Gross Injustice: Paul Minor

Of the many documented allegations against the Rove Republican Racket, nothing is as awful as the case from the Mississippi Delta: the set up, wrongful conviction, and jailing of Paul Minor.


To summarize, Minor was a major Democratic donor who was targeted in 2003 by the Rove-Bush politicized U.S. Department of Justice, and brought to trial for being literally a secondary co-signer and providing loan gurantees on the election loans of Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver E. Diaz. The political prosecution also went after Minor for providing an apartment to Diaz during his campaign. The Rove Racket went after Minor twice.

Minor was acquitted after the first trial. The Rove Racket came back again and Minor was finally convicted in September of 2007.

This past week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. decided to weigh in on this gross injustice and wrote a lengthy piece for The Huffington Post:

One of the nation's top trial lawyers, Minor stands convicted on partisan political charges ginned up by Rove's right wing toadies at the Department of Justice. Paul Minor is serving the second year of a breathtaking 11-year sentence for non-violent, white collar crimes he did not commit. Paul Minor's real crime was that he used nearly a half million dollars of his earnings from the 1997 Big Tobacco settlement and a string of other successful lawsuits to fund Democratic candidates for office at the local and national level. Minor was the largest donor to Democrats in Mississippi -- accounting for roughly one-third of all campaign contributions from trial lawyers in the state -- making him a prime target of Karl Rove's master plan to strategically take out key Democratic contributors nationwide using trumped up criminal prosecutions as his primary weapon.

(We note that the Rove Racket also went after Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Diaz--twice! Both times they tried to prosecute him, Diaz was acquitted.)

The case against Minor has huge loopholes. Today, we'll take a look at the apartment that Minor provided to Diaz. This is what Harper´s magazine wrote in 2007 about the apartment:

Diaz states that he used the apartment only on weekends to visit his children, who were separated from him thanks to a recent divorce, that he shared it with another renter, and that Diaz made payments for its use. Diaz’s statements on these points were corroborated by a series of other witnesses. However, none of this was noted in the charges brought by the prosecution. Indeed, the prosecutors also neglected to point out that the apartment was not solely Minor’s–a major shareholder was another prominent lawyer who had made the same sorts of loans that Minor had, and who, unlike Minor, actually had cases in front of the judges in question. The other lawyer, however, makes strong campaign contributions to the Republicans.

The full column by Kennedy is available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-and-brendan-demelle/free-paul-minor_b_176696.html