If you were a kid in the 1950s or ’60s, there probably was more than one occasion, while you were growing up, when you told your parents that somebody had done something wrong to you and they didn’t believe you.
Maybe it was your neighborhood’s version of Eddie Haskell, the smarmy creep who would ingratiate himself with all the adult characters on the Leave It to Beaver TV show to inoculate himself against reports of his nefarious behavior.
“Oh, Eddie would never do that,” they’d say, as Eddie smirked behind their backs. “He’s such a nice boy.”
If the culprit was an authority figure like a teacher or a coach, you quickly learned not to even bother complaining about abuse suffered at their hands. Your parents were simply unable to process the information.
“If Miss Schadenfreude or Coach Demonik punished you,” they’d say as if stating the obvious, “you must have done something wrong.”
The same thing happens to adults, too, of course. If the neighbors see a police car pulling up to your house, right away they start texting and posting about the perp next door.
When the feds arrested Chicago insurance broker Michael Segal over 15 years ago for allegedly looting $30 million from his own company, Near North National Group, you can bet a whole lot of people (even some who knew him well) assumed he was guilty. When he was convicted and given a 10-year prison sentence, well, that was that.
He must have done it, right? He got a fair trial, right? The prosecutor and the judge were impartial, right?
Last year, author Maurice Possley published a book called Conviction at any Cost, which describes in detail how Segal was railroaded.
“Some people may believe that the government does not prosecute someone for no reason,” Segal says in an endnote to the book. “I now understand that this is not true.”
He’s right. It isn’t true. It happens all the time and needs to stop. Dishonest prosecutors and dishonest judges should go to prison.