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TO A FRIEND
Atlanta's criminal injustice system
Thursday July 17, 2008
By Ellis Washington
Dr. Martin Luther KingI have a dream, that one day my four little children will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.~ Dr. Martin Luther King
Now that I live in the Atlanta, Ga., area, I thought in today's column I would comment on a topic of news germane to this region. A news item that caught my eye last week was an article by Steve Visser of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution regarding the Brian Nichols murder trial, which is being moved out of the Fulton County Courthouse in downtown Atlanta to another as yet unknown location.
Nichols has pleaded guilty by reason of insanity to the quadruple murder charges, but contends his will to resist committing the crimes was overpowered by delusion.
Nichols is charged with 54 crimes related to the March 11, 2005, killings of Fulton County Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, court reporter Julie Ann Brandau, Fulton County deputy sheriff Sgt. Hoyt Teasley and U.S. Customs Agent David Wilhelm after Nichols escaped from custody at the Fulton County Courthouse, where he was on trial for rape. He was captured later that day.
With this litany of crimes and mayhem in mind, as I read Mr. Visser's article I became even more outraged. Apparently, Superior Court Judge James Bodiford, the judge who currently is to hear this case, has granted the defense motion to move the trial to another venue.
Why? Follow the money. The innocent citizens of Atlanta will pay through the nose for this irredeemable miscreant. How? With this order to change venue, Mr. Visser states:
Bodiford issued his order a short time after County Manager Zachary Williams recommended not moving the trial to Atlanta Municipal Court because of costs.Williams said a proposed agreement between the city and the county would require the county to forgive a $376,000 city debt. In a Thursday memo to the County Commission, he said moving the trial would cost $151,345 a month in overtime and security costs indicated in the security plan for the municipal court.
Williams said that would cost the county an extra $1.8 million if the trial lasted a year, which is the length of the proposed lease. Bodiford contends the trial will be over before the end of this year.
That's right, dear reader, the citizens of Atlanta who have already paid millions in trying to convict a man obviously guilty as sin will now have to pay millions more for a ridiculous change in venue.
This is the same city that presently is willing to pay $32 million to return Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s collected papers to the city of his birth only to have Dr. King's remaining three siblings file lawsuits against each other for fraud and mismanagement over the MLK foundation established by Coretta Scott King.
This is the same Atlanta that just last week in the name of balancing the budget fired hundreds of policemen and firemen, including 20 firemen trainees taxpayers had just finished spending hundreds of thousands of dollars training to be firemen in Atlanta. Way to waste tax dollars for the benefit of neighboring cities, Mayor Franklin!
The incompetence of city governance in Atlanta reminds me of another great leader where I used to live, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick of Detroit, who has the city literally held hostage with five or six different criminal and civil trials against him from perjury, conspiracy, misconduct in office, obstruction of justice and no doubt additional charges to come. He has also cut city services to the bone while taxpayers fund his legions of $700-dollar-an-hour attorneys defending the mayor of "The most miserable city in America," according to a 2008 survey of American cities in Forbes magazine.
But I digress. Back to the Brian Nichols trial in Atlanta. "Well, Ellis, what would you have done to bring judgment to Nichols in a more expedited manner?" First I would have taken serious the defendant's Sixth Amendment rights to a "speedy trial" and follow that lion of liberalism, FDR, in the "Ex parte Quirin" case of 1942, the so-called "Nazi saboteur case," where in the midst of World War II eight Nazis landed on the shores of New York and Florida with explicit orders by Hitler to sabotage key military and war industry facilities in America to weaken our resolve and our will to fight abroad in Europe.
What did FDR do when we caught those eight Nazi saboteurs shortly after their invasion of America in June 1942? No, he didn't let them go on "Oprah" or do a cover spread for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair or People magazine. He put his best prosecutor on the case, Attorney General Francis Biddle, and had a special summary trial on the facts conducted by the Supreme Court that lasted just over one month, whereby they were promptly found guilty and six were executed on Aug. 8, 1942.
Now there's old school justice for you, American style – and guess what, Hitler and his Nazi henchmen didn't try that stunt again because FDR sent a strong message to Germany, Japan and the world: Don't mess with America in America!
Why in the middle of one of the greatest wars in America's history was a socialist like Franklin Delano Roosevelt able to get a unanimous verdict from the U.S. Supreme Court against eight Nazi spies in less than two months and today we can't even imprison one vicious murderer who practically killed his victims on national TV three years after the fact?
Of course, FDR didn't have a seditious ACLU to contend with, nor an American public brainwashed for decades in our Stalinist public education system and a crazy propaganda press hell-bent on undermining America at every opportunity, so here we are. Nichols, three years after he murdered in cold blood four innocent people, has still not come to trial. This notorious murderer is frequently on TV sitting in court with that stupid smirk on his face, making fools of us all and mocking our so-called criminal justice system.
If Atlanta had the necessary moral resolve, we should give Nichols an expedited summary trial on the facts, convict him on all four murder counts and either give him four life sentences or the death penalty.
Perhaps there is no justice in Atlanta in the Nichols case because one of the favorite mantras of progressivism is: It is better that 100 guilty men go free than one innocent be wrongfully punished. This sounds very egalitarian, but where will the liberals and activist judges be when those unrepentant, evil men you have unleashed upon society each murder or terrorize more victims?
To paraphrase MLK: I have a dream that one day Atlanta and every place in America will have the moral courage to judge a murderer by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin. Only then will there be justice in Atlanta.
Ellis Washington, former editor at The Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute, is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including "The Inseparability of Law and Morality:
The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law" (2002), "Beyond the Veil:
Essays in the Dialectical Style of Socrates" and He has just completed the manuscript to his latest book, "The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust" (2007).
Washington's latest book, "The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust," can be pre-ordered by calling 800-462-6420, promotion code "UPREPUB."
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