Men, not laws

When all is said and done with regard to the US vs Fred Heebe saga, all of the little dramas will inevitably add up to one thing.  The US Attorney's office messed with the wrong guy and that guy was able to blow up the whole office from the inside. The lesson to be learned is there are people whose status immunizes them from prosecution and then there are the rest of us.  I assume Jim Letten's successors won't mistake them again. 

See also:

NEW ORLEANS -- A federal appeals court has ordered a new trial for a former New Orleans police officer who was convicted of manslaughter for fatally shooting a man whose body turned up after Hurricane Katrina.

A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out David Warren's convictions Monday, saying a judge should have separated his trial form other officers charged in the death of 31-year-old Glover. (See the ruling)

Again, the lesson is there are those of us who are under suspicion just for being outside, or driving across town, and there are those of us who are allowed to burn bodies behind a levee.

Update: Some people might be reading this as the Glover verdict reversal having resulted from L'affaire Perricone. That's not what I mean. Only saying that some of us are privileged with more legal leverage than others and here are two examples of that.

And Upperdate: The Glover ruling is, on second thought, probably a bad choice as an example here.  The overturned convictions are in regard to very specific issues.  The court wanted Warren tried separately and only took issue with one aspect of McRae's verdict.  Of course, these appeals have benefited from access to better lawyers and more sympathetic judges than most of us would.