Tag: Law and Disorder

The States has Decided to Keep Its Political Prisoner

Anybody who paid attention to the trial of Ross Ulbricht knows that he was railroaded. The judge ruled his defense inadmissible. Then when several officers involved with hunting down Ulbricht were found to have been corrupt, thus bringing the validity of any claims they made during the trial into question, but new trial was called. Ulbricht’s lawyer has continued to push for a new trial despite these setbacks. Unfortunately, it looks like the State will keep its political prisoner:

The federal judge overseeing the trial of Ross Ulbricht, the man convicted of creating the underground Silk Road drug website, has denied the Ulbricht legal team’s attempt to extend the normal three-year window for “post-conviction relief.” In essence, the move stifles Ulbricht’s new attorney’s extraordinary effort to re-open the case with new exculpatory evidence, on the off-chance that it exists.

Don’t forget that all of this was done because of a fucking website. Ulbricht was never charged with manufacturing, selling, or distributing any illegal substances. The only thing he was guilty of was running a website. But the State needed to make an example out of somebody and Ulbricht was the person it could get.

Jeff Sessions Is a Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain

What should you do if you suffer from chronic pain? According to Jess Sessions, you should just toughen the fuck up:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions this week said that the solution for many people who suffer from chronic pain should be to “take aspirin and tough it out.”

Jeff Sessions reminds me of a villain from an old Saturday morning cartoon. If you remember such shows, the villains are often pure evil. Since they have no redeeming characteristics, the concept of moral grey area can be safely avoided by the show runners.

Jeff Sessions has no redeeming characteristics. He seems to be evil just for the sake of being evil. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wipes his ass with a puppy after taking a dump just because doing so would be evil. On the upside, since he reflects a Saturday morning cartoon villain, there’s a good chance that his evil schemes will be continuously thwarted by a group of mutated turtles with martial arts skills or giant robots that can transform into trucks.

Just More Heroes Doing Hero Things

For the life of me I can’t figure out why our heroes in blue have such a dismal reputation:

BALTIMORE — The officers’ job during some of the bloodiest years in Baltimore was to get guns off the streets.

Instead, they plundered money, jewelry, drugs and weapons and gouged the cash-strapped city for overtime and hours they never worked, according to their own admissions and testimony in ongoing criminal cases.

Over the past four years, some members of the Gun Trace Task Force stole more than $300,000, at least three kilos of cocaine, 43 pounds of marijuana, 800 grams of heroin and hundreds of thousands of dollars in watches from suspected drug dealers and civilians, according to officers’ plea agreements and statements in federal court.

They admit to putting illegal trackers on the cars of suspected dealers so they could rob their homes and sell off any drugs and guns they found.

This sounds an awful lot like the Minneapolis Gang Strike Force. In both cases officers were assigned to specific duties and used their newfound positions of authority to rob people left and right. Moreover, it appears as though the Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force followed in the footsteps of the Minneapolis Gang Strike Force in that it committed so many crimes that they could no longer be effectively swept under the rug.

I’m sure Minneapolis and Baltimore aren’t unique. After all, what else could be expected of a group of officers given tremendous powers, in addition to the tremendous powers they already have, and almost no oversight? Such an environment is custom made for corrupt behavior.

Pretending to Do Something

There is never a shortage of government busybodies when something has to be done and people have been demanding that something be done in response to the Las Vegas shooting. So the law enforcers in Mesa, Arizona have answered those demands by arresting and charing an individual show the shooter purchased ammunition from:

U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- Authorities have charged Douglas Haig, 55, of Mesa Arizona with selling “armor-piercing ammunition” to Las Vegas killer Stephen Paddock according to court documents acquired by the Associated Press. Haig works full time as an aerospace engineer and part-time as a manufacturer of reloaded ammunition.

This would be like arresting the head of Ford in response to somebody using an F-150 to run down a group of people. Haig made a product and sold it. After that he ceased to have control over it and therefore ceased to be responsible for it. But that doesn’t matter because the government wants to show the world that it’s doing something in response to the shooting.

The lack of Haig’s involvement with the crime doesn’t matter as illustrated by the charges against him. He’s not be charged with anything relating to the shooting. Instead he’s being charged with violating an unrelated regulation against manufacturing “armor piercing” ammunition (which, itself, is a nonsensical legal definition) without a license. Since none of the Las Vegas shooter’s victims were wearing body armor, the ability for the ammunition he used to penetrate body armor is irrelevant (and that’s not what the legal definition of “armor piecing” is even based on). But the arrest gives the law enforcers something to show the public and that’s all that matters.

Just Another Hero Doing Hero Things

A Tennessee hero has made headlines for ordering a hero under his command to heroically execute an unarmed man:

A sheriff in rural Tennessee was inadvertently caught on police body cam footage ordering deputies to shoot an unarmed man engaged in a slow speed chase, NewsChannel 5/WTVF reported.

The body cam revealed Sheriff Oddie Shoupe’s conversation with a deputy after the fatal shooting of Michael Dial, who was struck in the head after refusing to pull over his 1976 pickup truck when officers attempted to pull him over for driving with a suspended license.

Of course this situation was tragic and the brave sheriff wishes it could have gone differently…

“If they don’t think I’ll give the d*mn order to kill that motherf*cker they’re full of sh*t,” Sheriff Shoupe added. “I love this sh*t. God I tell you what, I thrive on it.”

Or not.

I have my doubts that Sheriff Shoupe’s attitude is unique. I would actually bet money on the fact that a lot of people who share his attitude are drawn to law enforcement because it allows them to act on their urges without concerns for consequences. Granted, because this was actually caught on video the sheriff may end up having to step down. However, I doubt that he or the officer who was “just following orders” will face the criminal charges they so deserve.

Quick! While National Attention is Elsewhere!

The Super Bowl has left Minneapolis. Its departure was joined by a fleet of private jets and the nation’s interest in this part of flyover country. Now that the nation’s attention is elsewhere, Minnesota officials can move onto other pressing matters such as ensuring a grand jury doesn’t see fit to charge Office Noor for the death of Justine Ruszczyk:

If he pursues manslaughter charges under Minnesota law, it would require him to prove that Noor’s actions the night he shot and killed Ruszczyk Damond were, in legal terms, “culpably negligent.” And to prove that, Freeman needs to prove that Noor’s actions were, again in legal terms, “objectively unreasonable.”

And that’s a high bar for him to clear, said former Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner.

“The law does not require that an officer’s decision was the best one, it just requires that it was a reasonable one,” Gaertner said. “Officers are given a great deal of latitude under the law to respond to danger that they perceive is present.”

I think the story really would benefit from a footnote noting that in order to prove the charges against Noor, Freeman has to actually want to see Noor charged. Seeing as Freeman went so far as to break his pledge to no longer use grand juries to determine whether officers will be charged, I would argue that this is cause to believe that Freeman doesn’t want to see Noor charged.

The Freest Country on Earth

Where else besides the freest country on Earth can a sporting event turn an entire city into an open-ended military presence:

With Super Bowl festivities swinging into full gear, so have the massive security measures that have lent downtown Minneapolis a distinctly military ambience.

Police officers with bomb-sniffing dogs patrol skyways and downtown streets. Rifle-toting deputies in Army fatigues and helmets stand watch over Nicollet Mall, which has been swamped with visitors to the Super Bowl Live event. Video feeds from 2,000 cameras are monitored in a law-enforcement command center near U.S. Bank Stadium.

[…]

In the time it took Lisa Cook to walk across the Hennepin Avenue Bridge to her job downtown, she had counted two “convoys” consisting of three “armored vehicles and a variety of marked and unmarked vans and trucks,” along with dozens of officers from departments around the metro, she said.

[…]

There are unseen elements, too: snipers perched on rooftops and in buildings in strategic places around downtown and plainclothes officers blending into crowds. A reporter visiting Nicollet Mall on Monday was approached by a plainclothes officer identifying himself as “NFL security,” who asked why the reporter was taking photographs and asked to see his media credentials.

It’s rather fascinating to me that so many people living here in the United States still consider themselves among the freest people on Earth. While the Bill of Rights; with its guarantee of press freedoms, free speech, the right to bear arms, etc.; certainly looks impressive, it is little more than a fiction. All of the so-called rights describe in that document can be revoked by the government at its whim. Consider the reported mentioned in the above excerpt. What if he didn’t have press credentials? My guess would be that he would have been removed. I’m also fairly certain that your right to free speech is pretty limited in Minneapolis at the moment, especially around the building hosting official Super Bowl events. Your right to bear arms isn’t going to get past the military goon squads that have setup the various checkpoints.

I’m fond of saying that your rights end where a politician’s perception of safety begins. An addendum to that is that your rights also end when a multibillion dollar organization decides to host an event in your area.

The Rules Change When the Super Bowl Is in Town

Starting either late Sunday night or early Sunday morning an incident erupted at the Graduate Hotel in Minneapolis. Police have been very coy about the entire ordeal. From what little they have provided it seems that their officers are standing off against an individual who has locked himself in his room. What is especially noteworthy though is that as of this writing the situation is still ongoing:

A standoff between police and a man holed up in a hotel room near the University of Minnesota entered its second day Tuesday as authorities continued to work for a peaceful resolution.

[…]

Late Monday after 21 hours, the man released a woman who had been in the sixth floor room with him. She was uninjured and was talking with investigators, said University of Minnesota spokesman Chuck Tombarge.

The suspect was still in the room negotiating with officers from the U, Minneapolis, State Patrol and Brooklyn Park, he said.

I feel as though this guy is only alive because the Super Bowl is in town. If we look at the history of the Minneapolis Police Department, we could safely assume that the standard response to situations like this is to rush in and waste the guy. However, that kind of reaction tends to result in a lot of bad press and none of the higher ups in Minneapolis want to make any headlines that aren’t exceedingly positive while the city is hosting the most holy of holy events.

Drunk Driving Laws Are About Profit, Not Safety

The blood-alcohol concentration (BAC) for sober driving (as opposed to drunk driving) is 0.08 for most of the country. Utah, however, decided to lower its BAC for sober driving to 0.05 and now neoprohibitionists want that standard set throughout the entire country:

The U.S. government-commissioned report by a panel of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine made multiple recommendations, including significantly lowering drunken driving thresholds. It calls for lowering the blood-alcohol concentration threshold from 0.08 to 0.05. All states have 0.08 thresholds.

But there’s a slight problem:

A Utah law passed last year that lowers the state’s threshold to 0.05 doesn’t go into effect until Dec. 30.

Utah’s arbitrary definition of drunk driving isn’t in effect yet so there’s no way an argument can be made that lowering the BAC to 0.05 reduces incidents of drunk driving. So if there’s no data indicating that Utah’s law is helping the situation, why is anybody arguing in favor of taking that law to the federal level? Money.

When somebody is charged with drunk driving they weren’t necessarily drunk. The dictionary definition of drunk is, “affected by alcohol to the extent of losing control of one’s faculties or behavior.” The legal definition of drunk is having a BAC over 0.08. Those two definitions are entirely unrelated. Alcohol affects different people in different ways. Some people are lightweights and a BAC of 0.08 impairs them while others aren’t impaired at all by a BAC of 0.08. If the real concern were dangerous driving, the law arbitrarily declaring drunkenness would be tossed out and the law against reckless driving would be used instead. But that would severely cut into government profits because it wouldn’t allow it to issue citations unless somebody was actually impaired.

Lowering the BAC for sober driving wouldn’t address the problem of dangerous drivers. It would increase government profits though, which is the actual reason such laws are sought after by politicians and the panels they commission.

Getting Away with Murder

Yesterday Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced that Officer Noor will be getting away with murder:

Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman has convened a grand jury to compel testimony and gather evidence in the July 2017 officer involved shooting death of Justine Damond.

For those wondering why I’m so sure Officer Noor won’t be charged it’s because grand juries have an extremely strong tendency to side with officers and that’s because grand juries are designed to intimidate jurors into siding with officers. Grand juries are usually just officious rituals tacked onto the act of dismissing charges against an officer.

Another point of interest in this decision is that it goes against one of Freeman’s previously made promise:

In recent years, Freeman has said he would no longer use grand juries to decide whether officers would be charged in police shootings, saying he would make those decisions himself to provide more accountability and transparency.

I understand that Freeman is caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand he’s an employee of Hennepin County. As a government employee he has a conflict of interest. Officer Noor, like himself, is also a government employee and government employees are supposed to have each other’s backs. But if Freeman just declared Noor innocent there would likely be civil unrest. By reneging on his promise he can effectively let Noor off while claiming he did the best that he could but the decision was in the hands of a grand jury.

Welcome to the United States of America, the freest country on Earth… if you have a badge.