Criminals

Legal (not Justice) System

Imagine that you are convicted of a crime that you didn’t commit and then sentenced to life in prison. Twenty years after your conviction, changing technology makes new ways of analyzing evidence possible, proving your innocence. The DA for the state still, knowing that you are innocent, manages to use the legal system to keep you in prison for another decade. He even does so far as to hide the fact that the only witness in the case had died.

Mr. Lott tried vacate his conviction in 2018 based on exonerating DNA results, but former District Attorney Paul Smith opposed the motion. Instead, on the eve of Mr. Lott’s evidentiary hearing, the DA offered only to modify Mr. Lott’s sentence, which would have released him from prison but kept the conviction on his record. Mr. Lott accepted the agreement on July 9, 2018. In doing so, Mr. Lott was freed after spending 35 years in prison for a crime that he didn’t commit- with 10 of those years being served AFTER the legal system knew that he didn’t commit the crime. That’s a legal system, not a justice system.

“Former District Attorney Smith’s opposition to the irrefutable evidence of Mr. Lott’s innocence was a blatant miscarriage of justice,” said Barry Scheck, Innocence Project’s co-founder and special counsel. “This unwillingness to acknowledge the truth in addition to the systemic factors at play in Mr. Lott’s wrongful conviction cost him 35 precious years — and have plagued other wrongful conviction cases in Ada for decades.”

It’s cases like this that force me to oppose the death penalty. The cops, the prosecutor, the judges, they all work for the same employer. It is virtually certain that some people have been executed for crimes that they didn’t commit. If we as a society execute one innocent person, we are all collectively guilty of murder. That is why I remain opposed to the death penalty- the system is flawed, designed to reward those employees of the government for convicting people of crimes, whether or not the convicted person actually committed them.

In this case, they took his life from him, or at least the part that counts, nearly as certainly as if they had killed him.

By Divemedic, ago

Property Crimes Are Our Achilles Heel

Before we get started, I don’t need anyone quoting the law to me. I know that in most places, we are not permitted to use force to protect property. I don’t care what the law is, because I am fully aware of that. This post is about what the law SHOULD be. Take a look at a couple of videos:

Now consider that we are being told that “insurance will take care of” reimbursing you for theft and vandalism of property. Never mind that the more insurance claims there are, the higher the costs of insurance. People who would destroy and steal your property for whatever reason are confident in the belief that they will get away with it, and in many cases, they are correct. The police and courts, our own law enforcement, are failing in their duties by doing absolutely nothing to prevent this, and in some cases are actively supporting it.

I trade pieces of my life in exchange for value, which I then used to acquire my property. If you destroy or take my property, you are in actuality engaged in stealing away finite pieces of my life. Pieces that I will never be able to recoup.

Either the government needs to step up, or the people will begin to say “enough” and will begin doing it themselves.

By Divemedic, ago

Maybe They Will Get Around to Drug Dogs

The Maryland Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that firearms experts will no longer be able to testify that a bullet was fired from a particular gun. Many forensic methods that rely on pattern-matching, like bite mark and tool mark analysis, rely on subjective interpretations that are presented as scientific conclusions with definitive solutions.

In the case of bite mark evidence, government watchdogs report that examiners not only cannot identify the source of bitemark with reasonable accuracy, they cannot even consistently agree on whether an injury is a human bitemark. It turns out that using rifling groove patterns to match an unknown bullet to a known firearm is not repeatable, reproducible, or accurate to any statistically valid level of certainty. I have previously reported similar reports suggesting that drug dogs are even more inaccurate. Cops know they are inaccurate, but refer to drug K9s as “4 legged money generators.”

Dogs are very good at reading people. They know that if they give their handler what he wants, they get a reward. If the cop wants the dog to alert on a car, the dog will alert on a car. There was one study that actually supported that, but once the study was published, cops have refused to participate in any more studies unless those studies are being performed by pro-policing organizations.

Cops don’t even keep records of how often dogs alert to drugs and then no drugs are found. The police say:

“There’s been cars that my dog’s hit on… and just because there wasn’t a product in it, doesn’t mean the dog can’t smell it,” says Gunnar Fulmer, a K9 officer with the Walla Walla Police Department. “[The drug odor] gets permeated in clothing, it gets permeated in the headliners in cars.”

The problem here is obvious- even giving the dog the benefit of the doubt, probable cause means that the search is being done because drugs are probably there. What the cop in the above quote is saying is that by alerting, the dog is indicating that drugs may have been there at some time in the past. The dog indicates the odor of drugs, but not the presence of drugs. That isn’t the same thing and shouldn’t be enough to trigger a warrantless search of someone’s property.

It isn’t just police dogs, or bite marks, or even bullet matching. Falsifying evidence to get higher conviction rates is widespread among police, and the FBI lab itself has been caught falsifying lab tests. Much of what is called “forensics” is little more than pseudoscientific nonsense that hides behind the public’s virtual ignorance of what science really is, but it sounds good and is nothing more than snake oil designed to fool a jury into convicting the defendant.

When I worked for the fire department, we participated in the United Way. One of the things I used to donate money to was the Innocence Project. They use scientific results to prove that people were wrongly convicted- things like DNA evidence to prove that a man on death row was actually innocent. It’s a worthy cause.

By Divemedic, ago

The Fix in In

No, not that one. I’m not talking about the 80’s band. I’m talking about how Hunter Biden has “reached an agreement” with the DOJ. In exchange for pleading guilty to two minor misdemeanor tax charges, all of the investigations against him will be dismissed and/or closed, including the felony gun charges.

An “in-your-face” show of contempt for the rule of law, Biden regime gives sweetheart plea deal to Hunter Biden. Avoids prosecutions tied to foreign bribery and the President. This is why Joe was laughing when reporters asked him about it.

It’s good to be a part of the Emperor’s family. How is the ATF going to treat anyone caught with a pistol brace? Meanwhile, the Bidens use bribe money to buy guns, crack, and hookers ON VIDEO, and they get a small fine.

By Divemedic, ago

Armed Robbery

Seward County, Nebraska has a population of less than 17,700. In 2004, the county commission was short of money and instructed Sheriff Joe Yocum to find new sources of revenue. So he did. His deputies began using any pretext to pull over out of state motorists on Interstate 80, with luxury cars having priority. Now Seward county leads the state in civil asset forfeiture. In the past 10 years, the deputies of this county have averaged more than a million dollars a year in seized cash.

It goes like this: you are pulled over on any pretext, no matter how weak. They ask for permission to search the vehicle. It doesn’t matter if you agree or not. If you refuse, they get a drug dog to alert on your car. Whether they find drugs or not, they take any money they find. They tell the motorist to sign a form abandoning the cash or face a felony arrest. Sign it or not, they are taking the cash and you are never getting it back.

Nebraska lawmakers made this scenario illegal in 2015, but the cops don’t care. They either file the forfeiture in Federal court, or they claim that there was evidence of drug activity. No matter what, if you have money, they are taking it. In my opinion, this makes those deputies no better than any other armed gang, and makes Sheriff Joe Yocum the head of a criminal syndicate. I would cheer if someone capped his ass, or any of his deputies.

Any cop who tells you that civil asset forfeiture is morally or Constitutionally acceptable is a tyrannical asshole, and I will cheer their getting capped as well. Even in the presence of a criminal conviction, taking thousands of dollars from someone is a violation of the Eighth Amendment. Don’t bother quoting any bullshit case on the matter. I can fucking read, and some lawyer in a black dress trying to justify his boss’ theft of the people’s hard earned money is a travesty.

To those who think that the cops or the military will take your side in the civil war that we all see coming: they won’t. They will take the side of whomever is signing their paychecks, and that isn’t you. Tell me again how most cops are good people doing a tough job. So for now, I will rejoice whenever I see that someone has killed a Nebraska criminal cop. Maybe the “defund the police” people are right. At least I can shoot criminals without having the National guard tanks called in to burn down my house with everyone in it.

I think that many people who are drawn to police work do so for good reasons. They are then captured by the lust for power and money. This is why the original Constitution purposely kept the government weak and subservient. People, however, just love having the power to tell others how to live. In order to do that, they gave the government more and more police powers. Those police agencies are now so powerful, that we are in a virtual police state. One where you can’t even be confident in your ability to drive down the highway without being robbed at gunpoint.

By Divemedic, ago

Found It?

A vehicle crashed into the security barrier outside of the White House. Reports are that police found a NAZI flag in the truck.

I wonder if the missing Ammonium Nitrate was found in the truck, too?

Patriot Front could not be reached for comment.

By Divemedic, ago

First, Kill the Lawyers

A year ago, I reported on an incident at a Target where a group of “teens” were stealing from a Target store. The store contacted police, who just happened to be conducting training nearby, and the cops attempted to take the young criminals into custody. The criminals, who were illegally armed with at least one firearm, tried to ram the responding deputies, whereupon the cops fired multiple shots into the car, killing one and wounding two others.

The lawyers for our young thugs stepped in and claimed that the police were not in uniform, driving unmarked cars, and did not identify themselves. They then shot into the car while at least one of them had his hands in the air. (If they weren’t known to be cops, why were the criminals surrendering?) Anyhow, Target then declined to file charges.

The reason I mention this is because the criminals are now suing Target for the cops shooting them, claiming that Target allowing the cops to use their parking lot for training was some sort of conspiracy to use the criminals as training subjects, so the police could use vehicles and guns on live subjects.

One of the claims is that Target knew, through their video surveillance, that the three thugs were stealing. They also knew that the cops were outside. The lawsuit claims that Target has a duty to warn all of its customers of hazards that may be present on the premises, and therefore has a duty to warn shoplifters that the cops are outside waiting to arrest them.

This is the kind of thing that lawyers should be penalized for doing. Our courts are overworked as it is, and this is the kind of money hunting, ambulance chasing behavior that needs to be discouraged. There are plenty of companies out there that are total jerks and need to be dragged into court. This case isn’t one of those.

By Divemedic, ago