alt Hacker NewsMore 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.
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I appreciated the interesting info on the originator of this quote, though this sentence made no sense to me:
> This is who republicans are quoting whenever they repeat the phrase that “you can indict a ham sandwich”.
Frankly, I've seen all types of people use this quote, not just Republicans, which is a simple statement that there is a very low bar to indict in a grand jury proceeding, which any reasonable assessment of the statistics would deem true. The fact that the originator of the quote turned out to be a douchebag is totally irrelevant.
Also, I think this part is missing a very important step:
> 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.
While that may explain the very high conviction rate at trial, getting a grand jury indictment was also an excellent way for prosecutors to get a plea deal if the accused was looking at decades in jail even if the "beyond a reasonable doubt" threshold would be unlikely to be met.
> He was a republican.
And Democrats were the party of slavery. Why do you bring this up? I'd think the Hackernews crowd would know history and wouldn't be surprised that on a long enough time line, philosophies change.
>This is who republicans are quoting whenever they repeat the phrase that “you can indict a ham sandwich”.
Do you think that only Republicans say this or something?
> He was a republican.
He was born in 1930, though, so it's hard to say that he shares much in common with the ideology we call republican today.