Justice Weeps
Jury nullification is in the Constitution, residing placidly within the framework of the Tenth Amendment. Curiously, it is in the Constitution because it isn't in the Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." There can be no disputing that the ability of a jury to nullify any unjust law is indeed a "power." But since this "power" is not named in the Constitution and delegated to the Federal Government, under the terms of the Tenth Amendment this "power" reverts to the states and since no state chooses to claim this "power" in its own jurisprudence, this "power" ultimately rests with "the People" and there can be no better representative judgmental structure than a newly assembled jury of ordinary citizens.
Who better to decide a law's morality than the actual members of the community? Certainly not judges whose original appointments and desires for higher appointments and laurels depend on pleasing the politicians. Jurors, having taken an oath that ends with, "so help me God," want only to please God by ensuring that Justice is done. Which motive is the most pure? Community standards and traditional values should be to the legal system what "the invisible hand" is to capitalism. Nullification will act in a natural way, taking its course according to the standards and values of the local community.
Would any community really believe it was not a "cruel or unusual punishment" to put a person behind bars for life for the crime of stealing a slice of pizza? Especially considering such a lengthy incarceration at over 50K per annum is somewhat antithetical to our need to lower the taxpayer's burden and entirely against our traditions of forgiveness and Christian charity.
There are not many communities in our liberal democracy that are likely to believe that an innocent person, a person who is KNOWN to be innocent, may be punished for someone else's crime but the Corporate State's Supreme Court has repeatedly held that known innocents may be punished simply because they are the mere owners of a property that was used in a crime and thus their property may be confiscated by the State.
A jury consisting of local citizens would likely decide that when a retired couple living in an expensive home suffers a visit from a no-good grandson who uses their property to deal drugs the couple should not lose their home to confiscation simply because five un-American political appointees in black robes pontificate that it is perfectly acceptable according to their world view. It is not a traditional American value that innocent persons lose their homes, or be punished in any way, but has become reality because the Supreme Court sees a need to intimidate We the People, and only such a jury could nullify any such legal monstrosity. A jury can also prevent travesties as when a petty criminal gets sent away for life for stealing a few video tapes, and it can refuse convictions for any of the victimless crimes.
Another case involves a woman whose husband used her car to solicit a prostitute and it was seized under the RICO Act. Our traditional values have always held that an accused person is considered innocent until the state proves him guilty in a court of law but the current partisan gang on the Supreme Court has chosen to destroy this democratic value so as to help impose a post-modern police state on our nation.
The purpose of this police state is parallel to the purpose of the Corporate State, to protect the ruling class from the people by terrifying the people that their property (and freedom) may be taken without due process and turned over to the State under the sole authority of the arbitrary will of some politically ambitious prosecutor who wants to advance his career and achieve real power over us by misusing taxpayer money and the law. Aiding in this debauchery is a Constitution corrupted by reactionary judges who just drool at the thought of using their power against troublesome outspoken citizens who want their freedom and prosperity back.
The Supreme Court has delivered an unmistakable message to We the People that (it wants us to believe) "resistance is futile," but it also has sent an unmistakable message that We the People have a right to keep and bears arms, especially for self protection. We need to self protect ourselves to the teeth. We now know that there is something we can do about it after all and it is called Revolution. Things are never going to get better the way things are arranged now. The only way things are going to get better is when we finally exercise our Right to Revolution and make things a lot better, quickly, and cut the Gordian knot that the Corporate State and its Supreme Court has bound us with.
They, of course, fail to inform us that we have this Right to Revolution and it is this Revolution that will do away with their various injustices by the simple expedient of exclaiming "enough is enough" and to hell with them and all the crap they've heaped upon us.
Even short of a Revolution we can get these enemies of justice out of power by using one of the tools the Supreme Court itself has used to send an innocent person, a known innocent who proved absolutely that he was innocent, to prison for thirty years on a despicable new legal theory that a suspect merely needs to APPEAR to be guilty to be judged guilty and severely punished. This case arose deep in the heart of the First Amendment and even deeper in the bowels of capitalism.
It is often remarked that the first capitalist was the prostitute, the second the businessman, the third the lawyer, the fourth the politician, and in later day incarnations, the smuggler, the drug dealer and the pornographer. Indeed, the early development of the science and art of photography was financed by pornographic businessmen. The Supreme Court officially considers them an evil that never-the-less possesses "redeeming social value."
Some depictions, like child pornography, have no "redeeming social value" and thus are illegal. The rules and regulations of this capitalist industry require that proof of age be on file for every production. One particular pornographic businessman complied with all the rules and hired only adult performers who could prove their ages. He did not break the law but he is in prison today and for the next 27 years simply because the actress "appeared" to be underage. She was not underage and proved it, but under today's corrupt regime a hard, verifiable fact has far less standing in the Supreme Court than the impassioned emotion of an ambitious prosecutor throwing his weight around. Where Justice was once blind, she is today intentionally blinded.
We live in an age of injustice so utterly, irredeemably corrupt that public prosecutors on the public payroll can use public funds to pursue a prosecution that might be popular to the public, but fatal to the idea of justice. The victim committed no crime but he is imprisoned because of the ambitions of a reactionary legal thug. Public funds were used to advance his career (and name recognition) and assassinate justice by putting a known innocent in prison for 30 years for the non crime of pornography for profit by simply using an arbitrary whim that he was sure he could get away with. The real frightening thing is he was sure the Supreme Court would agree to this monstrous lie and five of them actually did. It was a tragedy for American justice and a farce illuminating the radical reactionary right, but also a precedent for the rest of us.
The Supreme Court thus ruled that it is perfectly legal to punish a known innocent person with no proof whatsoever but for the unhinged expedient that the defendant merely appeared, or seemed, to be guilty in the eyes of someone who had prosecutorial power and political ambition. At first blush, of course, this was obviously un-Constitutional and un-American, but five black robed federalist ayatollahs have deemed it legal so we might as well take advantage of this novel new power they have unleashed.
To many Americans, especially many serving in Congress at the time, Clarence Thomas APPEARED to have committed perjury when he denied under oath to having sexually harassed Anita Hill. But in the "through the looking glass" jurisprudence of the federalists anyone with the power and the will can impeach and convict him for having "appeared" to have committed perjury, and so on for whatever offenses of John Roberts and others that can be determined. This sword of Damocles could be a powerful weapon in the right hands to help us crush the Corporate State by eliminating its chief protectors on high.
Appearances can be deceiving but when five traitors form a design to reduce us under a federalist despotism we have a right to rise in revolt and eliminate their pompous threat to liberty, justice and American values, no matter how august it is. One of the ways to this grand goal is by putting in power a populist Congress that has the nerve to fight fire with fire.
Hoping to dictate the repeal of the 4th amendment, the five black robed ayatollas who occupy the temple of justice, are now using the law as a weapon against us, by claiming they really just want to protect us, which, of course, is not unprecedented in the world over the past century. Recall how the Nazis came to power and quickly built an armaments industry that soon turned out a major amount of serious weapons of war, all the while most sincerely assuring an uneasy world that these were just defensive weapons, and the world kept its fingers crossed and its head buried in the sand. Now we see weapons of a more subtle (and sinister) sort wielded with impunity and gaveled into existence promising to fight crime but that threaten to put us under the yoke of a warped Constitution deliberately made that way to pave the way for the dominance of an unelected, elitist Corporate State, while assuring us that these were mere defensive weapons to be used against crime.
We cannot trust anybody who tolerates injustice. If we can't trust them they are of no use to us. We need to resist them, oppose them and defeat them and put in people who we can trust. We need to revive the old House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate how the Internationalist Corporate State managed to amass such wealth and power and how and why it uses that power against us.
A private organization, the Council on Foreign Relations, and similar outfits, are comprised of elitist movers and shakers from government (including the Foreign Service and Congress,) business, finance, the media and the Ivy League, all of whom are committed to the advancement of the Internationalist Corporate State at the expense of traditional middle America. Their loyal adherence to this foreign, un-American economic ideology that huge wealth and power concentrated in a few elite hands and protected by a corrupt government is exactly what our Founders fought against and defeated.
When we once had a violent Revolution to get rid of a ruling class consisting of the various unelected Earls and Dukes and Barons, we now dwell discontentedly under the collective thumb of unelected CEOs, Executive Vice Presidents and Board Chairmen, the new aristocracy. And with their use of legacy bribes to the Ivy League they will effectively create an actual hereditary aristocracy just like in the merrie olde Britain that we defeated in the first place.
Reverend Martin Luther King had a dream to end police brutality in America, especially that perpetrated against blacks. This dream was expressed nearly a half century ago and has been stalled for just as long as racists, having mothballed their hoods and robes, learned they can be even more effective in keeping blacks "in their place" by donning badges and sidearms and pretending to obey the Constitution. They have always been fully backed by the politicians and prosecutors who see a greater threat from Blacks than from the evisceration of our Bill of Rights.
Of the hundreds of innocent Blacks released from prison in recent years after DNA testing proved they were innocent, 75% were convicted largely on extremely faulty eye witness identification. Others were beaten into giving false confessions or were done in by jailhouse snitches who had been given a deal to do so which was never reported to the jury. And others were framed by crooked cops who brag privately about their "testilying" abilities.
These arrogant testiliers are backed by the "blue wall of silence" and are never required to take a polygraph examination about these cases. Regular lie detector tests can be just what we need to protect and expand justice in America.
Police are vastly underpaid for the work they do. If we were to make an investment in justice and pay our police three times what they get now, we will attract a better class of law enforcers who will understand what the Bill of Rights means and how their first duty is to protect it.
Many police are criminals who abuse their power and know how to get away with it. Many others witness another officer's crime but do nothing except turn a blind eye and ignore the crime. Police unions, the most corrupt brotherhoods in the nation, protect their officers by every means possible.
For example, when communities enact "domestic violence" legislation that is meant to disarm perpetrators of domestic violence even if no conviction ensues, the police unions jump in and protect their members who would lose their jobs because they can't work without their gun. The fact that these unions oppose these laws so strenuously shows how widespread domestic violence is among cops to the point that their union must come to their defense.
We must understand that if a cop is willing to beat his wife and abuse his children, he cannot be trusted with a badge and gun on the streets where he works. If a cop is willing to beat his wife and harm his children at home, it doesn't take a genius to realize what he'd be willing to do to a Black or Hispanic person in a dark alley. And plenty of Blacks and Hispanics, (and poor whites and gays and young people) have complained about such behavior for decades but nothing is ever done to stop it.
We have a tool to fight this injustice and it is a gift from the Supreme Court. If we were to compel all law enforcers to submit to a lie detector test annually, or whenever a serious allegation of misconduct is made, we can weed out the offenders and replace them with honest, intelligent and competent officers. A lie detector test result cannot be used in a prosecution of an alleged criminal but it is often used to narrow the field of suspects. It can be used as well to fire a crooked cop who flunks the test.
The police unions will claim this kind of testing is unfair but the Supreme Court has already laid the legal groundwork to allow such testing. Today, many people are fired from their jobs because they were forced to take a drug test and failed it, but they are never prosecuted. The Court has given the thumbs up for such testing even if the individual involved was not currently using a drug at the time of the test. Some drugs stay in the body for a long time after use and the Court has given employers the ability to fire such non workplace "offenders."
There is no difference between firing a cop because he failed a lie detector test and firing a worker for having failed a drug test. The cops themselves always tell suspects that if they are innocent they have nothing to fear from a lie detector test so we need to use the same argument against the lying cops. But since they exist in a corrupt culture where they protect each other and are protected by the district attorney and their union, we must use such a tool to finally get rid of the bad cops. Their unions, of course, will oppose this vociferously but if we link this program to every cop's desire for a greatly increased paycheck, the honest ones will support it, pass the test and get a big raise, but the crooked cops can refuse the test and remain at the lower pay rate. Or get fired before he can do real harm.
Some locales have such imbedded police corruption that they have enacted laws to prevent eyewitnesses from using cameras and other recording devices to prove criminal activity by the cops. In Chicago, and other reactionary places, crooked politicians try to prevent citizens from gaining proof of criminal activity by the police. They know that a video of cops beating a Black man while shouting "nigger this," (BAM) and "nigger that," (BASH,) would go viral and reveal to a hoodwinked public what cops are really like.
Chicago's extremely conservative gun control laws have been overturned by the Supreme Court, but it still has no laws enabling concealed carry and this is designed to prevent the public from using their Second Amendment Right to use weapons for self defense against anyone who threatens them, including the police. Chicago is just plain un-American. Every American already has a right to carry and it is contained in the Second Amendment and they got that right not from some politician but from the Constitution. If Chicagoans were to exercise that right against the criminal police, and make video records of such encounters, Dr. King's dream will become reality. Most other states, and many cities, already have very liberal gun laws and crime has steadily decreased since the adoption of these laws.
Professional politicians are ostriches when it comes to police brutality. In his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. twice inveighed against police brutality but nearly a half century later no progress has been made. Politicians who are former community organizers who lived at street level know perfectly well what the police are like, having heard lots of complaints from reasonable people about the problem, but are afraid to do anything substantive because they don't want to get a reputation of being "an angry Black man," and so hide their heads in the political sand. How can we trust a politician who knows the truth but will not endanger his power to right the wrong?
Not only should we always have cameras at the ready to catch the crooked cop in the act, we also need to create a communications system to alert the community and call for help that can arrive in minutes whenever there is a potential threat to the life and liberty of an individual at the hands of the local constabulary.
In New York City there was an ugly demonstration of thousands of cops breaking the law en masse. They demonstrated out front of City Hall against an attempt by Mayor David Dinkins to create a truly independent investigative commission against police brutality.
Police, like all other Americans, have an absolute right to demonstrate, but in New York the law says that cops cannot demonstrate while in uniform. The NY Times said 10,000 uniformed cops attended this demonstration and chanted against the Mayor, who was Black, "nigger, nigger, nigger," and not a single one was arrested or disciplined. Plenty of photos were taken at this event showing the mass blue crowd breaking department regulations and today, 19 years after the event, we have technology to identify the officers in the crowd.
We can ID those shouting "nigger" and perhaps fire the ones doing so in uniform and get them off the force before they qualify for a pension and thus save the taxpayers million$ in future retirement pay. Maybe we can even find some who have graduated into white shirt leadership roles and who like to pepper spray demonstrators just as much as they like insulting the Mayor with shouts of "nigger." We must never condone such behavior, and should publicly shame such racist criminals.
On the same day as this demonstration these cops also shut down traffic on the nearby Brooklyn Bridge but not a single one was arrested or fired. Now the police enjoy arresting other demonstrators for the same "crime." Wouldn't it be ironic if we were to review old photos and video of this illegal bridge closing to identify the NYPD culprits to see if any of them participated in the arrests of a subsequent generation of demonstrators for doing exactly what they themselves got away with 19 years earlier?
We should always support our local police and keep them independent of the Feds and force them to obey the law, but their crimes pale by comparison with those of the FBI. The FBI is massively corrupt, arrogant and un-American but since it occupies the highest place in the law enforcement food chain it is endlessly arrogant and vicious. Waco and Ruby Ridge are just tips of the iceberg.
This agency, carefully built up in lore and legend over the decades, gets away with everything, including murder. Perjury is its stock in trade. Innocence is its star victim.
The FBI is so corrupt it intentionally, with malice aforethought, put into prison for 29 years an American that it knew, beyond a shadow of any doubt, was innocent of a murder. The FBI knew he was innocent because the FBI knew the real killer was their star informant. The FBI didn't even have the integrity, or common decency, to whisper in the prosecutor's ear that he was not guilty. Each and every FBI agent takes an oath to defend the Constitution against every enemy, foreign and domestic, but today sees only brute force when looking in the mirror. Welcome to Boston, the place where the FBI managed to misplace its star informant for 16years. Little wonder that it also prohibits photography of police actions, calling it "interference." But We the People have a right to interfere in the interest of fighting injustice.
This Boston office of the FBI is a toilet and so it is not surprising that it is also the home base of Lon Horiuchi, the marksman who assassinated Vicki Weaver by shooting blindly into a building he knew contained women and children. Mrs Weaver was holding her baby when Horiuchi murdered her. It is against FBI rules to shoot in these circumstances but Horiuchi has yet to face justice. Being an FBI agent has a fringe benefit, a surefire "get-out-of-jail-free" card."
The FBI cares more about corporate property, such as music and DVDs, than it does about the American people. Shoot a baby-holding mother, you walk, but illegally download a tune and they'll come after you like you're Baby Face Nelson. The FBI has clearly shown that corporate property is far more important than human life in the rotten, thuggish, jack-booted FBI sub-culture.
If our Revolution were to turn violent a trigger point will be reached when the Supreme Court suddenly outlaws our basic human right, the Right to Revolution. When the Supreme Court waves its five magic wands and declares that the Declaration of Independence is herewith null and void, the rest of us need to start shooting, if not the five offenders, then at least who ever is available, the richer and more connected the better.
Announcing that our Natural Rights, specifically described by the Founding Fathers as "unalienable" and conferred upon us by a Universal God, are no longer valid, would be akin to waving a blood red flag at an unchained raging bull. Then the Corporate State will experience the true power of armed Populism. If the Supreme Court tries to disconnect We the People from God, then we'll just have to disconnect the Supreme Court from power.
All these years the Corporate State had us shivering in fear of "creeping socialism," when the true threat to our Freedom arrived as "slithering fascism." The Corporate State has yet to comprehend the submerged meaning of what a "reactionary" is, even though it is their own Frankenstein.
By outlawing the Declaration of Independence the Supreme Court will give us all the proof we need before any shooting can ethically begin. It sure looks like the Supreme Court is evincing a design to reduce us under their despotic federalist Corporate Police State, and that is a test we must pass to properly run a Revolution.