Monday, March 17, 2008

How To Railroad A Democrat

Lest we forget, the trial of former Allegheny County, PA coroner Dr. Cyril Wecht is still going on (here)…

…(Wecht) faces 41 counts, mostly mail and wire fraud, alleging that he had his county employees send correspondence relating to his private practice from the coroner's office on county time.

(Wecht Defense Attorney Jerry) McDevitt accused prosecutors of trying to bulldoze the jury into convicting Wecht with an avalanche of documents. He noted that 24 of the 41 counts involve faxes that cost the county a total of $3.96.
And as Paul Kiel of TPM Muckracker notes here, Wecht’s indictment originally contained 84 counts (no word on why the count was reduced to 41), and “Wecht's lawyers have calculated that the cumulative cost for the 37 charges in the indictment that involve improperly charging the county for gasoline and mileage costs add up to $1,778.55” (today’s CNN story, though, tells us that Assistant U.S. Attorney James Wilson alleges that Wecht profited by about $790,000 – that’s an enormous discrepancy; I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to smell a great big Bushco-leftover-from-the-Alberto-G-DOJ rat here).

The TPM story from last October (which has a lot of great stuff, by the way) also notes that…

The most colorful of the charges, of course, involve(d) (an) elaborate body snatching scheme: prosecutors allege that Wecht gave a local Catholic university unclaimed bodies in exchange for laboratory space.
No word of that in today’s CNN story, though.

Also, as noted here, former PA governor and longtime Repug honcho Dick Thornburgh tells us that this whole case was brought against Wecht by U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan ostensibly because he was a high-profile Democrat (Buchanan also milked the whole fandango of “Operation Pipe Dreams” for some nice PR, netting a conviction against Tommy Chong – and we all know what an irredeemable character and threat to society he is…snark).

That may be oddly appropriate, though; don’t be surprised to find one day that the case against Wecht will go “up in smoke” also, along with all of our tax dollars spent on its prosecution.

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