Wife-Beating Federal Judge Mark Fuller Personifies The Corruption That Is Rotting American Democracy

Paul Craig Roberts

U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller (Middle District of Alabama), who entered a rehab program in the wake of charges that he beat up his wife in an Atlanta hotel room, symbolizes the corruption that is causing decay in vital American institutions. In a sense, that makes Alabama "Ground Zero" for the kind of dishonest government that seems to have become the norm, especially in courtrooms across the country.

These thoughts come to us after reading the latest from Paul Craig Roberts, a former assistant treasury secretary in the Reagan administration and former columnist at the Wall Street Journal.  Despite his solid conservative credentials, Roberts has become an independent voice who is willing to criticize bad actors on both the right and the left.

One such bad actor is Judge Mark Fuller, and he caught Roberts' attention in a recent piece at the Foreign Policy Journal. Fuller's handling of the Don Siegelman prosecution is a black mark on a criminal "justice" system run amok, Roberts reports:

In the totally corrupt American criminal justice (sic) system, anyone indicted, no matter how innocent, is almost certain to be convicted.

Let’s take the case of Alabama Democratic Governor Don Siegelman. Judging by the reported evidence in the media and testimony by those familiar with the case, Don Siegelman, a popular Democratic governor of Alabama was a victim of a Karl Rove operation to instruct Democrats that their political party would not be permitted a comeback in executive authority in the Republican South.

There is no doubt but that the Alabama Republican newspapers and TV stations are political tools. And there is little doubt that former Republican US Attorneys Alice Martin and Leura Canary and Republican US federal district court judge Mark Fuller were willing participants in Karl Rove’s political campaign to purge the South of popular democrats.

Are Martin, Canary, Fuller, and Rove the kind of people we should entrust with our most important institutions? Roberts says the answer is no, and he points to Fuller's recent activities:

Republican US district court judge Mark Fuller was arrested in Atlanta this month for beating his wife in an Atlanta hotel. The judge, in whose honor courts must rise, was charged with battery and taken to the Fulton County jail at 2:30AM Sunday morning August 10. If you look at the mug shot of Mark Fuller, he doesn’t inspire confidence. Fuller was a bitter enemy of Siegelman and should have recused himself from Siegelman’s trial, but ethical behavior required more integrity than Fuller has.

Among many, Scott Horton, a professor of law at Columbia University has provided much information in Harper’s magazine involving the corruption of Fuller and the Republican prosecuting attorneys, Alice Martin and Leura Canary.

Roberts does not give Democrats, or the public, a free pass. He is particularly critical of those who live in the South and happily ignore Mark Fuller and his ilk:

So why hasn’t the Obama regime pardoned former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman who unlike other pardoned parties is actually innocent? Siegelman was bringing the Democratic Party back in the corrupt Republican state of Alabama. He was a successful governor who would have been US senator, and Karl Rove apparently exterminated him politically in order to protect the Republican hold on the South.

It is extremely ironic that the formerly solid Democratic South, plundered, looted, and raped by Republican armies, votes Republican. If anything shows the insouciance of a people, the South’s Republican vote is the best demonstration. The South votes for a party that destroyed the South and its culture. There is no greater evidence of a people totally ignorant of, or indifferent to, their history than the Southern people who vote Republican.

Corruption across the board should be a concern for all Americans, Roberts writes. But corrupt courts are a sure sign of trouble in the future:

Every public institution in the United States and most private ones are corrupt. . . .

Law is just one public institution, but it is a corner stone of society. When law goes, everything goes.

When law goes, everything goes? Experience has taught me that law already has gone in Alabama, and it is teetering in many other states--in all regions of the country. If Roberts is correct, and I believe he is, America has grim days ahead.