The Trump administration’s case against the former Olympic canoeist accused of damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is about to fall apart.
Following the draining of the Reflecting Pool last week, David Hearn filed a motion to dismiss the federal indictment against him. In his motion, Hearn argued that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia failed to preserve the physical evidence against him: the lining of the pool that he is accused of damaging.
Hearn’s attorneys said in their motion that they had made a written request for federal prosecutors to preserve the evidence, but the pool has repeatedly been drained more than once since his arrest, and large sections of the liner are missing.
If this strategy works, it will mean that Hearn escapes his bullshit charges through legal technicalities rather than through anything that looks like a functional justice system.
Those legal technicalities are the justice system. If the state was accusing him of murder by stabbing and lost the knife and cremated the body he should absolutely be released.
Okay, fair, the technicalities are part of the justice system.
What I mean is, there will be no opportunity to refute the charges, to recognize, in an official way, that the charges were baseless and corrupt. There will not be even the slimmest possibility that the people who caused him to be charged will face any consequence for their corruption.
The problem is the ones who would determine that are the corrupt cronies themselves.
That’s pretty typical of the US justice system. You can be falsely accused of something, spend a bunch of time with lawyers and bad press, and then they can just drop it. You don’t get compensated.