[Adapted from an earlier post on BureaucracyBlog.com.]
In my 11/24/07 inaugural post on BureaucracyBlog.com (http://bureaucracyblog.com/http:/bureaucracyblog.com/4/it-starts), I wrote the following:
I have seen state bureaucrats possessed of as much ineptitude and malice as anyone in the Bush administration, and what I’ve seen has convinced me that we’ve wound up with something as bad as our present corrupt federal government because of our acceptance of malice and incompetence at local and state levels.
A few days later, I mentioned in another post what two lawyers had told me about cases in the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office of Professional Regulation (OPR), which investigates allegations of misconduct against licensed professionals:
Once they file charges against you, they will convict you. …[T]hey would be embarrassed not to return a conviction in a case in which charges were filed. [Emphasis added.]
There’s a very strong and far more serious echo of that in a story by Russ Tuttle in The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080303/tuttle). Tuttle quotes Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo’s military commissions who resigned last October for ethical reasons, recounting a conversation he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes:
“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals. We’ve got to have convictions.‘” [My emphasis.]
So there’s a case in point, of the state and the national levels mirroring each other. I persist in thinking that our tolerance of such abuses at lower levels of government are what channeled the country right into accepting a president who’s so contemptuous of the rule of law that we have the situation we have in Guantánamo, in the DOJ, in the GSA, and on, and on.
Consider, also, that the OPR operating under Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz, who presents herself as an idealistic political liberal, shares this “win and to hell with justice” ethos with the neocon Pentagon under George W. Bush.
(If Secretary Markowitz would like to prove that wrong, all it would take would be OPR statistics showing a charge/conviction ratio that approximates charge/conviction ratios in the courts. I don’t think we’ll see those stats anytime soon.)
We need to change our consciousness about the business of justice. We need to institute restorative justice systems everywhere feasible, and we need new models to be cost-effective alternatives in those situations where restorative justice models aren’t adequate. We need to separate funding for state agencies and departments from numbers of cases won, and base it instead on new measures of how well justice is served.
What the average Vermont citizen can do to bring about transparency and accountability in federal government is pretty limited. But the average Vermont citizen can do a lot to bring transparency and accountability to state and local governments, starting with talking with neighbors and co-workers and legislators and selectmen and selectwomen.
Transparency and accountability. Transparency and accountability. Transparency and accountability. How, in this day and age and place, can anyone claim to be on the side of principled government without working, given one’s personal limitations, to institute transparency and accountability?
These things are true:
* No lawyer or law enforcement person who has participated in such abuses in local and state bureaucracies has a right to shake their head and decry Bush’s trampling of the Constitution, and that includes all the lawyers in the state who handle OPR and similar cases without agitating for transparency and accountability in those offices.
* The same goes for every state legislator, county commissioner or city council person who has failed to take action to institute transparency and accountability measures for reasons of (an assumed) high cost, or because “not that many people are affected,” or for any other “reason.” (There are cost effective means to be had.)
* The same goes for those in insurance companies and law offices who push innocent people to accept an outcome that’s short of justice, in any case in which justice isn’t absolutely precluded.
In short, anyone who participates in the problem in local and state realms is part of the problem at the national level.
May we find in Vermont state government our counterparts to Col. Morris Davis.