The Disappearance Of Due Process

Due process in legal matters is what separates barbarity from civility. It along with the concept of Habeas Corpus form cornerstones upon which our law used to be built.

Then along came W. Nero Bush who has destroyed the American constitution, with much complicity from our elected representatives, during the last 5 years.

What has happened at the national level is echoed in Pennsylvania wherein many innocent men and women are doing hard time for crimes they did not commit and suffering egregious violations of due process as the basic foundations of our law disappear in a concerted effort to strip protection from those fighting for their freedom.

I can illustrate this process from my own case, for it is the one I know best.

My original prosecutor, Barbara Christie, withheld Brady (exculpatory) material from us under discovery, employing a subterfuge to do so.

She took a private report (paid for by the Maddux Family), generated by 2 ex-FBI agents, reduced the size of the pages, thus allowing her to disappear the page numbers and remove 5 sightings of my supposed victim, made six months to a year after the prosecution claimed Holly Maddux was killed. A claim that they maintained for 23 years thus fixing the date in stone.
It took many court hearings to uncover the exculpatory material due to us, BUT, two of the reported sightings (made by two Philadelphia police detectives) were withheld until 2002.

Ms. Christie also refused to allow forensic results to stand on their own merits as twice (the FBI and Toxicon Associates) failed to produce results that supported her contentions. The man skipped over, Dr. Tumosa, to allow the more prestigious outside labs to have their say, did the 3rd round of testing. He achieved some partial results, BUT, the results came from a procedure (a new test he invented) that no honest court of law could accept as the procedure was never published or peer reviewed, which violates both standards that rule in our courts: Frye and Daubert.

I did not kill Holly Maddux, but the continuing due process violations made me aware that I would not receive a fair trial, so I left.

While I was away, the DA handed over 60 volumes of my journals to a writer, Steven Levy, who used stolen material for his own profit while writing a damning one-sided book about me. Of course such tainted evidence should have been excluded from the trial.

The journals had been seized under warrant as evidence; the act of their being given to a journalist for publication is unique in American case law as is the unconstitutional Einhorn Law which DA Lynn Abraham caused to be passed by the Pennsylvania legislature in order to trick the French into sending me back to the USA.

My appointed closet prosecutors, Strutin and Cannon, were loathe to challenge Judge William Mazzola in any way, so they placidly allowed him to forego pre-trial testimony on the Journal Issue as he knew how explosive it was, then failed to challenge the use of the journals on two other very solid grounds: chain of custody and the DA’s allowing pre trial publication of evidence seized under warrant, thus tainting the evidence and exposing the defendant to unprecedented pre-trial publicity generated by the prosecution.

“And what has happened in this case – and I challenge defense counsel or anybody else to site any case ever – and I really do mean that – ever in the state of Pennsylvania – possibly the whole country – that has so personalized and so sensationalized not just the case but a defendant.”

NOTES OF TESTIMONY 9/10/2002, Joel Rosen, prosecutor

My closet prosecutors also failed to challenge Dr. Tumosa’s obviously bogus test.
If they had done correct legal work, most of the prosecution evidenced would have been excluded from the courtroom.

Judge Mazzola also functioned as a prosecutor: while I was testifying Asst. DA Carmen Lineberger held up a 12X4 inch bag with the letters “Bullshit Bag” inscribed on it. That is what my counsel was told. When they complained about this and asked her to be questioned under oath, the judge refused as it was obvious grounds for dismissal.

In my defense, we presented 3 of the people who saw Holly, alive, long after her supposed death. One had died. Then we presented women who had spent nights and weekends with me while the body of the deceased supposedly lay within 10 feet of us, producing a smell that the medical examiner, Halbert Fillinger, described to the jury as being impossible to sustain for 10 minutes. No one smelled anything.

It had to be obvious to the jury that Holly was not killed on the date that the prosecution insisted on, but all of their case upon and that all of our defense was predicted upon. It was also obvious to Judge Mazzola, so in his charge to the jury, changing the indictment, he told them that the date of death was not an essential element of the crime.

This destroyed my defense.

After my conviction, he broke all law and precedent by reseating the jury in its box and invited microphones and TV cameras into the courtroom. Cannon and Strutin were shocked, but I’m a pariah and thus fair game. There is no law that applied to me in Pennsylvania. Anything can be done.

By statute Judge Mazzola was supposed to file his 1925(a) statement “forthwith”. He took 29 months. He assumed the role of a second prosecutor. Strutin and Cannon were silent, so I filed 9 motions. The judge was six months is contempt of court re: 2 court orders to file, when his untimely brief was finally filed it should not have been considered by the Superior Court. In the history of the case both Judge Mazzola and my closet prosecutors lied about the 9 docketed motions I filed.

The superior court decision was politics not law, based upon a tissue of lies and fallacious reasoning. I will parse it in another article.

My case is an emblem of what American behavior has become both inside and outside of court. The following quote from the New York Review Of Books, January 11, 2007 describes rendition in action, rendering American justice oxymoronic. It is what Good Americans are allowing their government to do.

“One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony, crying, trying desperately to suppress myself, but I was screaming...They must have done this 20 or 30 times, in maybe two hours. There was blood all over.”

Ira Einhorn
January, 2007