This post is the next in a series dating back several years. In fact, it has been going on long enough that, as of this year, it would be more accurate to call it "60 Years of Science". But I am going to continue to stick with the old title. Chalk it up to nostalgia. And, as the title indicates, this is the thirteenth post in the series. Your can go to: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2017/04/50-years-of-science-links.html for a post that contains links to all the entries in the series. I will update that post to include a link to this entry right after I post this entry.
I take Isaac Asimov's book "The Intelligent Man's Guide to the Physical Sciences" as my baseline for the state of the science when he wrote the book (1959 - 60). In these posts I am reviewing what he reported and what's changed since. For this post I am starting with the section he titled "The Nuclear Atom". I will then move on to the section he titled "Isotopes". Both are from the chapter he titled "The Particles".
The book was written at an interesting time in the evolution of our understanding of things subatomic. As Asimov notes "it was known by 1900 that the atom was not a simple, indivisible particle". By the time Asimov wrote the book the situation had reached maximum complexity. Roughly a hundred subatomic particles had been identified. This drove nuclear physicists nuts as there are only about a hundred different elements. The subatomic world was supposed to be simpler (i. e. composed of fewer parts and pieces) than the atomic world, not more complicated.
The impasse was broken a few years later by the introduction of "Quark theory". Quark theory made sense out of this large zoo of subatomic particles. One component of this idea was to organize them into families. Auto makers have developed "lines" of cars. Ford, for instance, used to have (it has now been discontinued) the Ford "Crown Victoria", the Mercury "Grand Marquis", and the Lincoln "Town Car".
To a great extend they were the same car. The Crown Victoria was the least expensive "base line" version for the economy end of the market. The Town Car was the most expensive "luxury" version for the carriage trade. And the Grand Marquis was midway between the two, both is terms of price and in terms of "trim level" and other features. It was fancier (and more expensive) than the Crown Victoria but not as fancy (or expensive) as the Town Car. But all three shared a lot of common design elements, parts, etc.
Nuclear physicists determined that there were similar familial relationships between subatomic particles. Particle families were grouped into "generations". In the case of one family of particles, the first generation was the Electron. It's second generation was the "Muon", originally called the "Mu Mason". Both particles shared a lot of attributes. The principal difference between the two was their mass. The Muon was much heavier and, therefore, held a lot more energy. The third generation was represented by the "Tau", originally called the "Tau Lepton". Again, the principal difference between it and the other two generations was a mass and, therefore, energy that was much larger than the other particles in the same family.
And with the introduction of the generations concept it became possible to line up various generations of one family of particles with the appropriate generational member of other families. So the cousin of the Electron that was a member of the Neutrino family ended up being named the "Electron Neutrino". Similarly, the second generation particle was eventually named the "Muon Neutrino". Unsurprisingly, the third generation ended up being named the "Tau Neutrino".
The second component of the new theory was the Quarks themselves. In the same way that atoms were composed of subatomic particles, some (but not all) of what had been thought to be indivisible subatomic particles like the Proton, turned out to be composites of new and heretofore unsuspected truly fundamental particles. And these newly discovered truly fundamental particles were called Quarks. And, cutting to the chase, Quarks could also be put into the same kind of "three generations" structure I have talked about above. But that's getting ahead of the story. Back to Asimov.
The Electron was identified by J. J. Thompson in about 1900. He was also the first to propose a model of the atom. It was like a cookie, specifically like an oatmeal raisin cookie. An atom consisted of some unspecified material playing the role of the oatmeal batter. Into it was stuck the Electrons, which played the role of the raisins. This model didn't last long but you have to start somewhere. Things quickly got complicated due to the study of radioactivity.
Becquerel did a lot of the early work. He quickly determined that in a lot of cases radioactivity looked like a particle shooting out of the atom. And some of there particles seemed to be Electrons. So far, so good. But another kind of emission was what he called an "Alpha" particle. It had a positive charge so was presumably a chunk of the oatmeal part of the atomic cookie. There were definitely other kinds of emissions. Following the convention he set up, he named a certain class "Beta" particles and another class "Gamma" particles. It didn't take long to determine that a Beta particle and an Electron were the same thing but the name "Beta" stuck and is still in use. And it also turned out that "Gamma" emissions looked like high energy X-Rays but the name "Gamma ray" also stuck and is still in use.
Good experimental work determined that Alpha particles were at least twice as heavy as Hydrogen atoms. More good experimental work soon determined that they were a form of Helium that weighed four times what a single atom of Hydrogen weighed. Other scientists followed up other clues and identified the Proton at about the same time the Alpha work was being done. Protons and electrons have equal but opposite charges. But a proton is roughly two thousand times as heavy as an electron. This large difference in masses was a puzzle that had no solution at the time of Asimov's book.
But the identification of the Proton led to the next iteration of the model for the atom. Now it consisted of Electrons orbiting a "nucleus" consisting of Protons. This was analogous to the solar system where the Sun is in the center (nucleus) and planets (Electrons) orbit it. This model led to a lot of questions. But it also led to some answers. The identity of an element was tied to the number of Protons in the nucleus. Hydrogen is Hydrogen because it has a nucleus containing one Proton. Helium is Helium because it's nucleus contains two Protons. Lithium is Lithium because its nucleus contains three Protons. And so on.
Also, chemistry is all about Electrons. They occupy the outer regions of the atom so when two atoms come close to each other, what they mostly see is the other's Electrons. Remove the Electron from a Hydrogen atom and it is still a Hydrogen atom. It just has a net positive electrical charge that attracts the electrons in the outer regions of other atoms. And that is the basis of how chemical bonds work. Similarly, a Beta particle is a Helium atom from which both outer electrons have been removed. It has a positive electrical charge that is twice as strong as that of a Hydrogen atom whose single electron has been stripped away. This was real progress.
One question that was quickly identified was the "mass" question. The Helium atom should weigh twice as much as a Hydrogen atom but it actually seemed to weigh roughly four times as much. Other, similar discrepancies popped up all over the place. One quick fix to this problem was to assume that a nucleus also contained Electrons. If a Helium nucleus contained four Protons and two Electrons then the mass would come out about right because the electrons weighed so little. And the charge would come out right because the two Electrons would cancel out two of the four Protons.
And there was another, more subtle version of this problem. According to this theory a Helium nucleus contained four Protons and two Electrons. But the weight of the Electrons could be neglected so the mass of the Helium nucleus should be exactly four times that of Hydrogen. But it was off by a bit. All masses for all atoms were off by a bit, a little bit in some cases, and a lot in others. What was going on? The next chapter is "what's going on". So let's move on to "Isotopes".
The obvious base for calculating the relative weights of the various elements is Hydrogen. But, as we have seen with Helium, that doesn't work very well. Helium does not end up having a weight that is exactly four times that of Hydrogen. Various things were tried and eventually it was decided to use Oxygen as the base. It seemed to be the least worst choice. (The reason for this will be explained below.) It was given a standard weight of 16. The weight of other elements then often fell close to an integer number. But not always. Chlorine, for instance, came in at 35.457 instead of a nice round 35. It took a while to figure out what was going on.
Becquerel found that if you purified Uranium, then left it lying around undisturbed for a while, it actually got more radioactive. He speculated that somehow a small portion of the not very radioactive Uranium was mysteriously transforming itself into highly radioactive "Uranium X". And if you carefully separated out the Uranium X then the remaining "regular" Uranium would, over time, just make some more Uranium X.
Rutherford found out that the same thing happened with Thorium. And it had already been determined that Radium, if left alone, would somehow create Radon gas. As this general phenomenon was further investigated it slowly dawned that elements were miraculously transforming themselves into other elements. And in every case radioactivity was involved.
Soddy in 1913 finally cottoned on to what was happening. If a radioactive transformation involved the emission of an Alpha particle then the source element was transformed into a different element that was down two places in the periodic table. What was happening was fission. An element broke into two pieces, One of them was an Alpha particle that carried off two Protons. The element that remained behind retained all of the other Protons but was now a different element due to the smaller number of Protons its nucleus now contained.
There were obviously multiple versions of elements. They all had the same number of Protons so they had to differ in some other way. He called these different versions "Isotopes" without worrying about what the difference was. An obvious "fix" was to assume that "the nucleus consists of a certain number of Protons and a certain number of Electrons". If we added extra Protons but also added the same number of Electrons to the nucleus at the same time then the atomic number stays the same. This trick allows us to account for all then known nuclear transformations.
We still ignore the masses of the nuclear Electrons as they are so light that their effect on the mass of the nucleus is what accountants call "not material". But we now have a new number, the "mass number". The mass number, according to our new theory is the total or "gross" number of Protons. The atomic number is the net Proton count, all nuclear Protons minus however many nuclear Electrons are present. Two isotopes of the same element have the same atomic number (net number of Protons) but different mass numbers (gross number of Protons).
And this isotope business helped to explain why the weight of a particular element did not end up to be a round number. If a typical sample of, say, Helium, contained some Helium -3 (atomic number 2, mass number 3) and Helium-4 (atomic number 2, mass number 4) then the atomic mass of the sample could come out anywhere between three and four depending on the ratio of the two isotopes. Things became clearer when the "mass spectrometer" was invented.
You turn your sample into a gas, then you "ionize" it (strip one or more Electrons off of each atom so it has an electric charge). Then you make it fly through a magnetic field at a constant speed. The magnetic field will make the trajectory of each atom bend. How much will it bend? Well, that depends on the mass, the speed, and the electric charge. If we can keep the speed and electric charge constant then if the mass is higher the sample's trajectory will be bent by a smaller amount. If we can pull this trick off (which is very hard to do in lots of circumstances) then we can weigh each individual particle.
The mass spectrometer allowed many individual isotopes of many elements to be weighed. And by measuring how much of each isotope a representative sample contained the "isotopic composition" of various elements could be determined. And, as an interesting side effect of this work. it was determined that some isotopes of some elements were "stable", they never engaged in radioactive decay. And, of course, some isotopes were determined to be mildly radioactive (they "decayed" slowly into other elements and isotopes) and others were highly radioactive (they quickly decayed into other elements and isotopes).
And it turned out that even Oxygen, the standard against which other elements were weighed when Asimov wrote his book, was a combination of isotopes. It's just that it was 99.9% Oxygen-16 and only a tiny amount of other isotopes of Oxygen. Since Asimov wrote the book, the reference standard against which the relative atomic mass of each isotope of each element is compared, has been changed from "Oxygen" to "Carbon-12".
Carbon is carefully separated out and pure Carbon-12 is isolated. Then it is weighed and given an arbitrary "atomic mass" of 12. The relative atomic mass of other isotopes relative to that of Carbon-12 is determined and that ratio is used to determine that isotope's atomic mass. This resulted in a small change in the atomic masses assigned to other elements.
This change was made because it improved the situation. It brought a lot of atomic masses closer to being integral numbers once isotope ratios were accounted for. And each isotope was now handled separately for the purposes of determining its atomic mass. Most discrepancies are now small, but with the exception of Carbon-12, none of them is an exact integer. The reason for this had been solved by the time Asimov wrote his book. But that's something he gets into later.
So physicists were pretty happy at this point. The "nucleus is a mix of protons and electrons" theory worked very well. But then Rutherford came up with an experimental setup that allowed him to probe the nucleus in new ways. He figured out how to fire Alpha particles at a target. The target was made from Zinc Sulfide which would "scintillate" (throw off a spark of light that could be seen with the naked eye) when hit by an Alpha particle.
He then put a metal disk in the path to see what would happen. At first the scintillations stopped. But then he added Hydrogen to the mix and things changed. He concluded that single Protons, presumably from the Hydrogen, were now striking the target because they had enough energy to penetrate his metal disk. Very interesting.
He tried some different things before switching to what is now called a "Wilson cloud chamber". If you have air with a lot of water vapor in it then lots of things will cause the water vapor to condense into small droplets that are visible using just your naked eye. By carefully tweaking the apparatus you can see the path of ionized particles. If you then add a magnetic field the paths of the ionized particles will bend just like they do in a mass spectrometer. Because you can see the paths of ionized particles you can take the same kinds of measurements. This is a classic example of a better apparatus leading directly to better science.
A careful analysis of an Alpha particle striking the nucleus of a Nitrogen atom led to a determination that the Nitrogen nucleus could sometimes absorb the Alpha particle. It immediately threw off a Proton and transmuted into Oxygen. The Proton's path could be easily seen because at this point it was ionized.
This is the first example of a man-made process that could transmute one element into another. Alchemists had hoped to transmute "base metal", by which they meant lead, into gold. This can now be done. But the process is fantastically expensive. You are far better off just buying gold in the first place.
The method of viewing a cloud chamber as it made the paths of charged particles visible using a "mark one eyeball" was quickly replaced by taking photographs. Photographs could capture more detail and resulted in a permanent record that could be reviewed by others.
Asimov notes that the scientist who nailed down the Nitrogen to Oxygen transmutation had to take and examine 20,000 photographs to find 8 in which the event he was interested in occurred. By the time Asimov's book was published scientists were employing rafts of graduate students to examine hundreds of thousands of photographs looking for interesting events.
But the rate at which scientific instruments could churn out photographs, all of which had to be examined for events of potential interest, kept increasing. It soon reached a practical limit. Fortunately, at about the time the practical limit was reached solid state devices came along that were capable of replacing the cloud chamber.
Detectors capable of collecting the same kind of data (particle path, speed, mass, etc.) that had been extracted from cloud chamber photographs now exist. And they work pretty well for charged particles. But there is only a very limited capability to observe and measure the attributes of uncharged particles. In some cases it is possible to detect the presence of an uncharged particle. It is also sometimes possible to measure the energy it carries. But that's about it. Still, that's better than nothing. There is no doubt that the business of detecting and tracking uncharged particles doesn't work nearly as well as scientists would like.
But it is now possible to hook detectors up to computers and have them look for and measure events. That gets grad students out of the business of going blind by looking at zillions of photographs. It might sound like that puts them out of work, but don't worry. They still have lots to do.
Even after computers do a lot of preliminary work it is still necessary for a trained person to look at the result. The detectors at CERN, the home of the LHC, the largest particle detector in the world, can generate the equivalent of those 20,000 photographs in a small fraction of a second. Even with all the computer filtering the LHC can turn out hundreds of potentially interesting events per day. That's why the staff of each detector runs into the thousands.
We have now reached the point where we have an atom with a nucleus of protons and, as far as we know at this point, some electrons. The nucleus is surrounded by electrons in some mysterious configuration. This is just the beginning of the story. But there is where I must leave it in this installment. To be continued . . .
Monday, March 18, 2019
Saturday, March 9, 2019
From Ito to Ellis
Like a lot of my posts, this one builds on previous work. In my last post I suggested you NOT go back and read my previous work on the subject. This time around I can strongly recommend you do the opposite, that you reread my previous post. And the reason is simple. One of the two people I am featuring in this post is someone most people have forgotten about. His name is Lance Ito. Who? My point exactly.
Mr. Ito was the presiding judge in "the trial of the century". The century in question is not our current one but the one that immediately preceded it, the twentieth century. Specifically, the trial ran from November of 1994 to June of 1995. The trial was a murder case that was handled by the State of California and the defendant was one Orenthal Julius "OJ" Simpson. He was acquitted even though most observers, including myself, thought he was guilty.
The trial was "the trial of the century" on one sense. It was covered more extensively and more intensively than any other trial from any century. The cable news landscape was quite different at the time. CNN had been founded in 1980 but both MSNBC and Fox News only date back to 1996. There were a couple of "business news" channels around (CNBC, founded in 1989, and Bloomberg Television, founded just in time at the beginning of 1994). But the business news channels covered business, And the OJ trial had no "business" hook. And CNN considered itself a "serious news" channel at the time. They devoted a lot of coverage to the OJ trial but did not go "wall to wall".
But the trial, and the events leading up to it, were covered intensively, not only in southern California, where all the events happened, but nationally. All of the network affiliated TV stations in my market (Seattle) broke in to cover the infamous "Bronco chase" (see my previous post for details). This left the local stations no alternative so you could literally flip from channel to channel to channel and see roughly the same feed on all of them.
Okay. That should give you enough information to convince you that you should definitely read my previous post. So here's the link: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-oj-trial.html. These events happened long enough ago that even people who were paying attention at the time have forgotten the details. In my previous post I covered many aspects of the trial. Here I want to focus on only one of them.
Judge Ito is still alive, although he retired from the bench a few hears ago in 2015. Going into the trial he had a good reputation. He emerged from the trial with his reputation in tatters. It never recovered. The OJ trial is a prime example of the influence, for good or ill, that a judge can have on judcicial proceedings.
And the OJ trial was unlike most trials in one aspect, an aspect that turned out to be critical. The state of California gives judges the option of letting proceedings be televised. Judge Ito okayed television coverage. So literally everyone could effectively sit in the courtroom and observe the proceedings.
Courts have been experimenting with TV coverage as long as TV has been around. A couple of early experiments led to a circus atmosphere. For one thing, the lights had to be extremely bright for the TV cameras of the time to work. For another, lots of people played to the cameras rather than observing standard courtroom decorum. That led to most courts banning TV cameras most of the time.
But by the time of the OJ trial those sorts of problems had been ironed out. TV cameras had gotten a lot better so lighting did not need to be especially bright for everything to work. And everybody had gotten used to the process. Judges had developed effective techniques for keeping everyone in line. So the presence of TV cameras did not have a direct effect on the proceedings.
What did have an effect was that the audience could see and judge the behavior and effectiveness of the various players. And they did. And the score card had a profound effect on several of the key players. As I reported in my previous post, the reputation of F. Lee Bailey, up to this point considered a superstar lawyer, plummeted. He just didn't seem to have a good grasp of what an effective defense strategy would be. The person who did was Johnny Cochran. He went from being someone that no one had heard of to having the kind of superstar reputation that Bailey lost.
Bailey lost the most but Judge Ito was also a big looser. Again, as I laid out in my previous post, Ito received a failing grade from most observers for the way he managed his courtroom. Rather than rehash my previous post let me make two observations. The key prosecution witness was a cop named Mark Furman. It turns out Ito's wife had been his supervisor at one point and Furman was on record as having said derogatory things about her.
Th other observation I want to make is that Ito's behavior had a substantial negative effect on the prosecution's case and a substantial positive effect on the defense's case. This is probably a good thing in many cases as the prosecution has substantial resources and most defendants have few or none. The prosecution should be forced to make their case. On the other hand, if the prosecution has s solid case they should be allowed to put it on. Ito really didn't let the prosecution do this.
And that's not the worst of it. Furman entered Simpson's property even though it was secured by citing a combination of "probable cause" and "exigent circumstances". It is likely that they didn't exist. If the evidence obtained this way had been thrown out then it is not clear that the prosecution had a case. In my opinion, ruling that the evidence, and all evidence that followed from it, was inadmissible, would have resulted in the prosecution losing fairly.
Finally, Mr. Simpson was not a normal defendant. He was well known, had many powerful friends, and had substantial financial resources. In these cases there is no justification for the judge being anything but even handed.
Now let me move on to the second person named in my subject line, Mr. Ellis. He is Federal Judge Thomas Selby Ellis III. He is a "Senior" judge, which means he is semi-retired. This is appropriate because he is close to eighty years in age and has been a Federal judge for more than thirty years. What has brought Judge Ellis to my attention is that he was the presiding judge on one of two cases recently brought against Paul Manafort. It turns out that there are a surprising number of similarities between the Manafort and the OJ cases.
In both cases the Judge was much harder on the prosecution than on the defense. In both cases the defendant had the wealth and power to mount a substantial, well resourced, defense. And in both cases the prosecution was burdened with putting on a complicated case while the defense had a much easier time of it.
The venue in which Judge Ellis serves is notorious as being the home of the "rocket docket". Judges try hard to move cases through quickly. They try hard to get both sides to pare their cases down to a few key items in dispute and to provide a minimum of support for their view of the issue.
Again, in the abstract, this is a good thing. It is unjust to force defendants to wait long periods of time, often in jail, simply waiting for their case to come up. If cases are short then more cases can be heard in a year and the backlog can stay short and cases spend minimal time in scheduling limbo.
But again it is incumbent on the Judge to let the prosecution prove their case if they can. In the OJ case a serious argument can be made that the prosecution did not make their case. This is definitely not true in the Manafort case. The prosecution presented substantial and compelling evidence to support each and every aspect in their case. And, unlike in the OJ case, the Manafort team provided little or no reason to call any of the prosecution's case into question.
In the OJ case, Judge Ito was a fan of Johnny Cochran, the eventual lead defense attorney. In the Manafort case, the Judge regularly expressed the opinion that the crimes Manafort was being charged with were "chicken feed" (not his characterization but equivalent to what he did have to say). He also opined that the only reason Manafort was in front of him was because he was as a stepping stone to bigger fish. And not all of this happened out of the hearing of jurors.
And a case can be made that the Judge was right. It has long been the case that white collar crimes, anything illegal perpetrated by men in suits and not using violence, does tend to result in a light sentence. It is probably true that the Judge could find earlier cases prosecuted in his district that had resulted in sentences being handed down that were roughly in line with the sentence Manafort received.
But that's the problem. Lots of people have received far harsher sentences than Manafort's for crimes most of us would characterize as far less serious, There are lots of people serving hard time in the Federal Prison system for non-violent drug crimes. But that just makes it worse.
And the decades long effort to make sure that sentencing is uniform and appropriate is a response to this. That's why the federal sentencing guidelines exist. They can get it wrong. But this only comes about if there is something in a particular case that is not appropriately handled by the guidelines. There was nothing like this in Manafort's case.
The guidelines start with the "type" of each crime the defendant has been convicted of and assigns a score. The scores are added up to produce a preliminary sentencing range. Then adjustments are made based on "mitigating" and "aggravating" circumstances. This is an entirely mechanical process of so much for this and so much for that.
If a defendant does this (i. e. enter into and execute a "cooperation agreement" with the authorities, demonstrate an understanding of his crime and show true remorse, etc.) then then based on the type of mitigation, the sentencing range is adjusted down. If a defendant does that (i. e. is a repeat offender, attempts to tamper with a witness, etc.) then a similar process is used to adjust the sentencing range up.
This process was done in the Manafort case. In short, there were several aggravating factors and no mitigating factors. The defense team did not challenge any of the findings that went into the sentencing recommendation. The Judge had spent the entire trial haranguing the prosecution to speed things up and don't take any detours. So the prosecution kept is short and said "we agree with the sentencing guidelines as is" rather than spending a lot of time on the subject.
So what did the Judge do? He in effect threw the sentencing guidelines out the window and, on his own, issued a sentence that was roughly 20% as long as the guidelines. Judges are given wide discretion to reduce sentences but they are expected to provide justification. Technically, the Judge did provide a justification. But the justification was wholly inadequate.
The first thing he did was ignore or grossly mischaracterize facts entered into the record as the case proceeded. He characterized Manafort as having led a "blameless" life. The trial record says differently. Evidence was introduced of Manafort engaging in various criminal activities over at least a decade. These crimes were perpetrated solely to increase the wealth and power of Mr. Manafort. In short, they were the kinds of things a Mafia kingpin would do.
He made a lot of money promoting the activities of various thugs and criminals who spent a lot of time and effort in opposing the interests of the United States. So Manafort was manifestly anti-American. These people also spent a lot of time undermining and subverting the institutions on which civilization depends, things like the very court system that Judge Ellis is a key part of. This is hardly the behavior of a blameless man.
And then there is all the lawlessness he engaged in after he was convicted of eight crimes and pled guilty to a slew of others. He then chose to enter into a cooperation agreement with the authorities and violate it repeatedly.
On the other hand, the Judge assigned heavy weight to a number of routine letters of support. Anyone as rich, powerful, and well connected as Manafort would have no trouble wrangling such letters. I'm sure Mafiosi could too. And they would be similarly effusive. And similarly meaningless.
The only thing that sticks in this whole sorry mess is the Judge's contention that white collar crimes usually result in light sentences. This, unfortunately, is true. Horrible damage was done to the economy and the lives of many thousands of people by the wretched excesses of Wall Street that led to the crash of '08. Nobody, with the possible exception of a single low level flunky, went to jail. There were almost no prosecutions.
And that means that there is little reason for the people who perpetrated that great disaster and similar other lesser disasters have any reason to change their behavior. And they get paid outrageous sums to keep doing the same thing. We should not be surprised that rich and powerful people often engage in bad behavior. They have every reason to do so and, thanks to people like Judge Ellis, there is little likelihood that they will pay a heavy price for their bad behavior even if they are caught and convicted.
The reforms that led to the sentencing guidelines that the Judge ignored were one feeble attempt to put things right. And the Manafort case is the poster child for why prosecutors are reluctant to bring these kinds of cases. They are hard to develop. They take a lot of hours of work by skilled people to put together. They require the prosecution to place a complicated case before jurors, keep them from getting confused, and prove all the elements.
That is very hard to do. It is particularly hard if a Judge Ito is permitting the defense to throw in interruption after interruption. Or if a Judge Ellis is disparaging the fact that you even brought the case in the first place while simultaneously saying "move things along" and " stick only to the essentials".
And you have the results in these cases. OJ gets off completely. Manafort gets a ridiculously light sentence. And the Manafort case in particular was a slam dunk. The prosecution had extensive documentation (which they were repeatedly told to keep to a minimum) and compelling witnesses like "salt of the earth" employees of small businesses that Manafort did business with. The OJ case could have been a slam dunk if the LAPD had done high quality police work. But they didn't. Even so, that case was still pretty compelling.
In many cases white collar crimes are much messier. Multiple bad actors can be blamed. This is definitely true in the crash of '08. It wasn't caused by a single individual but by a whole corrupt system. But cases normally need to be brought individual by individual. The Manafort case involved substantial, voluminous, and substantially complete documentation. (Manafort's number two, Rick Gates, flipped and was able to provide invaluable assistance). In white collar crimes the record is often far from complete.
But white collar crimes are often more damaging to society than other types of crimes that are routinely dealt with far more harshly. And the Manafort case brought the dual nature of our justice system into sharp focus. There is one system of justice for Manafort and others with wealth, power, and a network of well connected friends. Then there is an entirely different system of justice for the poor, marginalized, and powerless.
Those people do not have the resources to mount the kind of defense Manafort did. His defense was incredibly weak. They did not seriously challenge a single aspect of the government's case. They certainly had the resources to locate and exploit any weaknesses. The only thing I can conclude is that there were no weaknesses in the prosecution's case.
But in the end what they did do was effective. They said Manafort was a nice, well educated, and successful man who had not been caught before and who knew a bunch of people who would attest to the fact that he was a family man and the kind of guy they liked to be associated with. That turned out to be enough to get 80% of Manafort's sentence to go away.
Ultimately the OJ case accelerated the change in the "news" away from news and toward sensationalism. It had no impact on how the LAPD did business or how courts, either at the state level or anywhere else, operated. OJ is out of jail, finally, but he is now an old man.
It remains to be seen what impact this particular case will have. I think it will not have much. Manafort was convicted of crimes in two jurisdictions. The sentencing phase has not yet taken place in the second jurisdiction. More importantly, "Manafort" is only a small star in the much larger galaxy of scandals that is the Trump Administration. If substantial change is going to occur, it will most likely be a consequence of the gravitational pull of the black hole that is at the center of this large assemblage.
Finally, both cases make even more clear that "justice" is in the eye of the beholder. There are lots of people that feel that the OJ case was decided correctly. There are lots of people that feel that the Manafort case was decided correctly. It no longer matters much what the facts in either case are. All too often today beliefs are held not because of the facts but rather in spite of the facts. That, more than anything else, needs to change.
Mr. Ito was the presiding judge in "the trial of the century". The century in question is not our current one but the one that immediately preceded it, the twentieth century. Specifically, the trial ran from November of 1994 to June of 1995. The trial was a murder case that was handled by the State of California and the defendant was one Orenthal Julius "OJ" Simpson. He was acquitted even though most observers, including myself, thought he was guilty.
The trial was "the trial of the century" on one sense. It was covered more extensively and more intensively than any other trial from any century. The cable news landscape was quite different at the time. CNN had been founded in 1980 but both MSNBC and Fox News only date back to 1996. There were a couple of "business news" channels around (CNBC, founded in 1989, and Bloomberg Television, founded just in time at the beginning of 1994). But the business news channels covered business, And the OJ trial had no "business" hook. And CNN considered itself a "serious news" channel at the time. They devoted a lot of coverage to the OJ trial but did not go "wall to wall".
But the trial, and the events leading up to it, were covered intensively, not only in southern California, where all the events happened, but nationally. All of the network affiliated TV stations in my market (Seattle) broke in to cover the infamous "Bronco chase" (see my previous post for details). This left the local stations no alternative so you could literally flip from channel to channel to channel and see roughly the same feed on all of them.
Okay. That should give you enough information to convince you that you should definitely read my previous post. So here's the link: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-oj-trial.html. These events happened long enough ago that even people who were paying attention at the time have forgotten the details. In my previous post I covered many aspects of the trial. Here I want to focus on only one of them.
Judge Ito is still alive, although he retired from the bench a few hears ago in 2015. Going into the trial he had a good reputation. He emerged from the trial with his reputation in tatters. It never recovered. The OJ trial is a prime example of the influence, for good or ill, that a judge can have on judcicial proceedings.
And the OJ trial was unlike most trials in one aspect, an aspect that turned out to be critical. The state of California gives judges the option of letting proceedings be televised. Judge Ito okayed television coverage. So literally everyone could effectively sit in the courtroom and observe the proceedings.
Courts have been experimenting with TV coverage as long as TV has been around. A couple of early experiments led to a circus atmosphere. For one thing, the lights had to be extremely bright for the TV cameras of the time to work. For another, lots of people played to the cameras rather than observing standard courtroom decorum. That led to most courts banning TV cameras most of the time.
But by the time of the OJ trial those sorts of problems had been ironed out. TV cameras had gotten a lot better so lighting did not need to be especially bright for everything to work. And everybody had gotten used to the process. Judges had developed effective techniques for keeping everyone in line. So the presence of TV cameras did not have a direct effect on the proceedings.
What did have an effect was that the audience could see and judge the behavior and effectiveness of the various players. And they did. And the score card had a profound effect on several of the key players. As I reported in my previous post, the reputation of F. Lee Bailey, up to this point considered a superstar lawyer, plummeted. He just didn't seem to have a good grasp of what an effective defense strategy would be. The person who did was Johnny Cochran. He went from being someone that no one had heard of to having the kind of superstar reputation that Bailey lost.
Bailey lost the most but Judge Ito was also a big looser. Again, as I laid out in my previous post, Ito received a failing grade from most observers for the way he managed his courtroom. Rather than rehash my previous post let me make two observations. The key prosecution witness was a cop named Mark Furman. It turns out Ito's wife had been his supervisor at one point and Furman was on record as having said derogatory things about her.
Th other observation I want to make is that Ito's behavior had a substantial negative effect on the prosecution's case and a substantial positive effect on the defense's case. This is probably a good thing in many cases as the prosecution has substantial resources and most defendants have few or none. The prosecution should be forced to make their case. On the other hand, if the prosecution has s solid case they should be allowed to put it on. Ito really didn't let the prosecution do this.
And that's not the worst of it. Furman entered Simpson's property even though it was secured by citing a combination of "probable cause" and "exigent circumstances". It is likely that they didn't exist. If the evidence obtained this way had been thrown out then it is not clear that the prosecution had a case. In my opinion, ruling that the evidence, and all evidence that followed from it, was inadmissible, would have resulted in the prosecution losing fairly.
Finally, Mr. Simpson was not a normal defendant. He was well known, had many powerful friends, and had substantial financial resources. In these cases there is no justification for the judge being anything but even handed.
Now let me move on to the second person named in my subject line, Mr. Ellis. He is Federal Judge Thomas Selby Ellis III. He is a "Senior" judge, which means he is semi-retired. This is appropriate because he is close to eighty years in age and has been a Federal judge for more than thirty years. What has brought Judge Ellis to my attention is that he was the presiding judge on one of two cases recently brought against Paul Manafort. It turns out that there are a surprising number of similarities between the Manafort and the OJ cases.
In both cases the Judge was much harder on the prosecution than on the defense. In both cases the defendant had the wealth and power to mount a substantial, well resourced, defense. And in both cases the prosecution was burdened with putting on a complicated case while the defense had a much easier time of it.
The venue in which Judge Ellis serves is notorious as being the home of the "rocket docket". Judges try hard to move cases through quickly. They try hard to get both sides to pare their cases down to a few key items in dispute and to provide a minimum of support for their view of the issue.
Again, in the abstract, this is a good thing. It is unjust to force defendants to wait long periods of time, often in jail, simply waiting for their case to come up. If cases are short then more cases can be heard in a year and the backlog can stay short and cases spend minimal time in scheduling limbo.
But again it is incumbent on the Judge to let the prosecution prove their case if they can. In the OJ case a serious argument can be made that the prosecution did not make their case. This is definitely not true in the Manafort case. The prosecution presented substantial and compelling evidence to support each and every aspect in their case. And, unlike in the OJ case, the Manafort team provided little or no reason to call any of the prosecution's case into question.
In the OJ case, Judge Ito was a fan of Johnny Cochran, the eventual lead defense attorney. In the Manafort case, the Judge regularly expressed the opinion that the crimes Manafort was being charged with were "chicken feed" (not his characterization but equivalent to what he did have to say). He also opined that the only reason Manafort was in front of him was because he was as a stepping stone to bigger fish. And not all of this happened out of the hearing of jurors.
And a case can be made that the Judge was right. It has long been the case that white collar crimes, anything illegal perpetrated by men in suits and not using violence, does tend to result in a light sentence. It is probably true that the Judge could find earlier cases prosecuted in his district that had resulted in sentences being handed down that were roughly in line with the sentence Manafort received.
But that's the problem. Lots of people have received far harsher sentences than Manafort's for crimes most of us would characterize as far less serious, There are lots of people serving hard time in the Federal Prison system for non-violent drug crimes. But that just makes it worse.
And the decades long effort to make sure that sentencing is uniform and appropriate is a response to this. That's why the federal sentencing guidelines exist. They can get it wrong. But this only comes about if there is something in a particular case that is not appropriately handled by the guidelines. There was nothing like this in Manafort's case.
The guidelines start with the "type" of each crime the defendant has been convicted of and assigns a score. The scores are added up to produce a preliminary sentencing range. Then adjustments are made based on "mitigating" and "aggravating" circumstances. This is an entirely mechanical process of so much for this and so much for that.
If a defendant does this (i. e. enter into and execute a "cooperation agreement" with the authorities, demonstrate an understanding of his crime and show true remorse, etc.) then then based on the type of mitigation, the sentencing range is adjusted down. If a defendant does that (i. e. is a repeat offender, attempts to tamper with a witness, etc.) then a similar process is used to adjust the sentencing range up.
This process was done in the Manafort case. In short, there were several aggravating factors and no mitigating factors. The defense team did not challenge any of the findings that went into the sentencing recommendation. The Judge had spent the entire trial haranguing the prosecution to speed things up and don't take any detours. So the prosecution kept is short and said "we agree with the sentencing guidelines as is" rather than spending a lot of time on the subject.
So what did the Judge do? He in effect threw the sentencing guidelines out the window and, on his own, issued a sentence that was roughly 20% as long as the guidelines. Judges are given wide discretion to reduce sentences but they are expected to provide justification. Technically, the Judge did provide a justification. But the justification was wholly inadequate.
The first thing he did was ignore or grossly mischaracterize facts entered into the record as the case proceeded. He characterized Manafort as having led a "blameless" life. The trial record says differently. Evidence was introduced of Manafort engaging in various criminal activities over at least a decade. These crimes were perpetrated solely to increase the wealth and power of Mr. Manafort. In short, they were the kinds of things a Mafia kingpin would do.
He made a lot of money promoting the activities of various thugs and criminals who spent a lot of time and effort in opposing the interests of the United States. So Manafort was manifestly anti-American. These people also spent a lot of time undermining and subverting the institutions on which civilization depends, things like the very court system that Judge Ellis is a key part of. This is hardly the behavior of a blameless man.
And then there is all the lawlessness he engaged in after he was convicted of eight crimes and pled guilty to a slew of others. He then chose to enter into a cooperation agreement with the authorities and violate it repeatedly.
On the other hand, the Judge assigned heavy weight to a number of routine letters of support. Anyone as rich, powerful, and well connected as Manafort would have no trouble wrangling such letters. I'm sure Mafiosi could too. And they would be similarly effusive. And similarly meaningless.
The only thing that sticks in this whole sorry mess is the Judge's contention that white collar crimes usually result in light sentences. This, unfortunately, is true. Horrible damage was done to the economy and the lives of many thousands of people by the wretched excesses of Wall Street that led to the crash of '08. Nobody, with the possible exception of a single low level flunky, went to jail. There were almost no prosecutions.
And that means that there is little reason for the people who perpetrated that great disaster and similar other lesser disasters have any reason to change their behavior. And they get paid outrageous sums to keep doing the same thing. We should not be surprised that rich and powerful people often engage in bad behavior. They have every reason to do so and, thanks to people like Judge Ellis, there is little likelihood that they will pay a heavy price for their bad behavior even if they are caught and convicted.
The reforms that led to the sentencing guidelines that the Judge ignored were one feeble attempt to put things right. And the Manafort case is the poster child for why prosecutors are reluctant to bring these kinds of cases. They are hard to develop. They take a lot of hours of work by skilled people to put together. They require the prosecution to place a complicated case before jurors, keep them from getting confused, and prove all the elements.
That is very hard to do. It is particularly hard if a Judge Ito is permitting the defense to throw in interruption after interruption. Or if a Judge Ellis is disparaging the fact that you even brought the case in the first place while simultaneously saying "move things along" and " stick only to the essentials".
And you have the results in these cases. OJ gets off completely. Manafort gets a ridiculously light sentence. And the Manafort case in particular was a slam dunk. The prosecution had extensive documentation (which they were repeatedly told to keep to a minimum) and compelling witnesses like "salt of the earth" employees of small businesses that Manafort did business with. The OJ case could have been a slam dunk if the LAPD had done high quality police work. But they didn't. Even so, that case was still pretty compelling.
In many cases white collar crimes are much messier. Multiple bad actors can be blamed. This is definitely true in the crash of '08. It wasn't caused by a single individual but by a whole corrupt system. But cases normally need to be brought individual by individual. The Manafort case involved substantial, voluminous, and substantially complete documentation. (Manafort's number two, Rick Gates, flipped and was able to provide invaluable assistance). In white collar crimes the record is often far from complete.
But white collar crimes are often more damaging to society than other types of crimes that are routinely dealt with far more harshly. And the Manafort case brought the dual nature of our justice system into sharp focus. There is one system of justice for Manafort and others with wealth, power, and a network of well connected friends. Then there is an entirely different system of justice for the poor, marginalized, and powerless.
Those people do not have the resources to mount the kind of defense Manafort did. His defense was incredibly weak. They did not seriously challenge a single aspect of the government's case. They certainly had the resources to locate and exploit any weaknesses. The only thing I can conclude is that there were no weaknesses in the prosecution's case.
But in the end what they did do was effective. They said Manafort was a nice, well educated, and successful man who had not been caught before and who knew a bunch of people who would attest to the fact that he was a family man and the kind of guy they liked to be associated with. That turned out to be enough to get 80% of Manafort's sentence to go away.
Ultimately the OJ case accelerated the change in the "news" away from news and toward sensationalism. It had no impact on how the LAPD did business or how courts, either at the state level or anywhere else, operated. OJ is out of jail, finally, but he is now an old man.
It remains to be seen what impact this particular case will have. I think it will not have much. Manafort was convicted of crimes in two jurisdictions. The sentencing phase has not yet taken place in the second jurisdiction. More importantly, "Manafort" is only a small star in the much larger galaxy of scandals that is the Trump Administration. If substantial change is going to occur, it will most likely be a consequence of the gravitational pull of the black hole that is at the center of this large assemblage.
Finally, both cases make even more clear that "justice" is in the eye of the beholder. There are lots of people that feel that the OJ case was decided correctly. There are lots of people that feel that the Manafort case was decided correctly. It no longer matters much what the facts in either case are. All too often today beliefs are held not because of the facts but rather in spite of the facts. That, more than anything else, needs to change.
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