Jailhouse Murder
by DCDave

On October 25, 20/20 had an excellent expose about the murder of 30-year-old Scott Norberg in a Phoenix, AZ, jailhouse. I had never heard of his case, but the particulars were all too familiar. Of course the police lied as hard as they could at first, claiming that his death was just a tragic accident. There was even the familiar fraudulent autopsy. Dr. James Beyer, of Vincent Foster, Tommy Burkett, and Timothy Easley infamy, can go ahead and retire now. There are plenty of corrupt young coroners coming along to replace him. This one was even female. To top things off, there is even an FBI civil rights violation investigation going on, and the father was interviewed and expressed exasperation at its pace.

At least the public has now been shown it was a murder. Many witnesses have come forward and the family has won a multi-million dollar judgment in a wrongful death suit, which the taxpayers of Maricopa County, AZ, will have to pay, but no one has been punished.

So why are we getting this from ABC? You'd think we had some kind of free press or something. For one thing, young Mr. Norberg happened to be the son of an important lawyer in Phoenix. Drat! The jailhouse thugs didn't count on that. For another, ABC is able both to buy credibility and to enhance their ratings. Nothing wrong with that. It's how the system ought to work.

But don't get too excited. Already it's beginning to look like an isolated bump-and-run (see technique 14 of the 15 techniques for truth suppression on my web site). The chances that ABC will follow up when the FBI comes in with its latest whitewash are very low. Building on what they have shown us in the Norberg case, they could show us the outrageous FBI cover-up in the Tommy Burkett case or the Kenneth Trentadue case. Then people would begin to recognize a pattern, and perhaps a hue and cry would be raised to do something. It's like Paul Goodman said, "You can say anything you want in America as long as it has no effect." ABC, you can be sure, will be very careful to do apparently aggressive pieces like this as long as they are done in such a way as to have no effect.

To learn more details about the Scott Norberg case, search his name on http://www.google.com.

David Martin
October 26, 1999

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