Time to lob North Carolina in with other failed governments of the world — Chad, Rwanda, Afghanistan.
Not so much in terms of absolute violence in the society — although when the bullets start flying in East Charlotte, you wonder. But certainly in terms of the primary function of government completely and utterly breaking down.
Revelations of systemic corruption and fraud at the State Bureau of Investigation prove that state government is broken, a sham. The petty machinations of the Jim Blacks and Mike Easleys are dwarfed by what can only be called a rogue state imprisoning and executing its citizens arbitrarily and without regard to the rule of law.
The UN tries to fix such abuses in other failed states. Under the UN Office of Legal Affairs, the Rule of Law project attempts to boot-strap functioning justice systems in busted societies. In UN-ese they call this transitional justice:
Transitional justice programmes can involve truth-seeking processes that map patterns of past violence, and unearth the causes and consequences of such destructive events; prosecution initiatives that ensure a fair trial of those accused of committing crimes, including serious violations of international humanitarian law and crimes involving human rights violations; reparations programmes that provide a range of material and symbolic benefits to victims; and institutional reform that includes vetting the public service to remove from office those public employees personally responsible for gross violations of human rights.
Tell me that Raleigh does not need this sort of ground-up cleansing.
Criminal abuse of the state’s justice system has been going on for decades. There should be a wholesale turnover in the system, from judges to state bar officials, to state law enforcement officials. Attorney General Roy Cooper and his top assistants should have already resigned. US Attorneys should begin building prosecutions today against any and all persons involved in this negation of democratic government and the rule of law.
This will be painful and quite a few dirty little secrets will come tumbling out. Some rich and powerful men and women will go to jail. But the alternative is to continue to live a lie in which the residents of North Carolina pretend they are citizens of functioning government unit. And because some might prefer a comforting fiction to harsh reality, I think we should call in the blue helmets just to be safe.
They can start with Mecklenburg County’s sad joke of a judicial system.
Update: And so the cover-up begins. The work of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission is over. Done. We do not need the commission to double back to decide if SBI agents perjured themselves before the commission. That is — in the larger scheme of things — irrelevant. The commission needs to stand down and allow federal criminal prosecutions to commence.
Similarly AG Roy Cooper needs to shut up, quit, and lawyer up. He is at minimum an epic failure as a law enforcement administrator, possibly party to a criminal conspiracy during his decade in office. Only a full-blown federal investigation of the AG’s office, the SBI, the Highway Patrol — all LEOs — can begin to undercover what has gone on under the color of law in North Carolina.
Every single elected official in the state should be calling for the same thing — regardless of political affiliation. The fact that they are not tells you how deep the rot goes.
