Uncensored Justice System Discussion

JUSTICE1st · Joined: 13 Dec 2007 Posts: 715 Location: USA

Although most people believe in the concept of "innocent until proven guilty," anyone who has personally been subjected to what I call the "titanic effect" of our current INJUSTICE system knows that is a myth. A myth that is not only naive but is also dangerous to anyone who may one day be charged with a criminal offense, either by false accusation or by an unfortunate mistake.

The frightening truth is that the state, also known as the prosecution, goes to great lengths to stack the deck against the accused, then denies doing any such thing. But, before I get accused myself of "stating opinion as fact," I'm going to use actual facts from a real case to illustrate, fact by fact, how the state stacks the deck. The case I'm using is from Lincoln County, Oregon, and the defendant's name is Sandy Jones. Ms. Jones' attorney, very luckily for her, was the renowned trial attorney Gerry Spence of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and his book documenting her case is, most accurately, titled THE SMOKING GUN. The facts of this case are as follows.

1. Ms. Sandy Jones was charged with the murder of a local small-time real estate developer, one Wilfred Gerttula, who had been fatally shot in the chest one day in July, 1985. Her 15-year-old son Mike had also been charged with murder, but in juvenile court. Gerry Spence received a letter from a local woman in November, 1985, notifying him of the case, and Ms. Jones' treatment from the authorities at the local jail, where she had been held in isolation for four months after the police claimed she'd been exposed to Hepatitis A from a regular visitor. According to the letter, Sandy Jones was held without any medical treatment, and no blood tests were done to confirm whether or not she actually had the disease. In addition, "none of the jail staff or police officers involved in the minister's arrest have been similarly quarantined."

2. When Gerry Spence visited Sandy Jones for the first time in the jail, he described the following: "The woman behind the jail bars was dressed in men's prison garb that hung loose on her bones and mocked what had once been her good looks. Her bare feet were stuffed in rubber sandals. No socks. She sat huddled on the steel prison cot embracing herself against spasms of shivering. Her dark blond hair, uncombed and stringy, hung to her shoulders." Someone on the jail staff had taken away her socks, and according to Ms. Jones, she couldn't feel her feet due to the cold.

3. The lawyers for both Sandy Jones and her son Mike were both court-appointed, and both were paid very little by the state for their work of defending their clients. Quoting from page 14, the state's "reasoning" was the following. "From the prosecution's point of view, the thinking goes like this: the poor commit crimes. Then the poor want the state to provide the best lawyer in the history of American jurisprudence to get them off. No. The state would provide the accused just enough of a defense so some smart lawyer couldn't spring the bastard on appeal because the state had failed to provide due process."

4. The police handling the case had manipulated Sandy's 15-year-old son Mike into giving them a statement without reading him his rights. But the Deputy DA argued that Mike didn't have to be advised of his rights unless he was in custody, and the officers claimed he wasn't a suspect at the time, so what the boy said and did was totally voluntary.

5. When one of the prosecutors learned that Gerry Spence would also be on the defense team, which previously had consisted only of the two court-appointed attorneys, they did everything they could to prevent his representation of both Sandy and her son Mike. Which included threatening to turn Mr. Spence in to the Bar Association "for unethical representation," and using his position on the Ethics Committee to try and disbar one of the court-appointed attorneys for sponsoring Gerry Spence into the case.

To make a long story short, the efforts of the prosecutors to get Gerry Spence removed from Sandy Jones' and her son's case did not succeed, fortunately for his clients. But these facts are deeply disturbing, to say the very least. They are disturbing to me as an average citizen who couldn't afford the services of such a dream defense team, and to anyone else who doesn't have deep pockets or a home or lands to mortgage to obtain funds to hire even one top defense attorney, should the worst ever happen.

A wrongful conviction was avoided in Ms. Jones' case, but very narrowly, and only because Mr. Spence had the great courage and compassion to represent her for no fee. Others haven't been nearly as lucky, such as Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, the two defendants whose nightmarish stories were documented in John Grisham's THE INNOCENT MAN. They did not have Gerry Spence to represent them, nor any other well-known trial attorney, and were wrongfully convicted as a result.

So whenever I hear someone – in total ignorance – say that "the system is fair," I feel compelled to straighten the person out, and give them the REAL facts, as opposed to the dangerous and self-serving law enforcement myth that is believed by far too many...until it is too late.

As the saying goes, the subject is now open for discussion. And we can use facts from other cases we've read about, in addition to those I've named, in case others haven't read them yet. Zambeste

J

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"We must remember, always, that accusation is not proof, and conviction depends on evidence and due process of law."
EDWARD R. MURROW, 1954