Why “Judicial Lynching” - Prologue

The title of my book on Jeane Palfrey is: “Why Just Her – The Judicial Lynching of the D.C. Madam”. Why did I use the phrase “judicial lynching” in the title. As defined at go-dictionary.com, a “lynching” is: “to murder (an accused person) by mob action, without lawful trial, as by hanging.” 

Of course, in her suicide note to her mother written five days before she hung herself, Jeane wrote: “However, I cannot live another six - eight years behind bars for what both you and I have come to regard as this ‘modern day lynching’ only to come out of prison in my late ‘50s a broken, penniless and very much alone women.”

Why did Jeane come to believe she had been figuratively “lynched” by a mob after an un-lawful trial? To me, it was upon that belief that she felt she had to finish what the “mob” had already done to her by taking away her future in an unlawful manner. In the next six blogs, I will seek to highlight and explain six of these “unlawful” actions that occurred during her ordeal and why she came to seem them collectively as a “modern day lynching”. Those actions were:

The search of her home (Part I)

The seizure of her assets (Part II)

The Public Defender System (Part III)

The Prevarication of the Assistant United States Attorneys (Part IV)

The Jack-Booted Assault on her Mother (Part V)

The Abuse of the Grand Jury Process (Part VI)

These by no means are an exhaustive list of the death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts that Jeane suffered but they do highlight the major blows to Jeane’s faith in the U.S. Justice system which contributed mightily to the deep despair to which she sunk never to return.