Sometimes our legal system manages to go after rich and powerful wrongdoers.  Unfortunately, this seems to require horrific crimes and years of waiting.  This is the story of Stephen Flatow, a man who was determined to wring some justice out of the system.

A Grieving Father Pulls a Thread That Unravels Illegal Bank Deals

By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG and BEN PROTESS

New York Times

June 30, 2014 

Stephen Flatow of West Orange, N.J., accused Iran of financing the terrorist group responsible for the suicide bombing that killed his daughter, Alisa, in 1995.

A bus bombing two decades ago — and a New Jersey father’s quest for justice — inadvertently set off a chain of events that led American prosecutors to accuse some of the world’s biggest banks of transferring money for nations like Iran.

On Monday, that crackdown culminated with the guilty plea of BNP Paribas, which admitted to doing billions of dollars in deals with Iran and other countries blacklisted by the United States and agreed to pay a record $8.9 billion penalty to state and federal authorities.

The trail that ultimately led to BNP began in 2006, when the Manhattan district attorney’s office came upon a lawsuit filed by the father, who blamed Iran for financing the Gaza bus bombing that killed his 20-year-old daughter. Buried in the court filings, prosecutors found a stunning accusation: a charity that owned a gleaming office tower on Fifth Avenue was actually a “front” for the Iranian government, a claim that the prosecutors ultimately verified.

The prosecutors soon discovered that Credit Suisse and Lloyds, two of the world’s most prestigious banks, had acted as Iran’s portal to the United States financial system. To disguise the illicit transactions — the United States is closed for business to Iran — Credit Suisse and Lloyds stripped out the Iranian clients’ names from wire transfers to the Fifth Avenue charity and affiliated entities. The findings led the Manhattan prosecutors and the Justice Department in Washington to announce criminal cases against both banks.

As those cases were coming to light in 2009, a whistle-blower stepped forward to point the finger at BNP, France’s biggest bank. That tip has now materialized in a landmark criminal settlement, with BNP pleading guilty to criminal charges, capping a sweeping investigation into how the bank processed billions of dollars on behalf of Sudan and Iran.

The twists and turns leading to the BNP case — a series of whistle-blower tips and fortuitous discoveries recounted in interviews with current and former prosecutors — open a window into the interconnected yet shadowy world of global finance...

ORDINARY INJUSTICE: How America Holds Court by Amy Bach

ORDINARY INJUSTICE: How America Holds Court
by Amy Bach

"A disturbing and urgent call to reform." --Booklist

"A clear exposure of a dirty secret well known to lawyers and apt to outrage everyone else."
--Kirkus Reviews

"This is a magnificent work, a crusading call for reform in the tradition of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring or Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed . . . This groundbreaking book deserves widespread attention."
--Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals

The stories of grave injustice are all too familiar: the lawyer who sleeps through a trial, the false confessions, the convictions of the innocent.

However, the less visible failures of justice meted out by America's defective system receive scant attention unless you've personally experienced it. Attorney and journalist Amy Bach has spent the last eight years investigating the chronic lapses in courts across America...

ORDINARY INJUSTICE: How America Holds Court (Metropolitan Books/September 1, 2009) goes well beyond one particular injustice, one specific court, or one aspect of the legal system. Instead, Bach conducts a sweeping investigation that moves from small-town Georgia to upstate New York, from Chicago to Mississippi, recounting fascinating stories that reveal a deep culture of complicity among prosecutors, defenders, and judges--a complicity that puts the interests of the system above the court's obligation to the people...

Here are cases where brutal domestic assault and child rape go unpunished, where indigent defendants are coerced into guilty pleas without being notified of their right to a public defender, where bail for offenses like riding a bike on a sidewalk is set at $25,000.

In Quitman County, Mississippi, we meet Brenda Wiggs, a court clerk who keeps a list of cases that mysteriously never reach a courtroom; the county, she asserts, has not prosecuted a domestic violence case in twenty-one years...

Why is this happening? Bach goes beyond the easy explanations of bad apples and meager funding to show how in the name of expedience legal professionals routinely choose to collaborate rather than face off as adversaries...

AMY BACH, a member of the New York Bar, has written on law for The Nation, The American Lawyer, and New York Magazine, and has taught legal studies at the University of Rochester.

Ex-Klansman Is Sentenced to Life for Killings in 1964

Thomas Moore thanked Dunn Lampton, a United States attorney, for prosecuting James Seale, killer of his brother.

Photo by Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press

It's been a painful forty-three years for the families of Charles Moore and Henry Dee, teenagers who were murdered in Mississippi in 1964, but I suspect killer James Seale never suffered from remorse. But it's nice to know that the truth seems to always come out in the end.

Below is the story from the New York Times by JERRY MITCHELL and BRENDA GOODMAN:

"JACKSON, Miss., Aug. 24 (2007) — Calling the crime “unspeakable because only monsters could inflict this,” a federal judge on Friday sentenced a former member of the Ku Klux Klan to three life terms in prison for his role in the 1964 kidnapping and murder of two black teenagers in Mississippi.

"The victims, Henry H. Dee and Charles E. Moore, both 19, were hitchhiking in Meadville, Miss., when a group of Klansmen, including James Seale, picked them up and took them to a wooded area, where they were beaten and their weighted bodies thrown into the Mississippi River. Both young men drowned.

"Their bodies were not recovered until later that year in a high-profile search for three civil rights activists whose deaths generated widespread revulsion against the racial violence in Mississippi..."