"Prosecutors in the office who handled the case were quite anguished about how that turned out. Nobody was happy with that result." --Outgoing U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeffrey A. Taylor.
Washington D.C.--This is something else: soon-to-be ex-U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeffrey A. Taylor is saying that the suicide of Deborah Jeane Palfrey upset members of the prosecution and that it was a "shock" when she committed suicide on May 1st, 2008.
Funny that they suddenly get all teary-eyed after their absurd zealousness in prosecuting her to the point of death.
This is a lie and Taylor is a black liar who's hiding something along with his associates. That something is that he and the prosecution had ample reason to think that Palfrey was unstable, might kill herself and did nothing about it.
Even as a low-level member of her defense team, I knew for certain by February 28th, 2008 that the defendant was unstable when she forwarded me and the rest of the defense team an exchange between herself and journalist Jason Leopold. Would it have mattered had I forwarded it to the prosecution or the Court? Doubtful, and I wasn't going to violate attorney-client privilege when my contact with her was only via email. There wasn't enough to go on, and others missed the import of the email entirely.
Jason… let’s put it like this, the bastards aren’t going to take me alive. Of course, anytime that you want to do an interview – I will make myself available. However, I doubt that I will be doing any interviews once I am in D.C., for the trial. –Best, JeaneYet Taylor is stating that he wasn't aware of how unstable Palfrey was. This is going to be found to be a lie, a fabrication to protect the members of the prosecution from gross negligence in their mishandling of the case, their over-zealousness, and the fact that a competency hearing should have been convened. Why wasn't this done? Ask Taylor and ask Federal District Judges Gladys Kessler and James Robertson.
Is this one of the reasons why Judge Kessler was removed from the case? Did she have an awareness that Palfrey was in fact suicidal? I haven't listened to the entire WTOP radio broadcast, but I assume that their own Neil Augenstein interviewed Jeffrey Taylor and D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier who was on-hand for gender backup so that the prosecution of the deceased didn't look too much like a victory for entrenched patriarchy (it was). Where were the other prosecutors like Catherine Connelley, William R. Cowden, and Daniel Butler? They must have been busy getting ready for the wave of firings with the new president coming into office in January 2009.
This comment by Taylor was illuminating:"That's not to say we're not uncomfortable with the havoc that [we] can wreak on the lives of these individuals. We are careful, but at the same time have an obligation having brought the charges to prove that case." ("Prosecutors 'quite anguished over D.C. Madam's suicide," WTOP, 12.04.2008) He omits "we" in the sentence, so I reinserted it for his (and our) edification.
The Palfrey prosecutors should be "anguished" over it alright, they destroyed her life, humiliated over a dozen former escorts on the stand for a few days, and did their best to ensure that the defendant wouldn't receive a fair trial. They have a lot to feel "bad" about and it's this writer's humble curse that it haunts them until the day each of them die. I don't imagine that hey were asked by WTOP who leaked the unsigned warrant to The Smoking Gun's Bill Bastone, it being just another elephant in the room that they must ignore to get out of office safely, unscathed by civil suits from Palfrey's estate. Did they know Palfrey was suicidal?
They knew. They knew Palfrey was unstable and suicidal when she stated she wouldn't serve even one more day in prison several times in the mainstream media. When I decided to help her, I knew "this isn't going to end well. " It was obvious over time. They knew full-well that their case was political, but they lie because they got themselves into "quite" a mess. They knew they were doing their best to hide the identities of the "Johns" because many of them were either part of or had connections to the GOP in Washington D.C. Appointments have a way of working-out like this.
The WTOP article also contains a glaring mistake of its own. "Most of the former escorts subpoenaed to bolster the prosecution's claim that Palfrey ran a prostitution service managed to keep their identities secret before her federal racketeering and money laundering trial. " (ibid) This is factually incorrect, it wasn't "most," but a few of the girls did manage to stay hidden. Discovery documents contain a list of well over one hundred former escorts of Pamela Martin & Associates which was in-the-possession of the prosecution; they knew who almost all of them were. They settled on around fifteen of them to testify against Palfrey under immunity, meaning that they were busted at some point and forced to turn on her.
If USA Taylor wants to clear his and the rest of the prosecution's names, they should make the vast majority of documents related to the investigation and the prosecution available to the press, researchers, and historians. Transparency is key. With Ms. Palfrey now dead, there's no specific reason to keep these materials classified any longer...unless it was part of a larger investigation, which there have been indications of in the past. There is one thing that USA Jeffrey A. Taylor was honest about in the interview--Palfrey was offered several very good plea deals and she turned them all down.
In the fall of 2007, she conveyed to me that she almost took one of them, but by that point the prosecution wasn't offering much. For every reason, they should have seen very clearly that as an indicator of instability, she was not acting rationally in her own best interests. As a matter of fact, they most certainly did notice having reasonable proximity with her during negotiations. In addition, when she fired a couple members of her counsel at various points in the legal proceedings the papers were sealed by the Court. This is because they also knew she was unstable, maybe even suicidal. This could implicate the Court, the prosecution, and perhaps at least one of Palfrey's former counsels in the matter. One of them tried to do something about it, but for more on that one, you'll just have to wait...
"Prosecutors 'quite anguished over D.C. Madam's suicide," WTOP, 12.04.2008: http://www.wtop.com/?sid=1537593&nid=25
Good for you for staying on this issue in your blogs. There's something so "wrong" behind this entire case and how it was handled. Everyone "knows" it...but no one can crack it b/c the Gov't keeps secrets thier own way...
ReplyDeleteI'm saying at this point that what we have here is a case of gross negligence and incompetence amidst an over-zealous and selective prosecution of a disturbed woman.
ReplyDeleteWhat kind of message does that send? Definitely not the one the prosecutors are telling us, namely, enforcing the law.
There is no federal law against prostitution. They knew the names were in her possession--Dick Morris, David Vitter, Randall Tobias, Harlan Ullman, to name just a few--and that she wasn't going to take their plea deals.
Look, I never physically met her, I just spoke with her on the phone a mere handful-of-times and held a very long correspondence with her over the period of ten months (a mere!).
The prosecutors met with her several times, she was making comments from as early as March 2007 that pointed to suicide, and they and the Court did nothing, nothing.
Frankly, I hope the Palfrey Estate acts on this and initiates civil suits against the members of the government's prosecution as well as at least one of the Federal District Judges that presided over the case. Of course, this is all my opinion, but the opinion of someone who was close to the story for ten months and who worked for a time on her defense doing general research. Palfrey confided things in me she did not with very many others.
I've "seen" a lot in this story, but I raise unpleasant possibilities and have a tendency to point-out the elephants in the room, and have to be ignored.
It's a compulsion--I know--but one worth adhering to.
I enjoin the Justice Department and their prosecution to prove me wrong and release the internal record of this case, real disclosure.
The entire prosecution was a circus to feed some egos & political ambitions. Unfortunately they did not care about ruining Palfrey or the other women. They seemed to go out of their way to ruin the lives of as many of these women as they could. Yes, the witnesses got "immunity", but for several it cost them their jobs, their health, and their reputations. Contrary to what was stated they were NOT all "previously arrested".
ReplyDeleteNo, I don't think there were previous arrests either, but once the government took possession of her computer, they had all of the names they needed.
ReplyDeleteThe ruthless MO of the prosecution is just stunning. I feel bad for some of the former escorts, but when I look at their incomes outside of Pamela Martin & Associates, I have to wonder why they were doing it at all.
That's not an endorsement of the mainstream view of prostitution or the prosecution in the Palfrey case.
My feeling lately is that there was also incredible incompetence and negligence in the case, selective prosecution aside. There needs to be a probe and an opening of the internal record, this was handled badly, sloppily, and inhumanely.