Our Totalitarian Legal System

By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

For people whom the government has in its sights, the United States has ceased to be a free society. In their book The Tyranny of Good Intentions (Crown, 2008), Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton have made a strong case for this, and since they wrote, matters have gotten worse.

You might at first be inclined to dismiss this charge as exaggerated, but the authors devise a thought experiment that quickly induces a second look at their startling thesis. They describe in some detail the trial and subsequent execution of Nikolai Bukharin in 1938. Bukharin, once the “golden boy” of the Soviet Communist Party, stood accused of plotting with foreign powers to destroy the Russian Revolution. Of course, the charges were mere figments of Stalin’s crazed imagination, but this did not save the hapless Bukharin.

Quite the contrary, the trial proceeded to its foreordained conclusion. If evidence against Bukharin did not exist, no matter; “torture and [the threat of] family annihilation” hung over each prisoner and would secure the desired end. A sad tale, no doubt; but what has it got to do with us? Surely American prosecutors do not regularly employ torture to obtain their convictions. Not for them the three rules for securing a confession often attributed to Stalin: “beat, beat, and beat again!”

Roberts and Stratton dissent. Their point in describing the Bukharin episode is to focus an unaccustomed beam of light on American criminal justice. True, American defendants rarely suffer physical abuse, but psychological torture pervades our supposedly free system. Our authors here have in mind plea-bargaining. “In the United States today, plea bargaining has displaced trial by jury as the dominant method of criminal dispute resolution . . . 90 to 95 percent of all federal, state, and local criminal cases are settled by plea bargains” ......

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