It's not quite the same thing, but the point is duly noted. The government was dead wrong. Curtis is completely innocent. Another front page accusation down the tubes.
From the New York Times:
This month, Mr. Obama; Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi; and Sadie Holland, a Lee County judge, received threatening letters postmarked Memphis and filled with a white powder. Tests confirmed it was ricin, a poison made from castor beans that can be lethal.The letters read: “Maybe I have your attention now even if that means someone must die. This must stop. To see a wrong and not expose it, is to become a silent partner to its continuance.” They were signed: “I am KC and I approve this message,” a phrase that Mr. Curtis had used on his Facebook page.
According to a senior federal law enforcement official, the authorities were first drawn to Mr. Curtis because the language used in the letters was strikingly similar to language he had used before in letters to elected officials.
When trying to find a needle in a haystack, you use whatever presents itself. Angry words, unusual phrasing, that leads investigators to an individual offer a pretty strong indication of the sender. And Curtis turned out to be an odd duck, aside from his chosen occupation. He had a "long history of mental illness, including bipolar disorder," according to his family and friends. Just the sort of person to do something, well, crazy.
Except he didn't.
Mr. Curtis, a party entertainer who dresses and sings as Elvis, Prince, Johnny Cash, Bon Jovi and others, had been in jail since Wednesday. He said he had never even heard of ricin. “I thought they said rice,” he said. “I said I don’t even eat rice.”
On Monday, an F.B.I. agent, Brandon Grant, said that investigators had not found ricin or ingredients for making it while searching Mr. Curtis’s house or vehicle. The F.B.I.’s search of Mr. Curtis’s computer found no evidence that he researched making ricin, Mr. Grant said.
Last Wednesday, he was the ricin mailer. Seven days later, he was just another bipolar celebrity impersonator smeared in the media across the country who didn't commit the crime.
Just as Curtis' words in his Facebook account, like his letters to public officials, struck the feds as familiar, so too does his arrest, public smearing and subsequent release. Richard Jewell, anyone?
But the system worked this time, right? Charges against Curtis were dismissed and he thanked the prosecutors for cutting him loose. So if Curtis was cool with his week in the government's crosshairs, the media's meat grinder, who are we (am I?) to make a big deal of this?
The problem doesn't begin or end with Curtis, curious and colorful fellow though he may be. Had the feds found anything that could remotely have been used to manufacture poison, or perhaps a weapon of mass destruction, defined by Congress as anything that goes "boom," chances are that the prosecutors wouldn't have been nearly as sanguine about dismissing the charges.
More importantly, given the absence of any hard evidence that Curtis was the ricin mailer, might the government have taken a bit more time before arresting him in the first place? Sure, high profile events call for immediate response, lest the people think the feds impotent and incompetent. On TV, people are caught, prosecuted and sentenced before the hour is up, with commercials. The government wouldn't want people to think any less of them in real life.
And having prematurely arrested Curtis, it becomes plain how the government's efforts are directed not at following whatever investigative leads present themselves, but gathering evidence solely directed toward convicting the person they caught. Catch first, prove later. And if the wrong person is caught, that person not only continues to breath free air and think of new evil ideas, but can rest assured that any evidence pointing his way will be ignored or buried, since the one thing the government hates to do is find evidence that the person in custody is the wrong person. Stuff like that, like Brady, can really screw up the likelihood of conviction.
Still, Curtis suffered from being charged with a high profile offense. Anything involving the President of the United States makes the papers. But the investigation that led to his arrest, his mistaken arrest, bore the same hallmarks as the tools used by the government in deciding who the criminal is in other cases. Except in high profile cases, they try to do it better because a lot of people are watching and they don't want to look foolish.
In other cases, where there are no reporters asking questions and aside from the suspect's family and a friend or two, similar investigative techniques are used but without nearly this much effort to get it right. Nor is it likely that the government would have been quite as accommodating when its effort to find proof, post arrest, failed so miserably. Instead, there was always the tried and true method of pounding the rhetoric to make what little they had seem overwhelming, to smear the defendant with mental illness which proves nothing but prejudices him in the eyes of the public, and see whether they can slip it past a judge and even a jury.
Much to the surprise of many, chances are pretty darn good that even such a flimsy case would have been enough for a jury to convict. Contrary to surmise, juries tend to embrace the government's position, because they wouldn't prosecute if he wasn't guilty. Either way, Elvis would leave the courthouse, but this time he was lucky to head home rather than a metropolitan correctional center. This time.
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Source: http://blog.simplejustice.us/2013/04/24/elvis-has-left-the-courthouse.aspx?ref=rss
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