Lazenby: Sixth Amendment Down

This article rehashes some weirdness from prior articles, most notably the kajillions of dollars local law enforcement supposedly receives based upon their drug arrest numbers, which is simply not the case (especially not in the past ten years). I argued it to the point of exhaustion and general disinterest the last time FITS published it, so I won’t do that again here. It’s just not true. If it is, let’s see the fed drug money numbers from SC law enforcement over the past year, or the past 5 years. They won’t be published here, because they are embarrassingly low (non-existent in most years). Moreover, parallel construction doesn’t necessarily “hide” the source of the information; a more accurate way to characterize it would be to say that it attempts to locate the same information from a different source to protect a national security interest.

For example, Bubba is buying heroin from Afghanistan through a source in Amsterdam and that email traffic is picked up by a federal counter-terr outfit, who passes the dope piece to the DEA SOD (while they continue to monitor the al-Qaeda linked heroin source for their own purposes as part of the counter-terr investigation). The DEA or some other LE group now knows about Bubba, but may not want to tell al-Qaeda that particular cell has been compromised just yet. So, the law enforcement guys simply start investigating Bubba from other angles, just as they do when an angry anonymous ex-girlfriend had calls to tip them off (that happens MUCH more often than the Amsterdam AQ connection, by the way). Usually, LE can simply surveil Bubba, or find other reasonable suspicion to subpoena phone records, banking data, etc. and make the case without the original email info. Bubba is the same bad actor, the facts are the same, and no evidence used against him in any way is trumped up.

It’s laughable (and disingenuous) to say that the high rate of guilty pleas in fed court are because the gov’t is hiding the source of the evidence. The high rate of pleas is due to the stiff sentences and the thorough nature of the fed prosecution system. If you get federally indicted, lots of eyes have looked over your case and there’s a damn good chance that it’s a winnable case. There has NEVER been a law that says the gov’t must use EVERY piece of evidence it has. They routinely protect witnesses and informants in this manner, and have done so for decades. It’s not nearly as sexy as the hyper-Libertarian conspiracy theory folks would like it to be, but this is the way it is.

Make the big-L Libertarian case in this forum all you like, but please don’t tweak (or make up) facts to suit your premise.