More dubious prosecutions

Europe does not believe in innocense until proven guilty. Wired reports:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been ordered to return to Sweden to face sex-crimes allegations after the Supreme Court in the United Kingdom rejected a bid to re-open his appeal case there. ...

Assange has not been charged with any crime in Sweden. He is being sought for questioning in Sweden on rape and coercion allegations stemming from sexual relations he had with two women in that country in August 2010. One woman has claimed that Assange pinned her down to have sex with her and intentionally tore a condom he wore. The second woman claims that he had sex with her while she was initially asleep, failing to wear a condom despite repeated requests for him to do so. Assange has denied any wrongdoing, asserting that the sex in both cases was consensual.

After extradition, he will be held without bail:

Assange will be brought to Sweden by the country’s Department of Corrections, which will also take him into custody. Since Assange is considered to be a flight risk, he will be kept in prison while waiting for the remand hearing.

So Assange is being imprisoned without trial, without being charged with a crime, and without even any accusations that caused measurable harm or that could ever be proved.

Jerry Sandusky will surely be convicted and serve the rest of his life in prison. But I am skeptical about the prosecution's case because it is based on recovered memories, on McQueary the moral degenerate, and on long-forgotten incidents. All of the witnesses have been carefully coached by lawyers to tell stories that will maximize their own personal gain. Most of them are suing Penn State for millions of dollars, and will profit from a Sandusky conviction. In most cases, their testimony is contrary to their original stories.

If the prosecution is correct, then Sandusky molested dozens of kids over 20 years, and did it openly on the Penn State campus with the knowledge and mild disapproval of dozens of Penn State officials, employees, and students. And yet no one has any physical evidence, or took strong measures to stop it. People like McQueary witnessed rapes but did not stop them or call the cops. Could McQueary and the others really be that evil? It is hard for me to believe. Has anything like this ever happened anywhere? It seems like a witch-hunt to me.

John Edwards managed to beat the rap against him. If it were a crime for a politician to be a liar and a phony, then he would belong in prison.

George Zimmerman is being persecuted, even tho there is overwhelming evidence that he acted in self-defense.

The perjury case against Roger Clemens depends almost entirely on the credibility of one witness, and is going to the jury. The witness may be just saving his own skin.

There is a new sports doping case:

The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has backed Lance Armstrong into a corner. In a letter sent to the seven-time Tour de France champion, the organization said it has more than 10 witnesses prepared to testify that Armstrong used banned substances between 1998 and 2011.

The unfairness of this is that he has paased all his drug tests, the issues has been litigated multiple times before, and he cannot be retested to determine what he did in 1998.

There should not be any false accusations in blood doping because (1) we have very reliable objective tests, (2) a disputed test can be resolved by collecting another blood or urine sample and sending it to another lab, and (3) it is just a silly sport, so that is no harm is giving someone the benefit of the doubt.

So why are there the dubious prosecutions of Barry Bonds, Clemens, and Armstrong? They make no sense.

Update: Clemens was acquitted on all counts.