Justice talking

Apparently, the FBI thinks it perfectly reasonable to allow murderers to walk free and imprison innocent people so as not to hinder drug investigations.

[A]ll of this is necessary, the FBI is saying, to keep people from getting high.

Radley Balko has the details.

This is epilogue to the tale of the House of Death and the story that the DoJ, our guardian of law, has been ordered to pay restitution of $101.7 million after the FBI withheld exculpatory evidence and sent four innocent men to prison for decades. The judge in that case expressed righteous fury:

FBI officials up the line allowed their employees to break laws, violate rules, and ruin lives, interrupted only with the occasional burst of applause," said Gertner, berating the FBI for giving commendations and bonuses to the agents who helped send the men to prison....

"Sadly when law enforcement perverts its mission, the criminal justice system does not easily self-correct. We understand that our system makes mistakes; we have appeals to address them. But this case goes beyond mistakes, beyond unavoidable errors of a fallible system.

"This case is about intentional misconduct, subornation of perjury, conspiracy, the framing of innocent men."

The documents showed the FBI knew that the key witness in the case, notorious hit man Joseph "The Animal" Barboza, may have falsely implicated the four men while protecting one of Deegan's true killers, Vincent "Jimmy" Flemmi, who was an FBI informant.

Brazenly, FBI director Mueller said,

I would suggest to you that that is isolated. Day in and day out over the years, FBI agents have been undertaking investigations and done them lawfully.

Suggest all you want, Mueller. Go read the House of Death and see if you can believe anything coming out of the DoJ.