By: Donald V. Watkins
© Copyrighted and Published on January 8, 2020
Hollywood actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, will go to trial in 2020 on what federal prosecutors in Los Angeles claim is the biggest college cheating scandal in U.S. history. Loughlin and Giannulli have been charged with wire fraud, mail fraud, and bribery. Both defendants maintain their innocence. If convicted, they face up to 50 years in prison.
If there was ever a case for "jury nullification" against misguided federal prosecutors, this is the case. Jurors should boldly and proudly invoke the doctrine of jury nullification in Loughlin's and Giannulli's case.
The same federal prosecutors who targeted, indicted, and are expected to try Loughlin and Giannulli would never have the balls to charge the multitude of billionaires who routinely buy admission into prestigious universities for their academically challenged children and grandchildren by gifting these schools tens of millions of dollars for new buildings and endowed chairs that often bear the donors' names.
This is exactly how a mediocre high school student/current senior presidential adviser like Jared Kushner got into Harvard University. Kushner's father, a New York real estate mogul who served time in federal prison, bought Jared's admission into Harvard with his multi-million dollar gift to the university.
What is worse, the weak-kneed federal prosecutors in Loughlin and Giannulli's criminal case would pee on themselves if they had to challenge the college cheating practice that affords admissions preferences to the relatives of university alumni who otherwise could not win admission to these prestigious university on the basis of their own merit. Never mind that this discriminatory preference was instituted a century ago for the specific benefit of white Anglo-Saxon men at a time when Jewish enrollment at these universities was surging.
Furthermore, the same federal prosecutors who strutted to the microphones like peacocks during their press conference in the Loughlin-Giannulli case do not have the courage or intestinal fortitude to indict Boeing senior management executives and board members for the criminally negligent homicide of 189 people who died in the October 2018 crash of Lion Air Flight 610 or the murder of 157 people who died in the March 2019 crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, even though a Boeing manager in the 737 MAX program repeatedly warned these executives and board members about flight safety problems with the production of the 737 MAX aircraft before the fatal crashes occurred. On this issue, prosecutors are castrated eunuchs.
The only practical device available to ordinary Americans who want to redirect the attention of misguided federal prosecutors to the mega-criminals who break the law while winking at accommodating federal prosecutors during their crime spree is jury nullification.
Jurors should exercise this powerful tool whenever federal prosecutors extend their non-prosecution preferential treatment to the super-rich Fortune 500 corporations and Wall Street executives who are deemed "too big to prosecute."
If the federal judge who presides over the Loughlin-Giannulli criminal case is more than your typical, ingratiating, judicial "fluffer" for prosecutors, he/she will respect the jury's invocation of jury nullification in this case.
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