Category Archives: Criminal Injustice

Shades of Waco?

America, Criminal Injustice, Law, libertarianism, Media, Morality, The State

Another prosecutorial team is on the make, this time in Utah, where the state has been pursuing Warren Jeffs, the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Prosecutors have been egged on by a histrionic media—cable coquettes, especially, with their mangled maternal instincts.

First came District Attorney Michael Nifong of the Duke “rape” case fame. By the admission of the accuser’s co-striper, her story lacks credibility. The accused has an alibi. The DNA found on the accuser is not his. And the lineup was in violation of procedures. Yet this DA run amok forges on, oblivious to the constitutional and procedural safeguards to which an accused is entitled. (Here’s another superb source on the case.)

Mary Lacy, Boulder County’s inept DA, arrested a man in the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, based on no other corroborating evidence than a confession, a practice that was once prohibited, for obvious reasons. Lacy attended Patsy Ramsey’s funeral and was clearly personally invested in the intruder-theory of the case. Lacy and Nifong appear to represent a decaying legal system festooned with incompetents, who substitute the constraints of the law with their “grand” visions.

As to Jeffs, the mindless media has always been enthralled by child-abuse crusaders. Janet Reno, one of the most murderous DAs, established her career by launching the day care child sex abuse witch hunt that gripped the nation in the 1980s. She used fabricated accusations elicited from children (who never lie, right?) with the aid of highly suggestive techniques, to imprison her victims absent corroborative evidence. These cases served as a professional stepping stone for Reno, who went on to commit even greater crimes.

Here are the Jeffs arrest warrant and affidavit. It’s ludicrous. He is charged with being an accomplice to rape, no less. Such an accusation conjures visions of Jeffs holding the victim down while another commits the act. Jeffs, however, is charged, based on hearsay, with encouraging a girl, then under 18, to submit to intercourse with her husband, who was a little older. How does urging someone to consummate a marriage amount to being complicit in a rape, a very brutal crime indeed? By this standard or test, aren’t the girl’s parents also complicit?

The sect is wealthy and owns large compounds in Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, South Dakota, and British Columbia. Despite the fact that they live in peace and are non-violent, the federal government has described Jeffs, who was unarmed and did not resist arrest, as extremely dangerous.

The polygamist was placed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list in May, alongside Bin Laden. In this way, presumably, when the federal and state police storm these compounds and remove the children (with a view to seizing the valuable property too, no doubt), the public, dimmed and dulled by state-worshipping media, will shrug it off. After all, it’s all for “The Children,” isn’t it?

Question: Islam permits multiple marriages, doesn’t it? I have no doubt that devout American Muslims follow the dictates of their faith here in the US. Have you ever heard of any such prosecutions against members of that community?

Reversing Reality in the Yates Case

Crime, Criminal Injustice, The Courts

In the legal system, a shambles really, truth is often dismissed if petty procedural rules have been violated. If a defense lawyer can prove that an arresting officer skipped a word while mirandazing a murderer, the entire case ‘DNA evidence and all’ may be retried or worse: reality might even be reversed. The murderer, caught mid-act, could be found innocent. The exclusionary rule is another legal trick by which this can be achieved.

The modern day Medea, Andreas Pia Yates, methodically drowned her children aged six months to seven years. I won’t go into the tiresome details, but thanks to a legal technicality, she’s gone from guilty of murder to innocent by reason of insanity.

Even if the stellar jury that first convicted her overlooked her alleged psychosis, as I’ve written, “An individual’s essential nature does not change because he suffers behavioral or mood problems. Most ‘mentally-ill’ people choose never to commit murder. Why? Because mental peculiarities don’t rob people of their moral nature. Texas law concurs by implying that even under extreme mental duress, a person is not bereft of the capacity to reflect on his actions and thoughts and make choices. In every situation, no matter the constraints, one can exercise some free will, even if it’s only to decide how to respond to a hopeless predicament.

The insanity plea is bad enough as it is:

“ It capitulates to the mistaken ‘and corrosive’ notion that, when crimes are too horrible to comprehend, medical concepts must replace moral concepts. The insanity plea further performs a very odd exercise: It says that to find her not guilty by reason of insanity, the jurors would have had to accept that it was not Yates, but her ‘disease’ or some alter ego, that tortured those children to death. According to the new, reality-reversing verdict, Yates is no longer a victimizer, but an innocent victim of her ‘disease.’

This nonsensical bifurcation flouts the Law of Identity: A person can’t have done the deed, yet simultaneously be innocent of it! The great 19th-century American philosopher Lysander Spooner put it this way: ‘Guilt is an intrinsic quality of actions, and can neither be created, destroyed or changed by legislation.’

* In addition to the hyperlinks in the text, you can read more about so-called mental disease in “Broken Brains?”

Addicted to that Rush

Criminal Injustice, Drug War, Media, The Zeitgeist, War on Drugs

It seems authorities are Addicted to that Rush; they can’t stop badgering Limbaugh about his consumption choices. Having arbitrarily decided that ingesting pain-killers is infinitely worse for individual and “society” than compulsive eating, bungee jumping, alcohol or tobacco consumption, the policy pinheads have proceeded to preemptively trample the constitutional rights of people like Limbaugh, before the foreseeable harm to “society” can occur.

Lysander Spooner, the great 19th-century theorist of liberty, held that government had no business treating vices as crimes. “Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which a man harms the person or property of another.”

This classical liberal thinks that “incarcerating people for their consumption choices has the consistency of arresting a survivor of suicide for attempted murder. Moreover, if for harming himself a man forfeits his liberty, then it can’t be said that he has dominion over his body. It implies that someone else ‘government’ owns him.” (May 8, 2002)

Be mindful that law-enforced medical treatment must also be volubly opposed. The coercive, therapeutic state is a very poor substitute for the avenging state.

Having come up hard against the reality of it, you’d think Limbaugh would have at last leapt in to denounce the Federal government’s War on Drugs. Even National Review has done an about-face. But Limbaugh is too busy hobnobbing in Washington. (Read “Rush Goes to Washington clichés. You’ll want to barf if you’re my kind of person.)

The co-dependency Limbaugh has with the state is by far the more dangerous one.

Fierce, Fabulous Fallaci

Classical Liberalism, Criminal Injustice, Critique, Free Speech, The Zeitgeist

Here’s an interview with Oriana Fallaci in The New Yorker that doesn’t do her justice. Fallaci is unique in the annals of journalism. No superlative can properly describe the kind of irreverent grilling she subjected her interviewees to. The clubby, tête-à -têtes journalists conduct with their overlords are a disgrace—they’ll never come close to Fallaci’s skin-them-alive inquisitions.
Omitted from this interview is how Fallaci began her exchange with Qaddafi. It approximates the following paraphrase: “So your manifesto is so small and insignificant it fits in my powder puff. Why should anyone take you seriously”?”
When I attended journalism school, my teachers held her up as the iconic role model to emulate (of course, this would be unheard of in the left-liberal, groupthink dominated journalism schools of today). Thus one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received was Reginald Firehammer’s. In “The Passion of Principles,” his review of my book for the Randian Free Radical, he likened my passion to Fallaci’s. The passion, perhaps, but never the courage, the life-force, or the capacity for adventure.
The New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot depicts Fallaci as pathologically anti-authoritarian. Is there any other way to be? Talbot, moreover, likes Fallaci’s classically liberal feminism, but flagrantly frames her crusade against Islam as a function of waning faculties. Yes, Fallaci is out of place in youth-worshipping America, where the lukewarm nonchalance of a Wonkette and her “Whatever” Generation is considered the ideal intellectual and existential temperament.
It would, however, be a grave mistake not to heed Fallaci’s warnings. This is an immensely cultured woman, steeped in the past. She understands history and the forces that shape it. More material, she has lived it.