Category: Libertarianism

Prosecutorial Misconduct Is Just As Corrosive as Militarized Police

August 28, 2014 / / 2 Comments

With the events in Ferguson, Missouri, the public has rightly been discussing the growing militarization of the police forces in this nation. The flip side to that coin has been the increasingly reckless conduct by prosecuting attorneys, both at the state and federal level. Radley Balko, formerly of Reason and HuffPo, and now at WaPo, has done yeoman work documenting cases of prosecutorial misconduct and overreach. Just like the police, prosecutors are protected by qualified immunity and are rarely held to the same professional standards that their civilian* counterparts.

Prosecutorial misconduct is the reason I stopped supporting the death penalty. I can’t trust that the people exercising the ultimate government power are working within the law or even in the interest of justice.

That same reckless conduct led to the overturning of the convictions of police officer convicted for the killing of civilians on the Danziger Bridge during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. For those of you who don’t remember this:

The Danziger Bridge shootings were police shootings that took place on September 4, 2005, at the Danziger Bridge in New Orleans, Louisiana. Six days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, members of the city’s police department killed two people: 17-year-old James Brissette and 40-year-old Ronald Madison. Four other people were wounded. All victims were unarmed. Madison, a mentally disabled man, was shot in the back. New Orleans police fabricated a cover-up story for their crime, falsely reporting that seven police officers responded to a police dispatch reporting an officer down, and that at least four people were firing weapons at the officers upon their arrival. On August 5, 2011, a federal jury in New Orleans convicted five police officers of myriad charges related to the cover-up and deprivation of civil rights. However, the convictions were vacated on September 17, 2013 due to prosecutorial misconduct, and a new trial was ordered.

From the article:

“The case started as one featuring allegations of brazen abuse of authority, violation of the law, and corruption of the criminal justice system,” [Judge] Engelhardt wrote in his decision alluding to the Danziger prosecution. “Unfortunately, though the focus has switched from the accused to the accusors, it has continued to be about those very issues. After much reflection, the court cannot journey as far as it has in this case only to ironically accept grotesque prosecutorial misconduct in the end.”

This is unacceptable. The War on Nouns has lulled the populace into surrendering their liberty to the police and prosecutors. It’s time that those liberties were taken back and the offenders suffer the consequences.

h/t Ken Ostos, from the Book of Faces

* – Yes, I know that police and prosecutors are also civilians. It was a useful literary tool. It instantly made the dichotomy clear in your mind, didn’t it?

Friday Quote – Patrick Henry

July 25, 2014 / / 0 Comments

We should not forget the spark that ignited the American Revolution was caused by the British attempt to confiscate the firearms of the colonists.

Patrick Henry

Governments confiscate arms for their safety, not the citizenry’s.

Peelian Policing Principles

July 2, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I think Barron introduced me to these in one if his posts. Sir Robert Peel, who helped organize the London Metropolitan Police and later served as prime minister, set out principles for ethical policing. These are what I use to help me judge police actions and culture.

1. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.

2. To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.

3. To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.

4. To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.

5. To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion; but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour; and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.

6. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.

7. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

8. To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.

9. To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

Lifted from Wikipedia

Friday Quote – Learned Hand

May 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.

Learned Hand

The two quickest deaths of liberty in the hearts of the populace are “safety” and “convenience.”

Friday Quote – Learned Hand

May 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.

Learned Hand

The two quickest deaths of liberty in the hearts of the populace are “safety” and “convenience.”

DOJ Using Banks to Shutter Legal Businesses

April 29, 2014 / / 0 Comments

There is now some evidence that the DOJ is putting pressure on banks to stop doing business with what it considers questionable businesses. Small problem. These are legal businesses.

Under “Operation Choke Point,” the DOJ and its allies are going after legal but subjectively undesirable business ventures by pressuing banks to terminate their bank accounts or refuse their business. The very premise is clearly chilling—the DOJ is coercing private businesses in an attempt to centrally engineer the American marketplace based on it’s own politically biased moral judgements. Targeted business categories so far have included payday lenders, ammunition sales, dating services, purveyors of drug paraphernalia, and online gambling sites.

“Operation Chokepoint is flooding payments companies that provide processing service to those industries with subpoenas, civil investigative demands, and other burdensome and costly legal demands,” wrote Jason Oxman, CEO of the Electronic Transactions Association, at The Hill.

I have no love for payday lenders. I think they have absolutely usurious rates of interest for their customers. That said, they are a legal business. Same goes with drug paraphernalia. Legal business that somone(s) decided to use the force of the government to destroy.

Yeah, but they’re just doing it to bad businesses like porn actors, bong sellers, and payday lenders. Really? Did you see the reference to ammunition sales? Do you really think that Operation Choke Point wouldn’t be used against firearms businesses? Businesses run by “hate groups” like Hobby Lobby or Chik-Fil-A?