Will Grigg, of Pro Libertate, believes that Edgar Steele, a white nationalist attorney who faced off against the powers-that-be and earned the wrath of the SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center) and the JDL (Jewish Defense League), was framed by the Feds.
He was charged in a supposed murder plot against his wife of many years.
Steele was convicted and sentenced to a lengthy jail term, but died in September this year, apparently from health-related problems:
While the Edgar Steele jury was permitted to hear Loginova’s videotaped testimony, it was not permitted to hear the testimony of Dr. Robert Stoll, who had spent several hours in Steele’s company on June 10 – the day he supposedly planned to murder his wife. Dr. Stoll, a local veterinarian, has filed an affidavit recounting how he had discussed Steele’s health problems and how he was impressed by “the manner of Edgar’s tender affection for his wife and family. I believe that this man’s intent … when I visited him was not to kill anyone, especially his wife.”
To understand the deeply prejudicial nature of Winmill’s rulings in this regard it’s necessary to take into account the composition of the jury: In a case involving an alleged plot by a husband to murder his middle-aged wife, the jury consisted of eleven women and one man.
The panel that emerged from voir dire was ideal for the prosecution’s theory of the case, which could have been the plot from any of several dozen made-for-TV movies of the kind broadcast incessantly on the “Lifetime” cable network: The scheming, unfaithful husband, driven by ego and what remains of his mid-life libido, plots to murder his long-suffering wife in order to take up with a pneumatic trophy bimbo.
Edgar Steele is a widely despised figure. His legal practice was devoted to defending the rights of similarly marginalized and disreputable people out of the conviction that “it is the … politically incorrect whose rights are first infringed and then eliminated,” as he pointed out in a speech he delivered in Jekyll Island, Georgia almost exactly two years before his Stalinist show trial in Boise.
Actually, the comparison to the Soviet-era Russian legal system is unfair, given that a defendant hauled before a Soviet criminal tribunal actually enjoyed a small but measurable chance of acquittal.
After the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the jury system — which had been established under Alexander II in 1864 — was abolished and replaced with”People’s Courts” composed of a judge and a panel of two to six Party-appointed “assessors” who heard all of the evidence and decided all questions of both fact and law. The assessors “became known as `nodders’ for simply nodding in agreement with the judge,” wrote federal Judge John C. Coughenour in an article published by the Seattle University Law Review. “People’s assessors virtually always agreed with judges; acquittals were virtually nonexistent…. [U]nlike our adversarial system, the Soviet inquisitorial criminal justice system neither prioritized nor emphasized the rights of individual defendants, but instead paid homage to the interests of the state.”
What Judge Coughenour describes as a contrast between the Soviet and American legal systems is actually one of the strongest points of similarity. Lew Rockwell recently pointed out that in the pseudo-legal proceedings referred to as “trials” by the federal Leviathan, the defendant “wins once every 212 times” — a respectable approximation of “never.” During the late Stalin era, Soviet procurators were ordered to achieve a 100 percent conviction rate; their counterparts in contemporary U.S. federal courts have essentially accomplished that feat. This is because the federal system, like its Soviet predecessor, is designed to serve the interests of the State — and federal juries are typically purged of anyone unwilling to play the role of “nodder” in a show trial.
During jury selection in the Edgar Steele “trial,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Traci Whelan, who presided over the prosecution, carefully scrutinized potential jurors for what she called “hidden biases” against “the United States Government.” Neither Whelan nor Judge Winmill was willing to abide the presence of any juror who understood that the jury’s role is to force the government to overcome the constitutionally prescribed “bias” in favor of the defendant. They needn’t have worried.
In Idaho, the most “anti-government” state in the Soyuz, the Feds were able to win a murder conspiracy conviction in a case without a victim, a murder weapon, or a motive, using only a doctored audio recording and the self-exculpating testimony of an admitted liar who confessed to manufacturing and planting the non-functional bomb. Andrei Vyshinsky would be suitably impressed.
(Note: In the original version of this essay, I mistakenly reported that Dr. George Papcun had offered to fly to Boise for the “pre-trial hearing”; in fact, he had attended a pre-trial hearing, but was prevented by Judge Winmill from testifying at the trial. My thanks to Violet Harris, who attended the trial and took comprehensive notes, for that very important correction. I likewise erred in referring to Dr. Allen Banks as a veterinarian, rather than a research scientist who specializes in chemistry and biochemistry; my thanks as well to Robert Magnuson for correcting that mistake.)