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Just because we “know” someone is guilty, doesn’t mean a
fair trial isn’t necessary. Precisely because the state is always “sure”
the accused is guilty. It is to protect all of us from the state
that fair trials for the “obviously guilty” are necessary.
But truly fair trials are a rarity in the U.S.
If a trial is a sham, then it is just a show trial.
That is the case in the “trial” currently unfolding for the
surviving Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
The Federal judge in the case denied the defense’s request
for a change of venue (moving the trial to another location). The judge
speciously insists jurors in the Boston area, who have been subjected to years
of agit-propaganda and demonization of Tsarnaev by the media, will be fair and
impartial and unbiased.
That is positively absurd.
And two weeks before the trial began, the Federal
prosecutors pulled a typically sleazy trick, handing the defense 2,000 pages of
documents. Naturally, the defense asked for a delay to review the documents.
The judge refused. As is usual in the U.S., the judge is an ally of the
prosecutors.
No change of venue, no delay for defense to properly
prepare.
Notice the U.S. courts allow the government to hold
prisoners for many years without trying them when it wants. If the defense needs a delay in a political case, it’s
denied.
Isn’t the government confident in its evidence? Why does it
need to engineer an UNFAIR trial to guarantee a conviction?
And since the U.S. government is seeking the death penalty,
only “death penalty qualified” jurors are allowed to be empaneled as jurors.
That is, during the questioning of the jury pool, they are asked if they oppose
the death penalty. Any who do are excluded. (The state of Massachusetts has no
death penalty so probably most residents of the state oppose it. Therefore the jury
will automatically be unrepresentative of the population. As this is a Federal
trial of course Federal death penalty law applies.)
Pro-death penalty jurors have been proven by sociological
research to be more pro-prosecution than other people- another built-in bias
favoring the government.
One thing is sure- the FBI agent who executed Ibragim Todashev will never be tried.
[On trial: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. 20 years old now. Boston Marathon bombing April 15, 2013. Three killed, about
200 wounded. Brother Tamerlan was 26 when he was gunned down in a hail of
police bullets. (The police tried to execute Dzhokhar also, as he was hiding in
a small boat in the backyard of a homeowner who reported him to police after
they gave up looking. They pumped bullets into the boat, wounding him. The
media falsely reported a “firefight.” Dzhokhar had no gun with him by then.)]
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