Wisconsin's Radical Justice

Collin Levy has a great opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal today [The Wisconsin Targets Tell Their Story] that tells a tale that most anyone would believe took place in China or Russia.  In China, two weeks ago, several lawyers were rounded up by plain-clothes police who arrested them, without telling them what they were charged with, denying them legal council, then denying any opportunity to question the prosecution's witnesses.  The Russian FSB is cut from the same cloth, but slightly rougher and less tactful.  They have access to every e-mail, telephone call, and message a person gets through the Russian Internet, and have been known to use that in their business and personal interests as well as to support the politics of the Russian leadership.

Levy is talking about the John Doe cases brought by the Democrats, probing (blindly, it sounds like) among political friends of Scott Walker, a Republican.  Two of them claim armed police officers came to their houses, told people there they could not call a lawyer, and were to turn over "evidence" identified in an open-ended warrant for almost any communication between friends of Walker and a couple of political advisors.  One was a minor, advised to not call his parents.  They left with the evidence but never provided the warrant, nor a list of what was seized.  It was obvious to another that they had been reading his email before seizing it, because they knew what to ask for.  The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled this behavior was 'unconstitutional' and 'unsupported in either reason or law', both things that can expose some of them to lawsuits - and they now let their lawyers speak for them. How ironic the application of the rule of law allows them a defense they would not allow their victims.

We might ask where our Justice Department was in all of this.  Is it OK in our current Justice Department to allow a state system of prosecution that borders on the techniques used in Nazi Germany?  If the same guys were stalking Democrats, would it have helped to get then involved?  This isn't about politics and even this admninistration should know better.  It isn't enough to sit back and watch when such a travesty of Justice is going on.  They should  be helping Wisconsin to change a system like this and prosecute the people who abused their prosecutorial discretion.

I interviewed a defector from a Communist country who came to the U.S. because he could tell people in this country were free.  He said they acted free.  They didn't have to look over their shoulder for a policeman or  censor just because they didn't agree with the way people in government thought they should think.  We had a revolution over that once.  The prosecutor in Wisconsin must have missed that part in law school.