For the most part, our criminal justice system does an adequate job of creating a minimally credible appearance of due process and the rule of law. Judges grant the occasional defense motion, some stupendously ridiculous prosecutorial demands are rebuffed, and the judiciary even occasionally holds the state accountable for its own misconduct.
View the profiles of people named Tonya Craft. Join Facebook to connect with Tonya Craft and others you may know. Mac excel 2016 vba input message box too small for text. Facebook gives people the power to. In its broadcast on the Tonya Craft trial this morning, the Today Show featured none other than the adjunct law professor Wendy Murphy. Verdun mac. For those not familiar with Murphy, she is a serial liar who claims that in EVERY child molestation and rape case, prosecutors ALWAYS TELL THE TRUTH.
When kids are involved, though, all bets are off. The mask slips away, and the system is revealed at its worst: as a mechanism to accept, uncritically, the demands and accusations of the state, and to evade such impediments as the rule of law may pose to putting somebody in jail.
Over the last two years, Tonya Craft learned that the hard way. Yesterday she was acquitted of multiple counts of child molestation, demonstrating that juries can still occasionally serve their historical function as a buffer between the state and the individual. That's a victory. But the sweetness of the victory cannot cover the foul taste of the pervasive, terrifying, and contemptible behavior of the prosecution and its lapdog on the bench in this case. Tonya Craft was subjected to a Kafkaeque travesty of justice, and has emerged with her freedom, but with not much else.
Filco fk302q mac matias pro keyboard for mac. You can't talk about the Tonya Craft case without talking about the work of William Anderson, who has covered the case in great detail. Anderson is to the Craft case what K.C. Johnson was to the Duke Lacrosse case: a relentless citizen journalist devoting substantial time and skill to documenting government misconduct. I won't just regurgitate his work here. Visit his blog yourself, including his open letter to Tonya Craft after her aquittal, or read Gideon's summary or this post at Change.org or this one at [email protected]
I can't even summarize the damn thing without raising my blood pressure to vision-blurring levels. Let me just give you some highlights:
1. Judge Brian House, the prosecutorial lapdog in question, refused to recuse himself even though he had represented Tanya Craft's ex-husband in their divorce action. In other words, the sitting judge was previously an advocate against the defendant. This might explain why he vigorously suppressed and disallowed exculpatory evidence and testimony, while letting the prosecution levy every marginal, prejudicial, and inflammatory attack on Tonya Craft (for instance, by focusing on her having consensual affairs with adults).
2. The prosecution team, Len Gregor and Chris Arnt, openly and contemptuously committed egregious misconduct throughout the proceedings, with what amounted to the encouragement of Judge Brian House. That misconduct included suppression of exculpatory evidence, subornation of perjury, harassment of witnesses, open appeals to racism and sexism, unprofessional attacks on the defense team (and, really, on the entire concept of a defendant being entitled to a defense), unprofessional public statements about the case (like the Facebook post you see below, upon which friendly potential trial witnesses commented), breathtaking closing argument abuse, and a list of other conduct too disgusting and lengthy to set forth here.
3. The prosecution relied upon, and Judge Brian House allowed, the sort of junk advocacy-science that makes many child abuse cases so dangerous and unjust: 'child advocates' whose explicit role is to interrogate children until they make accusations of child abuse, and to explain away any inconsistent statements.
So, Tonya Craft escapes with her freedom, but with very little of her life left. Think it couldn't possibly happen to you? You're wrong, especially where kids are involved. The mere accusation of child abuse makes us go nuts. We live in a society that sentences a woman to life in prison for making a 13-year-old boy touch her clothed breast. We live in a society where proponents of censorship utterly unrelated to child abuse understand how they can manipulate our hysteria about children to promote broader censorship:
'Child pornography is great,' the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. 'It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites'.
We live in a society that has stopped having ridiculous show-trials for 'witches' centuries ago, but has had a century of equally hysterical, equally inquisitorial, equally unjust, and equally preposterous show-trials of suspected 'ritual' child molesters. Ask John Stoll. Ask the McMartins. Ask the Amiraults. It can happen to you, as surely as you can be struck by lightening. It can happen to anyone so long as we, as a society, allow the mere allegation of a threat to children to utterly unbalance us, eviscerate our critical faculties, and make us eager to abandon our commitment to the rule of law. It can happen as long as we tolerate (and even applaud) prosecutors like Len Gregor and Chris Arnt and pseudo-judges like Brian House.
One of the best legacies we can leave our children is a system of justice that takes rights, and due process, seriously. One of the worst bequests we could make is a system that abandons even the pretense of fairness upon an accusation of child abuse. Shame on us if we are willing to destroy our children's world in order to save it.
Last 5 posts by Ken White
Tonya Craft Wikipedia
- Now Posting At Substack - August 27th, 2020
- The Fourth of July [rerun] - July 4th, 2020
- All The President's Lawyers: No Bill Thrill? - September 19th, 2019
- Over At Crime Story, A Post About the College Bribery Scandal - September 13th, 2019
- All The President's Lawyers: - September 11th, 2019
Tonya Craft Wikipedia
A ring of the doorbell on May 30, 2008 would forever change the world of Tonya Craft. Outside of her North Georgia home stood two detectives waiting to inform the mother of two that she had been accused of the most heinous of crimes.
By the time Craft stood trial in April 2010, she faced charges on 22 counts of child molestation, aggravated sexual battery and aggravated child molestation against three children, including her own daughter. Additionally, the two-year ordeal had cost Craft custody of her children, her beloved job as a kindergarten teacher and over half a million dollars in legal and defense fees expended by Craft and her family.
On May 12, a jury found Craft not guilty on all 22 charges. In the process, serious doubt was raised about the validity of the charges against the former schoolteacher due to perceived corruption, unprofessional conduct and other questionable behavior by those involved in bringing forth the allegations as well as numerous public officials tasked with the subsequent investigation and prosecution of the case.
Today, Craft is a consultant on child abuse cases and is scheduled to graduate from law school this spring. She regained custody of her children following her acquittal and has re-established a strong and healthy relationship with both of them.
'Child pornography is great,' the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. 'It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites'.
We live in a society that has stopped having ridiculous show-trials for 'witches' centuries ago, but has had a century of equally hysterical, equally inquisitorial, equally unjust, and equally preposterous show-trials of suspected 'ritual' child molesters. Ask John Stoll. Ask the McMartins. Ask the Amiraults. It can happen to you, as surely as you can be struck by lightening. It can happen to anyone so long as we, as a society, allow the mere allegation of a threat to children to utterly unbalance us, eviscerate our critical faculties, and make us eager to abandon our commitment to the rule of law. It can happen as long as we tolerate (and even applaud) prosecutors like Len Gregor and Chris Arnt and pseudo-judges like Brian House.
One of the best legacies we can leave our children is a system of justice that takes rights, and due process, seriously. One of the worst bequests we could make is a system that abandons even the pretense of fairness upon an accusation of child abuse. Shame on us if we are willing to destroy our children's world in order to save it.
Last 5 posts by Ken White
Tonya Craft Wikipedia
- Now Posting At Substack - August 27th, 2020
- The Fourth of July [rerun] - July 4th, 2020
- All The President's Lawyers: No Bill Thrill? - September 19th, 2019
- Over At Crime Story, A Post About the College Bribery Scandal - September 13th, 2019
- All The President's Lawyers: - September 11th, 2019
Tonya Craft Wikipedia
A ring of the doorbell on May 30, 2008 would forever change the world of Tonya Craft. Outside of her North Georgia home stood two detectives waiting to inform the mother of two that she had been accused of the most heinous of crimes.
By the time Craft stood trial in April 2010, she faced charges on 22 counts of child molestation, aggravated sexual battery and aggravated child molestation against three children, including her own daughter. Additionally, the two-year ordeal had cost Craft custody of her children, her beloved job as a kindergarten teacher and over half a million dollars in legal and defense fees expended by Craft and her family.
On May 12, a jury found Craft not guilty on all 22 charges. In the process, serious doubt was raised about the validity of the charges against the former schoolteacher due to perceived corruption, unprofessional conduct and other questionable behavior by those involved in bringing forth the allegations as well as numerous public officials tasked with the subsequent investigation and prosecution of the case.
Today, Craft is a consultant on child abuse cases and is scheduled to graduate from law school this spring. She regained custody of her children following her acquittal and has re-established a strong and healthy relationship with both of them.
Craft has documented her story in a memoir titled Accused, which was released this past September 1. The book is available for purchase from BenBella Books here or on Amazon at this link.
Tonya Craft graciously spoke with me at length on the afternoon of February 28 to discuss her trial, rebuilding her life following the acquittal and her decision to author Accused.
Sandra Lamb Tonya Craft Wikipedia
(Special thanks to BenBella Books and Michael Wright of Garson & Wright Public Relations)
Please click on the 'Play' icon below to hear the interview:
https://truecrimefactor.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/tonya_craft_int.mp3