Now that an appeals court in Washington has ruled that the FBI did, in fact, violate the Constitution in a raid of Representative William Jefferson's office last year, the embattled Congressman and his supporters have a whole lot more room to breathe. If the raid produced any usable evidence, that evidence might successfully be challenged in court under the legal doctrine of the exclusionary rule, or "the fruit of the poisoned tree." Any evidence obtained illegally -- like, for example, a coerced confession, or fraudulently obtained information -- can't be used in court itself, nor can any evidential "fruit" arising from that "poisoned tree" of illegally obtained evidence.
Legal technicalities often benefit the defense-side of litigation in this country, and that's as it should be. A free society should err in its legal system on the side of freedom, not incarceration. The fact that this sometimes means the guilty go free is preferable to its correlate, namely the imprisonment of the innocent.
The burden is on law enforcment officers and agents to do their jobs correctly, professionally, and legally. If cops can't obey the law while they carry it out, then what, exactly, are they doing? Recently in another city, cops tricked a suspect into revealing the location of a murder victim's body, but because they used illegal means to obtain that information, the suspect couldn't be charged with the crime. Of course, evidence that didn't result from that trickery could be used against that same suspect, but everything the cops got on the dude that time had to be thrown out.
By acting overzealously, law enforcement may have sabotaged its own case against Jefferson. While the investigation carries on, it's likely that more political misdeeds will be unearthed, regardless of the ultimate resolution of the Jefferson case.
Some feel that getting a conviction out of Jefferson may not have been the goal of the Bush administration FBI. In their view, the hobbling of a leading black Congressman may have been an underlying motive as much as any allegiance to rooting our corruption in the halls of power. It may be that Jefferson was singled out because of his race, as we all know, racism is always lurking around the corner from polite discourse in these United States. Do white politicians have an easier time being corrupt than black politicians? Does white privilege extend that far up?
The recent thumpin' taken by David Vitter would argue that scandal knows no color. And frankly, Vitter's misdeeds were less than small potatoes compared to the web of malfeasance materializing around Orleans Parish with Jefferson fingerprints on it. How many other Congresspeople and Senators (of all races and sexes) have similar skeletons in their political closets, there but for the grace of god go they? Congresspeople who tread firmly by day but tremble in private at night, knowing secrets and fearing their revelation?
Or maybe the rest of the American legislature is honest, and is operating under the highest levels of integrity. Not likely, of course, but that argument should at least be proposed for consideration.
1. You don't appear to have researched this issue thoroughly.
The Jefferson search wasn't thrown out on garden variety 4th Amendment grounds. The FBI had a search warrant properly executed on probable cause. The search, instead, was held illegal based on the "speech and debate" clause, which bestows privilege on the legislative papers of Congressmen. Some of the papers seized from Jefferson's office were held to be legislative materials improperly seized by executive agents (i.e. the FBI). That was the source of the ruling.
First, this has little to do with "freedom" and everything to do with separation of powers. The court did not hold that Jefferson's constitutional rights were violated. Instead, they held that the search constituted an abuse of executive authority committed against the legislative branch.
Secondly, this has nothing to do with overzealous FBI agents. To my knowledge, these issues have NEVER been ruled on before by ANY appeals court. They are so far removed from the ordinary concerns of FBI investigators as to be irrelevant. Being novel, these legal issues had no clear resolution at the time of the search. As a result, there has never, ever been a ruling on the applicability of the exclusionary rule to a search thrown out due to the speech and debate clause. Again, this is new territory. The search could be held illegal but, since no constitutional rights were violated, a court could easily find it inappropriate to invoke the exclusionary rule.
Besides, only the D.C. Circuit has ruled on this. It's likely headed for the Supreme Court, and they may disagree.
As for the suggestion that Jefferson was "singled out" because he's black, that's just plain ridiculous. There are countless white Congressmen who are and have been the subject of investigations for corruption. In any event, the investigation of Jefferson started back in 2005 when an investor in an African tech project (one which had been boosted by Jefferson) went to the FBI and claimed they had been defrauded. As the investigation proceeded, evidence started to implicate Jefferson. If there's a racist motive anywhere in that narrative, I'd love to hear it. Otherwise it just sounds like paranoid race-baiting.
Posted at 4:33PM on Aug 4th 2007 by Courreges