Category Archives: Criminal Injustice

Arizona: Where Property Rights Go To Die

Crime, Criminal Injustice, IMMIGRATION, Private Property

For at least a decade, they’ve been littering his Arizona ranch with “trash 10 inches deep, including human waste, used toilet paper, soiled diapers, cigarette packs, clothes, backpacks, empty 1-gallon water bottles, chewing-gum wrappers and aluminum foil – which supposedly is used to pack drugs.”

Of late, rancher Roger Barnett’s property, northeast of Douglas, along Arizona Highway 80, has been vandalized by illegal aliens, who “tore up water pumps, killed calves, destroyed fences and gates, stole trucks and broke into his home.”

But at last justice. With the aid of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the aggressors are suing Barnett for trying to evict them from his land with excessive insensitively. What’s more, U.S. District Judge John Roll agreed to hear the case–and has ruled that there was “sufficient evidence to allow the matter to be presented to a jury.”

Read on.

Related: “The Gore Gospel: Act Globally; Trash Locally”

Pardon Me, Mr. President, I Was Just Following Orders

Bush, Criminal Injustice, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, Iraq, Law

The White House has confirmed that President Bush is considering a request that an eastern Idaho soldier convicted of killing an unarmed Iraqi receive a pardon, the soldier’s father says.

Didn’t I tell you, in “Take this, Mr. President, For Ramos and Compean,” that a soldier shooting up civilians in Iraq has more of a shot at a pardon than Ramos and Compean, who grazed the derriere of a Mexican drug dealer?

So I did.

Sgt. Evan Vela, a 24-year-old Army sniper assigned to Fort Richardson, was convicted in February and sentenced to 10 years in prison for killing an unarmed Iraqi civilian who stumbled upon him and five other soldiers sleeping on May 11, 2007.

The president has already sent an encouraging note to Sgt. Evan.

Compean and Ramos defended a border Bush wants open.

Airport Animals Gone Wild

Criminal Injustice, Fascism, Homeland Security, Justice, Law, The State

Watch this scene:

This woman is doing nothing unusual. She’s hovering close to the baggage screener, overseeing his rummage through her belongings.

The fat, thuggish, affirmative appointees then zero-in on her and proceed to toss her across the room. Then they climb into her.

The lowly subject clearly angered her overlords. A snippy word, perhaps? How dare she!

In a free society NO ONE has the right to lay a hand on another absent a clear threat of physical aggression. Verbal provocation is no excuse for this kind of aggression. As I wrote in “Tasers ‘R’ Us”:

Liberty is a simple thing. It’s the unassailable right to shout, flail your arms, even verbally provoke a politician, unmolested. Tyranny is when those small things can get you assaulted, incarcerated, injured, and even killed.

Did the victim, Robin Kassner, look as though she posed a threat to anything other than her captors’ sense of omnipotence?

Of course, America is not a free country, no matter how many freedom concerts Hannity holds.

Why does the ACLU not tackle the tackling and killing of innocent Americans at airports and elsewhere?

We have:

Don’t Tase Me, Big Bro
Tasers ‘R’ Us
Lunatic Government Occupies Airports

Pardon Me, Mr. President? Et tu, Pat Robertson?

Bush, Christian Right, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Law, Morality

The plenary power of pardon granted to the president is extremely broad.

But so far no word about the possible pardon by Bush of incarcerated Border-Patrol agents, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.

The president had set a precedent in the case of Ramos and Compean. For defending their country, and in the process shooting a drug smuggler in the derriere, Bush sicced his bloodhound, U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton, on these Border Patrol Agents who, absent a pardon, will remain locked up for over a decade.

Although Bush has yet to pardon Scooter Libby, you’ll recall that he commuted his sentence. Bush had spared his fall guy, Lewis Libby, but locked up these patriotic, heroic agents—Ramos and Compean—ostensibly throwing away the key. No remorse expressed from the Creep-in-Chief in their unjust conviction.

I’ve said it before: Bush would wrestle a crocodile for a criminal alien. Soon into his presidency, I also pronounced George W. Bush bad to the bone.

As have I defended evangelical leader Pat Robertson in the past. But he’s clearly just a cog in the well-oiled, oleaginous, Republican Party machine. Robertson was interviewed today by CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux, who asked him about the pardons.

Robertson put his moral might behind making the case for a Scooter-Libby pardon. Now, as I’ve written, “the ‘crime’ for which Libby was convicted was also the crime for which Martha Stewart went to jail: lying to the FBI. Not for leaking the identity of former (so-called) classified CIA operative Valerie Plame. Richard Armitage did that.”

This was yet another abuse of power by crooked outlaw, US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.

However, given his role in taking us to war, there was some poetic justice in the conviction of Libby (not that I support such justice).

There was no justice—poetic, or other—in the conviction of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.