I wrote last week about the unjust selective prosecution of alleged Anonymous hacker and human rights activist Marty Gottesfeld. Currently he is incarcerated awaiting trial for allegedly bringing down the Boston Children’s Hospital donation website with a DDOS attack in response to that hospital’s human rights violations against Justina Pelletier. Now, Gottesfeld’s fate is in the hands of a judge who probably can’t deliver an impartial decision.
Gottesfeld’s father passed away this week and Gottesfeld has requested temporary bail in order to deliver a eulogy the funeral on Saturday. It looks doubtful whether his request will get a fair ruling from the presiding judge though as she has significant ties to the alleged victim of the hacking of which Gottesfeld is being accused.
Boston Children’s Hospital is a teaching hospital associated with Harvard Medical School. It represents the bulk of Harvard Medical School’s pediatrics program.
The Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler who will decide whether Gottesfeld is allowed to attend his father’s funeral is married to a Harvard Medical School professor and she herself was employed by Harvard Medical School prior to embarking on her legal career. This is indicated in her official biography.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Judge Bowler received her Bachelor’s degree from Regis College in pre-med and her J.D. degree cum laude from Suffolk Law School. Prior to attending law school, Judge Bowler was a research assistant in biochemistry at Harvard Medical School and a medical and scientific journalist. Her articles appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines.
…
Active in the intellectual property community, Judge Bowler is President of the Boston Intellectual Property Inn of Court and was a co-founding President of Boston College Inn of Court for Intellectual Property in 1997. She was also the first woman president of the Suffolk Law School Alumni Association and the first woman to chair the board of the New England Baptist Hospital. Judge Bowler is married to Dr. Marc Pfeffer, the Dzau Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She enjoys extensive international traveling, is conversant in French, German and Italian, and is an accomplished artist specializing in faux finishes and trompe l’oeil painting. [Emphasis added]
I’ve heard of judges recusing themselves from cases for much less than this. The stink of cronyism was already strong with regard to this case simply because elements within the city government and a prestigious medical school aren’t being investigated for their own wrongdoing. That the presiding judge is connected to the medical school in question only makes it stink more.
On an unrelated but interesting note, Judge Bowler is also the same judge who made a hash of the interrogation of the surviving Boston bomber suspect by reading him his Miranda rights when the Justice Department had invoked the public safety exception to doing so.
The FBI filed a federal criminal complaint against the 19-year-old on Sunday, and federal District Court Judge Marianne Bowler arrived at the hospital where he is being treated to preside over his initial hearing Monday, when she read him his Miranda rights.
[FBI officials told The Associated Press Wednesday that Tsarnaev acknowledged to investigators his role in the attacks before he was advised of his constitutional rights. He reportedly said he was only recently recruited by his brother to be part of the attack.]
But Fox News’ sources say there was confusion about Bowler’s timing, with some voicing concerns that investigators were not given enough time to question Dzhokhar under the “public safety exception” invoked by the Justice Department.
Two officials with knowledge of the FBI briefing on Capitol Hill said the FBI was against stopping the investigators’ questioning and was stunned that the judge, Justice Department prosecutors and public defenders showed up, feeling valuable intelligence may have been sacrificed as a result.
It just gets better and better in left wing Massachusetts.
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