Last week Judge Dennis Kolenda of the Kent County Circuit Court dropped the hammer on a man who had lied under oath in a murder case and sentenced him to prison for nine to twenty-five years for committing perjury. Good. Our judicial system is rife with perjury because prosecutors are loathe to bring perjury cases like this one.
For example, the Kent County prosecutor has declined to bring perjury charges against one of the River Rats, Robert Wardrop. Wardrop had made under oath false statements in Kent County Circuit Court, which helped the Toxic Towers developers dump 20,000 tons of contaminated soil at the Monroe Avenue water filtration plant (see article below) and another 6,000 tons elsewhere in the Grand Rapids vicinity. This was confirmed in July 2003 when the court formally found that Wardrop's evidence was false.
Even though Wardrop's false statements under oath abetted grave violations of both state and federal environmental laws that exposed hundreds of innocent persons to toxic concentrations of hazardous substances, including arsenic, lead, and mercury, the Kent County prosecutor has refused to act. So, I don't know what it takes to get the prosecutor off the dime when it comes to perjury, except that a deliberate assault upon the health and the safety of the public doesn't do the trick.
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