In short, Siegelman says, Obama should have been upfront with the American people. But he still has not done it on a variety of justice matters, and it has chipped away at the administration's moral authority. Siegelman particularly is outraged by the 2009 case of Pottawattamie County v. McGhee, in which the Obama Justice Department argued there is "no freestanding right not to be framed." Writes Siegelman:
It's clear that President Obama [decided] to let [then-Solicitor General] Elena Kagan send her deputy in to the U.S. Supreme Court on January 4, 2010, to argue that United States citizens do not have a Constitutional right not to be framed. Said in another way: That the United States government can frame people, knowingly, and intentionally, and willingly, in order to inspire prosecutors to do their best to fight for those things that they think need to be prosecuted.
I think that's a wrong-headed, illogical, immoral position. Yet the President took that position when he allowed the United States government to make that argument to the Supreme Court.
This was in the case of those two black men who served 25 years for a crime they did not commit. They were framed by prosecutors and investigators in Iowa because the investigators and the local prosecutors didn't want to go after a white suspect. They were able to get a young felon to testify against these two black men in exchange for a bribe--in exchange for a government-sanctioned bribe--that they would cut this young felon a deal on his sentence if he would be willing to lie about these two black men and help the government convict them. He lied, they got convicted, served 25 years, and then were out suing for damages.
Obama is in danger, Siegelman writes, of having a failed presidency on justice issues--and maybe more:
The President needs to engage his moral GPS. He needs to get his moral compass locked in--while there's still a chance to recoup some value for himself and some legacy of his Administration that all of us can be proud of.
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