? Legally, there ought to be (I daresay that there is) no difference between all forms of consensual sex, whether or not neither, one, or both parties are married. The only thing sexual harassment and infidelity have in common is that both have something or other to do with sex, yet this flimsy “thematic” connection is the whole basis of your argument.

Sexual harassment is a crime because of the power function of it — not because of the hornyness of the harasser. Whether or not the harasser is a horny bastard or an unfaithful bastard has no bearing on sexual harassment. Simple statistics bear this out: according to studies, a third of married people have affairs, but does that mean that they are all prone to harassment?

My point about the Paula Jones case being dismissed wasn’t to excuse Clinton from perjury directly. Rather it was to show that even after his lie was exposed and his affair with Lewinsky was admitted into evidence, the judge still determined that the affair wouldn’t help prove Clinton’s guilt should the case go to trial. In other words, the judge knew that Clinton was a lyin’ cheatin’ bastard and still wasn’t convinced that the case merited a trial.

Indeed, Martha Stewart’s insider trading case was also dropped, but the lies she told and the evidence she doctored were entirely material to the insider trading case against her and against others. (Remember, Clinton did not tamper with physical evidence. Stewart was convicted of actually doctoring documents.) While clinton’s lies didn’t have anything to do with the case being pursued.

> In both cases, however, the accused comitted serveral
> serious crimes to confound the investigation.

I’m glad you said this because it goes right to the core of the difference between the cases. Clinton lied to protect his political career, his marriage, and his family from the scandal that would emerge from revealing the Lewinsky affair, not to confound the Jones investigation. Imagine if he had told the truth: would it have helped the prosecutors? No, it wouldn’t have. He knew that it wouldn’t. As it turned out, it didn’t. Whether or not he told the truth about his affair with Lewinsky would not have had any bearing on the Paula Jones case.

-Cf

A couple of response are in order here:

1. I was not accusing you of being a hypocrite, sorry for the misunderstanding. I was accusing many on the left of being hypocrites, because some of the same people who take sexual harassment most seriously defendant Clinton most vigorously because he was “good on women’s issues.” I think their defense of Clinton came not from the fact that they believe he was innocent, but because they liked him politically. Of course, Clinton isnt a convicted sexual harasser, and OJ Simpson isnt a convicted murderer, and Martha Stewart isnt a convicted insider trader. it is my opinion, however, that it is likely that all three are guilty. of course that opinion doesn’t really matter all that much because the legal system said they were not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt (or whatever the applicable standard was in the Clinton case), but I am still entitled to my opinion on it, as are you.

2. My first point about adultery is that while it isnt criminally illegal, it is certainly the breaking of a contract, something I take very very seriously. I know a lot of men cheat on their wives- that does not excuse the action in my eyes or in the eyes of the civil law. A promise made before the law is one that ought to be kept- thus, adultery is not like any other kind of sex. Moreover, if you cheat on your wife there IS a legal difference from regular sex. In terms of child custody, in terms of legal rights at divorce ect. Adultery is not legally neutral actions like all kinds of sex. This is openly acknowledged in the law.

3. My second point on adultery, is that a history of adultery is acceptable evidence in a sexual harassment claim. If a man has been faithful to his wife all his life, he is less likely to be guilty of sexual harassment. Being an adulterer is NOT conclusive proof of anything, but it is evidence that must be considered. It shows that your word isnt really worth believing when it comes to sex (after all, as far as I know, all marriage contracts still require monogamy). To take another example, lying isnt something you can go to jail for, yet it can be used to impute your credibility in another case. Being a liar makes you less credible- as does being an adulterer.

4. This is the important point I want you to focus on though. In our legal system we have orderly processes set up to decide what questions you can be asked and which ones you answer. If you are asked a question UNDER OATH, even if you believe that the question is not material to the case at issue, you must either refuse to answer it on 5th amendment grounds OR you must answer it truthfully in accordance to the oath you took to tell the whole truth. If the question is improper, it is the job of your attorney to object to the question. If that objection fails, then you must either answer or invoke the 5th amendment. There is no middle ground here. There is no “kind of perjury cause I didnt think it was important.” There is not “well it wasnt really perjury because I was protecting my political career.” There is simply perjury or not. If you are under oath and choose to answer a question asked of you- you must answer truthfully. Clinton failed to do that (and so he was disbarred- can you imagine- he wasnt even allowed to practice law but he was allowed to continue to be our president!), Stewart failed to do that. They should both have been punished for undermining our legal process. Only one was. that was my point.

Couldn’t some of the difference between these two cases (Stewart and Clinton) be that Stewart was found guilty of obstruction of justice, but Clinton was not. Clinton and Stewart were both charged, but that is where the similarities end. I am very happy that we can say we won’t impose a sentence just because one is charged with a crime.

Clinton was impeached by the House for obstructing justice (among other things) but then the Senate found that this was not a severe enough infraction to remove the president under the constitution.

Misha,

Isn’t impeachment the bringing an accusation against or the leveling a charge against a person? Isn’t your statement saying that the House accused Clinton of these things. They then tried him in the Senate, and failed to convict. (I’m not a lawyer, so this is my simplified way of looking at it)

Jim- I am not 100% sure, but I do not think that this is correct. I believe your view of what the House did is correct, but that is not what the Senate did. The question before the Senate was “is what Clinton did enough for him to be removed under our constitution.” The final vote for 50/50 (They needed 2/3rd to remove him). They could have concluded that they didnt agree with the House, and that Clinton was not guilty of obstruction of justice. Or they could have concluded, as I think they did, that hsi actions were not impeachable. The defense brought in numerous constitutional experts who argued that impeachment for obstruction of justice can only occur of that obstruction of justice had to do with his official funciton as president. The prosecutors said that it was for ANY obstruction of justice (and perjury). If I am correct, the major dispute, although not the only one, was WHICH KIND of obstruction of justice warranted removal from office- not whether he actually did it.. This is only from 1 day in my con law class and from my recollections, so I could be wrong.

Misha, Jim is right. Articles of impeachment are drafted in the House, tried in the Senate. If acquitted in the Senate, the Articles of Impeachment are nothing more than accusations.

Censure is a whole different enchilada and other topic not meeting nearly as high hurdles.

> I know a lot of men cheat on their wives

So do lots of women. Equal amounts, actually.

> If a man has been faithful to his wife all
> his life, he is less likely to be guilty
> of sexual harassment.

You see, neither of us are even sure if that is true statistically. It’s entirely a presumption based on the idea that sexual harassment and marital infidelity are linked, when in fact they may not be. In order for your assumption to be valid, people who are convicted of sexual harassment need to be known to also be more likely to cheat on their spouses. Who knows if this is true? Maybe sexual harassers tend to be those people who are unable to form “normal” extramarital relationships such as with friends and neighbors and instead choose to harass their subordinates for sex, or who even harass subordinates instead of having affairs. Remember, harassment does not mean rudely or violently demanding sex, it means demanding sex from people who report to you or even verbally sexually humiliating a person who reports to you. As you say, it’s a serious offense and one that I’m guessing you know is qualitatively different from breaking a marriage contract through infidelity.

Cheating on your spouse does affect divorce/custody cases, sure, but I was talking about criminal cases. It probably also comes into play as motive or in other tertiary ways in criminal cases, but nowhere is it considered a crime in itself.

> To take another example, lying isnt
> something you can go to jail for, yet it
> can be used to impute your credibility
> in another case.

Is that even true? I can imagine it would be true if the lie was a criminal lie (fraud, perjury) but being a bad, untrustworthy character without a criminal record as such shouldn’t have anything to do with the factual phase of a trial, right?

I agree that Clinton’s lawyer should have objected to the questions. If Clinton were a Republican, you know that his lawyers would have stonewalled, counterattacked, and played dumb for years and Clinton wouldn’t have testified in the first place. Clinton’s mistake was underestimating the depth of the attack machine, assuming that he could lie about something that billions of men and women have gotten away with lying about for millenia. He never guessed that somewhere out there a Republican operative had his semen stains in a ziploc bag.

-Cf

Misha,

Ciggy- so the government would both prosecute criminals AND require people to use government-appointed attorneys to defend them?

It’s already that way for people who can’t afford a private attorney. If there’s a problem with that, maybe we should look into the quality of that sort of legal defense?

CF,

hope you are not trying to suggest that I am a political hypocrite or that I don’t take sexual harassment seriously, because I haven’t said anything to indicate that. I am only guilty of defending Clinton, who is not (despite your own obvious bias) a convicted sexual harasser.

Methink he doth protest too much. In Politically Correct circles, sexual relationships between a male employer and a female employee are automatically characterized as “sexual harrassment” because there is a dynamic of power between them—even if she nominally “consents”. Do you, then, repudiate the Politically Correct interpretation of “sexual harrassment”? Has Bill Clinton finally liberated America from a garbage social attitude about the subject? Or will we revert back to hypocrisy if someone OTHER than Bill Clinton dates a female employee?

Rather than attack Clinton, I attack the ridiculous cultural attitude that women aren’t grown-ups and not able to think for themselves when approached by a boss for a date. Fortunately Clinton put it in terms that PERHAPS the left will understand, but then, perhaps not.

The way Mary Matalin put it is: “Live by sexual McCarthyism, die by sexual McCarthyism” (referring back to the Clarence Thomas smear job).

My beef with the Martha Stewart case is that the dollar amounts involved are a drop in the bucket compared to other big-time corporate CEOs with much worse career-long records who absolutely deserve to be making little rocks out of big rocks for the rest of their borns days. People like Andrew Filipowski, for example. Stole $70 million and got off scott free, protected by the bankruptcy proceedings of his failed company. With Martha it was what, $350K? Filipowski sometimes used to spend that amount on lunch.

One link here on Filipowski

> In Politically Correct circles, sexual
> relationships between a male employer and
> a female employee are automatically
> characterized as “sexual harrassment”
> because there is a dynamic of power
> between them—even if she nominally
> “consents”. Do you, then, repudiate the
> Politically Correct interpretation of
> “sexual harrassment”?

With the exception of your ambiguous term “nominally”, of course I repudiate the interpretation of sexual harassment you describe. You have to understand that the one thing we on the left hold above all others is love, which trumps “automatic” characterizations.

-Cf

Actually, Ciggy, with Martha I think it was around $50k (the difference between the cost of selling early and selling late). Who would have guessed that rich folks are such tightwads. I guess it’s an instance of the old wine ads “How do you think I got so rich?”

-Cf

There you go. $50K for five months should have put Filipowski in jail for 7,000 months for the $70 million he stole.

I’m going to refer to this objection to Bush’s SEC next time anyone accuses me of being a Republican for my criticism of the left. :P

Chris:

I agree that Clinton’s lawyer should have objected to the questions. If Clinton were a Republican, you know that his lawyers would have stonewalled, counterattacked, and played dumb for years and Clinton wouldn’t have testified in the first place.

It seems you are saying that Democrat lawyers are too stupid to know what to do, and that Republican lawyers are smart enough (though you play them as cynical and hypocritical enough) to know what to do.

“He never guessed that somewhere out there a Republican operative had his semen stains in a ziploc bag.”

In other words, Clinton never guessed that the Republicans knew the truth. He never guessed that he’d be held accountable to the truth. He never guessed that he had already been caught.

Here is my bottom line: When a President conducts an adulterous affair in the Oval Office during working hours, and while on the phone with government officials, that makes it PUBLIC!! It is no longer part of his private life, but rather part of his public duties. That’s the biggest lie in the whole thing.

Here is the documentation from the Starr Report to back up my claim:

“At some point, Ms. Currie approached the door leading to the hallway, which was ajar, and said that the President had a telephone call.(179) Ms. Lewinsky recalled that the caller was a Member of Congress with a nickname.(180) While the President was on the telephone, according to Ms. Lewinsky, “he unzipped his pants and exposed himself,” and she performed oral sex.(181) Again, he stopped her before he ejaculated.(182)

Records corroborate Ms. Lewinsky’s recollection that the President took a call from a Member of Congress with a nickname. While Ms. Lewinsky was at the White House that evening (9:38 to 10:39 p.m.), the President had one telephone conversation with a Member of Congress: From 9:53 to 10:14 p.m., he spoke with Rep. H.L. “Sonny” Callahan.(184)”

Ciggy- dont you see the difference between offering to provide defense if a person cant afford it, and REQUIRING someone to hire a government paid-for lawyer?

Also, under your system, all you would do is lower the quality of lawyers that everyone has, not increase the quality of lawyers that poor people have. The reason for this is that quality lawyers will still go to where the money is, generally, and they will simply all go to civil, corporate, tax law and stay away from criminal law. Criminal law is small in comparison to civil law anyway…

Misha, when a public defender is the only option, it’s the only option. Calling it “the only option you can afford” versus “systemically required” is a matter of pure semantics. It seems your objection would be the quality of the legal defense, and I agree that said quality should be explored and improved, not just for the benefit of any rich people newly forced to use such legal defense, but also those currently forced that way by lack of means.

When John Ramsey and Kobe Bryant have the same legal defense as a denizen of the projects who fist-fought in self-defense and ended up charged with assault, then I’m pretty sure a lot of new urgency and focus will be given to examining how well public defenders actually “defend”. And then we’ll all be motivated to fix it.