Stone Arrest Exposes the Cancer Eating American Criminal Justice

Conrad Black

"Last week’s arrest of Roger Stone at the behest of Special Counsel Robert Mueller incites me to recall Joseph Welch’s famous question of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you no decency?”

"Sending 29 FBI agents in bullet-proof protective gear and brandishing submachine guns at 6 a.m. to the house where Stone—who is 66 and does not own a firearm—lives with his wife, two dogs, and three cats, to effect another shakedown arrest for alleged untruths uttered by Stone to a congressional committee since Mueller was installed in his totalitarian sinecure, was disgusting and un-American.

"The charges could have been laid—and if there is the slightest truth to them, should have been laid—by contacting Stone’s lawyer during normal business hours and asking him to produce his client for charging and processing. So slight was the risk of flight (Stone claims his passport has expired), the judge set bail at an easily manageable (for him) $250,000, which was produced at once. The entire hideous procedure, as if Stone were a suspected violent criminal with vast resources, at the head of a heavily armed and dangerous organization, and in a home extensively guarded by armed and experienced gangsters and with a helicopter in the backyard, was an outrage that must shock every civilized American, as it astounds the civilized world.

"There was absolutely no need or excuse for such an absurd and repulsive use of force in effecting the arrest of a man with no history of violence who is an improbable flight risk and certain to surrender quietly and respond to allegations against him through due process in the courts. Moreover, he is fully entitled to the constitutional presumption of innocence." . . .