I needed a new pair of glasses, and fast. On Friday, I am departing on a road trip from New Jersey to Alaska and back again, and I need a new pair of glasses, as my old pair is broken, and I can’t sleep in a car with contacts in mine eyes.

On Saturday I tried going to all of the local glasses merchants around my area in South Jerz. Blast! They were all closed for the weekend. I knew what that meant. I would have to venture to that miserable place so full with emptiness.

So I went to the mall. While waiting for my glasses to be finished (”in about an hour”), I wandered into the only place I hoped to find salvation: a bookstore. I was sadly mistaken.

This was the first time I’ve been in a mall bookstore in years. It was a frightening experience. There was a sizeable section of a wall devoted to something called “Manga”… I don’t want to know.

Classic literature was squeezed into half of a bookshelf.

On another wall was the “social science” section, which was filled with books written by politicians and other media personalities, usually with their faces bulging on the covers.

Such horrible titles, such awful mugs. But the book that really stuck out for me was the Nancy Grace book. The title: “Objection! : How High-Priced Defense Attorneys, Celebrity Defendants, and a 24/7 Media Have Hijacked Our Criminal Justice System.” And there was her face, her whole torso in fact, on the cover. She was glaring at me with her arms crossed, in a stern, damning way. She made me feel like I was guilty of something. But I began to chuckle once I realized just how silly her tough facade really was. It was marketing, clever and damn effective.

I don’t know much about Nancy Grace. Really, I know next to nothing about her. I read on the Huffington Post recently that her current talk show was beating out Larry King in the ratings.

But back to the title of the book. Isn’t she a part of that “24/7 News Media,” and does she not profit gorgeously from it? I know, not a strong criticism. But from what I’ve heard, she is the type that jumps the gun with conclusions of guilt, as in the Michael Jackson and Scott Peterson cases. I can’t imagine the rest of the 24/7 news media doing anything worse than that. It sounds like she’s really pushing the journalistic ethical envelope by being overtly partial to a particular verdict.

I’ve also gleaned from the inside pocket of her book that Grace is a strong “victims’ rights” advocate. This may help explain why she could be so in favor of finding people guilty before a trial’s conclusion. I have not done any scholarly (or non-scholarly) research on the topic of victims’ rights. But ignorance has never stopped me before:

Victims should not have “rights” in a criminal proceeding, in the usual sense. They don’t need rights to be protected. Penal law is supposed to take care of that. Criminal defendants, however, do very much need rights, and they are so granted by the Constitution, as well as by other common law court rules and legislation.

Perhaps a victim should have the right to influence prosecutorial discretion and other areas of law enforcement. If a legislature believes that a victim should be allowed to push for the state to take action, I see no problem with that. Victims should also be adequately protected from vengeful defendents.

Some jurisdictions allow the families of murder victims to testify, usually during sentencing I believe. This practice is a little questionable. Should the decision maker, whether judge or jury, be irrationally swayed by raw emotion that has no relevance to the merits of the case? Here’s a way to look at it: should a murderer get a worse sentence for killing a person with a family than for killing a person without one?

I’m sure there are many other legitimate issues on which victims’ rights advocates are taking a proper stand. But I would like to see victims’ rights advocates focus their efforts on curbing a bigger problem: overzealous law enforcement. Do they already address this? I guess its possible. But getting back to Nancy Grace, I have a feeling that most folks who talk the “victims’ rights” talk don’t really have this in mind. Why is overzealous law enforcement a problem for victims? I’ll put it this way: a victim gets just as much out of an acquittal of a truly guilty defendant as they do out of a conviction of a falsely-identified defendant. They get nothing. In the latter circumstance, a victim or a victim’s family may believe for years that justice was done, only to discover later that they were never so avenged, compounded with the tragedy of knowing an innocent person has been so grossly abused.

In a stingingly sarcastic post, Mithras writes about just such a case. It appears that the cops corralled multiple rape victims into pointing the finger at the wrong guy. Many years later, DNA evidence tells another story.

At his trial, his lawyers put on a weak defense. First, his co-workers testified that he was at work as a cook when the rapes occurred. Obviously, they are all lying, because people who work with rapists lie like that. And they said that if the rapist had left work and committed the rapes like the prosecution contended, he would smell strongly of the grease and onions of the kitchen, and none of the victims had noticed such a smell. Obviously, Mr. Diaz, who is believed to be not white, had learned in non-white rapist school how to remove the smell from himself while on the way home from his job. Finally, the lying liar defense lawyers pointed out that Mr. Diaz was shorter and weighed less than the person in the descriptions of the rapist provided by all of the victims. Obviously, Diaz could also control his height and weight with his mind. Diabolical.

Fortunately, the court did not believe the rapist Diaz and his lying lawyers and witnesses and evidence. The judge said, “I’ve never seen a case where I was more convinced of a man’s guilt.” Heh. Indeed.

The lying liberal New York Times then prints this:

One victim, whose identification of Mr. Diaz led to his arrest, said she had originally thought none of the men in the nine photographs she was shown resembled her attacker. She had asked to see more pictures, she said, but settled on Mr. Diaz after the police twice told her to keep looking at the first batch. He was the only one who remotely looked like the attacker, she said.

“They told me to look closer at the ones I had,” she told a state prosecutor in 1993, adding that the police were watching her study the photos “almost like people holding their breath.”

So, the police were just being helpful. The police are always helpful in identifying the guilty, and witnesses should listen to them. If a police officer says he thinks someone did it, then they probably did it. The fact that Diaz got convicted after the police did this proves they were right.

This victim said she grew more convinced that Mr. Diaz was her attacker when she “shook like a leaf” upon seeing him in a live lineup.

“All these girls couldn’t be wrong, the detectives couldn’t be wrong, it couldn’t go this far,” she recalled thinking.

See??? Once the police had corrected the victim’s faulty memory, she became more and more sure Diaz was the one. They cleared up her doubts for her. They smiled and patted her on the back when she picked the right guy. They’re the good guys.

Nancy Grace appears to be the kind of person to jump the gun on declarations of guilt. This is anything but a service to victims. And according to a customer review of her book on Amazon.com by one “Tom Roberts”, she has been found by courts to have engaged in unethical behavior in her days as a prosecutor (I would corroborate, but hell, he has a case citation!). The reviewer writes:

Since leaving the prosecutor’s office, Nancy Grace has been sharply repremanded by three different appeals courts for unethical and illegal behavior while she was a prosecutor. Her behavior was called illegal by every judge on the Georgia Supreme Court. Georgia is not exactly a friendly place for criminal defense and the lengths the court went in calling out Nancy Grace for ethical violations was very unusual.

They said she:

- Misrepresented facts to the trial judge so that her out of state witness could access the defendants home without the knowledge of the defense. Her witness gained access by breaking down the front door. For good measure, she subsequently also entered the defendants home with CNN cameras.

- Outright misrepresented the testimony of witnesses (falsely indicating in her closing argument that a defense witness had not disagreed with an opinion of the state).

- She inserted false information regarding hearing dates into a court proceeding to gain an advantage.

- She repeatedly ignored the instructions of the court. For example, she made multiple references to issues in her opening statement that the court had ruled (previously) to be inadmissiable.

- She failed to disclose a romantic relationship she knew about between two of her witnesses to the defense. She deliberatly held back her full witness list until the start of the trial.

For those interested, the case was: Carr v. State, 267 Ga. 701, 482 S.E.2d 314 (1997). Its a very detailed case study in how Nancy Grace abused her power as a prosecutor and how she operated without any real sort of ethics.

The court summarized her conduct in really harsh language:
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Our review of the record supports Carr’s contention that the prosecuting attorney engaged in an extensive pattern of inappropriate and, in some cases, illegal conduct in the course of the trial.

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This isn’t one bad judge, its the entire very conservative usually pro prosection Georgia Supreme Court giving that opinion.

And the title of her book attacks “high priced defense attorneys” that have “hijacked our criminal justice system”? The reviewer continues:

Its also important to remember that the person involved is free today only because he was rich and had the money to hire the lawyers to fight back against what she was trying to do. Most people would have ended up in jail for the rest of their lives.