Liberia, Sept. 7 -- A prosecutor who asks three times for a trial date and never gets one is not the problem with Liberia's fight against corruption. A docket that lets that happen is.

THERE IS A VERSION of this newspaper's argument that would be easy to dismiss: that Liberia's courts are conspiring to protect the powerful from the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission. We are not making that argument, and the record, as best we can tell, does not support it. What the record does support is narrower and, in some ways, more troubling: that it no longer seems to matter whether the LACC does everything right. The outcome is the same either way.

CONSIDER THE CASE this paper detailed this week out of Margibi County. Prosecutors did not sit on t...