Baltimore is Burning and No One is Willing to Do what is Necessary to Stop the Violence

I wish I could say that the recent events in Baltimore are shocking, but in the larger scheme of things, I only can wonder why it took this long for violent unrest to hit that city in the wake of police brutality. Baltimore has long been known for having a brutal and unaccountable police force and in the past four years has paid out nearly $6 million in settlements to victims of police brutality -- and that does not include what the family of Freddie Gray, Baltimore's latest casualty, is going to receive.

One can agree that rioting and its aftermath always is shocking. Watching people destroy property and attack innocent bystanders, as has been done by rioters in Baltimore, is painful to see, although from what I have seen on the alternative media, plenty of black Baltimore residents have tried to keep the peace and have not taken part in violent activities. However, we should not forget why this madness began in the first place.

A couple of weeks ago, Baltimore police approached 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who ran away and was chased down by some officers. Gray had 18 arrests on his record, something that the conservative websites are trumpeting, but none of the arrests was for acts of violence. Instead, he was a criminal because he possessed and sold some plants that government says he should not be owning. When he was most recently arrested, Gray had a "spring-assisted, one-hand operated knife" in his pocket, which cops claimed was a switchblade, but apparently was not.

(As I see it, this is the sort of thing that sounds worse than it is. Switchblades are illegal in the USA, and when I was on the University of Tennessee track team 40+ years ago, my teammates and I would buy switchblades whenever we ran in meets near the Mexican border, such as El Paso. When we brought them back into the country, we, too, were criminals.)

After nabbing Gray, police tossed him into the back of a police van and then gave him the "rough ride" for which Baltimore police are infamous. Gray was handcuffed and placed in leg irons and police purposely did not secure him in a seat belt, and the cop then drove recklessly to the police station and during the way, Gray was so badly injured that he nearly severed his spine. He died a week later after police denied him even basic medical care upon arriving at the station.

The incident hardly is isolated. According to the Baltimore Sun:

When a handcuffed Freddie Gray was placed in a Baltimore police van on April 12, he was talking and breathing. When the 25-year-old emerged, "he could not talk and he could not breathe," according to one police official, and he died a week later of a spinal injury.

But Gray is not the first person to come out of a Baltimore police wagon with serious injuries.

Relatives of Dondi Johnson Sr., who was left a paraplegic after a 2005 police van ride, won a $7.4 million verdict against police officers. A year earlier, Jeffrey Alston was awarded $39 million by a jury after he became paralyzed from the neck down as the result of a van ride. Others have also received payouts after filing lawsuits.

This is stunning. Despite the fact that the City of Baltimore has paid out millions and millions of dollars to victims of the police "rough rides," police officers continue the practice with apparently no attempts by city officials to curb this dangerous activity. The obvious question one might ask is: Why does no one in authority do anything about this mess?

Baltimore: the Bastion of Progressivism

When it comes to police issues, Baltimore is not a right-wing, law-and-order city. It is not Dallas or Houston and certainly not Texas. It is, instead, the very epitome of what the Left wants all of the USA to be: the center city of The Liberal Paradise. Indeed, Baltimore is the fount of governmental policies that American Progressives have been demanding for years, and Maryland with the dominance of liberal Democrats provides the perfect cover.

First, Maryland is the penultimate one-party state, at least when it comes to state government. Maryland has 24 counties but only a few have enough population to decide anything statewide. For example, in 2012, Barack Obama carried only four counties (plus Baltimore City), but Obama took 62 percent of the statewide vote, and the Democrats have overwhelming numbers in the state legislature.

Second, Maryland politics combines a fairly large black population with affluent government workers and lobbyists (given the proximity of several counties to Washington, D.C., and the state has policies that clearly reflect the left wing of the Democratic Party. Abortion-on-demand is plentiful here, taxes are high, environmentalists rule state government, and government employee unions are strong.

Maryland is very affluent, or at least the counties around Washington are wealthy, some of the richest counties in the USA. Maryland's wealth is not built on producing anything, however, but rather its wealth comes from extraction of the wealth produced by others. Perhaps it is ironic that liberal Maryland politicians believe that free markets create wealth through "exploitation" of other people and that restricting private enterprise prevents "unjust" wealth extraction, but in reality, no one exploits the workers and producers of this country more than do Washington and its surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia.

The Democratic Party's dependence upon government employee unions (more than half of the delegates at the upcoming Democratic National Convention in 2016 will be unionized government workers) is at the heart of the brutality that defines the officers of the Baltimore Police Department. In Maryland, government unions rule and no union is more powerful than the Fraternal Order of Police.

Not surprisingly, the formidable police union has been able to gain privileges for its members that ordinary people cannot have. Maybe it is ironic that the website The Daily Kos, which represents the hard left of the Democratic Party and whose adherents believe that all of life should be under state control, is shocked, SHOCKED that the "Bill of Rights" for Baltimore police includes a provision in which "they are given a full 10 days before they have to tell you or anyone else on earth anything they know about what happened" after they kill someone.

No one should be surprised when government unions ensure that their members are not held accountable for wrongdoing or illegal behavior. Unions are about winning privileges for those who hold the union card, which is what liberal Democrats of The Daily Kos claim they want for all workers, and especially government employees, which are the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. So, I do find it ironic and perhaps a bit humorous when people of the Left don't like the outcomes of their activism. Sputters The Daily Kos:

So, in other words, the six officers who were involved in the arrest of Freddie Gray have had 10 whole days to get every single minute detail of their story straight. They've had 10 whole days to communicate with one another to make sure every single aspect of their stories perfectly sync up. They've had 10 whole days to watch the news, to watch the cell phone videos of their arrest of Freddie, to study what witnesses say they did or did not see. While the family of Freddie Gray has been forced to suffer during 10 long days of confusion and despair, these officers have been on paid leave, able to rehearse every word they will deliver when the law actually compels them to speak on the record.

This is an absolutely unnecessary and egregious aspect of the Maryland Police Bill of Rights. Officers should be forced to record their perspective on events immediately instead of being allowed 10 days to get a story together that just so happens to perfectly navigate around every detrimental aspect of the law.

The list of police reforms we need in the United States is extensive, but we must now add to that list the that police should never be allowed such an extended time before they have to tell their side of the story in the case of a person they injured and killed.

Politically, Baltimore is the very epitome of what the Wall Street Journal calls the "blue-city model of urban governance." It combines poor and middle-class black with affluent-but-liberal whites into a Democratic political machine that sees only some internal competition, although the choice is between candidates of the Left and of the Hard Left. (Obama received more than 87 percent of Baltimore's votes in 2012.)

Yet, while they are joined at the hip politically, these two groups have nothing in common and they have about as much connection with each other as the rest of us have to do with little green men from Mars. On the one hand, the affluent have the select universities like Johns Hopkins, Loyola, and the University of Baltimore, while the blacks have terrible public schools. The affluent and liberal whites have luxury apartments and the numerous cafes and high-end restaurants that populate their neighborhoods, and the blacks have slums or sterile, crime-ridden housing projects and shops that more resemble bunkers in war zones than places of actual commerce.

As the Wall Street Journal points out in its editorial, government agencies that exist ostensibly to educate children and serve the public in reality are jobs programs for unionized government workers. As for the economy, the city is known for its facade of the Inner Harbor and the downtown baseball and football stadiums, but the liberal "trickle-down" model does not do much for the average person living in sections of the city with black unemployment mirroring what one might expect to see in Greece or Venezuela.

Yes, Baltimore has world-class medical facilities and physicians and researchers at Johns Hopkins, but what the city really needs is what is anathema to the typical liberal Democrat: free markets. Indeed, in a recent interview with National Public Radio, former Baltimore mayor and Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley (who now is challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination for president) declared that any notion that government regulations and roadblocks actually hamper businesses is nonsense. Said O'Malley:

It is not true that regulation holds poor people down, or regulation keeps middle class from advancing; That's kind of patently bulls---.

While leftists like O'Malley claim that free markets are nothing more than "trickle-down" economics, in truth the Left's model for cities like Baltimore truly is based upon actual trickle down. The city's political elite, along with favored corporations and organizations, build high-profile projects in the name of "revitalization" of city centers that help enrich people who are politically-connected but do absolutely nothing for the masses of people without work and without any real hope of having a future apart from depending upon government assistance for food, housing, and just about everything else.

Unfortunately, most black residents of Baltimore and certainly black politicians believe like O'Malley and will support the very policies that further impoverish them. Let's face it, blacks have done relatively worse under Barack Obama than they have under any other president in my lifetime -- which goes back to Ike -- but despite the fact that Obama is harming them irreparably, blacks will support him and his policies and claim that any dissenting view is racist in origin.

Interestingly, when O'Malley was mayor of Baltimore, he instituted a "zero-tolerance" policy in which police arrested people (mostly blacks) by the score for minor offenses. Police also ramped up the War on Drugs during O'Malley's term in office from 1999 to 2007. (He was elected governor of Maryland in 2006 and served two terms in the statehouse.) While I not emphasized the Drug War in this post, it obviously has much to do with the reign of police brutality in Baltimore.

The Sum of Leftist Governance

So, we see that the inevitable results of the kind of governance Baltimore has had for decades becomes expressed in the events that led to the rioting, as well as the rioting itself. Police officers who are protected by the very unions politicians support engage in brutal behavior because their union contracts protect them from consequences. Thus, they brutalize and kill people who are not a threat to them.

Young people who have gone to failing government schools and whose neighborhoods are hamstrung by policies popular with leftists are left with no future and no real hope. They are angry at the police and angry at everyone else, and we see that anger explode in gang violence and rioting.

The answer? According to leftist politicians like Martin O'Malley, the answer is to expand welfare programs, build more sterile government housing, and woo more crony capitalists to build high-profile projects that make politicians look good.

The politicians and voters of Baltimore will not listen to any other alternatives. Free markets to them are like crosses as a vampire convention; just their very mention sends people into frenzies of rage.

Although the current spate of rioting will end soon enough and the city will go back to a shaky "normalcy," nonetheless the consequences of anti-private enterprise and anti-free markets remain and sooner or later, the union-protected Baltimore police will engage in another atrocity and the city once again will explode. It is just a matter of time.

SCOTUS: Judges and Prosecutors are Incapable of Misconduct

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would not hear the appeal of Sholom Rubashkin, sentenced to 27 years in prison in a case that involved a federal judge who was in on the planning of the case with government agents from the original raid on his business. The court is saying, in essence, that federal judges are not bound by any appreciable rules of conduct, and that there is no recourse for the citizen who is victimized by judicial and prosecutorial misconduct.

To the casual observer, the SCOTUS did the right thing. Here is a guy who broke the law, defrauded a bank, and got what he richly deserved, or at least that is how the media has portrayed this case. However, a number of people have taken a hard look at the conduct of Judge Linda Reade and have come up with a much different opinion: that what she did was an outright travesty of justice.

Judges and prosecutors have awesome powers and the SCOTUS already has ruled that they are immune from any challenges from private citizens. In the end, we have yet another example of the government "investigating" the government and declaring that the government has acted justly.

In rejecting Rubashkin's appeal, the SCOTUS also ignored legal pleas from a large number of former officials of the U.S. Department of Justice and civil liberties advocate Harvey Silverglate. When people of disparate political opinions are willing to join together and ask the High Court to examine the conduct of federal officials, this is something not to be taken lightly. Instead, even their opinions were blown off as though they were nothing.

The Federal Conviction Machine

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent piece on how federal prosecutors and judges have so rigged the system that the only thing left to do when charged is to plead guilty, guilt or innocence notwithstanding. This clearly is an immoral situation, especially when innocent people plead simply to avoid the draconian sentences that are handed down when federal juries, in their usual Pavlovian style, listen only to federal prosecutors.

The article here follows the fortunes of Kenneth Kassab, who originally was going to plead guilty to an explosives charge because his attorney just did not want to take the risk of trial. After an incident, Kassab changed his plea, went to trial, and actually was acquitted. The diagram below, I believe demonstrates just how rigged the federal system has become:

No doubt, federal prosecutors will claim that they garner in the convictions because they are great lawyers. However, in the words of Justice Antonin Scalia, who pretty much is pro-prosecution: (the federal system) "effectively compels an innocent defendant to avoid massive risk by pleading guilty to a lesser offense."

So, when someone like Scalia, the prosecutor's best friend, says there is a problem, then there is a problem. (Thanks to James Bovard for the link)

Sholom Rubashkin and the Unethical Judge

A couple years ago, I wrote on what I believed was a miscarriage of justice in the federal case against Sholom Rubashkin, the CEO of a now-shuttered kosher meat facility in Iowa. The Rubashkin case is one that draws a lot of different opinions, in part because there are so many elements involved from the hiring of illegal immigrants to accusations from PETA about mistreatment of animals to the issue of financial fraud.

I addressed each of those issues in a previous blog, but it seems to me that the worst part is the conduct of the federal judge in that case, Linda Reade, who immersed herself in the original immigration raid of the plant and who also seemed to have a role in directing how federal authorities should act. As Emily Bazelon wrote recently in Slate, Reade's involvement definitely seemed to cross the line of judicial impropriety:

Still, in asking the Supreme Court to take the case, Rubashkin’s lawyers—who now include former Solicitor General Paul Clement—are asking the justices to take a stand on Reade’s participation in the immigration raid planning. The argument is that Reade and the prosecutors had an obligation to tell Rubashkin’s lawyers about all that pre-raid planning. Except in very limited circumstances, judges aren’t allowed to meet with one side in a case without the other, and so those weekly meetings broke the rules. Several friend-of-the-court briefs have been written in support of Rubashkin’s position, or are on the way, and the signers include former judges and U.S. attorneys. One of the briefs was co-authored by my sister Lara, who is a clinical teaching fellow at the University of California Hastings law school, and lawyer Allison Ehlert.

Bazelon adds:

In response, Reade and the government have said there’s nothing to see here. The judge attended all those meetings simply to save her court a headache. Her support for the raid was about logistics, nothing more, and there’s no reason that wearing her administrative hat would have biased her against Rubashkin once she put her judge hat back on. Maybe so. But judges aren’t just supposed to be impartial, they’re supposed to make sure they don’t create the appearance of bias. Wouldn’t it be better, as a general rule, if judges who meet regularly with prosecutors in advance of a cascade of high-profile indictments didn’t hear the cases that follow? Rubashkin’s prosecution was the culmination of the raid, in a sense. Getting him was the best way to justify the spectacle of the processing of the sad sack Guatemalans on the cattle fairground, which we know from her comments to the New York Times Reade felt she had to defend (and which another federal judge in Iowa later called a “travesty”).

The larger problem here is that, practically speaking, federal judges have enormous leeway in deciding whether to take themselves off a case because of potential bias or perceived bias. When they make a bad call, there are rarely any consequences. In all likelihood, the Supreme Court will turn Rubashkin down and refuse to intervene this time, too. The jury who convicted Rubashkin sat for 18 days and reviewed more than 9,000 exhibits, and the justices probably have as little appetite for a do-over as they do for smacking down Judge Reade. But even if you can’t bring yourself to care much about the fate of Sholom Rubashkin, the oddities of this case don’t sit well. Judges shouldn’t be able to make up their own rules for policing themselves.

 While Bazelon is not sympathetic to the rest of Rubashkin's legal case (contrary to my own opinion), nonetheless I believe that when a large number of former federal legal luminaries are willing to file briefs with the court saying they have a problem with what has happened, then I believe this is not an ordinary situation. Like Bazelon, I do believe that the Supreme Court will defer to Reade's judgment, which I believe will be a terribly mistaken thing.

The Rubashkin camp has put out a video that I believe is worth watching, as it quotes my friend and mentor, Harvey Silverglate, and I believe it does make a good case for pointing out the travesties in this particular case. Yes, it does come from Rubashkin's supporters, but in federal criminal cases, we simply cannot depend upon either the government or the mainstream media (which generally adores federal prosecutors) to tell the truth.

The High Court is due to issue its decision on granting Rubashkin certiorari on September 24. Given the outrages that the SCOTUS already has unleashed in the past few years, I only can hope that for once in their lives the justices care about the things that judges and prosecutors actually do that either violate the law or are very suspicious. We shall see.

West Virginia Prosecutors Prove Once Again Why Individuals SHOULD be Permitted to Sue the State for Malicious Prosecution

The recent acquittal of Autumn Rae Faulkner in Elkins, West Virginia, in which a jury deliberated for only an hour, provides ironclad proof that prosecutors, state and federal, should NOT be protected with any kind of immunity, period. When jurors take only an hour to acquit -- and having served as a jury foreman, I can tell you that much of that time was spent on activities besides talking about the case -- one can bet that they made up their minds even before the prosecution rested its case.

Faulkner was accused of having sex with a 15-year-old student three times in 2008 and 2009. 

It is easy to surmise that prosecutors had NO case whatsoever, and either the so-called "experts" were the stupidest people in the room, or they were the most craven. I wish it were the former, but the latter dominates my thinking.

So, why did the prosecution bring the charges and destroy this woman's life in the first place? They did it because they can do it, and that is what they were telling everyone else. Prosecutors, you see, really don't care about guilt or innocence; they just love showing their authority, and since the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that prosecutors have absolute immunity, they also know that no one in the system will hold them accountable.

In reading the article on the acquittal, I am struck by the utter arrogance that prosecutors had, and the way they dishonestly went about presenting evidence:

Following the trial, special prosecuting attorney Steve Jory said he didn't believe there was anything else the prosecution could have done differently that would have altered the outcome of the case.

"I think we presented every piece of evidence we had available to present," Jory remarked. "The case was fairly tried and the jury made its decision. Apparently they didn't believe we had enough evidence to prove our case." 

 But it gets even better:

Mazzei also highlighted the fact that the state hadn't presented any DNA evidence.

"The state took phones and [Faulkner's] computer, her couch, her comforter, bedding, a car, and no evidence ever came out of that that would prove Mrs. Faulkner was guilty," Mazzei said.

During his final statement, however, Jory told Mazzei that the prosecution wasn't able to present any DNA evidence because "you wouldn't allow your client and her husband to give (DNA) samples and we could not complete lab analysis." When asked after the trial if the court could have compelled Faulker and her husband, Scott Faulkner, to submit their DNA for testing, Jory said that it was possible, but the previous prosecutor in the Faulkner case -- former Randolph County Prosecutor Richard Busch -- had failed to do so.

When asked why he didn't later ask the court to order the Faulkners to submit their DNA for analysis, Jory simply said "there were a lot of factors" involved. (Emphasis mine)

As anyone familiar with criminal law knows, if the state wants evidence, it can get it. My sense is that the prosecutors and police did not seek DNA evidence because they knew there was none, it so leaving things in the realm of mere speculation where they could use innuendo would be more effective. (I imagine prosecutors already had convinced members of the media that Faulkner was a predator, but most journalists will believe anything cops and prosecutors say.) To claim to a jury that the state could not get evidence because the defendant and her attorney told them they could not get it fails to pass the laugh test.

But, when it comes to the use of innuendo, nothing tops this:

The state's evidence - or its lack thereof - was the subject of (Rocco) Mazzei's closing arguments Thursday.

"The state has this theory that a whole lotta text messages somehow equals guilt of sex," Mazzei said, referring to the voluminous number of text messages Faulkner sent to the 18-year-old student based on documents the prosecution subpoenaed from AT&T. "[Jory] wants you to convict her on a number of text messages. You should require the state to prove that this theory ... as it is, this theory is mere speculation. You haven't seen the content of a single text message."

 Wow! So, prosecutors told the jurors that there were a great number of text messages, but did not show their content to jurors in hopes that they would be able to use their imaginations to surmise what Faulker MIGHT have written. As anyone familiar with teacher-student sex cases knows, text messages in the sort of situation prosecutors were alleging existed would have been filled either with sexual innuendo or outright graphic language.

What does this mean? It means that prosecutors read the messages and realized that not one of them were sexual, so they tried to deceive jurors, instead, by lying and suborning perjury.

Lord knows how much money Faulkner and her husband and family spent defending her against charges that obviously were false from the beginning. No doubt, the West Virginia school system will take its revenge by permanently sullying her record.

And what happens to prosecutors who financially ruin innocent people just because they can do it? Nothing. These are people who viciously ruined the lives of others in an attempt to make an obviously fraudulent case look to have substance.

Will the State of West Virginia take action? Don't hold your breath. Once again, we see why prosecutors should be sued; that is the ONLY way they will be held accountable.

Are these prosecutors the proverbial "bad apples" in a good barrel? Think again; in West Virginia, the entire barrel is rotten.

"On the Administration of Things"; My post today on The Agitator

This morning I spent time with a some men aged 80+ at a small roundtable discussion, and the topic dealt with the modern application of Claude-Henri de Rouvroy Saint-Simon’s dictum that “the government of men must be replaced by the administration of things.” While the topic of discussion dealt mostly with the Obama administration’s health carelaw, nonetheless I could see how it fits exactly into the modern American “justice” system and how it swallows millions of people while many of us watch in horror.


THE REST OF THE POST IS HERE.

I'm Blogging on The Agitator this Month

Radley Balko has asked me to blog on The Agitator this month. I'll be making periodic posts and also linking to this blog.