[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
If the difference between an innocent person’s going free and that innocent person’s serving a ten-year prison sentence depended on your say-so, and if you could set that person free with zero risk to yourself, what would you do?
Jesus Christ.
I’m torn between getting out of jury duty, and working hard to stay on it so that I can acquit (or at least cause a hung jury.) Certainly not what this hypocrite did.
Billy Beck is right on, in the comments section.
I suppose it just goes to show, 99.9% of the time people won’t help others, and in 99.9% of human history injustice has been the rule rather than the exception.
It’s odd that Franks appears not to realize that what he did raises a moral issue, let alone realize that what he did was wrong.
He not only doesn’t realize that what he did was wrong, he actually enjoyed it: it was “a good experience”.
You should see the follow-up post he did on January 17th, called “Morally Innocent?”. It’s almost funny (but not really).
This is downright disgusting. It shows the danger of blindly following “the law”.
As I said over at radgeek, that was just *painful.*
“And wow, it was kinda cool, you knooow? It really made me feel like I was part of a working repressive state apparaaaatus, you knooow? Like I was really one of the cool kids, sending terrified middlemen to prison and stuff, and it was kinda neeeeat!”
I mean, jeez, he could at least *pretend* to be conflicted about it.
At the end of the article, Franks does express some “regret” that “we really couldn’t honestly find enough reasonable doubt to acquit Mr. Rhett.” Not because he feels bad about abducting harmless people and locking them in a cage for 10 years, of course, but rather because he would have rather reserved that treatment for some other innocent person higher up in the import-export business. But Rhett didn’t snitch, and “he was the one that got caught,” so ten years of his one-and-only life is close enough for government work.