Louisiana Voice

Sycophant Alert

At any given time, between 2 percent and 10 percent of convicted persons in U.S. prisons are innocent. With 2.3 million people incarcerated in federal, state and local prisons and jails, that means that anywhere from 46,000 and 230,000 who were wrongfully convicted.

That is why I wrote 101 Wrongful Convictions in Louisiana, a 281-page book about individuals who were convicted and imprisoned (some for several decades) for crimes they did not commit.

I will be holding a book signing for this, my 11th book, at Cavalier House Books in Denham Springs this Saturday at 1:00 p.m. I will be discussing the injustices done to these individuals, the damage wrongful convictions do to our system of justice and the unfairness they do to the victims of crime. I hope to see you there.

Louisiana, which is in head-to-head competition with Oklahoma for the highest incarceration rate in the civilized world, presently has 58,000 persons in prisons and jails. That means that between 1200 and 5800 could have been wrongfully convicted. The costs of these wrongful convictions ae incalculable in terms of the hundreds of years in cumulative time spent behind bars unjustly and the shattered lives and families, but the astronomical financial cost, as well.

The 101 wrongfully convicted individuals profiled in this book received more than $60 million in compensation for sloppy prosecutorial work, shoddy police investigations, mistaken eyewitness identification, uncaring judges and junk science that resulted in their convictions. And that doesn’t even count the cost of housing, feeding and caring for the prisoners, the salaries paid cops and prosecutors for inadequate investigative and prosecutorial work, or the cost of trials to put them away. Add to all that the fact that when the wrong person is convicted, that means the real perpetrator is still out there.

Well, folks, it’s official now. IMPOTUS may now rename our nation’s capital as he did the Gulf of Mexico. After the U.S. vote with Russia, North Korea, Iran and 14 other Moscow allies against a UN resolution condemning Russian aggression against Ukraine, there’s no further need to refer Washington, D.C. as anything other than West Moscow.

And by its crushing silence, the U.S. Congress, with its Repugnantcan majorities in both chambers, is fully complicit in the abandonment of our European of our allies, of democracy and of every principle this country once stood for.

There is no longer any purpose in pretending that America is the “shining city on the hill” which Ronald Reagan once claimed.

The closest thing we’ve heard in the way of protest against Donald Trump’s whoring himself out to Putin is when Kennedy said Putin made Jeffrey Dahmer look like Mother Theresa. That was something of a rebuke of Trump but other than that, there’s been nothing but silence from our senators and representatives.

• Steve Scalise: nothing
• Clay Higgins: nothing
• Mike Johnson: nothing
• Julia Letlow: nothing
• Cleo Fields: nothing
• Troy Carter; nothing
• Bill Cassidy: nothing
• John Kennedy: platitudes

In high school typing class, there was a practice sentence we were all required to type. It went like this:

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of our country.

It was an exercise that required us to hit nearly every letter of the alphabet.

But it is also a sentence that says much about the heart and soul of America.

It wasn’t so long ago that Reagan took on the Soviet Union and, we thought at the time, defeated communism. It was a time when the Republican Party was the vociferous opponent of Moscow and the Democrats were looked on as less than sufficiently rigid in its opposition.

Trump has turned all that on its head and now we have him, backed by nearly every Republican member of Congress, playing footsie with Russia, North Korea and Iran. And every single one of them should know that given the opportunity, Putin will turn on us in a heartbeat and without blinking an eye.

The current climate begs the questions of just what does Putin really have on Trump and what concessions will Trump ultimately cede to that despot?

And to think, he’s been in office for only a month.

Now is indeed the time for all good men to act.