alt Hacker NewsSolomon "Sol" Wachtler appears to have coined the phrase.
He is a retired New York judge, ultimately chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals.
And still living at 96.
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cwnyth • today at 5:06 PM
Ah, so it was topical!
Solomon "Sol" Wachtler appears to have coined the phrase.
He is a retired New York judge, ultimately chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals.
And still living at 96.
Ah, so it was topical!
More color to this tidbit:
He was a republican. He wanted to stop using grand juries to bring indictments, so he wasn’t impartial in his assessment.
Unrelatedly, he had an affair with a republican fund-raiser. When it ended, started making threats to kidnap her daughter, who was 14 at the time. He sent a sexually explicit note to the daughter, enclosing a condom.
He got a 15-month prison sentence.
This is who republicans are quoting whenever they repeat the phrase that “you can indict a ham sandwich”.
The real force behind the low no-true-bill rate for federal grand juries is that the DoJ had extraordinarily high standards for themselves before they even approached a GJ. They had to believe they could convict and sustain on appeal. They haven’t lived up to those standards for a couple years now.