Equal Justice Under the Law?

To watch "the memo" click here .

The Talking Points memo, once again, is about how the powerful protect each other.

All of the country, prosecutors are now hunting down Catholic priests accused of sexual abuse. But why didn't that happen before?

There have always been civil lawsuits, and the American Catholic Church has paid nearly a billion dollars to he victims of clerical sexual abuse.

Where were the law enforcement authorities? The answer to that question goes to the heart of our justice system in America. Many DAs were simply too frightened of getting bad publicity from the church and American Catholics. Remember, district attorneys are elected, so law enforcement against Catholic clergy was not exactly aggressive.

As we now know, the leaders of the Catholic Church in America covered up the sexual abuse, at least some of them did. It's my opinion that Cardinal Law in Boston could be arrested and charged with criminal negligence in the matter.

Remember, Law admits transferring pedophile priests to places where they had continuing contact with children.

But no law enforcement person in New England was going to go up against the power of Cardinal Law. Thus hundreds of children were hurt.

The Factor has run down other examples of law not being aggressive in the face of power. Does anyone really believe the Justice Department is aggressively investigating President Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich? Does anyone really believe that Attorney General Janet Reno wanted to find out who broke the law when communist Chinese generals gave money to the Democrats?

And what about Enron? Are these guys going to be indicted any time soon? What say you, John Ashcroft?

It's sad but true that there is not equal justice under the law in the USA. The Catholic Church is very powerful, therefore it took an enormous scandal generated by the press to motivate prosecutors in the priest child abuse situation.

Unless there's a huge smoking gun, like John Dean in Watergate, crooked politicians usually get away with their crimes, another example.

The powerful protect each other. That's one of the bad things about our system in America.

And that's the memo.

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