In discussing the latest news about Jeffrey Epstein's arrest and the attempts of his lawyers to get the child rapist out of jail, two lawyers, Lawrence O'Donnell and Mimi Rocah discussed one of Epstein's big-deal lawyer, Reid Weingarten blatantly lying TO THE JUDGE about even the very law under which Epstein has finally been arrested, claiming that what he is accused of doing (what he is certainly confirmed as admitting doing by the illegal Florida plea agreement) wasn't covered by the law he's accused of breaking. If there is any doubt that Reid Weingarten was lying in a filing to the court on that point, O'Donnell read the law which lists what is covered, a number of which are exactly what Epstein is accused of doing to dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of children.
What I found especially telling in the discussion between O'Donnell and Rocah - who used to be an Assistant U. S. Attorney working in the Southern New York District - was that they more or less said that the expectation of success of such defense attorney lies was seriously hampered by the chance assignment of the judge in this case having previously spoken out against the injustice of allowing the super-rich to get out of jail because they have resources that poor People don't have. Such equal justice under the law should not be a matter of mere chance, though it certainly is. If, by chance, a judge who was one of the many, many judges who are predisposed to give such privileges to the rich, that would certainly not be the case and many such judges are certainly ready to hide behind the kind of lies that Weingarten told in his filing. I doubt that high-priced lawyers with that much experience lie just for the pleasure they get from lying at those per-hour fees, they do it because they know that with many judges and "justices" such lies give them outs for doing the most unjust things. I can imagine such successful lying might become a habit if it works enough, it certainly has turned into a habitual expectation when dealing with "EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW," as the lie over the facade of the Supreme Court building puts it.
Similar lies are behind the outrageous sweet-heart deal that Alex Acosta, as a Republican-appointed Federal Attorney in one of the states which are cesspools of corruption, Florida came to in private with Jeffrey Epstein's lawyers, including, certainly, the TV-Harvard lawyer implicated in Epstein's crimes, Alan Dershowitz.
The blatant injustice of the legal system leads directly to things like the disrepute that lawyers and judges and the law, itself, are held in are, in so many cases, fueled by the permission they give each other and themselves to lie through their teeth. That is obvious in even the relatively virtuous truth telling that O'Donnell and Rocah engage in when they excuse the lies of Weingarten as being "good" defense lawyering. What is good about it is clearly not good for the truth or justice, it is certainly not good for equal justice under the law because expensive, high-power lawyers held in high esteem are so much more likely to lie to get rich criminals off, Alan Dershowitz has made his claim to fame on such TV lawyering on behalf of Trump and a series of wife murderers and, now, child rapists - don't forget the provision in his agreement with Acosta that, bizarrely, exonerates any possible co-rapists associated with Epstein.
There is every rational reason to abolish such free lying by lawyers, certainly in the filings they make with courts - if judges could punish them for that, I don't know - and which they tell to the public on behalf of their guilty, corrupt clients. That kind of lying is routine for those with the money to buy it, FOX is full to the top and overflowing with such lying, several of their more prominent lawyer-celebrities have made a career of pushing such lying to the public to ever lower depths, some of them having worked as Republican appointees and having associations with elite universities.
The law in the United States, the judicial system, is held in entirely higher regard than it deserves. A good part of that is the phony aura of quasi-religious awe it is presented in by the allegedly superior media - NPR, Nina Totenberg, I'm talking about you. But as long as this kind of blatant lying is a a typical, casually expected part of it, the legal-judicial system is one of the major venues of corruption of American democracy. Something should be done about that. If judges were forced to stop accepting the lies of high-price and other lawyers, if law associations and the professional establishment of the law didn't allow it, there would be a hell of a lot less injustice around than there is.
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