Conrad Black at the Huffington Post

“But in the blame game, the political class locked arms to scream from the Capitol and White House steps and from the skyscraper tops that “greed” was the problem, in the private sector of course. The tangible encouragements heaped by unsound countrywide on, inter alia, Chris Dodd of Dodd Frank, didn’t count — i.e. the politicians aren’t counting. And Attorney General Holder and his acolytes in the federal prosecution service such as Time‘s current cover heart-throb, set out to end the debate by indicting the opposition debating team, with the enthusiastic collusion of most of America’s bovine, law and order-deluded national media.

Thus the instant pantheonizee, Preet Bharara, who is in fact chasing after alleged inside traders, an activity which had nothing to do with the economic crisis, “collars the masters of the meltdown.” He may be a capable and even, against the odds, a principled prosecutor, but this fatuous bit of Time-puffery does not incite optimism on that score.

If Time had had the privilege of a Damascene bolt of revelatory lightning (that it did not mistake for a UFO), it would have mentioned, as more serious magazines such as the New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnick and the Economist recently have, that the U.S. criminal justice system is a compost-heap of corruption and hypocrisy. All is governed by the plea bargain system, the wholesale extortion and subornation of perjury in exchange for immunity or a reduced sentence. The Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendment guaranties of the grand jury as an assurance against capricious prosecution, of no seizure of property without due compensation, of due process, an impartial jury, access to counsel, prompt justice, and reasonable bail, have long since shrivelled into figments of the imagination of the sentimental, without that erosion being noticed by the national media or even the Supreme Court.“

Comment:

Well, as to promptness, the system here is prompt enough, at least compared to, say, India.  But that’s the problem. Sometimes, it’s better for things to take a long time. It would make prosecutors less inclined to prosecute anything but the most egregious offenses, and it would make citizens less willing to go to court, unless they’d suffered the worst kind of injury.