[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 19]
[House]
[Pages 26186-26187]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                       COVER-UP OF SALVATI STORY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Thornberry). Under a previous order of 
the House, the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) is recognized for 
5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I spent 7\1/2\ years just prior to coming to 
Congress as a criminal court judge in Tennessee trying the felony 
criminal cases, the murders, the armed robberies, the rapes. I tried 
the attempted murder of James Earl Ray, many leading cases, but I can 
tell Members that I do not think that in my years of law practice or in 
my years as a judge that I have ever seen a worse miscarriage of 
justice than that done to Joseph Salvati in Massachusetts where he was 
made to stay in prison for over 30 years. Even the FBI knew he had not 
committed the crime for which he had been convicted. Sometimes we read 
about people who have been wrongly convicted, but almost always in 
those cases the prosecutors or the law enforcement people honestly 
thought the people were guilty, and only found out later that they were 
not.
  But in the Salvati case, the FBI knew apparently for 30 years that 
this man was not guilty of the crime he had been convicted of, and yet 
they made him stay in prison for more than 30 years.
  I can tell Members that the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) of 
the Committee on Government Reform has tried to call attention to this 
miscarriage of justice and see that nothing like this ever happens 
again. He held one hearing and he attempted to hold another hearing 
today about it, but today the Department of Justice refused to release 
or submit the documents that the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) 
had requested in a continuing cover-up of the original cover-up.
  I think it is shameful. In fact, I think it is fair to say that I 
have never seen

[[Page 26187]]

the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) as angry as he was today, and 
he said that he is going to told hearings until the Department of 
Justice has the decency to come forward and do what they can to correct 
this horrible miscarriage of justice.
  I remember reading a cover story in Forbes magazine, certainly a very 
conservative magazine, in 1993 in which they reported that the 
Department of Justice had more than quadrupled its budget since 1980, 
and that there were U.S. attorneys falling all over themselves trying 
to find cases to prosecute. The article discussed how Federal 
prosecutors were cherry-picking local cases, taking the best or easiest 
cases away from local prosecutors so they could have something to do.
  This quadrupling of the budget and size of the Department of Justice 
was being done, even though 94 percent of all crimes were being handled 
and prosecuted by local and State law enforcement personnel and 
prosecutors. Even though their work was not going up, their budget and 
number of employees was.
  This article in Forbes said too often in Federal law enforcement the 
name of the game is publicity, not a reduction in the amount of crime. 
The article in Forbes said that the Department of Justice was proving 
that Parkinson's law of bureaucracy was true, that work expands so as 
to fill the time available for its completion. As the real or imagined 
work expands, the bureaucrats ask for more bureaucrats to do it.
  Since then, we have expanded the Department of Justice even more. Now 
here we are giving them more power. Last week Joseph Califano, a former 
top assistant to President Johnson and a former Secretary of Health and 
Human Services under President Carter, wrote in The Washington Post 
last week that in all of our concerns about terrorism, we ``are missing 
an even more troubling danger, the extraordinary increase in Federal 
police personnel and power.''
  Mr. Speaker, for the FBI to keep a man in prison for 30 years for a 
crime that they knew he did not commit, that should be criminal in and 
of itself. I described it at this hearing as saying that the arrogance 
of the Federal bureaucracy seems to grow with each passing year. The 
gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt) said I was mild in 
describing things in that way. It seems that we now have a government 
of, by and for the bureaucrats instead of one that is of, by and for 
the people.
  I salute the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) and commend him for 
continuing to try to call attention to the miscarriage of justice in 
the Joseph Salvati case, and to say if we keep expanding the Department 
of Justice and the FBI, then the abuse of the American people is going 
to continue to grow, and we are going to have much of our freedom taken 
away from us, and the American people are going to have problems that 
they never dreamed of. We need to bring these people under some type of 
control because they are certainly out of control at this time.

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