Sunday, October 26, 2014

The Police State Can't Exist Without...

I think it's an obviously true statement that the police state can't exist without the full cooperation of the judicial branch.  If the judicial branch would start restricting things like Civil Forfeiture, those would start to go away.  If they would start getting involved in the excessive use of SWAT raids and the increasing rise of warrior cops, that would decrease. 

With that in mind, it's interesting to read about the Supreme Court's refusal to hear a case this session which had the potential to restrain what seems to me (and IANAL) to be an egregious violation of civil rights.  Perhaps the most unique aspect of this is that the dissent against the judgement was filed by conservatives Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and statist Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

The case is called Jones vs. The United States, and centers around a trio of drug dealers: Joseph Jones, Desmond Thurston, and Antwuan Ball.  The three were tried for distributing cocaine and also conspiracy to distribute drugs (I have to assume this is another example of prosecutors stacking charges so they can be sure to get a conviction).  The jury convicted them of the lesser charge of distributing, but acquitted them of the conspiracy charge, which brings a harsher sentence.  Here's where it goes bizarre in my view: the judge then, despite the acquittal, sentenced them to that harsher sentence from conspiracy. 

Got that?  They were sentenced for a crime a jury had found them not guilty of!  The Supreme Court, refused to hear the case.  It seems to set the absurd precedent of someone being charged with a crime, tried by jury, declared not guilty, but then being put in prison regardless of the jury trial's outcome. Why bother with the show trial? 

The dissent in pdf format is here, and the important part is on pages 14-16.  Justice Scalia says, in my words, that the court has previously ruled that this sort of sentencing based on a judge's determination of fact is illegal and must be put aside, but they had always promised to clarify the law when an appropriate case got to the court.
We thus left for another day the question whether the Sixth Amendment is violated when courts impose sentences that, but for a judge-found fact, would be reversed for substantive unreasonableness. 551U.S., at 353; see also id., at 366 (Stevens, J., joined in
part by GINSBURG, J., concurring)  (“Such a hypothetical case should be decided if and when it arises”)...

Then Justice Scalia goes on to say...

This has gone on long enough. The present petition presents the nonhypothetical case the Court claimed to have been waiting for. And it is a particularly appealing case, because not only did no jury convict these defendants of the offense the sentencing judge thought them guilty of, but a jury acquitted them of that offense.
A dissenting opinion, even from the supreme court, is just that.  It's an opinion written on paper that has no effect on how laws are prosecuted or not.  They left in place the apparatus of the police state, that anyone tried of a crime and found innocent may still be subject to a harsh penalty on the whim of the judge. 

Many of us are voting for judges right now.  If only we could find where they stand on issues like this!



6 comments:

  1. Would that the crosshairs rested upon the judge who exceed his authority and sentenced someone for a crime they were found innocent of, rather than upon the Constitution. Which is already dying from multiple fatal wounds.

    (Not a judgment of your graphic, just expressing some wishful thinking on my part.)

    As our black (Panther) brethren used to be fond of saying, back in the '60s: "When de revolution come . . ."

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  2. Instances such as this leave rational people scratching their heads because they view the situation from a logical perspective. That being that the courts exist to serve justice and administer the law in a fair and impartial manner while dismissing cases where the law and the Constitution have been violated.

    That is the wrong perspective. The courts exist for ONE REASON...to serve the needs of the people in power. To keep the subjects in line and subservient and to extract tribute from them whenever possible. The idea that the police state would not exist if the courts would "get involved" is folly. The courts and LEO are two sides of the same coin....the coin that IS the police state, the coin minted by corrupt politicians at the behest of powerful moneyed interests keen on expanding their power and influence over everything and everyone. Looking to the courts for protection is as much a waste of time as it was for a slave to look to Caligula for protection from the Roman military....a laughable notion.

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  3. INDEED!
    Like Jenga, awaiting a toppling should a constitutional judge be appointed and rule.
    (BTW - an linking to this in a day or so on my blog - thanks)

    gfa

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  4. The police state can't exist without... Our support and cooperation. Even the prison system could not exist without those inside that cooperate with their own incarceration.

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  5. Dan has the right of it.
    Eatgrueldog, I doubt that anything we could do - short of armed insurrection - would make a difference. Just as there was nothing any slave in history could do, short of armed uprising or killing the "master". Or the LEOs (like the slave overseers) who serve the "masters".

    And an armed uprising would likely fail, as moving enough of us out of our "comfort zone" to actually accomplish anything is unlikely to happen. That's not to say it shouldn't be attempted, just that "support and cooperation" is as much as myth as saying the last generation (Gen X, Gen Y, the Greatest Generation, etc.) was responsible for the mess we find ourselves in.

    The Founders - most of them good men, and a few true visionaries - were responsible, when they allowed Hamilton and other Federalists to poison the Constitution with words/clauses which subverted the freedom and protections it was meant to provide. We could also blame the citizens who didn't impeach and hang Wilson and FDR when they further subverted the Constitution, and the justices of SCOTUS who have used their position to legislate and "social engineer" from that bench.

    Better men than either you or I have pondered how to regain control of our lives, how to remove power from the elite who would (and do) control us. Short of John Wilkes Booth, I don't think any of them have had a clue.

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  6. The police state can't exist without...

    The active obedience and snitching of the middle class. The professional enforcers are outnumbered hundreds to one. They can't force any big group to do anything.

    I doubt that anything we could do - short of armed insurrection - would make a difference.

    Your doubt has been carefully trained. Imagine a web site with a signup form similar to what the free state projects used. Signing up says you promise that if one million people sign up, you promise to never pay taxes again. In preparation you will withdraw the bulk of your savings out of paper forms and keep it in precious metal coins at home. Signups under aliases are fine.

    "support and cooperation" is as much as myth as saying the last generation (Gen X, Gen Y, the Greatest Generation, etc.) was responsible for the mess we find ourselves in.

    The politicians didn't teleport into office, beamed into positions of power by gray aliens in round silvery spaceships. No, specific humans depressed specific voting levers at specific times and places, the sum of which which was the sole cause of the bad effects. Joint and several liability doesn't vanish just because 200 million parties did the injury.

    The Founders - most of them good men, and a few true visionaries - were responsible, when they allowed Hamilton and other Federalists to poison the Constitution with words/clauses which subverted the freedom and protections it was meant to provide.

    In the Whiskey Rebellion, General Washington led an army as large as the revolutionary war army in order to impose taxation without representation upon Americans. These Americans had created whiskey to use as honest money, instead of the debt money created by bankers. The Constitution was not intended to protect freedom, it was intended to displace a British aristocracy and replace it with a brand-new American aristocracy. That's why the American government was a clone of the British government with only the names of the offices changed.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion

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