02 June 2007

Catching up

Somehow earlier in the week I missed this opinion piece by William Rees-Mogg, hardly a flaming liberal, in the Murdoch paper The Times entitled "American justice? Isn’t that a contradiction?". Admittedly his primary complaint is with the grossly unfair and one sided extradition treaty between the US and the UK that recently went into effect but he describes the American legal system thusly:

"Its abuses include plea bargaining, class actions, Hollywood actions, Guantanamo Bay, racism, elected district attorneys looking for votes, hick justice in states such as Arkansas, federal patronage of prosecutors and judges, the politicisation of the Supreme Court, the squalor and brutality of big federal and state prisons and the aggressive ruthlessness of tax and regulatory authorities."

It is worth a read.

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