Recently in the Hall Of Shame Department:
May 19, 2010
So Long Mary Beth
Heh. Looks like Mary Beth Buchanan lost her primary bid in Pennsylvania's 4th Congressional District. It was a 67 to 33 percent blow-out in favor of her opponent, Keith Rothfus. I don't know anything about Rothfus, but Buchanan is a reprehensible human being:
Buchanan promoted her eight years as Western Pennsylvania's top federal prosecutor even though opponents ridiculed her for a failed corruption case against former Allegheny County Coroner Dr. Cyril H. Wecht and her conviction of famed marijuana advocate Tommy Chong for selling bongs online.
She's also done a lot of other useless crap, like the first obscenity prosecutions in 20 years and railroading Dr. Barnard Rottschaefer for supposedly prescribing too much Oxycontin. She's a winner of Radley Balko's Worst Prosecutor of the Year award.
I'd like to think this is the last we'll hear of her, but I suspect she'll be around to haunt us for a while. At best, she'll switch sides and end up running the white collar defense department for some big New York or D.C. lawfirm, where "white collar defense" is defined as "dealing the client to the federal prosecutor faster than anyone else."
More likely, she'll hang around the fringes of the Republican party until someone gives her a job again, perhaps Drug Czar for the next Republican president. And I wouldn't be too surprised if we start seeing a lot of her on Court TV and Fox News.
October 6, 2009
Polanski Questions
About the only good thing I can think about in the whole Polanski fooforaw is that it gives folks who wouldn't otherwise have had one an easy opportunity to stake out a not particularly morally difficult or brave position against middle-aged guys raping young girls, and in favor of said assholes being given appropriate punishment for it.
Miami lawyer Brian Tannebaum takes a little time out from both what is apparently a very successful legal practice (as well as endless fascinating with moderately expensive wine and an obsession as to which group of men is marginally better at transporting an oblate spheroid constructed of a fragment of inflated swine's epidermis in an arbitrary direction) to point out some obviousnesses; Brian has, from time to time, a keen eye for the obvious.
A lot of folks have been blogging about Polanski. I'll join in, perhaps, but . . . I'd like to know a little more, before I start flogging my own keen eye for the obvious.
Which leads to my questions -- which aren't of the hypothetical of "What sort of rope would, in a saner society, be used to execute the 'suspended sentence' that the bastard deserves?" as easy and tempting a target as that might be.
Nah. Realistically -- and forgetting about what should or shouldn't be done -- what sort of sentence would a guy who doesn't have a plea bargain be likely to face, today in California, for the offense Polanski pleaded guilty to? (I'm not asking about what somebody who pled out recently would get; the law may have changed in CA in the ensuing decades, and I'm assuming -- although certainly willing to be corrected -- that he'd be sentenced based on what the law was then, as opposed to now.)
Also: on the flight charge or charges, what would the CA crimes be that he's at least possibly going to be prosecuted for violating by his flight? And what, should he be charged and convicted, would he likely to face in terms of time for those?
I'm not asking any lawyer to put his law license into the pot for the purposes of satisfying my curiousity, but if anybody -- with or without a law degree -- has any knowledge on the subject that they'd care to share, I'd love to see it in the comments.
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