Five Towns Jewish Times
Dear Ms. Rose, your service in fighting crime in this country is both very necessary and most appreciated. It truly is. However, at times, a prosecutor can get a bit carried away. Your open letter to the public about the prosecution of Sholom Rubashkin paints a vile portrait indeed. The question is, however, is the narrative in your open letter in any way skewed or slanted? A representative of the government has a responsibility to present truth – not a vision that is distorted by imbalanced descriptions, nuances, and superlatives. The perspectives and perceptions in your narrative is revealing of the zeal involved in this prosecution – a zeal that, truth to tell, has been denounced by no less than six United States Attorneys General.
What follows is a line by line analysis of your open letter. It is not meant to be a defense of the criminal activities of Mr. Rubashkin. He was guilty of crimes, true. What this analysis is meant to do is to reveal the underlying motives for the excessive zeal and ardor involved in this entire affair.[...]
Dear Ms. Rose, your service in fighting crime in this country is both very necessary and most appreciated. It truly is. However, at times, a prosecutor can get a bit carried away. Your open letter to the public about the prosecution of Sholom Rubashkin paints a vile portrait indeed. The question is, however, is the narrative in your open letter in any way skewed or slanted? A representative of the government has a responsibility to present truth – not a vision that is distorted by imbalanced descriptions, nuances, and superlatives. The perspectives and perceptions in your narrative is revealing of the zeal involved in this prosecution – a zeal that, truth to tell, has been denounced by no less than six United States Attorneys General.
What follows is a line by line analysis of your open letter. It is not meant to be a defense of the criminal activities of Mr. Rubashkin. He was guilty of crimes, true. What this analysis is meant to do is to reveal the underlying motives for the excessive zeal and ardor involved in this entire affair.[...]
One quick comment. To quote the letter:
ReplyDeleteThe fact that some detractors have made false claims of prodding people down cattle chutes and other imagined abuses says more about those detractors’ personal agendas than it does about the real events in May 2008.
However, during the trial, one of the witnesses was Matt Derick, a former manager who was fired by Agri. They dsimissed his testimony by pinning the allegations of hazing new employess, as well as docking and penalizing employees who who didn't understand enough English to know what was going on. IOW, he was discredited by pointing out that he did exactly the kinds of things that Agri was accused of pulling on its employees!
"It didn't happen and someone else did it" is a pretty weak lie.
The union is demonized as inventing the accusations, even though the accusations started before their involvement (and before Derrick was hired) and continued even after the union won the right to enter the plan with or without the owner's permission.
The irony is, none of it's relevent. If we look at the judge's open letter about how she chose the sentence, she followed guidelines -- and toward the lower end of the range, at that. Yes, the fact that bank fraud is punished worse than murder is crazy -- but Rubashkin actually was given a sentences AT THE LOW END of recommendations!
-micha