When I was indicted in June 2014 my new lawyers told me to stop blogging.
"The government will take everything you write and twist it to make it work for them, to make you seem guilty."
My lawyers know I haven't committed a crime, not in any sense of the word--they have said as much. Yet prosecutors are adept at making innocent behavior (e.g., a doctor taking care of patient after patient, day after day, hundreds per week, and submitting proper claims for payment to insurance carriers) the appearance of high crime, ever aware that a naive jury--a jury prejudiced in the ways everyone everywhere carries cultural bias--can be swayed along the curves of that naiveté and bias to convict a defendant, regardless of the facts.
The facts, it turns out, are malleable.
Wait: facts aren't malleable, but people see them through the wavy lenses of their prejudice, and that prejudice can be fanned and set to flame, so that in the end the facts seem to support one's prejudices, not stand on their own.
(Isn't this why so many African-Americans and poor people end up in jail? Prejudice wins.)
I'm not African-American, and I haven't been poor since my college and medical school days, but there is enough cultural bias against doctors in America for a skillful prosecutor to have an advantage.
According to this bias, we doctors are rich, jaded, uncaring, too busy, without ethics--and we take advantage of people at their nadir to make a few bucks. A jury of people who can be fanned into fury by a prosecutor who accuses me of being rich, uncaring and without ethics, is a jury that will ignore the facts underlying my innocence and goodwill--people who will ignore their own personal experience of their own (I hope) caring doctors--to satisfy a deep-seated prejudicial wish to put rich, unethical people in jail.
I see no reason to stop blogging. True, the prosecutor has introduced my entire blog into evidence for the upcoming trial, and plans to use it, I presume, as kindling for the jury's prejudice. If the prosecutor wants to "win" so much that she has to cut and paste blog posts, and twist what I have repeatedly said (i.e., I'm innocent, I'm innocent, I'm innocent) into a crazy, backward "admission" of guilt, she's the one who should be incarcerated for her sleight-of-hand failure of ethics: for ignoring truth and facts in the interests of "winning."
Who wins, when an innocent person is convicted of a crime and sent to jail?
"The government will take everything you write and twist it to make it work for them, to make you seem guilty."
My lawyers know I haven't committed a crime, not in any sense of the word--they have said as much. Yet prosecutors are adept at making innocent behavior (e.g., a doctor taking care of patient after patient, day after day, hundreds per week, and submitting proper claims for payment to insurance carriers) the appearance of high crime, ever aware that a naive jury--a jury prejudiced in the ways everyone everywhere carries cultural bias--can be swayed along the curves of that naiveté and bias to convict a defendant, regardless of the facts.
The facts, it turns out, are malleable.
Wait: facts aren't malleable, but people see them through the wavy lenses of their prejudice, and that prejudice can be fanned and set to flame, so that in the end the facts seem to support one's prejudices, not stand on their own.
(Isn't this why so many African-Americans and poor people end up in jail? Prejudice wins.)
I'm not African-American, and I haven't been poor since my college and medical school days, but there is enough cultural bias against doctors in America for a skillful prosecutor to have an advantage.
According to this bias, we doctors are rich, jaded, uncaring, too busy, without ethics--and we take advantage of people at their nadir to make a few bucks. A jury of people who can be fanned into fury by a prosecutor who accuses me of being rich, uncaring and without ethics, is a jury that will ignore the facts underlying my innocence and goodwill--people who will ignore their own personal experience of their own (I hope) caring doctors--to satisfy a deep-seated prejudicial wish to put rich, unethical people in jail.
I see no reason to stop blogging. True, the prosecutor has introduced my entire blog into evidence for the upcoming trial, and plans to use it, I presume, as kindling for the jury's prejudice. If the prosecutor wants to "win" so much that she has to cut and paste blog posts, and twist what I have repeatedly said (i.e., I'm innocent, I'm innocent, I'm innocent) into a crazy, backward "admission" of guilt, she's the one who should be incarcerated for her sleight-of-hand failure of ethics: for ignoring truth and facts in the interests of "winning."
Who wins, when an innocent person is convicted of a crime and sent to jail?
Don't give up the faith. Richard and Dorothy Fitzpatrick
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