Detective work.

[rivka]

Last week, elynne posted that she's thinking about supporting Howard Dean. In the comments, a couple of people mentioned critical pieces about Dean: hopeforyou linked to a post by greendalek accusing Dean of opposing civil liberties, and someone I don't know linked to a harshly critical column in Counterpunch.

My first glance at the Counterpunch piece identified things which were obviously false, and easily proven to be false. The author said, for example, that

"what Dean really means is that he is willing to disregard environmental safeguards and worker's rights, as long as the wheels of economic capital start churning. No wonder then that Dean supports the expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). But you won't find much information about this in his campaign propaganda."

I suppose it is literally true that Dean wants to "expand NAFTA." But he wants to expand it by *including* labor and environmental protections. In a speech here (I've linked to it before), Dean said,

"If we're going to do trade with Mexico or China or Brazil, now Brazil has a strong trade union movement, but if we're going to trade with these countries, they need to have the same labor standards that we have in the United States of America, no child labor, right to organize, time and a half for overtime, occupational safety and health inspections, and if they don't I don't feel obligated to re-import their products, because we're not subsidizing the creation, in the best interest of the United States, of a middle-class country elsewhere. So if it's OK for Maytag to move its plant from Galesburg to Mexico, then it has to be OK for the Machinists to go down and organize that plant, and if it's not, we're under no obligation to re- import those machines at half or a third of the cost.

Secondly, the same has to do with NAFTA, secondly, in terms of the environment
we need the same environmental standards everywhere."

I had just finished reading this speech and posting a link to it when I read the Counterpunch piece, and so the distortion of Dean's position was particularly glaring. That made it easy enough to dismiss the column as a nasty hatchet job. But I hadn't encountered the civil liberties accusations before, so curiousangel and I dug a little deeper.

Most of the complaints about Dean as being a foe of civil liberties seem to come from two sources. First of all, he's made some complaints about people who appear to be guilty getting off "on technicalities." For example:

"We had a case where a guy who was a rapist, a serial sex offender, was convicted, then was let out on what I would think and believe was a technicality, a new trial was ordered and the victim wouldn’t come back and go through the second trial. And so the guy basically got time served, and he was the man who murdered a 15-year-old girl and raped her and then left her for dead and she was dead."

(greendalek included the first part of this quote only, leaving out the part making it clear that what upset Dean was that the guy went on to rape and murder a teenaged girl after he was released.)

I find it hard to be deeply offended by this statement of Dean's. I think this is the kind of case that makes just about everyone frustrated with the justice system, even if they simultaneously recognize the importance of protecting defendants' rights.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence that Dean has ever advocated policies that limit civil liberties or defendants' rights. What are mostly presented as evidence of his crimes against civil liberties are tightly edited quotes, devoid of context. For example, one commentator wrote that Howard Dean announced that he wanted to appoint to the Vermont Supreme Court a justice who would consider "common sense more important than legal technicalities" and "quickly convict guilty criminals." He offered this as evidence that Dean doesn't believe innocent people are ever put on trial, because "when politicians like Dean call for 'swift and certain conviction of the guilty' [it] actually means 'swift and certain conviction of the accused,' since a person is only guilty when they’ve been convicted."

Dean's actual positions on civil liberties are progressive. He's spoken in favor of the Innocence Protection bill, which institutes a federal guarantee of competent counsel and the right of inmates to get DNA testing of old evidence. He's pledged to order a federal commission to study wrongful convictions and recommend reforms. And he wants to roll back John Ashcroft's policies promoting the federal death penalty. None of this is cited by the Dean-is-anti-civil-liberties people. Nor can they cite damning civil liberties performance in Vermont, except to say that the public defender's office didn't have enough money - which has long been a problem in all fifty states, and doesn't appear to be a specific fault of Dean's.

Oh: they also cite a case in which, in Counterpunch's terms,

citizen reporter Scott Huminski was barred from Vermont courts, a DC lawyer stated in an interview with Eugenia Harris from the First Amendment Center that, "the real heart of the issue is whether local government officials can unilaterally silence speech and exert arbitrary power over their citizens." Seems Howard Dean stuck by his word and appointed judges that care little about real "justice."

It's hard to know where to start with this case. Essentially, this guy Huminski calls himself a citizen-reporter because he used to attend court proceedings, write stuff about them on big signs, and post the signs on his house and car. He was convicted on obstruction of justice charges related to a landlord-tenant dispute, subsequently sued just about everyone in the Vermont legal system for violating his civil rights, and lost several appeals relating to the case. He kept coming back to the courthouse where he'd been convicted, bearing large signs accusing the judge who convicted him of being a "butcher of the Constitution." They kicked him out of the courthouse, and eventually issued a permanent ban because he kept coming back and disrupting court proceedings - and because he threatened to "take the law into my own hands," which made the judges fear for their safety. The court rulings in Huminski's favor, cited in the links greendalek posted, appear to have been temporary injunctions lifting the courthouse ban while the appeals were being considered. (The injunctions have since been rescinded by the same federal judge.)

In other words, it doesn't seem like there's anything more to this than a crank taking on the legal system. Certainly nothing in the long, sordid story reflects badly on Dean.

This has gotten awfully long and rambling, and I'm not sure how many people ever took the civil liberties accusations seriously. I told hopeforyou I'd look into them, and now I have. What I've found has been a whole lot of smear, and not much in the way of facts. Suffice it to say that I'm still supporting Dean, and I hope that others will research his positions independently rather than accepting heavily slanted summaries - from either side.

Comments

[signsoflife.livejournal.com]

I take everything seriously. It makes me unbearably dull. Thanks so much for your research.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

*laugh!*

You're welcome.