Today’s prosecutorial abuse of power

I rarely endorse a “flying monkeys of the internet—attack!” plea, but I do believe Dan Savage is correct in calling for the good and decent people of the internet to do whatever lawful things they can to make Claiborne Richardson’s life as difficult as possible for the foreseeable future, at least until he ceases and desists in pursuing this unconscionable prosecution. American adults have, as a group, always had a rather unhealthy obsession with the sex lives of teenagers, but this is a particularly absurd and appalling overreach. Ideally our child pornography laws need to be clarified to prevent creeps like Richardson from pursuing such prosecutions. But in the meantime, we should do the only thing we have the power to do, which is to shine the brightest light we can on this abuse of power.

Update: Thanks to Skidrow Wilson in comments for providing some background on Paul Ebert, Claiborne Richardson’s boss, who apparently doesn’t let pesky matters like “exculpatory evidence” slow down his career:

This Paul Ebert’s third nomination. Ebert, you may remember, made the list several years ago for refusing to investigate the massive corruption among public officials in Manassas Park, Virginia in their efforts to shut down David Ruttenberg’s Rack & Roll pool hall. In 2008 and 2009, Ebert was the special prosecutor in the Ryan Frederick case. Frederick shot and killed Chesapeake, Virginia Det. Jarrod Shivers during a drug raid on Frederick’s home. Frederick had no prior criminal record, and says he thought he was being robbed. Which is credible, given that police informants had broken into Frederick’s home days earlier to obtain probable cause for the raid, part of a possible pattern of illegality among police informants Ebert found unimportant.

Ebert tried Frederick for capital murder. He attempted to change the venue, arguing that bloggers and Internet writers had made it difficult for the state to get a fair trial. He told jurors Frederick was a pot-crazed killer, then sought to exclude video of Frederick’s post-raid interviews at the police station, where a clearly despondent Frederick bursts into tears and vomits upon being told that he had killed a cop. Best of all, Ebert put on the stand a perfectly-named jailhouse snitch named Jamal Skeeter who claimed that during their one hour per day of rec time at the jail, Frederick repeatedly boasted about killing Shivers and mocked Shivers’ widow. Skeeter was so utterly devoid of credibility, fellow Virginia State’s Attorney Earle Mobley made the admirable and rare move of speaking up in  mid-trial to say that he and other area prosecutors had determined Skeeter was a professional liar, and had stopped using him years ago.