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By Root 860 0

who was four years old when the abuse allegedly occurred seven years earlier. Snowden, the most decorated police officer in the history of the South Miami Police Department, was sentenced to five life terms—and was imprisoned with people he had put there. He served twelve years before his conviction was finally overturned by a federal court in an opinion that ridiculed the evidence against him and called his trial “fundamentally unfair.”

In a massive criminal justice system, mistakes will be made from time to time. But Janet Reno put people like Snowden in prison not only for crimes that they didn’t commit—but for crimes that never happened. Such was the soccer-mom-induced hysteria of the eighties, when innocent people were prosecuted for fantastical crimes concocted in therapists’ offices.

SCORE

• Innocent people put in prison by Ashcroft:

0

• Innocent people put in prison by Reno:

at least 1 that I know of

On August 19, 1991, rabbinical student Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed to death in Crown Heights by a black racist mob shouting, “Kill the Jew!” as retaliation for another Hasidic man killing a black child in a car accident hours earlier. In a far clearer case of racial jury nullification than the first Rodney King verdict, a jury composed of nine blacks and three Puerto Ricans acquitted Lemrick Nelson Jr. of the murder—despite the fact that the police found the bloody murder weapon in his pocket and Rosenbaum’s blood on his clothes, and that Rosenbaum, as he lay dying, had identified Nelson as his assailant.

The Hasidic community immediately appealed to the attorney general for a federal civil rights prosecution of Nelson. Reno responded with utter mystification at the idea that anyone’s civil rights had been violated. Civil rights? Where do you get that?

Because they were chanting “Kill the Jew,” Rosenbaum is a Jew, and they killed him.

Huh. That’s a peculiar interpretation of civil rights. It sounds a little harebrained to me, but I guess I could have someone look into it.

It took two years of nonstop lobbying from the date of Nelson’s acquittal to get Reno to bring a civil rights case against him.

SCORE

• Number of obvious civil rights violations ignored by Ashcroft:

0

• Number of obvious civil rights violations ignored by Reno:

at least 1

Janet Reno presided over the leak of Richard Jewell’s name to the media, implicating him in the Atlanta Olympic park bombing in 1996, for which she later apologized.

SCORE

• Number of Americans falsely accused of committing heinous crimes by Ashcroft:

0

• Number of Americans falsely accused of committing heinous crimes by Reno:

1

Reno also seized young Elián González from his Miami relatives to forcibly return him to his sperm-donor, illegitimate father living in Castro’s Cuba.

SCORE

• Number of six-year-old boys seized at gunpoint and deported to communist dictatorships by Ashcroft:

0

• Number of six-year-old boys seized at gunpoint and deported to communist dictatorships by Reno:

1

In what factless, rationality-free universe is Ashcroft a civil liberties nightmare while Janet Reno represents the golden age of attorneys general? From the phony child-abuse cases of the eighties when Reno was a Miami prosecutor to the military assault on Americans at Waco, Janet Reno presided over the most egregious violations of Americans’ basic civil liberties in the nation’s history. These outrageous deprivations of life and liberty were not the work of fanatical right-wing attorneys in the Bush administration in response to the 9/11 terrorist attack, but of liberal Democrat Janet Reno, serving in peacetime.

The Left’s estimation of Ashcroft versus Reno goes well beyond simple partisanship. It would be as if conservatives obsessively denounced President Obama as the worst public speaker ever to sit in the Oval Office, while demanding that everyone acknowledge Bush as a modern-day Demosthenes.

To maintain that sort of contradiction in one’s mind is pathological. It is the pathological response of a crowd, as described by Le Bon—the “incapacity to reason,” “absence