News and Notes is an NPR program that highlights stories of particular interest to African American listeners.  Host Farai Chideya took an interest in the Jena 6 story early on and her program has contacted me about it in the past.  The lion’s share of this roundtable discussion deals with Mychal Bell’s attempted suicide (none of the panelists considered the shooting accidental).   

I clicked on the “listen now” tab with a sense of foreboding.  I was afraid participants would conclude that the black community should never have supported the Jena 6. 

That’s not what I heard.  Jasmyne Cannick, Shaun King (of Shaun in the City), and Eric Brown of the Detroit News talk about the impact of intense media coverage on small-town kids like Mychal Bell.  The general sense is that supporters of the Jena 6 turned Mychal into a hero–a burden of expectation he couldn’t handle. 

When we stand behind people like Mychal Bell, Robert Bailey and the other Jena defendants we must understand who they are and who they aren’t.  They aren’t heroes.  They are neither wise nor well-informed.  For the most part, they come from broken families and have learned to live with severe financial hardship.  In their world, role models are in short supply and, for better and for worse, the Hip Hop culture fills the moral void.

Justice advocates need to grow beyond what I call the thug-hero syndrome.  The Jena 6 were vulnerable to over-prosecution because the white community in Jena had labelled them as lower ninth ward thugs.  I tried to present the Jena 6, Justin Barker (the student assaulted at Jena High School) and the young white boys who hung nooses from a tree on the white side of the school courtyard as victims of a toxic social environment.  These kids had been fighting sporadically for months when a fire at the high school sparked a crisis atmosphere. (more…)

At the request of Bill Mefford, Director of Civil and Human Rights with the United Methodist Church, I have added my signature to this forceful call for a more compassionate and common sense criminal justice policy.  If you are a religious leader and would like to add your endorsement, Rev. Mefford can be contacted at:

Bill Mefford
Director, Civil and Human Rights
General Board of Church and Society
The United Methodist Church
100 Maryland Avenue NE
Washington DC 20002
(202) 488-5657
bmefford@UMC-GBCS.ORG

 

Criminal Justice Reform Faith Letter

The undersigned faith organizations are committed to reforming the criminal justice system in the United States. We represent millions of Americans, many of whom provide pastoral care for prisoners while they are incarcerated, direct services for those reentering society after incarceration, and sponsor various drug and crime prevention services and programs for our constituencies and the community at large. Thus, our organizations have a vested interest in the state of the criminal justice system and are mobilized to advocate and work for common sense reforms.With a new Administration and Congress we hope that the needed reforms in the criminal justice system will be implemented in a bipartisan fashion. The past approach by Congress to “get tough on crime” has given rise to policies which led to a ballooning of the prison population and has often averted our focus from effective solutions for our communities. These policies forced the states to place their most intense focus on building prisons, which subsequently diverted their attention away from effective solutions that result in safer communities. This explains why we have a 68% national recidivism rate.

Our purpose is to work with Congress to pass criminal justice reforms that refocus our energy and efforts on prevention, treatment and rehabilitation programs, increase public safety, strengthen families, and reduce the enormous social and economic costs of maintaining such a large prison population.

Current get-tough approaches have not enhanced public safety, but instead, have exacerbated problems for communities. The number of those imprisoned exceeds two million, one in every hundred adults. And 1.7 million children have a parent in prison. Moreover, racial injustice has been intensified, as one in every eight Black males in their twenties is currently incarcerated. Prison conditions have become harsher with less and less resources to manage the bulging system. The lack of education and rehabilitation breeds antagonism which negatively affects the incarcerated and the prison staff as well. Studies indicate that prison guards suffer from a much higher rate of suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness as well as domestic violence. We believe that reforms are needed not just to protect the rights of the imprisoned but to protect corrections staff as well.

With serious effort and necessary leadership and vision, this situation can be effectively addressed. Reform based on a holistic approach will protect the human rights and basic dignity of the imprisoned, maintain the mental health of corrections staff, and increase public safety for all of society. The faith organizations endorsing this letter believe there are common values that can effectively bring about these necessary reforms. These values include:

• A greater emphasis on prevention as a way to reduce drug abuse and crime and thereby establish safer communities;
• Healing for the victims of crime and personal responsibility and accountability for those responsible for committing acts of crime;
• Education and meaningful work as a basis for morale and as preparation for those who are incarcerated to become self-sufficient, contributing members of their communities when they are released;
• Compassion for all people coming out of prison who should be given a second chance so that their families and communities will be strengthened;
• Equality for racial minorities that have been unfairly targeted through racial profiling and sentencing disparities;
• Respect for the integrity, safety, and rights of the imprisoned.

The reforms we call for will require sustained effort and leadership, and we look forward to working with you to make them a reality.

Opinion leaders from the Dallas Fort Worth area are beginning to call for a new conversation about race.  If there are any white people out there who feel the same way I would love to hear from them.

Bob Ray Sanders, a columnist with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, says Americans need to start talking about race and the conversation needs to begin immediately. 

George Yancey, a professor of sociology at the University of North Texas, believes this conversation needs to begin in the Christian church.   I am currently reading Yancey’s, Beyond Racial Gridlock: Embracing Mutual Responsibility.  Yancey writes specifically for Christians.  His arguments appear to anticipate the common sense balance that characterized Barack Obama’s speech on race delivered in Philadelphia. 

Finally, Gerald Britt, a black pastor from Dallas, extends his argument that progressive Democrats shouldn’t be upset by Barack Obama’s invitation to evangelical pastor (and Proposition 8 supporter) Rick Warren.

In February of last year, I published “Hard Times in Bunkie, Louisiana.”  Space won’t allow me to repeat the entire sordid story.  Suffice it to say that the Bunkie Police Department, represented by a controversial detective named Chad Jeansonne, filed a narcotics case on Larry Bazile, a heavy-set, middle-aged black man. 

Chad used the usual tricks to get Bazile to cop to a quick plea.  He threatened the family members arrested in the course of a warrantless raid that they would be prosecuted if they didn’t flip on Larry. 

They refused to flip.

A local defense attorney was assigned to represent Bazile.   After making her client wait all day to see her, she scanned a few documents and reached a swift conclusion: “You’re going to jail!” she announce imperiously.  “Who do you think they will believe; two niggers or an FBI agent?”

The contours of the case against Big Larry was beginning to emerge from the bureaucratic fog.  Bazile was charged with selling drugs to an FBI agent through the auspices of a middleman named Lloyd Robinson.

Although Bazilecouldn’t find an attorney to take his case, he had the enthusiastic support of his brother Jerriel, a Dallas businessman, and a sister, Gaythell Smith, an experienced Dallas Police officer who knew sloppy narcotics work when she saw it.

When Larry’s brother and sister demanded to see the paper work filed in connection with the case, they received six separate reports describing three mutually-contradictory crimes.  In one story, Larry sold the dope directly to the FBI agent; in a second story, the FBI man was accompanied by an unnamed confidential informant; in version three, the FBI agent did the deal in the company of Lloyd Robinson.

The goal was to frighten Robinson into implicating Bazile.  But at a hearing at the Marksville, Louisiana courthouse, Robinson refused to play along.

That’s where things stood in February of last year.

That month, an attorney was hired to defend Larry Bazile.  District Attorney Charles Riddle told the new attorney that he had an audio tape of the transaction that clearly implicated Bazile.  When the largely inaudible tape was played (with Larry’s Dallas siblings listening in) the only distinct phrase was, “Big Larry would not sell them drugs.”

District Attorney Charles Riddle had no hard evidence, but he refused to drop the case. 

Over the next few months, five inconsequential pre-trial hearings, all scheduled by the state, were convened.  The DA’s office was trying to wear Bazile down.  Again, it didn’t work.

Finally, on November 3, 2008, shortly after his attorney had withdrawn from the case, “Big Larry” was called to the courthouse in Marksville for yet another hearing. 

As soon as the family entered the courtroom they knew something was amiss.  Instead of the usual sea of black faces, the courtroom was awash in white people.  Larry Bazile was informed that a jury was being selected and he was going to trial.

“But I don’t have an attorney,” Bazile protested. 

Judge Mark Jeansonne (the cousin of the Bunkie cop who originally filed the case on Larry Bazile) was defiant.  (I’m not making this up.) The case was going to trial one way or another. 

A dishevelled civil attorney with no experience in criminal law was summoned to represent Bazile.  When the p0or man protested that he knew next to nothing about criminal law, Judge Jeansonne tossed him a manual of criminal procedure and told him to do the best he could. 

As the hapless civil attorney flipped manically through his instruction booklet, Larry Bazile was instructed to direct voir dire questions to a roomful of prospective jurors.  Larry told the judge that he had no idea how to proceed.

Jerriel Bazile and Gaythell Smith glanced nervously around the courtroom.  There was no sign of the FBI agent who had allegedly purchased drugs from Larry Bazile.  The state of Louisiana was going to make this case as a swearing match between a black defendant and a white police officer. 

Before withdrawing from Larry’s case, an attorney had filed a discovery motion but had never received the requested information.  Judge Jeansonne said it didn’t matter.

Larry Bazile was on the verge of panic.  If he was forced to represent himself, a conviction was a foregone conclusion. 

Finally, a defense attorney who was passing by the courtroom was prevailed upon to defend Mr. Bazile.  He had no choice but to advise his client to accept the government’s plea bargain.  If he could stay our of trouble for three years, the attorney explained, the conviction would be expunged from Bazile’s record.

It seems almost certain that Detective Chad Jeansonne invented a phantom FBI officer in order to make a fraudulent narcotics case on a defenseless black defendant.  Moreover, Judge Mark Jeansonne allowed his wayward cousin to submit his creative writing assignment.  Both men will emerge unscathed. 

Why pay attention to a nickel-and-dime narcotics case in an obscure corner of Louisiana?  If this kind of behavior is tolerated in Avoyelles Parish, it will eventually be tolerated everywhere.  That must not happen.

 

Judge Leon Holmes

Tomorrow morning I will be driving to Little Rock where, the following day, an attorney named Alvin Clay will attempt to convince a federal judge that he deserves a new trial.   (You can find the backstory here.)  

A reporter showed up on the final day of Clay’s trial six months ago and his conviction by an all-white jury was duly noted.  Casual readers of the Democrat-Gazette likely glanced at the story and smiled approvingly.  The FBI had nailed another small-time scam artist.  Message: the authorities have your back. 

The article failed to mention that Alvin Clay had been indicted for mortgage fraud in the midst of a highly contentious case in which the Little rock attorney accused the US Attorney’s office of flagrant misconduct. 

Readers never learned that Clay once brought a federal prosecutor to the brink of scandal.  A confidential informant admitted on the verge of trial that dozens of narcotics cases had been manufacturede out of thin air.  The informant’s honesty was rewarded with charges of perjury and obstruction of justice and a young attorney named Alvin Clay was assigned to his defense.  Clay defended his client by putting the federal government on trial.  Had the press been paying attention, Clay would have done serious damage to an assistant US Attorney’s credibility.

The mortgage fraud case against Mr. Clay has always been remarkably weak.  A mortgage broker named Ray Nealy falsified information on five loan applications.  A small-time construction contractor named Donny McCuien claimed to have performed rehab work on the properties that, in most cases, was never performed.  The government’s case against Nealy and McCuien is air tight.

Nealy and McCuien couldn’t pull off their scheme without convincing a long list of business partners that they were legitmiate businessmen.  For one thing, extensive rehab work can only be done in the state of Arkansas if you have a contractors license, something neither Nealy nor McCuien possessed.  Fortunately, Alvin Clay had a license, and his office was just down the hall from Nealy.  Clay didn’t have time to oversee rehab work; he was a hard-working attorney running a real estate firm with six agents.  Nealy told Clay that if he would let McCuien use his license he wouldn’t have to give the matter a second thought.

At least, that’s the way Alvin Clay tells it. 

It was also the way Donny McCuien told it when he first talked to federal agents.   The quick-thinking street hustler quickly ascertained three facts: (1) the FBI had little interest in Nealy and McCuien–they wanted Alvin Clay; (2) the feds wanted McCuien to tell them that Clay was in on the scam; and (3) McCuien would have to present himself to the jury as an ignorant burger flipper who had never held a hammer, weilded a saw or rehabbed a house. 

Donny McCuien never claimed that Alvin Clay had helped Ray Nealy file fraudulent loan applications.  McCuien couldn’t make this claim because, as he admitted at trial, he had never seen the applications.  All McCuien could assert was that Clay knew that no rehab work was being done.

The government’s argument to the jury went something like this: no one who met a bungling fool like Donny McCuien could have possibly believed that he was capable of doing rehab work; ergo, Alvin Clay had to have been in on the scam.

Nealy and McCuien made false representations to buyers, sellers, lenders and title companies, so why didn’t the government conclude that Alvin Clay was just another victim of two scam artists?  As a convicted felon, Alvin Clay would lose his law license.  Revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold.  The Alvin Clay story is festooned with icicles from head to toe.

On the witness stand, Donny McQuien was rude, evasive, clueless and agitated.  But these traits were perfectly in accord with the government’s contention that McCuien was a hapless loser that no rational person could mistake for a rehab man.  On paper, McCuien was running a property management company when the five fraudulent deals went down, but McCuien insisted the company was a front created by the devious Ray Nealy.

In concert with the government’s wishes, Donny McCuien claimed at trial that he had never rehabbed a single property in his life.  He had never owned a single piece of property.  Heck-fire, he had never even owned the tools of the trade.

Clay’s defense team presented a series of rebutal witnesses who testified that McCuien had sold them carpentry tools or employed them to do rehab work. 

The jury was unimpressed.  Like virtually every all-white jury weighing the fate of a big black defendant (Clay is built like a middle linebacker) jurors couldn’t imagine that the federal government would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to convict an innocent man.  No one wanted to believe that the federal government could be the final victim of a crude scam.

Since his conviction, Alvin Clay has been making the simple phone calls that could have cleared things up for the FBI a long time ago. We now know that McCuien was running real estate scams before he met Ray Nealy and continued this behavior long after he had been indicted by the feds.  Over the years, Donny McCuien has bought, sold and rehabbed dozens of Arkansas properties.

A few days ago, Clay stumbled upon a truly shocking piece of information.  Through the grapevine, Clay learned that McCuien had been congratulated by his pastor for getting a contractor’s license.  Clay called the Contractor’s Licensing Board of Arkansas and spoke to the board’s attorney.  He was told that in 2006 the state of Arkansas issued a contractor’s license to Complete Construction of Arkansas, LLC.  The company officers were: 1) Donny McCuien – President; 2) Donny McCuien Sr. – Vice President.

In other words, at the very time Donny McCuien was parroting back the government’s story on the witness stand, he held a contractor’s license and was president of a construction company. 

Why would a guy in such a compromised position tell a series of blatant lies to the FBI and an assistant US Attorney?

Two reasons.  First, McCuien knew he was only useful to the government if he told the story their way.  A single deviation from the script he had and he would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Second, McCuien knew the federal government had no interest in undermining their own case.  Federal officials had no solid grounds for believing that McCuien was telling the truth or that Clay was lying.  They embraced the story that felt right. 

Is this kind of sloppy and vindictive prosecution a rarity in the federal system?  My experience suggests that it is far more widespread than is generally realized.  A vigilant US Attorney can stop this sort of nonsense dead in its tracks.  But what if the US Attorney isn’t paying attention, doesn’t care, or is part of the problem?

In the Colomb case, a wrongful prosecution was thwarted by a principled federal judge named Tucker Melancon.  On Tuesday morning, Judge Leon Holmes has an opportunity to show his shine. 

During his eight years in office, George W. Bush appointed 326 federal judges. In this week’s edition of Rollingstone, Judge Holmes is given the distinction of being one of Mr. Bush’s six most dangerous appointments.  Is this a fair assessment?  Holmes’ ruling in the Alvin Clay case should give us our answer.

Mychal Bell is back in the news.  Shortly after being arrested for allegedly shoplifting shirts at a mall in Monroe, Louisiana, Bell was admitted to a hospital following what his attorney calls a gun-cleaning accident.   According to Cassandra Wooten of the Monroe Police Department, Bell shot himself because he was upset over the coverage his arrest received in the local press.  Bell has also been charged with simple battery because he allegedly elbowed a mall security guard. 

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of any of these allegations nor for the explanations offered by defense counsel.  But these reports suggest that, like Britney Spears and countless others, Mychal Bell is the victim of his own celebrity.  

The media tend to reduce complex stories to a single personality, a fact that has not escaped media-savvy activists.  Al Sharpton transformed Mychal Bell (and his parents) into sympathetic victims of a southern town without pity.  When other Jena-6 parents refused to give Sharpton the right to act as their sole media representative, the civil rights leader reached out to Mychal’s parents.  Desperate and afraid, the Bell family was more than eager to give Sharpton carte blanche control. 

From a legal standpoint, this arrangement worked to Mychal’s advantage.  If, as he now says, Mychal knocked Justin Barker unconscious with a sucker punch to the head, he fully deserved to spend a year in a juvenile facility. 

He didn’t deserve to spend a quarter century in an adult prison, and that’s where things stood when Friends of Justice entered the picture.

Unfortunately, most of the 20,000 people who flocked to Jena last September were convinced that Mychal was innocent.  They latched onto the best case scenario for the same reason the good people of Jena chose to believe the worst: in both cases perception was driven by ideology.  

The high degree of scrutiny surrounding this case guarantees that the due process rights of the Jena 6 will be protected.  The five defendants yet to face trial are all represented by world class defense attorneys.  As a result, the wheels of LaSalle Parish justice are turning very slowly; so slowly, in fact that I believe the outstanding cases will be resolved outside the courtroom.

Meanwhile, Mychal Bell and his parents have been forced to live in a strange twilight zone.  Initially, they were greeted as civil rights heroes by enthusiastic supporters across America.  In Central Louisiana, however, they were considered dangerous pariahs.  The psychological repercussions have been devastating. 

Predictably, Rev. Al has moved on to more pressing matters and is no longer there for the Bell family.

This should have been a story about what some call the “school to prison pipeline”: black and white students betrayed by racially insensitive administrators who created a toxic social environment then washed their hands of all responsibility when the floor caved in.  This is the way I told the story from the beginning. 

It wasn’t the story Al Sharpton told the world.  And once the New York civil rights icon got involved nobody was listening to Alan Bean or anyone else.  The story belonged to Al.  Al forced the facts into the cramped confines of his anachronistic moral vision and talked up Jena as if it was Selma, Alabama circa 1962.  Sharpton took this tack because he knew the media would like it.  They wouldn’t necessarily buy it, mind you, but they would repeat Sharpton’s shtick word-for-word.  It was familiar, it was simple and it made for effortless reporting.

The upside is that the Jena 6 are getting the justice they deserve–nothing more, nothing less.  On the downside, a precious learning opportunity has probably been squandered.

 ‘Jena 6’ figure shoots himself

(CNN) — A teenager whose arrest in a racially charged assault case drew thousands of protesters to his rural Louisiana hometown was in a hospital early Tuesday after a shooting that his lawyer said was accidental.

Mychal Bell was released in September 2007 and later agreed to a plea deal in the beating of a classmate.

Mychal Bell was cleaning a gun when it accidentally discharged, shooting him in the shoulder, his attorney, Carol Powell-Lexing, told CNN. He had surgery Monday night at a hospital in Monroe, Louisiana, and has not yet been able to talk, she said.

Monroe police Sgt. Cassandra Wooten said the wound was not life-threatening.

Bell was one of six black teenagers who faced adult felony charges in the 2006 beating of a white classmate in the town of Jena. The beating followed months of racial tensions in the community of 3,000 after three white students hung a noose in a tree whose shade was traditionally off limits to blacks at Jena High School.

The case of the “Jena 6” drew national attention from civil rights groups who argued that the charges were excessive. An estimated 15,000-plus people turned out for a September 2007 rally in the Louisiana town on the black youths’ behalf.

Bell eventually pleaded guilty to battery in a juvenile court, served several months in a youth home and later moved to Monroe, about 70 miles north of Jena.

I was going to write something about the current furor over Rick Warren’s participation in Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony.  Fortunately, the Rev. Gerald Britt said everything I wanted to say (and a good deal more) in his Change the Wind blog.  Please check it out.

No one doubts that Bernard L. Madoffis guilty.  He readily admits to running a decade-long Ponzi scheme in which, to quote the New York Times, “early investors are paid off with money from later victims, until no more money can be raised and the scheme collapses.”

Some commentators wonder what separates Madoff from 100,000 “legitimate” operators in the mortgage and investment business.  Paul Krugman gives one typical example of larcenous but technically legal behavior:

Consider the hypothetical example of a money manager who leverages up his clients’ money with lots of debt, then invests the bulked-up total in high-yielding but risky assets, such as dubious mortgage-backed securities. For a while – say, as long as a housing bubble continues to inflate – he (it’s almost always a he) will make big profits and receive big bonuses. Then, when the bubble bursts and his investments turn into toxic waste, his investors will lose big – but he’ll keep those bonuses.

Krugman admits that Mr. Madoff’s scheme differed in a few particulars from the scam described in his hypothetical. “Still,” he says, “the end result was the same (except for the house arrest): the money managers got rich; the investors saw their money disappear.”

We’re not talking about a few hustlers lining their pockets at the public’s expense; Krugman is describing an economic system rooted in illusion and deceit.  “In recent years,” he points out, “the finance sector accounted for 8 percent of America’s G.D.P., up from less than 5 percent a generation earlier. If that extra 3 percent was money for nothing – and it probably was – we’re talking about $400 billion a year in waste, fraud and abuse.”

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is trying to explain why ten years of allegations from a string of concerned citizens didn’t rouse them to action.  Despite repeated “investigations,” not a single witness received a subpoena. 

Maybe the federal government was too busy with the affairs of state to check up on Mr. Madoff.

Then how do we explain why the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation invested thousands of person-hours tying Alvin Clay to nickel-and-dime fraud in Little Rock, Arkansas?  

Ray Nealy and Donny McCuien manipulated the ignorance and greed of a few people for personal gain.  The documentary evidence is overwhleming.  Nor is there any question that Mr. Clay allowed Nealy and McCuien to use his contractors license to rehab five pieces of run-down property.  But here’s the big question: did Clay know that much of the rehab work on the invoices wasn’t being performed? 

Sure, Clay should have gone to the work sites and checked things out for himself, just as the good people bilked by Mr. Madoff should have asked themselves how the mega-profits were being produced.  Across America, millions of good people have been making bad decisions.   This is regrettable, but it isn’t illegal.

While the SEC was studiously ignoring Mr. Madoff, federal agents raided Alvin Clay’s office and seized his business records.  They researched hundreds of real estate deals.  Every one was legitimate.  

Which suggests that Alvin believed he was involved in a series of above-board, straight forward real transactions. 

Clay’s combined profit from five deals: $27,500.

Again, why did the federal government focus on such small potatoes while ignoring a fifty billion dollar (yes, that’s “billion” with a “b”) Ponzi scheme that was repeatedly brought to their attention by people with burning hair?

Simple, really.  The feds wanted to believe Alvin Clay was guilty and they wanted to believe that Bernard L. Madoff was a legitimate investor.

Clay was an aggressive attorney with a penchant for embarrassing federal prosecutors.  So of course he was guilty.  This explains why no one with the FBI or the DOJ made the slightest attempt to check out the grand jury testimony of Donny McCuien–the only witness linking Alvin Clay to illegal activity.  Had they done their homework, they would have learned, in a matter of hours, that every word proceeding from the mouth of their star witness was, to employ a seasonal expression, Humbug.

Alvin Clay and his attorneys have been making the phone calls that should have saved twelve white jurors from two weeks of tedium in June of 2008.  During the trial, McCuien testified that he never did rehab work, that he didn’t know how to do rehab work, that he had never hired anyone to do rehab work, that he had never owned the tools of the rehab trade, and that (the coup de grace) he had never owned any real estate property.

None of it was true.  In fact, it was grossly, fabulously, comically false.  McCuien was running real estate scams before he met Ray Nealy and he continued his low level Manoff impersonation even after he was indicted by the feds.

Federal agents didn’t check out McCuien’s story because they knew, deep down where it hurts, that he was feeding them pretty lies to avoid aggressive prosecution.  McCuien made his money telling people what they wanted to hear; this scam was no different than all the others.

The feds wanted to believe that Leonard L. Madoff was a straight-up investor because, like thousands of less adventurous investors across the nation, the New Yorker was making so much money for so many people.   

Is there any real difference between Madoff and your average investment banker? 

Sure.  Madoff knew he was trading in dreams; everyone else was hoping there might be some real value behind the funny paper they were peddling.

Either way, whether we’re talking about Clay or Madoff, we’re in the realm of magical thinking.  The collapse of the investment industry tells us that most people, even agents of the federal government, trade in greed and self-delusion unless someone is keeping tabs.

On January 6, 2009, Mr. Clay and his attorneys will be back in federal court with boxes of evidence showing that Donny McCuien lied to the federal government.  They will not attempt to prove, because it would hardly help their case, that the feds knew the true worth of McCuien’s testimony but gave it a AAA rating anyway.

Friends of Justice will be in the courtroom.  Will a hard-working Little Rock lawyer take the rap for the sins of a nation?   The question will soon rest in the capable hands of federal judge Leon Holmes.