ASHCROFT PURSUES OWN AGENDA

In California, two weeks ago, five members of a federal jury that had
convicted a fellow San Franciscan on three counts involving the growing of
marijuana, held a news conference to apologize to the man and to demand that
he receive a new trial. The defendant, Ed Rosenthal, faces a minimum of five
years in prison when he is sentenced in June.

So why the second thoughts on the part of the jurors? Rosenthal was growing
marijuana for medicinal purposes, which is legal under California state law
and has been since 1996. What is more he was doing it in his capacity as "an
officer of the city," under Oakland's medical marijuana ordinance, according
to The New York Times.

But because Rosenthal was being tried on federal charges, that fact was
withheld from the jurors. His lawyers were not allowed to present that fact.

In a statement read at the press conference, the jurors said they would not
have voted to convict had they been allowed to consider the California law.
They didn't know because the judge in the case, Charles S. Breyer of the
Federal District Court, barred Rosenthal's attorneys from mentioning the
state law.

"We as a jury were truly kept in the dark," said Charles Sackett, the jury
foreman. "I never want to see this happen again." Well, he's entitled to
hope, but chances are he's going to see similar judicial travesties happen
again as long as we are saddled with St. John Ashcroft as U. S. Attorney
General.

George Bush has surrounded himself with some shady characters, including
employees of just about every extractive industry that helped bankroll his
candidacy, but none as deplorable as Ashcroft. When it came time to appoint
an attorney general, Bush could have tapped governors Frank Keating of
Oklahoma or Mark Racicot of Montana. Both are lawyers and both have solid
conservative credentials.

But they were not ideologically reactionary enough to suit the far-right
Christian zealots who helped Bush triumph in South Carolina and other
sub-Potomac backwaters. Consequently, we are saddled with a man so despised
that when he ran for re-election to the U.S. Senate from Missouri in 2000
the residents of his state rejected him in favor of a dead man.

He is, without a doubt the worst attorney general since A. Mitchell Palmer,
with whom he invites comparison. Palmer was obsessed with anarchists, for
which read foreigners from southern and eastern Europe, and deported as many
as he could round up. Ashcroft is obsessed with Middle Easterners who are
not born-again Christians. He's equally obsessed with members of the legal
profession who think the United States Constitution applies to people
Ashcroft has already decided are guilty. He is even obsessed with his own
deputies who do not share his enthusiasm for the death penalty.

And let's not forget medical marijuana growers and users, and prostitutes.
Who can forget that with the rubble of the World Trade Center still
smoldering, Ashcroft sent his minions off to purge -- or attempt to purge --
New Orleans of its ladies of the evening? First things first, when you're a
moral crusader.

Last week Ashcroft ordered U.S. Attorneys in New York to reconsider their
decisions to not seek the death penalty in a dozen cases where they had that
option but rejected. This is frightening and unconscionable.

U.S. Attorneys are, by and large, men and women highly skilled in their
profession. Unlike their boss of the moment they are not political hacks who
got their jobs as a consolation prize.

In enlightened times, the U.S. Attorney General's office has refrained from
meddling in state matters on the not unreasonable grounds that their
representatives at that level had a better handle on local cases than did
the Washington bureaucracy.

But we do not live in enlightened times. We live in a time when one by one
the lights are going out on due process in our legal system. All in the name
of national security, of course. Just as they did in Nazi Germany 70 years
ago.