Eschaton

Leah A. tries again in comments below (working our way up to 500 ways...):

Paul Bird:

York didn't shoot holes in anyone's thesis. He simply left out all kinds of relevant facts. FACTS NOT OPINIONS!

And who exactly is this Marxist-socialist group? Do you mean PFTAW?

By the way, have you bothered to read the evidence they've gathered on their website? Of course not. That's why York's version of events sounds compelling to you. Because you're ignorant of the facts that those who oppose Pickering's nomination have presented.

For instance, York's whole argument is based on the notion that Pickering was upset about a Justice Department decision to offer lenient plea bargains to two defendants, and then to prosecute the third defendant, who ended up with an inappropriately harsh sentence.

Pay close attention, here Paul:

A. No plea bargain can be finalized without the approval of the presiding judge. That would have been Mr. Pickering. He approved the plea bargains, which were offered to all three defendants. Two of them accepted; the third didn't and went to trial. He was convicted by a jury.

B. That disproportionate penalty had nothing to do with the Justice Department or its prosecutor. Once Swan, the defendant who chose to go to trial, was convicted, the sentence was mandated by the mandatory minimum Federal guidelines, and not those for "hate," crimes, no, this particular guideline is for any Federal felony committed with the use of incendiaries.

C. It shouldn't have been a surprise to Judge Pickering what penalty was going to be on the other end of a conviction in this case. York has to present it that way, i.e., that the Judge was shocked, shocked at the unfairness of it all, because York has to be careful not to let you know, or whomever fed York the information was, that Pickering was part of the original plea bargains, that the plea bargains were offered to all three defendants, so this couldn't be a case of selective prosecution, which is the major implication of York's "thesis," which is less about defending Pickering than about attacking those questioning his nomination.

C. York tries to make the context of Pickering's remark about the cross-burning being a "drunken prank," that of his indignation about disparate outcomes for defendants who participated in the same crime, a disparity that both Pickering and York try to lay at the door of the Clinton Justice Department. But the disparity was the fault of Swan himself, who chose to go to trial, and Pickering, who signed off on the plea bargains, and mandatory sentencing guidelines, of which, I imagine, he approves, at least in other cases not involving drunken pranks.

D. I'm not even going to begin to get into the questions raised about the way that Pickering went about trying to pressure the Justice Department to do something about Swan's sentence, which raised ethical questions in and of itself, and also questions about how honest Pickering was in his discussion of his Justice Department contacts on the subject at his first hearing.