In the December 12, 2000 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court handing the election to George W. Bush, the Court committed the unpardonable sin of being a knowing surrogate for the Republican Party instead of being an impartial arbiter of the law.

The Court majority, after knowingly transforming the votes of 50 million Americans into nothing and throwing out all of the Florida undervotes, actually wrote that their ruling was intended to preserve "the fundamental right" to vote. That an election can be stolen by the highest court in the land under the deliberate pretext of an inapplicable constitutional provision has got to be one of the most frightening and dangerous events ever to have occured in this country.

With his powerful, brilliant, and courageous exposé of crime by the highest court in the land Vincent Bugliosi takes his place in the pantheon of patriots who have stood up and spoken out against injustice. When an article he wrote on Bush v. Gore appeared in The Nation magazine in February 2001, it drew the largest outpouring of letters and e-mail in the magazine's 136-year history, tapping a dep reservoir of outrage. Bugliosi's argument is here greatly expanded, amended, and amplified.

At the time I am submitting this manuscript for publication (March 9, 2001), news organizations have not yet completed their count of all the Florida undervotes to determine who really won Florida's twenty-five electoral votes, and hence, the office of the Presidency of the United States. But lest anyone believe that their findings, whatever they turn out to be, are relevant in any way at all to what you are about to read, let me assure you that they are not. As I say in my Nation article of February 5, and it bears repeating: "It misses the point to argue that the five Justices stole the election only if it turns out that Gore overcame Bush's lead in the undervote recount. We're talking about the moral and ethical culpability of these Justices, and when you do that, the bell was rung at the moment they engaged in their conduct. What happened thereafter cannot unring the bell and is therefore irrelevant."
One thing is for sure. Irrespective of the result reached by the newspapers, we know that more Floridians intended to vote for Al Gore than George Bush on November 7, 2000. The confusing butterfly ballot in Palm Beach county resulted in literally thousands of people erroneously voting either for Pat Buchanan, or Al Gore and Pat Buchanan (the latter situation, called an "overvote," rendered their ballot invalid). Absent this confusion, Gore would easily have won Florida and there wouldn't have been any Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore for us to be talking about.

But apart from that, no one, not even the rabid right-wing of the Republican Party, would quarrel with the proposition that if, for example, a person premeditated the murder of a fellow human being by blowing him up in his car, but for whatever reason the explosive did not detonate, that person is unquestionably just as evil and blackhearted as he would be if his mission had not failed.

Not even God can change the past, so regardless of the findings of the newspapers, the conduct of the five conservative justices of the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore remains the same. That conduct was either criminal or it was not. And if it was, a subsequent finding that Bush won the Florida vote cannot diminish, even one iota, the criminality of their act.

If Bush ends up winning, the automatic response by the mental midgets on the far right will be that the five justices acted completely properly, but even if they didn't, "It doesn't matter. Bush won the election anyway." But it is they, not those of us who are interested in justice and fair play, whose folly should be treated so dismissively.

To elaborate further on the possible results of the counting of votes in Florida by the major newspapers, if Gore ends up overcoming Bush, then Bush instantly becomes the most famous imposter in the history of democracy, one who is running this country only because of the high crime committed by the Supreme Court, and for no other reason -- certainly a first in U.S. history and, I daresay, perhaps the first time that such an event has ever occurred in any duly constituted democracy.

 

VINCENT BUGLIOSI received his law degree in 1964 from U.C.L.A. law school, where he was president of his graduating class. In his career as a prosecutor for the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, he successfully prosecuted 105 out of 106 felony jury trials, including twenty-one murder convictions without a single loss. His most famous trial was the Charles Manson case, which became the basis of his true crime classic, Helter Skelter, the biggest selling true crime book in publishing history. But even before the Manson case, in the television series The DA, actor Robert Conrad patterned his starring role after Bugliosi.

Bugliosi has uncommonly attained success in two separate and distinct fields, as a lawyer and an author. Three of his true crime books, Helter Skelter, And The Sea Will Tell, and Outrage, The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away With Murder, reached number one on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list. No other American true crime author has ever had more than one book that achieved this ranking.

And as a trial lawyer, the judgment of his peers says it all. "Bugliosi is as good a prosecutor as there ever was," Alan Dershowitz says. F. Lee Bailey calls Bugliosi "the quintessential prosecutor." Harry Weiss, a veteran criminal defense attorney who has gone up against Bugliosi in court, says: "I've seen all the great trial lawyers of the past thirty years and none of them are in Vince's class." Robert Tanenbaum, for years the top prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney's office, says, "There is only one Vince Bugliosi. He's the best." Perhaps most telling of all is the comment by Gerry Spence, who squared off against Bugliosi in a twenty-one hour televised, scriptless "docutrial" of Lee Harvey Oswald, in which the original key witnesses to the Kennedy assassination testified and were cross-examined. After the Dallas jury returned a guilty verdict in Bugliosi's favor, Spence said, "No other lawyer in America could have done what Vince did in this case."

With the recent compilation CD he produced, Greatest Latin Love Songs Of The Century, which the incomparable Chilean, Lucho Gatica - whom many believe to be the greatest singer of boleros Latin America has ever produced - calls "the best album of Latin love songs I have ever heard," Bugliosi seems to be launching yet another career.

Bugliosi lives with his wife in Los Angeles and is working on a book about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

 

 

The Betrayal of America by Vincent Bugliosi
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