New Standard for Justice: Innocent Until a Secret Shrink Study Proves You Guilty after Your Death

[kpete]

New Standard for Justice: Innocent Until a Secret Shrink Study Proves You Guilty after Your Death
By: emptywheel Wednesday March 23, 2011 6:11 am

Our country apparently has a new standard for justice: innocent until a secret study–headed by a guy who may have had some responsibility for screwing up an earlier investigation and conducted entirely after your death–finds you were psychologically capable of committing a crime.

Report faults Army in 2001 anthrax mailings
Officials missed signs of alarming mental problems in Dr. Bruce Ivins, the scientist suspected in the deadly bioterrorism attacks.
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-anthrax-ivins-20110323,0,1308261.story

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It’s bad enough that DOJ is using what was intended to be a lessons learned study (to prevent bioterrorism in the future, even though we’re not sure Ivins committed this crime; note that DOJ closed the case during the period of this study) to try to shore up their shaky case against Ivins.

But what really pisses me off is that DOJ was off contracting secret studies at the same time as it was repeatedly refusing to accept an independent review of their work on the case. Pat Leahy, one of the targets of the attack, declared the case against Ivins to be inadequate in August 2008. Rush Holt tried to get an independent review of the case in March 2009. Jerry Nadler did the same in March 2010.

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So that’s what DOJ has come to: secret studies to try to prove their case, but under no circumstances an actual review of all the things FBI did wrong that might reveal that they still haven’t found the killer.

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/03/23/new-standard-for-justice-innocent-until-a-secret-shrink-study-proves-you-guilty-after-your-death/