Massey foremen plead guilty in Aracoma case

The obvious question Ken Ward assiduously avoids (0.00 / 0)

is whether or not this new U.S. District Attorney offered any of the foremen a plea deal to testify about the pressure they were put under by Don Blankenship and company.

Despite the U.S. D.A. WV Southern District's standard operating procedure of negligence by once again avoiding the opportunity to indict those really responsible for that disaster, Judge Copenhaver did manage to squeeze out one very revealing statement.

From the last paragraph of Ken Ward's article:

Ellis indicated he was pressured by his superiors to falsify the record book.

"They tell you to 'catch up your books' or something like that, [because] 'we've got somebody coming to look at them,'" Ellis told Copenhaver.

U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin has said charges against the four foremen end his office's investigation of the Aracoma fire.

That guy Ellis sure seemed more than willing to spill the beans, didn't he? No telling what Booth Goodwin could have gotten out of those foremen if he'd have just offered a lighter sentence.

Almost as disturbing is Ken Ward's failure to ask Booth Goodwin directly about it, especially after he blogged:

The Bragg and Hatfield families have complained all along that federal prosecutors didn't take any charges further up the corporate ladder at Massey, and today, family attorney Bruce Stanley noted that at least three of the foremen were not charged with the felonies they admitted to in court:

Although, I am not a criminal lawyer, my understanding is that falsification of record books is a felony. If so, the Government should have made the appropriate charge. By the same token, surely no one can seriously believe that upper management at Aracoma was not acutely aware of the criminal condition of the mine. Yet only two widows and a few lowly foremen have been asked to foot any of the human cost of production over safety. Something is sorely wrong with the entire picture.

There's a common phrase used to describe when an author hided the most disturbing part of a story. Ken Ward has been in the news business long enough to know exactly what it is.

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by: One Citizen @ Wed Jul 21, 2010 at 11:23:11 AM UTC