Posted on 10/06/2009 5:53:46 AM PDT by decimon
Needed: A 'clean line' to determine lawfulness
"You don't need to know. You can't know." That's what Kathy Norris, a 60-year-old grandmother of eight, was told when she tried to ask court officials why, the day before, federal agents had subjected her home to a furious search.
The agents who spent half a day ransacking Mrs. Norris' longtime home in Spring, Texas, answered no questions while they emptied file cabinets, pulled books off shelves, rifled through drawers and closets, and threw the contents on the floor.
The six agents, wearing SWAT gear and carrying weapons, were with - get this- the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.
That's right. Orchids.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Between DSM 4 and categorizing thousands of “pathologies” and “disorers” and the criminalizing of most facets of human behavior we have been reduced to cogs, to replaceable units.
he better have had a warrant
This fisherman was walking up a hill with a cooler full of fish. A DNR official stopped him and asked to look in the cooler. The fisherman opened the cooler and exposed all the fish to the Official. The Official tells the guy he caught over his limit. The fisherman answered, ‘I didn’t catch these today. These are my pet fish. I bring them down here and let them swim around and when I am ready to go home I call them and they jump in the cooler and we go home’. The DNR Official says he wants to see that. So, the fisherman puts the fish in the water. The Offical asks the fisherman to call the fish back now. The fishman says, ‘what fish?’
Does anyone still believe this is a free country?
Not anymore.
War has been declared on American citizens by the US federal government I believe it is becoming time to respond accordingly.
Good luck not running afoul of that set of tyrannical laws..."for the children," of course.
Tyranny.
Those are felony convictions, "forever" barring the convict/victim from legally possessing firearms.
I don't believe in coincidences.
Did I miss a recent thread on this or is it old news?
There was one posted late yesterday with a different article by Radley Balko (Reason mag):
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2355639/posts
That passage is the first thing that popped into my mind as well.
Thanks.
Apparently it is happening now...
RE Vineyard: “..I can hardly see ANY justification for anything more aggressive than a single agent, unarmed, knocking on the door...”
For the exact same reason that “Officer Friendly” in Germany (local cops) showed up with a few heavily armed Sicherheitsdienst (Internal Security Forces) or Einsaztgruppen (”Special Purpose Groups”) when they went door to door looking for Jews or folks who didn’t turn in their firearms - to instill absolute fear, shock, intimidation, coerce IMMEDIATE COMPLIANCE, make an example for the sheeple, and let EVERYONE know “We’re in charge here”.
Damn this crap p*sses me off...
RE Vineyard: “...Anything more serious should result in firing of all agents on excessive use of force!!!”
Yeah, good luck with that. How many Feds do YOU know that ever got dismissed and did jail time? One of them is STILL in hiding for shooting an unarmed, nursing woman in the face - murdering her while she was holding her baby...Ruby Ridge ring a bell?
They don’t care. They mean to be masters, one way or the other.
3 more, thank God. And it could be one more if some conservatives with the balls and stomach for a fight take over Congress in '10. Then O would be a castrated, neutered a$$hole, instead of a generic but dangerous a$$hole, like now.
If that happens expect to see ol O crack.
Hillary will then challenge him for 2012.
>> Lets be reasonable ladies and gentlemen. Before we go overboard about over-criminalization, we ought to keep in mind the time-honored precedent that
IGNORANCE OF THE LAW IS NO EXCUSE!
60,000+ pages of new and proposed laws and regulation are printed in the Federal Register each year for the convenience of the public, with updates on a nearly daily basis. Everything is placed at the publics fingertips to keep abreast of our federal governments continuing program to regulate America into a perfect social paradise. It is a simple matter of sitting down after dinner each night and reading through 150 odd pages to see if anything new might apply to you.
How hard can it be? <<
Oh yes, I think everyone should be able to attend Colombia Law school like our Pres__ent and do it on the federal dime too. That way we can all be law abiding citizens.
Generally the rules favor the defendant. IOW, I believe the judge can set aside a guilty verdict and acquit but if the jury finds for acquittal, I don't believe the judge can set that aside and convict the guy anyway. Similarly, in the penalty phase of a capital case, the jury doesn't actually condemn the convict, they simply "recommend" the death penalty. If they do so, the judge can still apply a life sentence, but if they don't recommend capital punishment, he can't "upgrade" to death.
Courts, of course, don't like nullification because it diminishes their appearance of great importance as well as taking the process more out of their control, and they will actually instruct jurors something which SCOTUS has found to be false, that they may judge only the facts of the particular case, and are required to assume that the law is valid, and valid as applied to this defendant. SCOTUS' position basically boiled down to the idea that it is a citizen's job to be informed of his rights and obligations, and that the court, which is inferior to him, is not responsible to inform him of his right, which actually makes sense in a way. However, I don't believe it's proper to go so far as to tell jurors the opposite of the truth.
Now in practice nullification is a problematic matter these days. Large proportions of the public are in unnatural awe of the government and anything they're told by the government, at least on certain matters. Plus the court will exclude you from selection if you admit you know your rights wrt nullification. So if you are a juror in a case where you believe nullification is appropriate, you may have to do so undercover. If you admit during deliberations that you are aware of this option, after the jury has just been admonished the opposite, there are enough obedient drones among the public that someone will no doubt rat you out to the judge, and you'll at a minimum be removed from the jury, leaving the defendant with no one on the jury who is aware of all the aspects of their duty.
I would be less surprised if the Dems decide to stage an assassination. He's a big loser for them and paints them in all sorts of political corners. So by getting rid of him, they benefit three ways: 1) they get rid of him and he's been a real political liability, 2) anything they can claim he would have supported, from gun registration to National Socialist Health Care, now gets a free ride, because the MSM makes sure it's political suicide to oppose it, and 3) they claim he was shot by a bigot and get to keep playing the race card till the end of time, instead of like now when it's losing credibility because a [half] black guy got elected to the highest office in the land.
I hope they don't, both because it would be wrong and because I think it might help them, but I wouldn't bet money on it.
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