A daily chronicle of judicial corruption, legal system failures, and the urgent case for reconstructing America’s courts — rooted in the vision of the Founding Fathers. Our legal system has drifted far from the republic the Founders designed. It is time to take it back.
“The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary — working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief over the field of jurisdiction.”— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Charles Hammond, 1821
One state chemist certified drug evidence she never tested. Another tested the evidence while high on the lab’s own supply. Between them, and the prosecutors who hid what they knew, Massachusetts was forced to throw out …
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A cardiologist agreed to a $150,000-a-month arrangement to give the world’s most famous entertainer a surgical anesthetic every night, in a bedroom, to help him sleep. Michael Jackson called the drug his “milk.” The coro…
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“I’ve got this thing and it’s f—ing golden.” The wiretaps caught a sitting governor auctioning a United States Senate seat, shaking down a children’s hospital, and holding state business hostage to campaign cash. Illinoi…
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He billed Indian tribes tens of millions of dollars, called them “monkeys” and “troglodytes” in emails, secretly worked against their interests to generate more fees, and bought a casino fleet with a forged wire transfer…
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He was convicted of poisoning his co-workers in 1985. He then practiced medicine, under his own name and others, on three continents for another twelve years. The FBI came to believe Michael Swango may have killed as man…
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Randy “Duke” Cunningham was an authentic American hero — a Navy fighter ace, a Top Gun instructor, the congressman with the best war stories in Washington. He was also for sale, and unlike every other corrupt politician …
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Paul Bergrin had been a soldier, a state prosecutor, and an Assistant United States Attorney before he became the defense lawyer Newark's drug lords and celebrities kept on speed dial. Then a federal informant named Kemo…
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For two decades, Sheldon Silver was one of the three men in a room who ran New York — a Speaker so powerful that governors negotiated around him. Federal prosecutors proved that beneath the power sat a machine of almost …
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In May 2019, a Boston jury did something no jury had done in the history of the American opioid epidemic: it convicted a pharmaceutical company's founder and top executives of racketeering, as if they were a crime family…
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The Founders did not leave us a shrine. They left us a toolshed. Having spent three essays making the case — in Thomas Paine's tradition and largely in his words — that the American government of 2026 has drifted beyond …
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Thomas Paine called governing from beyond the grave 'the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.' Thomas Jefferson calculated that no constitution should bind a generation that never consented to it, and proposed …
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Thomas Paine wrote thirteen Crisis papers between 1776 and 1783, beginning with the most famous opening line in American letters: 'These are the times that try men's souls.' He wrote the first of them on a drumhead by fi…
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In January 1776, Thomas Paine wrote that government even in its best state is but a necessary evil, and that hereditary rule was an absurdity no free people should tolerate. Two hundred and fifty years later, America has…
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In November 1919 and January 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and a twenty-five-year-old Justice Department lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover organized raids in over thirty cities, arrested up to ten thousand people—…
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On November 10, 1898, as many as two thousand armed white men burned Wilmington's Black-owned daily newspaper, killed Black residents in numbers never officially counted, and forced the lawfully elected mayor and alderme…
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In 1921, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were convicted of murder before a judge who boasted of what he had done to those anarchist bastards. Six years later, after a confessed participant named Celestino Madeiros s…
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On September 13, 1971, Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered state troopers to retake Attica prison in a 15-minute assault that killed 29 prisoners and 10 hostages — all shot by state gunfire, though officials initially cl…
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In September 1955, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were tried for the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Black teenager from Chicago. An all-white Mississippi jury acquitted them in 67 minutes. Four mont…
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On May 31 and June 1, 1921, a white mob destroyed the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, killing up to 300 Black residents, burning 35 city blocks, and incarcerating thousands. An all-white gr…
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In 1927, the Supreme Court ordered Carrie Buck sterilized because she was deemed 'unfit,' citing Oliver Wendell Holmes's phrase 'three generations of imbeciles are enough.' Her own lawyer helped the sterilization side. T…
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On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guard soldiers fired 67 rounds in 13 seconds into a crowd of students protesting the Cambodia invasion, killing four and paralyzing one. A presidential commission called the shootings 'unnec…
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On December 4, 1969, Chicago police and Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan raided a Black Panther apartment with an FBI informant's floor plan, fired nearly 100 rounds into a sleeping man, and killed Fred Hampt…
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In 1873, Susan B. Anthony was tried in federal court for the crime of casting a ballot. Justice Ward Hunt wrote his opinion before the trial began, barred her from testifying, directed the jury to convict, refused to pol…
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In July 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, left Mary Jo Kopechne in the water, waited ten hours to report it, and received a two-month suspended sentence. An inquest judge later found …
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On November 25, 2006 — the morning of his wedding — Sean Bell left his bachelor party at a Queens strip club and was met by an NYPD fusillade: fifty bullets. No gun was ever found. Three detectives were tried and acquitt…
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On May 13, 1985, Philadelphia police dropped a bomb from a helicopter onto a residential row house on Osage Avenue, killing eleven people — five of them children — and letting the fire destroy sixty-one homes. A city com…
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In the early morning of February 4, 1999, four plainclothes NYPD officers fired 41 shots at an unarmed 22-year-old immigrant reaching for his wallet on his own doorstep. Nineteen bullets found their target. A jury in Alb…
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The ATF raided a building full of children on a firearms warrant, lost the element of surprise, proceeded anyway, then watched the FBI besiege Mount Carmel for 51 days before gassing it with tanks and letting it burn. 76…
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At Ruby Ridge in 1992, federal agencies adopted shoot-to-kill rules for any armed adult male on sight, killed a 14-year-old boy and his unarmed mother, and closed the matter with a $3.1 million settlement and no criminal…
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In 1997, NYPD officer Justin Volpe tortured Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in a Brooklyn precinct bathroom. His 30-year sentence was the exception that proved how rarely the system punishes at all — and how quickly it pr…
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