Would nancy Grace suspend habeas corpus and legalize torture?

http://www.talkleft.com/story/2005/06/18/332/28176">DNA Clears Father of Murder of His Child

How many times do you hear Nancy Grace, Jeanine Pirro, Wendy Murphy, Mark Fuhrman and other prosecution oriented tv analysts proclaim a parent guilty of murdering his or her child because, they claim, statistics show that this is almost always the case?

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Fox had given investigators an incriminating statement, Glasgow said, and, "There was other evidence that we had in our possession to corroborate the statement. Based on that, we had probable cause, and we had clearly a legal basis to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.

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Next month, a landmark law goes into effect across Illinois, requiring police departments to begin electronically taping custodial police interrogations and confessions. Illinois was the first state to pass the sweeping legislation in 2003 and has since been followed by others.

Taping, however, will not resolve the problem of false confessions unless police officials re-evaluate the techniques they use to elicit those statements. Why did Kevin Fox spend eight months behind bars, haunted by the thought that prosecutors sought his execution? That demands a careful study by police interrogators.

The issue shouldn't be whether Mark Geragos gets another case or whether http://www.talkleft.com/story/2003/05/04/963/64147">Nancy Grace is a disgrace to the legal profession. The real issue is why does the American viewing public tune in night after night to see a person presumed to be innocent get ravaged, tried and convicted on sheer speculation by former prosecutors, cops, forensic experts and criminologists who have no first-hand knowledge of the facts or evidence in the case?

Gary Condit, John and Patsy Ramsey--none of them were charged, let alone convicted, of the crime for which they were under investigation or "the umbrella of suspicion." Yet former prosecutuors went on tv nightly proclaiming their guilt based on rank speculation.

http://www.talkleft.com/story/2006/09/18/459/90390">Reviewing Nancy Grace

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1874696,00.html">Marcel Berlins reminds us that trial by television is still going strong in the United States, "with sometimes tragic consequences." In the courtroom of television, Nancy Grace is chief judge and head executioner.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/05/20/GRACE.TMP">Guilty or not, here she comes -- Nancy Grace brings mob justice to CNN

If one looks at every page of every transcript since "Nancy Grace" debuted three months ago, the program more closely resembles a torch-bearing mob than the "legal issues" show that CNN promised. Grace has created her own parallel universe in which guests are berated for advocating due process, panelists are invited back frequently if they make ad hominem attacks and suspects are seemingly guilty until proven innocent.

http://www.talkleft.com/story/2006/03/01/089/84419">Nancy Grace: Reality Check

While I agree that her distortions aren't exactly outright lies and have little bearing on her career I do think that it says something very important about the Victims' Rights Movement. This is a movement that isn't just arguing in favor of greater access to the system for victims of crime (usually, after all, V-Rights refers to the family's of victims anyhow) but actually actively alleges that the victim's personal experience represents a more valid form of truth than the legal system can afford. Grace never attempted to look at the documents to make sure she had the facts right because the facts matter less than her emotions of outrage and violation. In order for victims' rights to have any meaning, the system must continually fail to punish wrongdoers. So, Grace invented a fantasy-world in which "The System" was responsible for taking her fiance away -- and this justified her questionable practices as a prosecutor and is the very foundation for her entire on-air personality, in which the legal evidence available in, say, the Natalee Holloway case matter much less than Natalee's mother's "feelings" about the case. A cult of victimhood is essential to right-wing politics, which rejects democracy and legal fairness because it fails to deliver "justice." It is, unfortunately, only a short hop from Grace's made-up version of her victimhood to totalitarian legal theories. Nonetheless, I still think Nancy is a one of the funniest people on TV.

http://www.printculture.com/item-643.html">Reading Nancy Grace

Pound says Mussolini is "right in putting the first emphasis on having a government strong enough to get... justice (p. 45).” Nancy Grace says, “The most important thing to me, regardless of the circumstances, was getting justice for the victim.” They both want first and foremost to get justice, though they are not themselves the wronged parties.

But getting justice is not the proper role for a prosecutor. The purpose of a criminal trial is to establish what happened. It is not a battle between a single person who mystically possesses the truth in advance, carrying it tucked under one arm like a football, and a massive system bent only on stopping them from reaching the end-zone of final vicarious vengeance.

In a murder trial, there can be no real justice. You can’t get back what was taken away, not by frying the most likely suspect or by stuffing them into a cold stone box to rot away the rest of their life.

When I was young, sympathy for victims was seen as the congenital weakness of the liberals, who were invariably called bleeding hearts. Today it is the conservatives who worship a cult of martyrdom validated by varying degrees of pain, revelling in stripes you earn by lashing yourself. So these days a TV personality denies being a journalist and dissociates herself from truth-twisting attorneys, and instead derives her authority by painting herself a victim speaking for other victims.

Glorified suffering is the bedrock foundation of popular conservativism. The real objection to the pathos of liberalism is that all external sympathy is misplaced, that any available sympathy should be drawn toward my own collapsed ego just as light is drawn backward into a black hole, that your sympathy and my own self-pity should merge perfectly with no wasted remainder.

http://www.law.uga.edu/academics/profiles/dwilkes_more/50objection.html">STILL STRIKING FOUL BLOWS

Nearly three-quarters of a century ago, the Supreme Court of the United States, expounding on the legal and ethical responsibilities of a prosecutor, announced that “while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one.” Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78, 88 (1935).

To Nancy Grace, the Supreme Court’s admonition is bleeding-heart twaddle.

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Nancy Grace’s discussion of the Central Park Jogger Case furnishes an excellent example of how she manipulates the facts to serve her pro-state agenda. In 1989 a young woman jogging in New York City’s Central Park was beaten and sexually assaulted, and the following year five young men were tried for the crimes. The case involved, Grace claims, “the brutal gang rape of a woman who’d been left for dead.” At the trial, Grace asserts, the defense attorneys adopted a “blame the victim” strategy, thereby demonstrating that they “were not interested in pursuing the prevention of violence against women.” Grace omits an important fact. Whatever the truth of how the defense attorneys proceeded (Grace’s account of the presentation of the defense case at the trial is not necessarily to be trusted), the defense attorneys were totally unsuccessful in that all their clients were convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. You would never know from reading Objection! that the defendants were found guilty.

More importantly, Grace conceals the fact–firmly established before Grace wrote her book–that actually there had been no gang rape and that the five young men charged and convicted were innocent on all counts. She neglects to mention that these young men served up to 12 years in prison for crimes they never committed. She also conceals the fact that police had induced these young men, all minorities, into making the false confessions which were used to convict them. Over two years before Objection! went to press, the trial court, with the consent of prosecutors, granted the defendants’ motion for new trial based on newly discovered evidence. People v. Wise, 194 Misc. 2d 481, 752 N.Y.S.2d 837 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. New York County 2002). From that decision setting aside the convictions, we learn that the defendants’ innocence was proven by DNA evidence and by the volunteered confession of the actual criminal, Matias Reyes, who had acted alone. See also Davies, “The Reality of False Confessions–Lessons of the Central Park Jogger Case,” 30 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 209 (2006).

Nancy Grace — puffy-cheeked, helmet-haired, heavy-lidded, strangely expressionless even during her frequent rages — conveys by body language alone the idea that we're all guilty of something...and she knows it. Her specialty is the sorts of tabloid crimes The National Enquirer used to cover in the bad old days, when car-crash photos and Mexican decapitations were staples. George Pelecanos, James Ellroy, and Michael Connelly are able to elevate such horrors to art; Nancy Grace degrades them so deeply into the fleapit of the imagination that a week of her makes Dick Cheney highlight reels look good. And like Puritan elders, Wild West hanging judges, or Madame Defarge knitting in the shadow of the guillotine, Nancy Grace gives the sense that somehow, someway, she just knows whodunit.

But not even veteran Grace watchers could have been prepared for this autumn's spectacular, when Ms. Grace kicked around the dead body of Melinda Duckett for either 30 or 60 minutes a night, depending on who else in this great land of ours was being stabbed, raped, or abducted.

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Enter Nancy Grace. It's hard to tell if Melinda Duckett knew of Grace's penchant for ambush interviewing, or her seeming fantasy life as Perry Mason in a pink power suit; if she didn't, she found out. Grace repeatedly asked, while overriding Duckett's attempts to answer: ''Have you taken a polygraph?'' (Her lawyer told her not to.) ''Where were you?'' she later trumpeted, pounding on her desk. ''Why aren't you telling us where you were that day?'' The next day, Melinda Duckett crawled into her grandfather's closet and blew her head off with his shotgun. She had to be identified by an arm tattoo. Anyone with the smallest shred of decency would not have run that pre-suicide interview, but Nancy Grace isn't just anyone. She ran it — with a small graphic at the bottom of the screen saying Melinda Duckett's body had been found that afternoon.

If Trenton Duckett is dead, Nancy Grace is in the grotesque position of having to hope Mom did it. If not, the part Grace may have played in Duckett's death is almost beyond thinking about. If Duckett did kill Trenton (the police now call her the prime suspect), she's beyond the reach of the law and of no further help in finding the boy's body and easing the agony of his father or of his grieving relatives, and Ms. Grace almost certainly bears a responsibility for that, though she denies it.

more: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/commentary/0,6115,1540592_34725780_0_,00.html

http://criminaldefenseblog.blogspot.com/2005/07/hey-nancy-grace-your-objection-is.html">Hey Nancy Grace - Your "Objection" is Overruled

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Nancy, let me tell you what I do.

I review the evidence against my client and advise him or her what I think. They then determine whether to take a plea or proceed to trial. If they proceed to trial, I prepare a defense.

Although I advise what I think a jury may do, I do not determine guilt or innocence. If my client tells me he wasn't there, didn't do it, or didn't do what they said, I still prepare a defense because I do not know if my client is guilty or innocent. I do not take the state's word for it, nor my client's. My job is to protect my client's rights and force the state to meet their constitutionally mandated burden of proof.

I do not apologize for that to you, nor anyone else.

I do not lie in court or put on pejured testimony or false evidence, nor do I advance arguments that have no basis in fact. The ethics rules do not permit this. I do not harass, threaten, or otherwise abuse witnesses. I believe the system works when a good, ethical prosecutor, along with a good, ethical defense attorney, present arguments to a fair and impartial jury in front of a fair judge. You, Nancy, seem to think the system would work much better if a prosecutor was permitted to walk into a courtroom, tell the judge what happened, and have the defendant sentenced to the maximum sentence.

Most good prosecutors appreciate a good defense attorney, so that they do not have to deal with the defendant returning on appeal to argue ineffective assistance of counsel.

I am passionate about what I do. I exist because of the United States Constitution, and am proud to walk into an American courtroom each day and defend the principles this country stands for and lives by.

I am not just "doing my job," as you say Nancy, I am doing the job that the American People and Constitution demand.

PIXLEY: Well, Larry, Charles brought it up. I quite honestly have been a been a little tired of hearing that race isn't going to play a factor in this trial. We've heard it from the media repeatedly now when we talk about Eagle County. The fact of the matter when is Kobe Bryant steps into that courtroom, he's not going to be wearing his basketball uniform, he's not going to be flanked by 6'6" athletes. He's going to be standing next to his female attorney, she stands fully a foot shorter than him and he's going to be compared consciously or subconsciously to his white accuser who's also much smaller.

So you take his physical stature coupled with his race, and the fact of the matter is, it's very likely to scare the all-while jury that he will get in Eagle County. And he's going to have to be extremely well-mannered and really handle himself well to overcome that handicap.

I've just been very surprised to hear across the board that no one thinks race is going to be a factor.

GRACE: You didn't hear from it me, Chris Pixley. I have never said that.

PIXLEY: And I didn't accuse you of it.

GRACE: You said across the board, and I consider myself to be part of the board.

KING: Nancy, do you think it is a factor?

GRACE; Yes, anybody that says race is not a factor in any trial in this country is fooling themselves or they're unfamiliar with the system. You have to, you must, get a jury that is reflective of the community, and a jury that will benefit your client, be the victim or the defendant. However, I still say even with race as a factor, Larry, the great equalizer is the money. The money that Kobe Bryant has. That's the great equalizer.

KING: You agree with that, Charles?

BARKLEY: Yes, I totally agree with that. Obviously, Chris is 100 percent right, and Nancy, race is huge. Probably the most unfortunate thing in this country. It's unfortunate that -- that's the thing about me, about that poll, that we haven't heard a stitch of evidence, and 70 percent of black folks think he's innocent, but 70 percent of white folks think he's guilty.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0308/21/lkl.00.html