Fire Ashcroft for clear incompetence

Marie Cocco
Fire Ashcroft for clear incompetence
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vpcoc143966772sep14,0,7320437.column?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines
September 14, 2004
Newsday

Let's say you hire a lawyer. The lawyer pursues a case - a very big case, he says - on your behalf. As it goes forward, the presiding judge sanctions your lawyer for violating one of his orders and your attorney apologizes to the court.
The trial ends with what your lawyer says is victory and vindication. Until the lawyer is forced to admit he has botched the case, completely and irredeemably - and, by the way, with virulent disregard for the law. The judge finds such malfeasance among your legal team that he calls the misconduct "prevalent and pervasive." He agrees that the verdicts must be thrown out.
Let's say this debacle reaches its denouement less than three months after the U.S. Supreme Court has repudiated the central legal argument your lawyer has used for much of the work he's done on your behalf for three years. And that the admonishment from the high court came just after your legal team had been forced to apologize for yet another blunder - the wrongful jailing of an innocent whose fingerprints were falsely said to match those of terrorists in Madrid.....