THE WALL STREET JOURNAL April 27, 2000
Letters to the Editor
Legal Tactic Destroys Lives and Businesses
Your April 6 page-one article “Into Thin Air,” addressing the
difficulty of stopping illegal gun sales to criminals around
Chicago, too readily accepted the government’s explanation for
why it failed in its quest to win criminal convictions against
Bell’s Gun & Sport Shop or the two sales clerks.
The failure was not due to the lack of more stringent gun laws.
Nor was it — as the city tries to claim — that Illinois law
prevented the police from making audio tapes. Consider the
publicity aspect. Video tapes made for great TV-coverage,
which, as the article noted, the city succeeded exceptionally
well in getting — including on “60 Minutes” and other national
news shows. Yet the lack of audio tapes allowed Mayor Daley
to put whatever “spin” he wanted on the undercover
conversations. For the purposes of any legal case, audio tapes
were crucial, and the city knew this before it even started its
investigation. Unable to trust the government’s claims of what
transpired, it’s obvious why the jury took only 10 minutes to
reach its acquittal. The criminal and civil cases are not serious
cases. If the city thought that real violations were occurring, it
would have been serious about the evidence that it gathered.
Instead, as elsewhere in the nation, the tactic is to abuse the
legal system so as to damage the opponent through imposing
large legal debts and generating bad publicity. Your article
vividly described how these suits are destroying lives and
businesses.
John R. Lott Jr.
Senior Research Scholar
School of Law
Yale University
New Haven, Conn.