Thursday, January 26, 2006
Self-absorbed prosecutor goes too far
From the RoundTable blog
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Donna Knox
Knox is married to Cecil Knox. A former journalist, Ms. Knox currently advocates on behalf of missing American servicemen and practices family law in the Roanoke Valley.
They slung terms like "house of death," "drug kingpin" and "fraud central." Cecil Knox waited for them to realize their mistake, but he finally grasped that U.S. Attorney John Brownlee was not vested in truth. Brownlee wanted a high-profile case to make him a hero and had chosen "Dr. Knox" to play the villain.
For four years, Cecil's life has been scorched by Brownlee's devotion to ego, his propensity for making poor decisions and his disturbing lack of integrity. It is time to publicly examine this prosecutor who has the gall to pretend he is serving the public good when he trumps up charges, brandishes enormous prison sentences and visits financial ruin upon his targets. It is time to hold Brownlee accountable.
Having launched an offensive against Cecil where none was justified, Brownlee set about concocting a case. He accused Cecil of intentionally addicting patients to narcotics to make them return for more; of being responsible for the death of a patient he hadn't seen in 18 months; of trading narcotics for drugs many times with a convict who, at trial, couldn't even identify him.
Cecil is an incredibly dedicated physician. He accepted patients other doctors couldn't help. He worked all hours, made house calls, and went well beyond the call to help suffering people. Many of them credit him with saving their lives.
But Cecil was different, with his long hair and his cowboy boots. Brownlee tried hard to confuse eccentricity with criminality. His accusations were preposterous. A genuine investigation would have revealed that.
Brownlee acted utterly without conscience. His team blatantly manipulated people and information as they scoured the region for anything they could twist into evidence. They exemplified the deplorable mentality that it is better to destroy an innocent man than to lose a case.
Brownlee stooped to disingenuous press conferences and distortion of the Medicare billing process to set up fraud, conspiracy and racketeering charges. He indicted Cecil's staff, terrorizing them with inexcusable threats. He disregarded the Medical Board's earlier findings that Cecil's treatments were appropriate. It was a telling display of over-reaching by a prosecutor without a case.
Few of us stop to consider the imbalance of power in criminal prosecutions, and how prosecutors can abuse the system to bully defendants. Using all-too-common tactics, Brownlee froze our assets, had Cecil's practice closed and deluged him with an attack involving 23 government entities.
But Cecil was determined to fight: for patients' rights to pain relief and for doctors' rights to answer to medical boards, not to rogue prosecutors seeking notoriety.
After a brutal eight-week trial, Brownlee was soundly defeated. He slipped from the courtroom, deprived of the victory speech he had, undoubtedly, envisioned as a stepping stone to greater professional heights.
Needing to save face, Brownlee reindicted Cecil, then pushed for a deal just before the second trial.
Cecil had borrowed more than $1 million and would need another half-million to proceed. His cancer was in remission, and the trauma of another trial might've provoked a relapse. He wanted to end the case for his office manager, whom Brownlee had tormented for refusing to capitulate.
Reluctantly, Cecil accepted a plea agreement, admitting to relatively minor misconduct, unrelated to pain medicine, giving Brownlee nothing he had charged, and foreclosing the threat of prison. The plea was a legal fiction -- a ransom federal prosecutors often extract, even from innocent people. It is government coercion that society should not tolerate.
Brownlee's boastings about Cecil's plea bore little relationship to reality. He acted as if he had proven his case and brought down a terrible criminal. After wasting untold millions in taxpayer dollars, it is Brownlee who should be brought down.
We all lose when a prosecutor, enamored with himself and uninterested in his obligation to justice, rides roughshod over criminal defendants in search of personal glory. We can measure Brownlee by his conduct in the two largest cases of his tenure in Roanoke: Cecil's and that of Richard Burrow.
In both, Brownlee tried to create flashy crimes where none had been committed; he painted good, honest men as big-time criminals, setting in motion the limelight he coveted for himself.
Thankfully, people in our community are not as ignorant as Brownlee supposed. But, the fact that the ultimate travesty was not occasioned in these cases should not distract us from the threat to our core beliefs that Brownlee poses.
Brownlee's attitude of entitlement allows him to subvert the truth, destroy the lives of innocent people and place his personal ambition above the public good. This is a man who abuses power; a man who should not hold public office.
