William H Peterson put two innocent men in prison in 1987, they each sat there for 12 years, and one of the two was stuck on death row for years to boot. These weren’t innocent mistakes. Peterson made use of perjured testimony from a corrupt forensic technician employed by the Oklahoma state police and also made rather unprofessional use of jailhouse snitches at trial. Peterson was later humiliated when DNA evidence not only exonerated the two men, but identified the actual perpetrator. Sloppy local police and the pair of bozos the state police sent to work on this case hadn’t honed in on this man at all, even though he was the last person witnessed speaking to the deceased. A normal man would have been mortified by this chain of events. Not Peterson, who has been defiant about it for 19 years and had the audacity to sue Grisham. Were Pontontoc County a community with a decent political culture, the sachems of the local bar would have seen to it that Wm. Peterson had serious opposition come election time and the public would have tossed him out on his tuchus. No such justice. Peterson retired without incident in 2008 and his position was turned over to his protege, who had worked for him since 1987. Grisham says in his book, ‘Ada’s a nice town…’ No it ain’t.

The defendants, by the way, were two men past 30. One was a town drunk who had a history of petty public order offenses (e.g. disorderly conduct) but nothing else. The other was a middle school science teacher who was cleaner than a hound’s tooth. He was considered ‘suspicious’ because he was a 3d drawer friend of the town drunk and because he happened to have called in sick to work the day the deceased’s body was discovered. There was no evidence that either man knew the deceased from a cord of wood and no evidence that the science teacher had ever set foot in the bar where the deceased worked. (There actually was testimonial and documentary evidence that the town drunk had spent the evening with his mother watching rented movies with rented equipment, an unusual activity in small town Oklahoma in 1982). To anyone remotely familiar with the sociology of crime, these two were a most implausible pair of perpetrators. Per Grisham, the municipal police (who one might expect had limited experience with this type of crime) were only a minor contributor the whole train-wreck. It was the state bureau of investigation whose baby this was. So much for specialized expertise.

Back in the Day of the Dinosaurs, a friend of mine was driving up Chicago’s Outer Drive (along the lakefront) from Hyde Park to downtown. As is so often the case, the traffic on the Drive was moving along smartly at roughly around 55-60 m.p.h., somewhat over the legal limit of 45.

My friend was tooling along at the same general speed,* when a traffic cop pulled her over for speeding.

“But officer,” she said, “I was only driving at the same speed as everyone else.”

“Sure,” he answered, “but you’re the one we caught.”

Ya win some, ya lose some.

.

(No, that’s not at all in the same category as the Flynn mess, or many, many others. Not making light of those.)

Call Northside 777 is an excellent movie, by the way. Speaking of people about to executed, as in the lawsuit against Grisham — the newsok site says one of the defendants in the murder case was released just five days before his scheduled execution.

Thanks for pointing to Mr. Grisham’s book.

There is a writeup of the case at

https://newsok.com/article/3299346/judge-tosses-lawsuit-against-john-grisham .

The article, published 9/18/18, begins:

A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a libel lawsuit against best-selling author John Grisham over a nonfiction book he wrote about the 1982 killing of an Ada cocktail waitress, calling the petition’s claims “not plausible.”

(I tried to find out whether newsok.com is a site of The Oklahoman newspaper or an independent site, but all I could find is that The Oklahoman’s main site is listed in the left sidebar of the article. The paper appears not to save such old items in an archive. Here endeth the investigation. Personally, I imagine newsok.com is an arm of the paper.)

The article links to a pdf of the Opinion of the Judge:

http://downloads.newsok.com/documents/s17grishamsuit.pdf

As lagniappe, there is at the bottom of the Opinion a link to a very short clip from Casablanca:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM_A4Skusro

Mr. Grisham also posted a piece on the case at his website:

http://johngrishamonline.com/oklahoma-district-attorney-bill-peterson-to-retire/

I think he will now. I thought Sullivan would throw this crap out like he did with Stevens but he seems to have morphed into a swamp creature. Too bad.

The FARA law was passed in 1938 and there have been seven prosecutions with three convictions in 80 years. I suppose it was a Nazi-era fifth column law but if it were to be really enforced now, half of Washington would be in court.

It is really galling to see the Podestas, whose behavior resembled Manafort’s, in Bill Ayers’ situation. “Guilty as sin and free as a bird.”

I agree with AesopFan that the Turkey charges were what led Flynn to plead out. Otherwise, he could easily have found a conservative legal foundation to defend him pro bono, or even started a GoFundMe page, as several Mueller defendants have done. My defense would have been, “These guys said they were coming to discuss a counterintelligence matter, and I had no information as to their clearances or need-to-know. So I had to conceal what I was doing, just like my mentors, John Brennan and James Clapper!”

Trump can pardon him, and should.

Judge Sullivan has now joined the Resistance and ruled against a long list of Trump/Sessions rules on amnesty.

I guess this explains what happened with Flynn.

On Wednesday Judge Sullivan joined the judicial division of the #Resistance. He struck down most of the policies former Attorney General Jeff Sessions had issued to prevent the abuse the law applicable to asylum claims. Sessions had clarified the proper application of the immigration law’s asylum provision in Matter of A-B and in the related Policy Memorandum. No longer were alleged victims of abusive husbands or alleged victims of Central American gangbangers to be given a free pass to seek asylum.

He even ruled that ICE has to find the rejected (probably imaginary) claimants and bring them back to the US for hearings. He has morphed into another left wing activist judge. Flynn is screwed.