It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place. – H.L. Mencken
In “Imagination Pinned Down” I explained how the human mind can and often does distort or manufacture memories in order to support an individual’s belief system; I pointed out that the existence of such distortion and fabrication invalidates the whole concept of eyewitness testimony, because there is no simple way to test the veracity of a witness’ memories in order to establish them as true recollections of real events. But that’s not the only reason eyewitness testimony should be cast from the legal pedestal on which it has long been enshrined; people suffering from false memories at least believe what they say on the stand, but a far larger group of witnesses simply lie.
One unintended consequence of universal criminality is that since nearly everyone has been accused of some crime or another (including traffic violations and the like) at some point in his life, a very large number of people have themselves been the victims of “testilying”; as a result, juries have become increasingly skeptical of police testimony (especially in consensual crimes), much to the chagrin of prosecutors. But they and police have moved to fill the credibility gap by another method: suborning perjury from manufactured “witnesses”. Now, this is really nothing new; the use of torture to extract “confessions” of witchcraft, heresy or treason is probably as old as civilization, and the practice of rewarding jailhouse stool pigeons for hearsay evidence goes back at least to Biblical times. But in the past few decades a new technique called “climbing the ladder” has gained in popularity among prosecutors, and to a lesser extent among police.
As explained by Harvey Silverglate in Three Felonies a Day, it works like this: Say federal prosecutors want to bring down the head of a corporation, either because of personal enmity or merely because his conviction will make a valuable trophy. Such a man is likely to have money and lawyers who will defeat any ill-supported accusations, so the prosecutors need a strong, credible witness to whatever “crime” they wish to frame their victim for. But anyone close enough to the real target will also have access to legal protection, so the inquisitors start small: they find some patsy whom they can threaten with total social and economic devastation and decades in prison via a host of spurious criminal charges, then make him a deal. He will be “allowed” to plead guilty to a lesser charge, and perhaps even avoid prison time altogether, if he will agree to swear on the stand to whatever cock-and-bull story the prosecutors invent against the biggest victim he can credibly be depicted as having contact with. This “evidence” is then used to threaten the new victim with a similar roster of imaginary offenses, and he, too is offered a deal…and so on, and so on, until they reach the top of the ladder or someone refuses to play the game, at which point he becomes a proxy sacrifice for the victim they really wanted to skin.
As long as prostitution is criminalized, the only dependable way to discover the extent of coercion in the trade is to get that information from researchers who can win the confidence of a large enough sample of workers to be considered representative. Any such statistics touted by police or other “authorities” is as questionable as the “testimony” they belch out in court, because there is absolutely no way to know how many so-called “human traffickers” were caged due solely to perjury coerced from frightened whores by cops and prosecutors eager to score the currently-popular fad conviction.
One Year Ago Today
“Village Voice Strikes Again” is a brief account of the beginning of what Village Voice Media tells us will eventually become a full-fledged campaign for decriminalization.