Justice Issues

South Kansas City Blast Site

Five innocent people were convicted in February 1997 in the deaths of six Kansas City firefighters in 1988.  These two stories run a total length of 20,000 words, and won the Missouri Bar Association's annual "Excellence in Legal Journalism" award. On Oct. 30, 1998, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the appeal in the Kansas City Firefighters case. Read the full opinion here and our analysis of the opinion. On Oct. 4, 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to grant certiorari in the case.

by J.J. Maloney

[Editor's Note: to read more about this case go to http://kcfirefighterscase.com ]

Indictment and Trial

The ATF has four "National Response Teams" - teams which respond to disasters such as the Oklahoma City bombing - and Special Agent Dave True was leader of the Midwest team. He is a distinguished looking man with silver hair and mustache.

With 26 years of government service under his belt, True, who was in his early 50s, was ready to take retirement from the ATF and open the next chapter in his life, possibly as a consultant or a security executive for a corporation. There was a hitch, though. For more than eight years, the unsolved firefighters case had dogged him. As the ATF's top special agent in Kansas City, True didn't want to retire with the biggest case of his life hanging over his head, unsolved.

According to True's testimony at trial, the firefighter investigation was dead in the water by November, 1993. (For five years, True had maintained steadfastly that organized labor was responsible for the explosion.) Then he testified that he got a call from Captain Joe Galetti of the Kansas City Fire Department, who wanted True's help in getting the case on the "Unsolved Mysteries" television show, a last-ditch effort to solve the case.

In November, 1994, as the "Unsolved Mysteries" segment on the case was being prepared, True said he received a call from a witness saying Richard Brown had admitted to being involved in the explosion. "If there was a starting point for investigating the Marlborough area," True testified, "that was probably it."

These photos of whites torturing and lynching black men present a side of U.S. history that most history books ignore. They provide one of the many reasons why blacks (and Indians) hold a different view of U.S. history than whites. Notice the carnival atmosphere prevailing as these crowds of U.S. citizens watch the completely lawless and most inhumane executions imaginable.

In the U.S. we often pass judgment on people in other countries: Germany, for the Holocaust; Japan, for its war crimes in Asia; Stalin for his purges.

We conveniently forget our own past, however.  A past in which we enslaved hundreds of thousands of blacks -- beating them, working them in inhumane conditions, and killing them.

There are many photographs, showing crowds of U.S. citizens attending the most inhumane butchery imaginable, and getting away with it.  If you'll notice, they seem to be enjoying themselves.

This page is a reminder that the beast dwells within all of us -- Americans, Germans, Japanese, Russian and all other nationalities.  The urge to participate in butchery is not unique to any nation -- it is a universal affliction.

If we forget that fact, the beast may prevail.

Oct. 5, 2009

Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma April 19, 1995

Advanced, sophisticated profiling could prevent the next Columbine or Virginia Tech

by James Ottavio Castagnera

While the “War on Terror” typically is taken to designate the actions, foreign and domestic, directed at Al Qaeda and its allies (e.g., the Taliban), and although the attacks of September 11, 2001, were and remain unprecedented, America’s homegrown terrorists pose a far more serious threat to public safety and the commonwealth.  These native sons and daughters fall into three principal categories:

--Disgruntled individuals with an ax to grind.  They are exemplified by the government scientist who the FBI now believes perpetrated the Anthrax attacks, which followed close on the heals of 9/11, in 2001;

--The obsessed, represented by the radical animal-rights activists.

--The mentally disturbed, characterized by those who have committed individual acts of murder and mayhem on college campuses, most notably the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007.

The threat posed by these homegrown terrorists to plague our democracy, challenging our ability to remain a free and open society, will remain long after radical Islam has been eradicated or otherwise pacified.  To better understand these three varieties of domestic terrorists, they may be viewed as comprising three breeds within a single species.  If that is a fair assumption, then preventative measures, found to be effective in one arena, may be applicable in all.  These may include advanced profiling procedures.

May 1, 2009

Mumia Abu-Jamal

Not even the U.S. Supreme Court is immune from “the Mumia Exception.” On April 6, 2009 the high court denied Abu-Jamal’s request for a Writ of Certiorari, scuttling his last chance for justice.

by J. Patrick O’Connor