Given other historical precedent, there’s nothing wrong with our current government leaders that wouldn’t be solved far more rapidly, by simply chopping 342 of them open with tomahawks and hurling them into the Potomac river-since Boston Harbor is kinda far to toss the bodies
“…and the sad truth is that 95% of the problems we have in this country could be solved tomorrow, by noon… simply by dragging 100 people out in the street and shooting them in the fucking head.” – An anonymous US Marine.
“The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government – lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.” ― Patrick Henry
“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” — Albert Einstein
“The U.S. government now poses the greatest threat to our freedoms.
More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, even more than the perceived threat posed by any single politician, the U.S. government remains a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.” – John W. Whitehead
The criminal justice system in the United States today bears little relationship to what the Founding Fathers contemplated, what the movies and television portray, or what the average American believes.
To the Founding Fathers, the critical element in the system was the jury trial, which served not only as a truth-seeking mechanism and a means of achieving fairness, but also as a shield against tyranny. As Thomas Jefferson famously said, “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”
The drama inherent in these guarantees is regularly portrayed in movies and television programs as an open battle played out in public before a judge and jury. But this is all a mirage. In actuality, our criminal justice system is almost exclusively a system of plea bargaining, negotiated behind closed doors and with no judicial oversight. The outcome is very largely determined by the prosecutor alone.
In 2013, while 8 percent of all federal criminal charges were dismissed (either because of a mistake in fact or law or because the defendant had decided to cooperate), more than 97 percent of the remainder were resolved through plea bargains, and fewer than 3 percent went to trial. The plea bargains largely determined the sentences imposed.
While corresponding statistics for the fifty states combined are not available, it is a rare state where plea bargains do not similarly account for the resolution of at least 95 percent of the felony cases that are not dismissed; and again, the plea bargains usually determine the sentences, sometimes as a matter of law and otherwise as a matter of practice. Furthermore, in both the state and federal systems, the power to determine the terms of the plea bargain is, as a practical matter, lodged largely in the prosecutor, with the defense counsel having little say and the judge even less.
“BRADFORD COUNTY, PA — A motorist was viciously beaten, tasered, and maced repeatedly, then charged with 24 separate crimes and maliciously prosecuted for every one of them. He was beaten four (4) times over the course of 11-hours, and not once had he acted maliciously. The incident stemmed from his driving while on an unusually high dosage of legally-prescribed bipolar medication and a subsequent fender bender. Dash-cam footage revealed the extraordinary exaggerations made about the case — 2 years after it took place.”
“Once his car was immobilized, the senior trooper on scene, Corporal Roger Stipcak, stood on top of Mr. Leone’s hood and ordered him out of his car while aiming a taser at him. Mr. Leone COULD NOT comply with the trooper’s order because a state police car was intentionally blocking Leone’s driver-side door.
Mr. Leone was then tasered through his open sunroof and forcibly dragged to the ground through the passenger-side door and beaten by fellow troopers. The senior trooper who was standing on the hood of Leone’s car was then seen jumping directly onto Leone’s back from the hood of the car.
“You’ve got a long f***ing night ahead,” the officer menaced. “Do ya hear me?? Do ya f***ing hear me?!”
This was but the first threat of many Mr. Leone was going to receive over the next 11 hours. It was also the mildest. At no time was Leone videoed resisting or attempting to strike the officers.
After his first beating he was handcuffed and questioned. At that point Leone was arrested and placed in the back of a patrol car. Without advising Mr. Leone of his constitutional rights he was questioned a second time and responded with respectful answers of “yes sir,” and “no sir.”
During the questioning, the trooper accused Leone of intentionally spitting in the trooper’s face and used that alleged behavior as a reason to beat Mr. Leone — who was still handcuffed. The trooper then hog-tied the victim.
“Who do you think you’re messing with?” one officer challenged. “We’re the Pennsylvania State Police… it’s not just some chumps.”
After analyzing the audio portion of the dash-cam it appears that the trooper fabricated the spitting incident in order to justify the beating, even though spitting does not allow an officer to beat a prisoner”
Watch as author Larry Hohol provides a play-by-play of the traffic stop:
An ambulance had initially been called to transport Mr. Leone, who had suffered multiple injuries. Instead, the trooper who had broken his hand while punching Leone received medical attention, and Mr. Leone — who was handcuffed and hog-tied — was transported to the hospital in the back of a patrol car.
All district attorneys have two basic requirements — not options — when fulfilling their Oaths of Office. One is to prosecute the guilty, and the other is to protect the innocent. In this case DA Daniel Barrett did neither. At the very least the dash-cam video contradicted sworn statements made by troopers and in many instances proved Mr. Leone’s innocence. Instead of dropping the charges, the Bradford County District Attorney knowingly prosecuted a man that he knew was innocent of everything except his failure to stop (Leone is guilty of this for sure).”
“We as Americans are willing to go to foreign lands and spill our own blood in the defense of freedom (both ours as well as someone else’s), yet here at home our freedoms are being directly attacked on a daily basis by the very agencies that are in place to assure us things like this never happen. Not only are injustices happening, they are happening on a large scale. I directly blame the chain of command as much as I blame the individual offending officers. In most instances not only does the chain of command attempt to cover-up and justify misconduct, but they actively chastise any officer who might step forward in an attempt to right a wrong. In addition, I blame the Judicial Conduct board as they directly oversee the courts, and I blame the Bar Association as most of the players here (except for the police) are attorneys including the elected officials that should be intervening.”
The big question that we should all be asking ourselves is, “How do we fix all of this”?
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government agreed to a police request to restrict more than 37 square miles of airspace surrounding Ferguson, Missouri, for 12 days in August for safety, but audio recordings show that local authorities privately acknowledged the purpose was to keep away news helicopters during violent street protests.
So-the local gestapo just has to ask-and the FAA enacts a no fly zone-hell no.
This is beyond bullshit,this is the gestapo and .gov inc. suppressing the news.
The reason would be that the local cops,sheriffs and state police wanted zero media access to the “civil disobedience” taking place in Ferguson.
By keeping the media away,team .gov inc. can make up whatever bullshit they want to-then those lies become the “official version” of events.
You think this shit won’t happen again?
It will-it will happen again,and again,and again-and keep happening until people start standing up for their rights.
We have a Constitution that contains a Bill of Rights-these are rights are NOT granted by the government,these rights are pre-existing-granted by our creator-the government is not our creator.
The government can neither grant us rights,nor take rights away from us.
Unless WE ALLOW team .gov inc. to do so.
Allowing team .gov inc. to get away with this kind of shit is why we are losing our rights little by little,it’s why team .gov inc. continues to grow,infringes on more and more of our rights-because we allow them to do this.
This is just the latest in a long,long progression of events in which team .gov inc. has violated our rights,and censored the media in order to hide the bullshit that they do.
No one protests about the media being denied access to team .gov inc.’s methods of controlling “civil disobedience”.
Those who’s rights are violated do not complain about team .gov inc.’s brutal tactics-that is why they keep getting away with more and more-no one complains-it’s not reported by the media-because the media has no clue what took place,so they report team .gov inc.’s version of events.
This is what was done in the old USSR,this is what should never,ever be permitted to take place in the USA.
People should be marching on DC with pitchforks and torches over this kind of gov’t abuse.
One of the more controversial provisions of the Patriot Act was to broaden the “sneak-and-peek” power for federal law enforcement officials. The provision allows investigators to conduct searches without informing the target of the search. We were assured at the time that this was an essential law enforcement tool that would be used only to protect the country from terrorism. Supporters argued that it was critical that investigators be allowed to look into the lives and finances of suspected terrorists without tipping off those terrorists to the fact that they were under investigation.
Civil libertarian critics warned that the federal government already had this power for national security investigations. The Patriot Act provision was far too broad and would almost certainly become a common tactic in cases that have nothing to do with national security.
This type of shit goes on in every municipal court in the U.S.
The obscure laws, codes, and regs enforced by the local gestapo and “justice” systems are nothing but legal extortion of those who can least afford it.
From Balko’s The Watch…
“Last month, I posted a long investigation of how the 80-plus municipal courts and 90-plus municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty by extracting money from residents for minor infractions such as moving violations, occupancy permit violations, business permit violations and code violations. It’s a system built on a history of racial discrimination, one that supports far too many towns and the public officials who work for them considering the size of the county, and one that makes the survival of some of those towns contingent on issuing an extraordinary number of citations, arrest warrants and fines.
The system weighs most heavily on the poor, who are less likely to have legal representation. Those without attorneys are more likely to be swept into the cycle of accumulating fines and arrest warrants. And of course, those fines and court costs amount to a much higher proportion of a poor person’s income. Compounding all of this, most municipalities in the county derive most of their revenue from a sales tax. Poorer towns are less likely to generate revenue from a sales tax. That makes them more reliant on the municipal courts for revenue.”
If you do the research in your state-you will find similar results-all the municipal courts are is a means to extort $$$ from local residents. Police dept’s use the courts as a funding source-cities use the courts as a funding source because they can not extort enough $$$ in property, income, or sales taxes.
“In 2013, the municipal courts of St. Louis City and County collected $61,152,087 in fines and fees. During that same time, the combined total of court fines and fees collected by Missouri municipal courts was $132,032,351.63. This means that the municipal courts in the St. Louis region accounted for 46% of all fines and fees collected statewide, despite being home to only 22% of Missourians.”
If they are not, we get a criminal justice system driven by the politics of power, following directions to imprison people that the power structure dislikes. Unlawful prosecutions are where it starts, and it goes stronger if unethical prosecutors doing illegal prosecutions go unpunished. I recently blogged about the innocent man imprisoned for years, thanks to a Brooklyn prosecutor: the man got a $10 million settlement, and the prosecutor, after taking a couple of months of taxpayer-funded vacation, resigned quietly and is living happily, with no actions taken against him.
Now Pamela Colloff has an excellent article in the Texas Monthly that makes a strong case for punishing prosecutors who misuse their powers. She writes:
On September 17, in a decisive 7–2 ruling, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the capital murder conviction of a Corpus Christi woman named Hannah Overton. Readers of Texas Monthly may recall Overton’s case, which I examined in an article a few years ago called “Hannah and Andrew,” a lengthy story that questioned the assumptions that had led to her prosecution. Overton is one of a number of defendants I have written about in recent years whose convictions have been overturned by the CCA.Michael Morton, who was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 for the murder of his wife, and Anthony Graves, who was sent to death row in 1994 for killing six people, were exonerated after spending a collective 42 years behind bars. Although these three cases are each quite different, they share a common theme: the prosecutors who sought their indictments and secured their convictions should never have tried the cases in the first place.
The first is from Anthony Fischer at Reason.tv. It includes just about every drug war excess imaginable, including a militarized police raid for a nonviolent crime, vaguely written drug laws, prosecutorial misconduct, the coercive use of bond, abuse of conspiracy charges, abuse of the plea bargain and the intimidation of media and witnesses to duck transparency.
The second video is from the conservative criminal justice reform group Right on Crime. It’s about prosecutorial discretion and the criminalization of environmental law. The couple in the video were forbidden from building on a parcel of land they had purchased when, after they had purchased it, it was designated a “wetland,” apparently because a backed-up drainage system had caused some standing water. In addition to being prohibited from building the home they had planned, they were then hit with felony charges.
Adesanya, 23, of Bel Air, Maryland, was then taken to a nearby hospital, said Donovan. Adesanya was later charged with two counts of felony assault on a police officer (K-9), four counts of resisting/unlawful entry, a misdemeanor, and one count of making threats, also a felony.
Kicking a dog that is trying to bite your nuts off is now “assault on a police officer”-felony assault at that.
Just as drug sniffing dogs-which can be trained to “alert” to the presence of drugs on command can not swear oths,or affirm that drugs are in the car or home-a freakin dog can not be a police officer.
This bullshit is so far removed from the Constitution,and the rightful liberty described by the founders it’s beyond absurd.
Alabama man gets $1,000 in police settlement, his lawyers get $459,000
(Reuters) – An Alabama man who sued over being hit and kicked by police after leading them on a high-speed chase will get $1,000 in a settlement with the city of Birmingham, while his attorneys will take in $459,000, officials said Wednesday.
The incident gained public attention with the release of a 2008 video of police officers punching and kicking Anthony Warren as he lay on the ground after leading them on a roughly 20-minute high-speed chase.
Warren is serving a 20-year sentence for attempted murder stemming from his running over a police officer during the chase, in which he also hit a school bus and a patrol car before crashing and being ejected from his vehicle.
Calling their conduct “constitutionally abhorrent,” a federal judge recently chided government prosecutors for working in secret to keep millions of dollars in cash and assets seized from a Las Vegas gambler and his family in a decadelong bookmaking investigation.
In his 31-page opinion, U.S. Magistrate Judge Cam Ferenbach cast light on the little-known court process that allowed the government to file civil forfeiture actions against Glen Cobb, his 82-year-old parents and his stepdaughter under “super seal” with no notice to anyone — not even the family it targeted.
Government documents filed under super seal, a procedure overseen by the federal clerk’s office, are stored in the court’s vault and not loaded into the electronic case management system. The documents remain secret from the public and opposing parties.
Ferenbach said prosecutors sought a level of secrecy normally reserved for cases that threaten public safety or national security.
“This is unacceptable,” Ferenbach wrote in court papers only recently made public. “Relying on various sealed and super-sealed filings, the government asks the court to rule against private citizens, allow the deprivation of their property and deny them a process to redress possible violations of their constitutional rights through a secret government action that provides no notice or opportunity to be heard.
“Saying that this would offend the Constitution is an understatement. It is constitutionally abhorrent.”
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Starvin Larry 