Regardless of what the justice system did to Hope Steffey or the outcome of her crimianl and civil trials in the Stark County kangaroo courts, what happened to her was wrong. If you can’t see that, then you need a blood test to check your humanity. If you’re not outraged by what was done to her, not only during her arrest, not just at the jail, but more importantly by the criminal conspiracy commited buy the officials of Stark County to deny Hope Steffey justice, then you are one truly sick person and probably a sociopath.

Whether or not a judge or jury finds evidence to be boring “minutia” is a matter of skill and presentation of the attorney. The fact that an incredible amount of evidence was withheld is enough to sustain a charge of evidence tampering against the Sheriff’s office.

According to your own argument, she had her clothing removed because she was flippant and defiant. That alone is an indictment of the LEOs. If you truly are a lawyer, you’re not a very good one.

What you see as a weak case I see as backwoods justice system. Another example of a poor person gets the legal shaft. In the big picture, your not going to see the ACLU come to bat for Steffey, but that by no means makes your case that because she was convicted she must have been in the wrong. It only means that the system had more power to control the evidence and the courts.

The bottom line is that this person who was beaten and kidnapped from her own home for no real reason other than pissing off the goon-cop who was supposed to tbe there to help her, then when the LEOs realized they had screwed up they started making up a case for her being suicidal and then stripping her and humiliating her as means of intimidating her into not pressing charges.

What happened to Hope Steffey is nothing less than the opening of law enforcement’s pandora’s box – one officer loses control, makes a series of misjudgements, resorts to violence against the wrong person, is backed up by his fellow law enforecement officers who then join in a conspiracy to frame Hope Steffey and to intimidate her and her family from pursuing any criminal or civil remedies. National politics has nothing to do with it.

While inexplicably missing video reminds me of the missing segments from the Nixon tapes, authorities stonewalling request for court documents reminds me of judges inexplicably sealing Obama’s birth records. Law enforcement officials lying to cover their asses reminds me of Nixon and Clinton. None of that has anything to do with what happened to Hope Steffey.

The only question is whether you believe that her behavior justified the assault on her. Its fairly clear from the tapes I’ve seen and the reports that I’ve read that she wasn’t suicidal, rather she was being sarcastic. If the “nurse” responsible for making the call has that poor judgement, then she should be gone. If not one of the seven adult law enforcement officers present during the assault on Hope Steffey saw nothing wrong and did nothing to stop it, then something is wrong with their attitudes and training, not to mention their humanity, and they should be gone. We don’t need people with this poor judgement toting guns and having the kind of authority that LEOs have.

I see no difference between what happened to Hope Steffey and what happened to Rodney King, except that Rodney King at 6’6″ and 300 pounds required 4 officers to subdue and while Hope Steffey, handcuffed and physically imposing at 5’5″ and 113 pounds required seven officers to brutally beat down and strip of her clothing in the most humiliating manner possible.

Anyone on this column that believes there was nothing wrong in what was done to Hope Steffey needs to spend some serious time on a psychiatrist’s couch.

If any LEO ever did that to me wife or daughter, jail and financial ruin would be the least of his/her problems. They would spend the rest of their lives on the run from me.