Monday, December 08, 2014

Bernalillo County DA

Apparently our longtime and likable Bernalillo County DA, Kari Brandenburg, is being scrutinized for trying to protect her drug addict son from facing prosecution.  Just about any parent would do that I think, although not every parent is a District Attorney.  This is a troubling controversy.

But I have to say it pales beside the failure of her office to ever bring an indictment against the police officers who have engaged in a killing spree over the last few years in the city of Albuquerque.  That is a massive failure of her office and it really needs to be examined by the mainstream media, or at least the Justice Department.  Or, maybe they are looking at it.

The sweetheart relationships between the prosecutors and the cops has always existed.  But it is at a point where there needs to be some sort of ombudsman who can handle these police shootings in front of grand juries.  That system is already flawed enough that alleged perps, who are not cops, have little in the way of tools to use in these one sided legal proceedings.  Someone needs to do some original thinking here that might be turned into legislation.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"The sweetheart relationships between the prosecuters and cops has always existed", and catering to snitches/puppets of dirty cops is what Brandenburg and her crew have done for FIVE years by mishandling, sabotaging, refusing to investigate or process vital evidence in my son, UNM engineering student Kerry Lewis' murder. The mess is still in court, and the new rules by the Supreme Court are directed at 2nd District incompetence and delayed prosecutions.
It is difficult to find words to describe the frustration, disgust, pain I have ecperienced in watching the mistreatment of my precious son's life/death. He would have been 26, too, but he had no criminal record, no drugs or alcohol in his body, no weapons, and the two blood-covered guys with scratches that ran from the house were never investigated or charged. How would Brandenburg feel if this had happened to her son?
Serving snakes is dangerous-they can turn on you.

Anonymous said...

I read news coverage of the DA Kari Brandenburg case and felt sympathetic toward her, but I think there are going to be issues that the news media hasn't thought of yet (or neglected to mention), such as her taking advantage of her position of knowing about the crimes before he was formally charged. Police don't actually formally charge you with a crime, the DA does. Other people don't have the advantage of being able to intervene like that, and she could just as easily be seen as abusing her position in that regard.

Also, sometimes when a rich or powerful person intervenes to save their son or daughter it's cast as them trying to "buy off" the victims, which this isn't being cast as, that I've seen.

But I do agree that the shameful way she's acted in covering up police shootings is worse and more important.

She's mentioned tangentially as a tool of the police, by the way, in a damning new article about the APD by Max Blumenthal, posted on Alternet a few days ago. I wanted to alert you and your readers to the article but Alternet's web site hasn't been working right until today.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/inside-twisted-police-department-kills-unarmed-citizens-highest-rate-country