for BigTrial.net
This morning, bigtrial.net is publishing the first of two powerful blog posts written by Betsy Mulgrew, the wife of former Traffic Court Judge Bob Mulgrew.
Betsy wrote about how the feds and the local media, led by The Philadelphia Inquirer, teamed up to destroy their lives.
It's been a common theme on this blog, the deadly consequences of what happens when prosecutors and the media collaborate to stage a moral crusade. As I wrote in the preface to my 2017 book about the lessons of the Vince Fumo case, which ran for nearly five months in U.S. District Court in 2008-2009:
So there were limits to Fumo's power. But as this case demonstrates, in America today, there are no limits to the frightening power wielded by prosecutors and the press; especially when they team up to destroy someone.
That's the final legacy of the Fumo case. The defendant has been punished; the rest of the villains are still at large, self-righteous and unaccountable.
The most outrageous current example of this phemomenon that I can think of is the Jerry Sandusky case, where unscrupulous prosecutors and a useful idiot of a reporter conspired to illegally leak a false grand jury presentment that charged that a witness had seen Sandusky raping a 10-year-old boy in the Penn State showers. It was a false charge that poisoned the jury pool forever, but ultimately turned out to be the creation of fiction writers in the state Attorney General's office.
In the Traffic Court case, Bob and Betsy Mulgrew were the targets of the feds and their collaborators in the media, and Betsy writes eloquently about the resulting devastation brought upon their lives.
In preparation for publishing Betsy Mulgrew's two blog posts about the couple's ordeal, on Monday I sent both posts to a spokesperson for the Department of Justice, as well as the editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, to see if they would have any response.
This morning, Jennifer Crandall, public information officer for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Philadelphia, wrote in an email, "With regard to the posts, our office has no comment."
Regarding the Inquirer, Editor Gabriel Escobar didn't even bother to respond to a request for comment.
This, regrettably, has become the policy of the Inquirer, a place where I used to work.
For example, the Inquirer stonewalled me when I asked about a lawsuit that charges that the newspaper's top editor and a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter conspired with officials at the University of Pennsylvania to smear a graduate student who had just won a Rhodes scholarship.
The Inquirer similarly stonewalled when I asked why they were staging in federal court a formal inquisition in the Stu Bykofsky libel case, to out the source who had leaked embarrassing emails from top Inquirer management to bigtrial.net.
This happened again when the Inquirer published a story that cited a fatally-flawed academic study about crime rates to defend our soft-on-crime D.A., Larry Krasner, a study that got the figures wrong about murder rates in 30 out of 34 surveyed cities.
Not only did the Inquirer stonewall me, but they also republished their faulty story citing the fatally-flawed academic study for three more days.
Regarding the Traffic Court case, what I wrote about the Fumo case would seem to apply here as well:
The defendant has been punished; the rest of the villains are still at large, self-righteous and unaccountable.