TooManyLaws

Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.

Translation:

"The more numerous the laws,

the more corrupt the government."

Variant:

"The more corrupt the state,

the more laws."

-- Gaius Cornelius Tacitus; ca. 56 – ca. 117

The Annals of Tacitus Book III, 27

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Tacitus/Annals/3B*.html

(*** Note it is when the "State", or "Government" is most corrupt; It is not when the "People" are most corrupt, that the laws were most abundant.)

The history of the Empire is also the history of the sunset of the political freedom of the senatorial aristocracy, which he saw as morally decadent, corrupt, and servile towards the emperor. Tacitus portrays both Tiberius and Nero as tyrants who caused fear in their subjects.

NOVA Colosseum:

Roman Death Trap Preview | PBS Video

http://video.azpbs.org/video/2365397690/

The ancient Roman Government made Innocent people into criminals to be used for Roman entertainment by hurling these people accross the Colliseum, burned on stakes, fed to Lions, ....

How many laws are there in the United States?

Answer:

Are you looking for an exact number? Because you're not going to find it.

There are levels of government city laws, county laws, State laws, and finally federal laws. Different cities, counties, and States may have similar -but different- laws, and they all fall under federal law.

Actually, the proper question would be how many federal crimes are there?

The US Justice Department is your best source to keep tract of this total.

The fact there are so many criminal laws, the odds of no one breaking one in a lifetime are so astronomical, it would make DNA odds look like simple math.

Since the start of 2000, Congress has created at least 452 new crimes. So the total number of Federal crimes as of the end of 2007 exceeds 4,450. Ninety-one of the 452 were contained in new laws that created 279 new crimes, and the remaining were contained in amendments to existing laws.The total of 452 new crimes breaks down by year as follows: 65 for 2000; 28 for 2001; 82 for 2002; 51 for 2003; 48 for 2004; 13 for 2005; 145 for 2006; 20 for 2007. The Appendix to this report lists all the federal statutes containing new crimes.

One estimate put out by a bar study puts Federal Criminal Laws alone at just under 4,500 in year 2011.

The only difference between a criminal and a non-criminal is that the criminal has been either caught and convicted of breaking the Law, or wrongfully convicted.

While the non-criminal has either not been caught yet; or avoided conviction usually by plea deal or good lawyer;

Or Law enforcement not enforcing the law equally or not at all;

Or law enforcement selctively choosing what crimes to enforce, when they will enforce them, and to whom they decide to enforce the laws against.

It is Selective Prosecution, and Un-Equal enforcement of the Law.

Many laws only become enforced when Money is pushing it. Money from Government Grants, Private Donations, Political Agendas, People of Power, etc...

So we can safely conclude that "IF" every Law was enforced equally, then every American citizen would be a Criminal.

How Many Federal Laws Are There Again?

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2015/06/06/how-many-federal-laws-are-there-again-n2009184

There are at least 5,000 federal criminal laws, with 10,000-300,000 regulations that can be enforced criminally. In fact, our entire criminal code has become a leviathan unto itself. In 2003, there were only 4,000 offences that carried criminal penalties. By 2013, that number had grown by 21 percent to 4,850 ... The Heritage Foundation is also concerned about this growth in our criminal code, which often contains laws that are often subject to a wide array of interpretation and are vaguely written [emphasis mine]:

Many new criminal offenses also are deeply flawed. Many federal criminal laws make it possible for the government to convict someone even if he acted unknowingly or without criminal intent (that is, without what lawyers call a guilty mind, or mens rea). ...

You are probably breaking the law right now

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/03/29/crime-law-criminal-unfair-column/70630978/

But not everybody favors this state of affairs. While a century or two ago nearly all crime was traditional common-law crime — rape, murder, theft and other things that pretty much everyone should know are bad — nowadays we face all sorts of "regulatory crimes" in which intuitions of right and wrong play no role, but for which the penalties are high...

While the old-fashioned common law crimes typically required a culpable mental state — you had to realize you were doing something wrong — the regulatory crimes generally don't require any knowledge that you're breaking the law. This seems quite unfair. As Cottone asks, "How can people be expected to know all the laws governing their conduct when no one even knows exactly how many criminal laws exist?"...

Under the vagueness doctrine, a law is void if a person of reasonable intelligence would have to guess at its meaning, because it would be unfair to punish someone for violating a law that cannot be understood. It seems just as unfair to punish people for violating a law that they couldn't reasonably be expected to know about.

Law that can't be known is no law at all.

Three Felonies a Day - How The Feds Target The Innocent

http://www.threefeloniesaday.com/Youtoo/tabid/86/Default.aspx

How can the average American commit three arguable felonies in the course of a given day? Consider these hypothetical examples—along with their real-life parallels—in which vague and broad federal laws have made honest citizens into federal felons.

40,000-new-laws-take-effect-in-2014:

http://www.infowars.com/40000-new-laws-take-effect-in-2014/

New laws in 2014: From tanning bed bans to 'lemon pets'

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/29/new-laws-january-first/4219901/

“Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”

Abraham Lincoln

Prohibition | PBS

http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/watch-video/#id=top-of-show-tease

PROHIBITION is a three-part, five-and-a-half-hour documentary film series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that tells the story of the rise, rule, and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the entire era it encompassed.

Prohibition turned law-abiding citizens into criminals, made a mockery of the justice system, caused illicit drinking to seem glamorous and fun, encouraged neighborhood gangs to become national crime syndicates, permitted government officials to bend and sometimes even break the law, and fostered cynicism and hypocrisy that corroded the social contract all across the country.

The story of Prohibition's rise and fall is a compelling saga that goes far beyond the oft-told tales of gangsters, rum runners, flappers, and speakeasies, to reveal a complicated and divided nation in the throes of momentous transformation. The film raises vital questions that are as relevant today as they were 100 years ago – about means and ends, individual rights and responsibilities, the proper role of government and finally, who is — and who is not — a real American.

Too many laws, not enough freedomhttp://www.politickernj.com/murraysabrin/62904/too-many-laws-not-enough-freedom

Too many laws, too many prisoners -The Economistwww.economist.com/node/16636027

One nation, under too many laws http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/10/AR2010121007132.html

Too Many Laws Turn Innocents into Criminals http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2010/05/too-many-laws-turn-innocents-into-criminals

Overcriminalized http://www.overcriminalized.com/aboutus.aspx

You May Think You Have Nothing to Hide … But You Are Still Breaking Laws Which Government Spying Could Discover and Use Against You

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/10/you-break-the-law-every-day-without-even-knowing-it.html

...James Duane, a professor at Regent Law School and former defense attorney, notes in his excellent lecture on why it is never a good idea to talk to the police:

Estimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary. It has been reported that the Congressional Research Service cannot even count the current number of federal crimes. These laws are scattered in over 50 titles of the United States Code, encompassing roughly 27,000 pages. Worse yet, the statutory code sections often incorporate, by reference, the provisions and sanctions of administrative regulations promulgated by various regulatory agencies under congressional authorization. Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, but the ABA thinks there are ”nearly 10,000.”

If the federal government can’t even count how many laws there are, what chance does an individual have of being certain that they are not acting in violation of one of them?

ONLY CRIMINALS BREAK THE LAW SO ALL YOU LAW ABIDING GOOD GUYS HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE, RIGHT? AND SINCE YOU HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE THEN YOU DONT NEED A BILL OF RIGHTS. ...

Lets see now - Federal Criminal Laws- anything that could be a crime.

WE HAVE THE FOLLOWING:

United States Codes (2006 / 50 volumes -published every 6 years with 4 to be added next year)

Federal Register

Code of Federal Regulations (CFR - 50 titles)

Procedural Laws (Criminal / Civil) See Your own state and local laws, these are adapted from the Federal laws, so appeals are uniform and consistent..

Substantive laws (Criminal, Civil, Contract)

Counting all that could be violated as a crime, some mind boggling here 1,298,000 laws or regulations

Law of the United States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_United_States

"The claim and exercise of a Constitutional right cannot be converted into a crime."

-- Miller v. U.S. 230 F 2d 486, 489

USA CONSTITUTION

AMENDMENT XIV Section 1.

• ... No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States;

• nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;

• nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

"A tyrant is a king who governs violently and without regard for justice and law. In the exact sense, a tyrant is an individual who arrogates to himself the royal authority without having a right to it. ... I call him who usurps the royal authority a tyrant, and him who usurps the sovereign power a despot. The tyrant is he who thrusts himself in contrary to the laws to govern in accordance with the laws; the despot is he who sets himself above the laws themselves. Thus the tyrant cannot be a despot, but the despot is always a tyrant." - Rousseau

Definitions simple & brief:

• • Law is: (Constitution Article VI)

1. The Constitution;

2. Only Constitutional Laws;

3. All Treaties under authority of the Constitution of the USA..

• The Sovereign authority in the USA is the People.

• A Tyrant usurps the royal authority; breaks the law to enforce the law; rules in contrary to the law to govern according with the law.

• A Despot usurps the sovereign power; puts himself above the law.

• A Usurper becomes both by delegating unauthorized powers to himself to become the unauthorized Supreme Law over the sovereign authority.

"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government." - Declaration of Independence

Sentenced to a Slow Death –

Only in America?

http://wrongfulconvictionsblog.org/2013/11/19/sentenced-to-a-slow-death-only-in-america/

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/opinion/sunday/sentenced-to-a-slow-death.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131117&_r=0

If this were happening in any other country, Americans would be aghast. A sentence of life in prison, without the possibility of parole, for trying to sell $10 of marijuana to an undercover officer? For sharing LSD at a Grateful Dead concert? For siphoning gas from a truck? The punishment is so extreme, so irrational, so wildly disproportionate to the crime that it defies explanation.

And yet this is happening every day in federal and state courts across the United States. Judges, bound by mandatory sentencing laws that they openly denounce, are sending people away for the rest of their lives for committing nonviolent drug and property crimes. In nearly 20 percent of cases, it was the person’s first offense.

Deterrence in CriminalJustice - Evaluating Certainty vs. Severity of Punishment

http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/deterrence%20briefing%20.pdf

“Existing evidence does not support any significant public safety benefit of the practice of increasing the severity of sentences by imposing longer prison terms.”

Is Modern Law preserving your Freedoms, or turning you into a Slave?

https://sites.google.com/site/nodakwc/home/toomanylaws/slave.rtf?attredirects=0&d=1

Denver Murder Rate Cut in Half After Marijuana Legalization. Coincidence?

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/denver-crime-rate/

According to statistics recently released by the government in Denver, the amount of robberies and violent crimes significantly decreased since marijuana legalization went into effect. It is important to mention that this strong correlation is not definitive proof that legalization is the cause of this drop in crime, but it does strongly suggest that this is the case.

These statistics are especially convincing considering the short amount of time that this drastic reduction in crime has taken place. In just one short year the number of homicides dropped by 52.9%. Sexual assaults were reduced by 13.6%. Robberies were down by 4.8% and assaults were down by 3.7%.

Traffic Stop Of Star Trek Fans Raises Concerns About Drug Searches

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/31/drug-search-trekies-stopped-searched-illinois_n_1364087.html

US No Longer Among 20 Most Economically Prosperous Countries

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/10/29/us-no-longer-among-20-most-economically-prosperous-countries

US Drops Out of Top 20 in Annual Economic Prosperity Index

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-10-28/u-dot-s-dot-drops-out-of-top-20-in-annual-economic-prosperity-index

“With the exception of the U.S., all countries in the Americas have improved their overall Prosperity Index score in the last five years.”

We might be the biggest economy in the world, and that certainly carries some weight, but we’re an economy in decline – and obviously that’s not so good for our pursuit of prosperity here in what was supposed to be the most prosperous nation in the world.

At the core of the collapse are variables including our declining/non-existent domestic savings rates, a decline in high-tech exports, a decline in the five-year growth rate of our per-capita GDP, waning confidence in our financial system and, more disturbingly, a growing dissatisfaction with access to food and shelter in America.

Less than one-third of Americans think it’s a good time to find a job. Nearly 70% believe corruption is widespread in U.S. business and government.

And It Gets Worse …

The message is clear: Washington, D.C., has larded our nation with so many rules and regulations, and so much debilitating bureaucracy, that our entrepreneurial spirit is being slowly crushed.

Safety & Security … we’ve fallen to 31st.

Governance, we’re down to 11th ... meaning that the greatest governmental ideology ever created is crumbling in front of us because of what we tolerate from our politicians. Only 35% of Americans have confidence in the people we elect to office – well below the global average of 52%.

And, finally, Personal Freedom … we’ve lost another two spots and now pop up in 16th place. The land of the free just ain’t as free as you’ve been lead to believe.

The tenor of politics in our country today is not at all conducive to the creation of prosperity. The most telling statistic in the Legatum survey is the one I referenced earlier: nearly 70% of Americans believe that government and business are corrupt. A society in which the overwhelming majority see corruption as the standard operating procedure is emblematic of either a developing nation like, say, Haiti or Bulgaria, or it’s an early-warning indicator of an empire in its last days.

Life in America will slowly continue to degrade.

The single-greatest accumulation of debt in the history of the world, nearly $120 trillion on and off the balance sheet.

Returning to rates of a 5% average across all Treasury maturities vs. roughly 2% currently — would imply an additional $844 billion in annual debt payments, the Congressional Budget Office warns, which is double what we pay today. We can’t manage that outlay too long without falling into an inescapable debt spiral in which we issue more and more debt to cover the interest payments, which begets more and more debt to cover the interest payments … and so on.

Since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, there has been one thing it has without a doubt done to the dollar — devalue it.

From 1913 to today, the United States dollar has lost 97% of its purchasing power. That means what $1 was worth in 1913, is now worth $0.03. Another way to look at it is what you could buy for $1 in 1913 would now cost you $33.33

Slip Sliding Away: What US Decline Means for the World

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/jeffrey-gedmin/us-decline-what-it-means-for-the-world_b_4179521.html

This year's Legatum Prosperity Index found the United States slipping. Again. It's not good news for Americans, writes LI President and CEO Jeffrey Gedmin (Huffington Post).

"For those who believe, "it's the economy, stupid," it's mostly bad news. In the PI's economy sub-index, the United States has seen a decline of 24 per cent over the last five years, causing the country to fall from 12th in 2009 to 24th place this year. America is now trailing China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and most of Europe (including Francois Hollande's beleaguered France). In what once was an American bread and butter category, "entrepreneurship and opportunity," the U.S. is struggling. It keeps getting harder and costlier to start a new business in most places in the U.S. Fewer and fewer Americans today believe that hard work will get them ahead."

America's race to the bottom

https://sites.google.com/site/nodakwc/home/toomanylaws/Americas%20race%20to%20the%20bottom.rtf?attredirects=0&d=1

The United States has fallen behind in nearly every measure imaginable. The so-called greatest country in the world is now third in median household income, number four in labor force, number four in exports, seventh in literacy, 22nd in science, 27th in math, 34th in infant mortality and 35th in life expectancy.

Would you like to know what we are first in?

The U.S. is first in health care spending but 35th in life expectancy. We’re first in the number of incarcerated citizens per capita. We’re first in defense spending.

And the United States, once a “shining city on a hill” illumining a dark world with our practice of liberty, is now considered a bad example by Human Rights Watch. The group’s most recent report worries that “governments with poor human rights records may try to follow in America’s footsteps,” justifying their repression of citizen’s rights by citing our own.

Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe explaining his draconian “terrorism” laws by saying: “after all, the U.S. does the same thing.” Indeed we do: Detention without trial, extrajudicial killing, seizures of assets without any crime having been committed or sentence pronounced.

Americans are overregulated and overtaxed. The money taken from us is being used to build even more regulatory capacity, shovel out favors to business sectors with powerful lobbies, sustain the ranks of the unemployed (which is at an all-time high), and to maintain and operate an imperial system of global military intervention and surveillance.

For all that the government spends, our people are less healthy, less educated and less likely to succeed in life than people in dozens of other countries.

The Top 10 Least Corrupt Countries in the World.

USA not amongst the most honest.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/12/02/367815515/which-countries-are-the-most-corrupt

Four Scandinavian nations and New Zealand are the world's least corrupt countries while North Korea and Somalia are the most corrupt, according to the Corruption Perception Index released today by Transparency International.

• Top 10 Countries (And The U.S.)

• Rank Country Score

  • 1 Denmark 92

  • 2 New Zealand 91

  • 3 Finland 89

  • 4 Sweden 87

  • 5 Norway 86

  • 5 Switzerland 86

  • 7 Singapore 84

  • 8 Netherlands 83

  • 9 Luxembourg 82

  • 10 Canada 81

  • 17 Barbados 74

  • 17 Hong Kong 74

  • 17 Ireland 74

  • 17 United States 74

• Bottom 10 Countries

• Rank Country Score

  • 174 Somalia 8

  • 174 North Korea 8

  • 173 Sudan 11

  • 172 Afghanistan 12

  • 171 South Sudan 15

  • 170 Iraq 16

  • 169 Turkmenistan 17

  • 166 Uzbekistan 18

  • 166 Eritrea 18

  • 166 Libya 18

Source: Transparency International (About the data, sources)

United States ranks 23rd in overall well being in Worldwide comparison according to The Gallup-Healthways State of Global Well-Being:

2014 Country Well-Being Rankings report

http://info.healthways.com/hubfs/Well-Being_Index/2014_Data/Gallup-Healthways_State_of_Global_Well-Being_2014_Country_Rankings.pdf

U.S. Exodus

Putin's made no secret of the fact that he's looking to trade outside U.S. borders...

He's locked in 40 countries that want to be part of his ambitious new "Eurasian Economic Union," or EEU.

(The U.S. isn't invited.)

Putin's also chopping away at the dollar... In fact, Russia has cut its holdings of U.S. Treasurys by more than 40% since August of last year.

China, the largest buyer of U.S. debt, trimmed its holdings by $2.5 billion...

And Japan, the second-largest buyer, axed its holdings by $600 million.

Then... get this...

Saudi Arabia and the oil exporters chopped $4.4 BILLION in U.S. Treasurys from March to April alone!

"There are many countries that would be happy to join in dethroning the U.S. dollar," one Forbes contributor wrote.

So what happens when our dollar gets left in the dust?

U.S. mass exodus: Record number of Americans renounced citizenship in 2014

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/11/us-mass-exodus-record-number-of-americans-renounce/

A record-setting number of Americans renounced their citizenship in 2014,

up from 2,999 in 2013 to 3,415

This claims it is because of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. But, is it the only reason?

Russia's "Startling" Proposal To Europe: Dump The US, Join The Eurasian Economic Union

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-04/russias-startling-proposal-europe-dump-us-join-eurasian-economic-union

Russian-EU Alliance is an Apocalyptic Scenario for Washington

https://sputniknews.com/business/201607301043780772-europe-russia-us-sanctions/

“The EU is the US’ largest competitor, thus Washington doesn’t miss a chance to weaken the block. The Ukrainian conflict could not have come at a better time. The US has used this opportunity to drive a wedge between the EU and Russia,”

U.S. debt dump deepens in 2016

http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/16/news/economy/us-debt-dump-treasury/

So far this year, the global bank debt dump has reached $123 billion.

China, Russia, Norway, Brazil, Taiwan Dump US Treasurie

http://wolfstreet.com/2015/10/08/china-russia-norway-brazil-taiwan-dump-us-treasuries/

Five large purchasers of US Treasuries – China, Russia, Norway, Brazil, and Taiwan – have changed their minds. They’re dumping Treasuries, each for their own reasons that are now coinciding. And at the fastest rate on record.

Is Russia Dumping Nearly $118 Billion in U.S. Gov’t Bonds?

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/03/20/has-russia-been-dumping-over-a-billion-in-u-s-govt-bonds/

“We will encourage everybody to dump U.S. Treasury bonds, get rid of dollars as an unreliable currency, and leave the U.S. market,”

Russia Reveals 'Satan 2' Nuclear Missile Capable of Destroying Texas in One Blow

http://gizmodo.com/russia-reveals-satan-2-nuclear-missile-capable-of-destr-1788187587

The RS-28 Sarmat missile—better known as the Satan 2 nuclear missile—has finally been revealed after years of being hyped by the Russian government. According to a Russian publication aligned with the Kremlin called Sputnik, the super-nuke has a payload capable of destroying an area “the size of Texas.”

The new weapon can deploy warheads of 40 megatons, or about 2,000 times as powerful as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagaski in 1945. ...“Five or six of these ‘Satans’ as they are known by the US military, and the East Coast of the United States disappears.”

To make it even more frightening, the Satan 2 is also capable of evading radar defenses and could travel far enough to strike the US East and West Coast.

What's the other side of the story?

PUTIN LIBERATOR | RUSSIA LIBERATOR

http://putinliberator.com/en/

With more innocent American citizens being wrongfully convicted and wrongly murdered by its own Law and Government; lost Bill of Rights; and continuous threats to our lives, liberty, and property we American Citizens need security and protection from our own Government. We the People need new allies to fight the tyrants in the USA law and Govt.

Four NATO Nations Would Pick Russia to Defend Them If Threatened: Poll

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-17/melania-trump-s-slovenia-would-pick-russian-over-u-s-protection

Poll of 66 nations shows extent of shifting global alliances

China and Russia prefer each other’s support, survey shows

Who you gonna call? For the citizens of four NATO countries asked which military power they’d want fighting on their side if attacked, the answer was simple -- Russia. ...

Four NATO powers prefer Russia to the US, Gallup poll shows

https://www.rt.com/news/377828-four-nato-powers-prefer-russia/

A Gallup poll has revealed that citizens of four NATO nations would sooner count on Russia to defend them rather than the United States, Bloomberg reported on Friday, reflecting the changing perceptions of the US's role in global security. ...

(NEW)Russian army 2017 MiG 41S Su47S Sut50S Hypersonic Jet Fly Faster than any Anti Aircraft System

https://youtu.be/K8wOA-JGESs

After four decades and $200 billion, the US missile defense system is no match for a Russian nuclear attack

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/03/12/nation/after-four-decades-200-billion-us-missile-defense-system-is-no-match-russian-nuclear-attack

the US military has spent more than $200 billion in the nearly four decades since working to make that science fiction a reality.... The US only has a limited ability to destroy an incoming nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile, a study released last month by the American Physical Society concluded. It said that “the current capabilities are low and will likely continue to be low for the next 15 years” to protect the US against a strike from North Korea, which has an estimated 20 nuclear warheads and relatively unsophisticated missiles. The Pentagon disputes the findings and says the most recent tests show the system can handle a North Korean attack.

But the ability to defend against an attack by Russia, which is estimated to have nearly 6,000 nuclear warheads and highly sophisticated missile technology, is practically nonexistent. The US system is no match against a large number of incoming missiles — precisely the kind of attack that Russia would launch, experts said.

“This idea of an impenetrable shield against an enormous arsenal of Russian missiles is just a fantasy,” said Laura Grego, a fellow at MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy...

“Anyone who tries to interfere with us, or even more so, to create threats for our country and our people, must know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never before experienced in your history,” he said in a televised speech. A few days later, he announced Russia’s nuclear forces had been placed in “special combat readiness.”...

The US must depend on nuclear deterrence because the arithmetic of our limited missile defense system and Russia’s massive arsenal doesn’t add up... “If Russia wants to penetrate US missile defenses, they can.”...

Survey says: 35 percent of Americans would expatriate

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/30/survey-says-35-percent-of-americans-would-expatriate.html

Reasons cited for U.S. residents to stay in U.S.:

• • 59 percent of citizens cited "it is home" as a major factor for staying in the United States.

  • 58 percent, romantic and family ties were cited important reasons for anchoring in the U.S.,

  • 22 percent cited democratic society

  • 17 percent culture

  • 13 percent jobs

  • 10 percent good future for children

  • 5 percent affordable housing

  • 3 percent low crime rate

  • 2 percent said low taxes.

Is It Time to Leave America, While You Still Can?

http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2014/02/02/is-it-time-to-leave-america-while-you-still-can/

Many Have Already Left...Last year over a 155,000 Americans expatriated to foreign countries...

Do It For The Kids...America is no longer the land of opportunity as the United States is not even in the top ten. In fact, the United States only ranks 20th in terms of overall gross pay!

Employment...When all figures are combined, the Shadow Stats calculations are staggering as the unemployment and underemployment rate is approaching 24%!

America’s Economy Could Soon Collapse...Employment issues aside, America only has to look at three economic indicators to know that we are in a lot of trouble. The budget deficit is $17 trillion dollars, unfunded (partially or otherwise) mandated social programs constitutes another $222 trillion dollars and the credit swap derivatives total between $1 quadrillion dollars to $1.5 quadrillion dollars. When we look at Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all the government programs that we all take for granted, the price tag is a whopping $222 trillion dollars....Over 50 percent of all stocks and bonds are owned by just 1 percent of the U.S. population. Additionally, Treasury Secretary Lew is borrowing against select Federal retirement accounts.

Civil Liberties...Well, we may not have our health and we may not have our wealth, but at least we have our freedoms, don’t we? Nothing could be further from the truth....According to the Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index 2011, the United States is tied with Romania for forty-ninth in civil liberties.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road...DHS insider contact painted a very grim picture of the deadly martial law crackdown that is coming.

Record number give up US citizenship, green cards – US Treasury

https://www.rt.com/usa/331643-us-renounce-citizenship-record/

A record-breaking 4,279 individuals decided to call it quits with the US in 2015 in comparison to 3,415 people the previous year, according to a US Treasury report released on Friday.

The encroachment on foreign banks prompted many of them to scrap business with Americans living abroad, causing some US citizens overseas to give up their passports.

Since the law has come into effect, US authorities have collected $13.5 billion from foreign banking institutions and Americans in taxes and penalties.

The United States is the only nation within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that subjects its citizens to taxes irrespective of their place of residence.

Record Number Of Americans Renounce U.S. Citizenship In 2016; 2,200% Surge During Obama Reign

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-09/record-number-americans-renounce-their-us-citizenship-2016

The number of published expatriates for 4Q 2016 was 2,365, bringing the total number for 2016 to 5,411, setting a new all-time quarterly and annual record. ...

Russia-led Eurasian Union notches up major success in dumping dollar in favor of national currencies

https://www.rt.com/business/444957-eeu-share-settlement-national-currencies/?fbclid=IwAR1kkAx6BcnCRimgvVoqGu_F0A9HCImTlNNWZ6OEyxFoQVbR7K42HqeJUzs

“In the first six months of the current year, the share of settlements in national currencies between the members of the EEU exceeded 70 percent,” he said prior to a visit by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. “The further growth of the figure will be achieved via ensuring macroeconomic and financial stability, creating of a common financial market, and harmonization of legislative control over the financial sector,” ...

The EEU is not the only alliance of countries willing to replace the US dollar with alternative currencies in trade. Earlier this year, the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) of emerging economies took steps towards increasing settlements in local currencies to avoid using the greenback. Countries like China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela and others are also planning to substitute the US national currency in oil trade amid deliberate policy of sanctions implemented by Washington over recent years.... Officially launched in 2015, the EEU currently includes five member states – Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Moldova as an observer state. Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Turkmenistan, Iran, Turkey, Syria and Tunisia are reportedly planning to join the union.

Why bureaucracy will likely destroy America

http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/silveira50.html

US Debt Clock

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

Putting America's Record-Breaking $20 Trillion Debt In Global Context

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-23/putting-americas-record-breaking-20-trillion-debt-global-context

Popular approval for Congress averaged around 15% in 2014 according to Gallup, only just above the record-low average of 14%, which was set in 2013.

Source: EIU

Ranking America

https://rankingamerica.wordpress.com/tag/economist/

How does the United States rank…

https://rankingamerica.wordpress.com/how-does-the-united-states-rank-in/

1 out of every 5,000 people are in Slavery in the USA:

http://d3mj66ag90b5fy.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Global_Slavery_Index_2014_final_lowres.pdf

According to the Global Slavery Index, 2014, an estimated 0.019% of all the people in the United States are held in slavery. That is enough to make the United States rank one hundred forty-fifth out of one hundred sixty-seven countries ranked in that category. Mauritania ranks first, with an estimated 4% of its people held in slavery.

The U.S. ranks 46th in freedom of the press

http://rsf.org/index2014/en-index2014.php#

According to Reporters Without Borders, the United States has the forty-sixth freest press in the world (sandwiched between Romania and Haiti), a decline of thirteen spots from 2013. This decline was one of the biggest in the world.

2016 Index of Economic Freedom

http://www.heritage.org/index/

The U.S. has fallen from the 6th freest economy in the world to 11th place in 2016. America’s declining score in the index is closely related to rapidly rising government spending, subsidies, regulation, and bailouts.

Study concludes Americans are the stupidest people on the planet

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Satire-Study-Concludes-Am-by-Carmen-Yarrusso-100921-156.html

But a recent Rand study examining 160 countries concludes America now has the highest percentage of stupid people in all 10 internationally recognized categories of stupidity.... By far the factor contributing most to the final rankings in all categories was the competence (or lack thereof) of the government sustained by the people of each country. The study clearly shows the competence of a country’s government directly reflects the mental competence of the people it represents (conversely, the stupider a government’s policies, the stupider the people it represents).

It’s Official: Americans R Stupid

http://www.globalresearch.ca/its-official-americans-r-stupid/5437181

Half of American Millennials score below the minimum standard of literacy proficiency. ...That placed U.S. Millennials dead last for numeracy among the study’s 22 developed countries....

Top 10 Ways the US is the Most Corrupt Country in the World

https://www.juancole.com/2013/12/corrupt-country-world.html

United States Ranks 25th In World For Judicial Independence

http://justicedenied.org/issue/issue_72/jd_issue_72.pdf

The Judicial Independence rankings are based on a rating scale of 1 to 7. A score of 1 means a country’s judicial system heavily favors the government or well-connected firms and individuals. A score of 7 means a country’s judicial system is neutral.... USA ranks 25th at 5.5 ...

“Irregular payments and bribes.” That category includes how common it is “make undocumented extra payments or bribes connected with ... obtaining favorable judicial decisions?” The rankings are based on a rating scale of 1 to 7. A score of 1 means undocumented extra payments or bribes is “very common,” while a score of 7 means they “never occur.” ... USA ranks 34th at 5.2 ...

US Senate: Legislation & Records Home

- State Traitors making Laws

http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/two_column_table/Legislation_and_Procedure.htm

Congressional Record

- US Govt Printing Office

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/browse/collection.action?collectionCode=CREC

USA IS ROTTEN TO THE CORE. USA DEMOCRACY IS A SELF ROTTING DISEASE DESTROYING ITSELF FROM WITHIN ITSELF LIKE A CANCER. DEMOCRACY IS HYPOCRISY, IT IS NATIONAL AND RACIAL GENOCIDE, IT IS KORRUPTION, IT IS SLAVERY, IT IS INJUSTICE, IT IS UNEQUAL, ETC.. DEMOCRACY ALLOWS WRONG TO MIX WITH RIGHT AND THE MAJORITY WINS MAKES WRONG BECOME RIGHT IN MOST CASES. IT ALSO ALLOWS THE POWERFUL MINORITY TO OVERRULE THE MAJORITY REGARDLESS WHO IS RIGHT OR WRONG MERELY BY HAVING THE MOST MUNEE AND/OR POWER. THE WORLD AGREES EVEN AMONG THE DEMOCRACIES THEMSELVES....

US allies drive much of world’s democratic decline, data shows

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/11/16/world/us-allies-drive-much-worlds-democratic-decline-data-shows

With few exceptions, US-aligned countries saw almost no democratic growth in that period, even as many beyond Washington’s orbit did. The findings are reflected in data recorded by V-Dem, a Sweden-based nonprofit that tracks countries’ level of democracy across a host of indicators, and analyzed by The New York Times. The revelations cast democracy’s travails, a defining trend of the current era, in sharp light. They suggest that much of the world’s backsliding is not imposed on democracies by foreign powers, but rather is a rot rising within the world’s most powerful network of mostly democratic alliances. In many cases, democracies such as France or Slovenia saw institutions degrade, if only slightly, amid politics of backlash and distrust. In others, dictatorships like Bahrain curtailed already modest freedoms. But, often, the trend was driven by a shift toward illiberal democracy. In that form of government, elected leaders behave more like strongmen and political institutions are eroded...

THE USA IS FRAUD, AND FAILURE. THE USA NO LONGER REPRESENTS ITS FOUNDING AND MUST BE EITHER REINSTATE ITS FOUNDING, OR IT MUST BE DISMANTLED AND A NEW SYSTEM ESTABLISHED....

As faith flags in US government, many voters want to upend the system

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/07/13/nation/faith-flags-us-government-many-voters-want-upend-system/

A majority of American voters across nearly all demographics and ideologies believe their system of government does not work, with 58 percent of those interviewed for a New York Times/Siena College poll saying that the world’s oldest independent constitutional democracy needs major reforms or a complete overhaul....

"The Supreme Law of the Land"

is "The Constitution as it is written"

The Great Barrier to the Alienation of the Unalienable Natural Rights of All Free Men, and the Metes and Bounds of the Government of the United States,

is the Constitution for the United States.

The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the constitution is written. To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?

“An unconstitutional act is not law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties, affords no protection; it creates no office; it is in legal contemplation, as inoperative as though it had never been passed.” -1886 Supreme Court decision Norton v. Shelby County:

“All laws which are repugnant to the Constitution are null and void.” -1803 case of Marbury v. Madison

“If this opinion [of judicial supremacy] be sound,...The Constitution on this hypothesis is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.” -Thomas Jefferson

“To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps ... And their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The constitution has erected no such single tribunal.” -Thomas Jefferson

"Their jurisdiction is both derivative and limited:...The preservation of a free Government requires, not merely, that the metes and bounds which separate each department of power be invariably maintained:...The Rulers who are guilty of such an encroachment, exceed the commission from which they derive their authority, and are Tyrants. The people who submit to it are governed by laws made neither by themselves nor by an authority derived from them, and are Slaves"

-- James Madison, June 1785.

"If we find our government in all its branches rushing headlong, like our predecessors, into the arms of monarchy, if we find them violating our dearest rights, the trial by jury, the freedom of the press, the freedom of opinion, civil or religious, or opening on our peace of mind or personal safety the sluices of terrorism, if we see them raising standing armies, when the absence of all other danger points to these as the sole objects on which they are to be employed, then indeed let us withdraw and call the nation to its tents."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so." -Thomas Jefferson

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual. -Thomas Jefferson

The Constitution is the guide which I never will abandon. -George Washington

"The whole of the Bill (of Rights) is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals.... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of." (Albert Gallatin of the New York Historical Society, October 7, 1789)

A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate. -Thomas Jefferson

[I]f the public are bound to yield obedience to laws to which they cannot give their approbation, they are slaves to those who make such laws and enforce them. -Candidus

Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure. -Thomas Jefferson

If men through fear, fraud or mistake, should in terms renounce and give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the great end of society, would absolutely vacate such renunciation; the right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave. -Samuel Adams

The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. -George Washington

[T]he Constitution ought to be the standard of construction for the laws, and that wherever there is an evident opposition, the laws ought to give place to the Constitution. -Alexander Hamilton

They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes for that purpose. To consider the latter phrase not as describing the purpose of the first, but as giving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please...Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given them. It was intended to lace them up straightly within the enumerated powers and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect. -Thomas Jefferson

The Constitution on which our Union rests, shall be administered by me [as President] according to the safe and honest meaning contemplated by the plain understanding of the people of the United States at the time of its adoption - a meaning to be found in the explanations of those who advocated, not those who opposed it, and who opposed it merely lest the construction should be applied which they denounced as possible. -Thomas Jefferson

[T]he present Constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banners, bona fide must we combat our political foes -Alexander Hamilton

If it be asked, What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? The answer would be, An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws - the first growing out of the last. . . . A sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government. -Alexander Hamilton

In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution. -Thomas Jefferson

Mind provoking images of Too Many Laws:

(All images used on this page comes from the following Links:)

http://media.washtimes.com/media/image/2010/08/17/20100817-172804-pic-786674921_s160x243.jpg?68736b2b11440ed5d253fa9f80e9ebf6abff84ff

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gHQeHxcI-8c/UH05oooNOAI/AAAAAAAAJ1E/vFINcaaBhAE/s1600/A+country+with+too+many+laws+is+a+country+with+too+many+problems.jpg

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/s480x480/603981_464763996895175_1476939650_n.jpg

http://www.foundersintent.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Too-Many-Laws.png

http://blog.gaapweb.com/.a/6a00d83546328353ef01310ffb980d970c-500pi

http://thumbnails.visually.netdna-cdn.com/which-one-has-too-many-rules_50291a53abbcf_w587.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RwdH5DTKRas/TE-g2vLQ08I/AAAAAAAADLE/MctecVV0QHA/s400/incarceration+rate+by+country+chart.gif

http://talesfromthelou.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/bureaucracy.jpg?w=400&h=284

http://thebilzerianreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/1984-poster.jpg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YmD5pJS0VA8/TtWS2MwHvGI/AAAAAAAAAdg/BDFkNkIaBpE/s1600/crime+4.JPG

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_RwdH5DTKRas/TE-ftWKsO_I/AAAAAAAADK8/graR7GZeoP0/s640/three+felonies+a+day.jpg

http://media.economist.com/images/images-magazine/2010/30/ld/201030ldp001.jpg

http://plancksconstant.org/blog1/iamges/sub5/overcrim.jpg

http://grrrgraphics.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/authority_man.jpg?w=640&h=457

http://user.cavenet.com/rolandl/NORML_Remember_Prohibition.jpg

http://images.sodahead.com/profiles/0/0/2/9/6/1/0/2/3/Too-many-laws-98204273855.jpeg

http://www.tentmaker.org/images/lawyers_per_capita.gif

http://www.political-humor.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/guns-are-not-the-problem-people-are-the-problem-including-people-who-are-determined-to-push-gun-control-laws.jpg

http://oi43.tinypic.com/34sgprq.jpg

http://bobcohenlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/header_17.jpg

http://media.gamespy.com/columns/image/article/568/568835/half-life-2-the-signs-of-city-17-20041124045445061.jpg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BVU9U3KHhVE/UAciFZuCVVI/AAAAAAAAAIo/iYKCTDd_o0Q/s1600/crazy+and+insane.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Vg2M24nDzmI/TtLEbXftDXI/AAAAAAAABfw/zvC0B-ssc1Y/s1600/laws+-+rules+are+for+fools.jpg

http://reformimmigrationfortexas.org/1/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/nativistdummy.jpg

https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/2c730a3dbba62a42a5e422659b7bb356.jpg?s=78&d=https://ideascale.com/images/avatar/idea-man.png

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-omnhpXIV-Aw/T7-SZ9bZ2kI/AAAAAAAAAvk/vqYCUxe1nLc/s1600/laws.jpg

http://img.geekpark.net/uploads/reading/seed/2c3d069c2e5adab9f9e9ecc3cd5a8c88.jpg

http://pulse-of-petaluma.blogs.petaluma360.com/files/2009/08/pulse090827.jpg

http://www.usacarry.com/forums/attachments/firearm-politics-2nd-amendment-issues/9206d1363752789-sheriff-warns-second-american-revolution-if-gun-confiscation-laws-pass-image02220.jpg

http://dwbracken.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/lightbulb.jpg

http://rlv.zcache.com/jefferson_big_governement_will_take_everything_sticker-p217212674428451998q0ou_400.jpg

http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/p480x480/482186_342542805862474_1805018140_n.jpg

http://www.libertygunrights.com/JeffersonOnUltimatePg2.gif

http://www.opednews.com/populum/cachedimages/s_500_img641_imageshack_us_0_49013014.gif

http://thecynicaleconomist.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/motivator1.jpg

Comment:

How can you support and defend the Constitution of the USA when you no longer have a Constitution remaining to defend, nor do you have the Rights to defend it with?

Revolution 2

Comment:

By making many laws, and making many criminals the governments are able to control the people and force the citizens to walk in line with their agenda. Putting restraints and conditions on the so-called criminals allows the legal system to disregard the Constitution stripping the Rights of the citizens. Bogus charges and wrongful convictions are also added along with the numerous laws to subjugate any potential rival that would dare speak against this corrupt system.

The only enforcement the people had to keep the corrupt government in check was their Right to Bear Arms. It becomes so crystal clear that a corrupt government, and a corrupt legal system would naturally remove the only means of protection and enforcement the citizens had to maintain their freedoms and liberties. The founders of America knew this big government would soon tyrannize thus, is the reasoning for the peoples right to arms.

With the removal of the peoples Right to Bear Arms the corrupt Government, and corrupt Legal System, along with their immunity are free to tyrannize whenever they want. Afterall, who is going to stop them?

The Court and Overcriminalization

http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/court-and-overcriminalization

The overcriminalization canon is triggered when the government prosecutes an individual for a single act (or course of conduct) under a criminal statute whose main purpose has nothing to do with the defendant’s conduct, yet which contains broadly worded provisions with words that, read literally, encompass it. The canon applies when the government is demanding years of incarceration for a far-from-deadly criminal act: either it is piling on, adding a federal charge when traditionally a state one would suffice, or it is criminalizing what would normally be a civil infraction.

How Columbus’ “Discovery” Set Off the Brutal Native American Oppression that Continues Today

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/doctrine-discovery-500-years-genocide

In 1454, the Bull Romanus Pontifex was issued by Pope Nicholas V to King Alfonso V of Portugal , which declared war upon all non-Christians worldwide. He specifically sanctioned and promoted the conquest, colonization, and exploitation of all non-Christians and lands under their control.

...Essentially, all Native nations were subject to the ultimate authority of Christendom and the US could then claim possession of any region of indigenous lands.

...The Court essentially affirmed that U.S. law was based upon precedent of the “Law of Nations,” and that it is was permissible, as such, to ignore native rights as they were considered “heathens.” All “unoccupied lands” of America, rightfully belonged to any Christian European nation that claimed them.

...Operating from a standpoint of legal recognition for “discovery,” in 1831, the Supreme Court stated in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia that the Cherokee Nation (and, by default, all Native nations) was not fully sovereign, but “may, perhaps,” be deemed a “domestic dependent nation.”

This decision allowed the federal government to refuse to recognize legal treaties made with Indian nations, as they were no longer considered sovereign nations, but under U.S. government control.

Native American nations were now considered “domestic dependent nations” subject to the federal government’s absolute legislative authority – known as “plenary power.” This power is a direct retardation of the those enumerated in the Constitution, and was never intended by the Founding Fathers.

Somehow an ancient Christian religious doctrine, which allowed for the subjugation of “heathen” non-Christians, was granted legitimacy by the U.S. federal government. This, in turn, allowed the federal government to exert almost complete control over Native nations and their lands.

Five Hundred Years of Injustice: The Legacy of Fifteenth Century Religious Prejudice

http://ili.nativeweb.org/sdrm_art.html

Woman killed for witchcraft in 1715 to get retrial in Brentonico, Italy

http://mmc-news.com/news-woman-killed-for-witchcraft-in-1715-to-get-retrial-in-brentonico-italy-251690.dbv

A VILLAGE council in rural Italy has decided to give a retrial to a woman 300 years after she was convicted and killed for the crime of witchcraft.

Retrial ... Toldini was publicly beheaded and her body burned after she was convicted of witchcraft.

A VILLAGE council in rural Italy has decided to give a retrial to a woman 300 years after she was convicted and killed for the crime of witchcraft.

Maria Bertoletti Toldini was condemned to death in Brentonico aged 60, the Guardian reported.

She was found guilty in 1715 of an array of bizarre and horrific crimes that included child murders, making land barren and throwing a five-year-old into a pot of boiling cheese. Toldini was publicly beheaded and her body burned.

A local official in the pretty Alpine village is now seeking to clear her name.

Local culture minister Quinto Canali has investigated the records and thinks Toldini was entirely innocent and was probably targeted because she was childless and a widow.

Mr Canali told the Guardian he was inspired to act after watching a theatrical re-enactment of Toldini’s story aimed at tourists that he said cheapened her suffering.

“Who would have the idea of doing a comedy folkloric show on Auschwitz?” he said. “If we see in our history that there was something that was wrong against humanity, we have to know it and say that this history was wrong.”

He told the paper that the trial will involve a real judge in a real court of appeals familiar with medieval laws.

While there are no exact figures it is thought that thousands of women were killed for witchcraft across Europe throughout the Middle Ages.

OverCriminalization

http://www.heritage.org/issues/legal/overcriminalization

Criminalization by Bureaucrat: Scores of federal departments and agencies have created so many criminal offenses that the Congressional Research Service itself admitted that it was unable to even count all of the offenses. The service’s best estimate? “Tens of thousands.” In short, Congress’s own experts do not have a clear understanding of the size and scope of federal criminalization.

Deeply Flawed Criminal Offenses: A recent Heritage-NACDL joint study reported that three out of every five new non-violent offenses have inadequate criminal-intent requirements. This means that they fail to protect from unjust criminal punishment Americans who engaged in conduct that they did not know was illegal or otherwise wrongful.

Breakneck Pace Continues: Despite existing overcriminalization, Congress continues to criminalize at an average rate of one new crime for every week of every year (including when its Members are not in session).

Repeal Unjust Laws: Congress seems to have forgotten that it can repeal bad laws. It can and should. The worst, most unjust criminal offenses should be thrown into the legislative dumpster.

Black man serving life sentence for stealing hedge clippers granted parole

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/black-man-serving-life-sentence-stealing-hedge-clippers-granted-parole-n1243757

A Black man in Louisiana serving life in prison for stealing hedge clippers more than two decades ago was granted parole — months after the state's Supreme Court declined to review his sentence. The Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole voted Thursday to release Fair Wayne Bryant, 63, records show. He walked out of prison later that day after serving more than 20 years at the state penitentiary in Angola, his attorney said....

Bryant was 38 when he was arrested in January 1997 for taking a pair of clippers from a carport storeroom at a home in Shreveport. The homeowner was alerted to the theft and chased Bryant off....One justice, Scott Crichton, recused himself from the case while Chief Justice Bernette Johnson wrote in a dissent that his sentence was "excessive."

"This man’s life sentence for a failed attempt to steal a set of hedge clippers is grossly out of proportion to the crime and serves no legitimate penal purpose," Johnson wrote, comparing it to the post-Reconstruction era laws that mandated harsh penalties for petty theft associated with poverty. She said those laws “were largely designed to re-enslave African Americans" and "undoubtedly contributed to the expansion of the Black prison population that began in the 1870s."...

NO STATE SHALL MAKE OR ENFORCE ANY UNCONSTITUTIONAL LAW.

IF A LAW IS CONSTITUTIONAL FEDERAL LAW IS SUPREME OVER STATE LAW, WHICH MEANS STATE LAW IF CONSTITUTIONAL MUST BE LESS RESTRICTIVE COMPARED TO FEDERAL.

CHAPTER 12.1-07 TREASON - FLAG DESECRATION

https://www.legis.nd.gov/cencode/t12-1.html

12.1-07-02. Desecration of the flag of the United States.

1.A person is guilty of a classA misdemeanor if he knowingly casts contempt upon anyflag of the United States by publicly mutilating, defacing, defiling, burning, or tramplingupon it.

2.The term "flag of the United States" as used in this section shall include any flag,standard, colors, or ensign, or any picture or representation of either, or of any part orparts of either, made of any substance or represented on any substance, of any sizeevidently purporting to be either of said flag, standard, colors, or ensign of the UnitedStates of America, or a picture or a representation of either, upon which shall beshown the colors, the stars and the stripes, in any number of either thereof, or of anypart or parts of either, by which the average person seeing the same withoutdeliberation may believe the same to represent the flag, standard, colors, or ensign ofthe United States of America.

12.1-07-03. Carrying in parade or the display of certain flags, ensigns, banners, andstandards prohibited.

No flag of any nation, state, country, or territory other than the flag of the United States or astate flag, or the flag of a friendly foreign nation, or the dependencies of such nations, shall be:

1.Carried in parade on any public street or highway within this state.

2.Exhibited in any hall or public place.

3.Displayed or exhibited:a.On any vehicle.b.On any building or premises.c.In any other manner in public within the state.

Flag burning constitutes symbolic speech that is protected by the First Amendment.

https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-activities/facts-and-case-summary-texas-v-johnson

Facts and case summary for Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989).

The majority of the Court, according to Justice William Brennan, agreed with Johnson and held that flag burning constitutes a form of "symbolic speech" that is protected by the First Amendment. The majority noted that freedom of speech protects actions that society may find very offensive, but society's outrage alone is not justification for suppressing free speech. In particular, the majority noted that the Texas law discriminated upon viewpoint, i.e., although the law punished actions, such as flag burning, that might arouse anger in others, it specifically exempted from prosecution actions that were respectful of venerated objects, e.g., burning and burying a worn-out flag. The majority said that the government could not discriminate in this manner based solely upon viewpoint.

[LIKEWISE NORTH DAKOTA VIOLATES FEDERAL LAWS, ITS OWN STATE LAWS, AND THE USA AND STATE CONSTITUTIONS. THIS FLAG BURNING LAW IS EXAMPLE, AS WELL AS ITS GUN LAWS. FEDERAL UNCONSTITUTIONAL LAWS BAN ITS SLAVES FOR THE CRIMES OF EVERYTHING BUT ONLY WHEN THE SLAVE IS SENTENCED BEYOND A YEAR WHICH IS THE FEDERAL DEFINITION OF FELONY. BUT NORTH DAKOTA HAS ADDED ITS OWN UNCONSTITUTIONAL LAWS WHICH ARE MORE RESTRICTIVE THAN FEDERAL SUPREMACY CLAUSE.]

"Democracy in its turn is abolished and changes into a rule of force and violence" as the people grow more "accustomed to feed at the expense of others and to depend for their livelihood on the property of others."

- Polybius (Greek historian 200-118 BC)

When a commonwealth, after warding off many great dangers, has arrived at a high pitch of prosperity and undisputed power, it is evident that, by the lengthened continuance of great wealth within it, the manner of life of its citizens will become more extravagant; and that the rivalry for office, and in other spheres of activity, will become fiercer than it ought to be. And as this state of things goes on more and more, the desire of office and the shame of losing reputation, as well as the ostentation and extravagance of living, will prove the beginning of a deterioration. And of this change the people will be credited with being the authors, when they become convinced that they are being cheated by some from avarice, and are puffed up with flattery by others from love of office. For when that comes about, in their passionate resentment and acting under the dictates of anger, they will refuse to obey any longer, or to be content with having equal powers with their leaders, but will demand to have all or far the greatest themselves. And when that comes to pass the constitution will receive a new name, which sounds better than any other in the world, liberty or democracy; but, in fact, it will become that worst of all governments, mob-rule.

POLYBIUS

But as soon as a new generation has arisen, and the democracy has descended to their children’s children, long association weakens their value for equality and freedom, and some seek to become more powerful than the ordinary citizens; and the most liable to this temptation are the rich. So when they begin to be fond of office, and find themselves unable to obtain it by their own unassisted efforts and their own merits, they ruin their estates, while enticing and corrupting the common people in every possible way.

By which means when, in their senseless mania for reputation, they have made the populace ready and greedy to receive bribes, the virtue of democracy is destroyed, and it is transformed into a government of violence and the strong hand. For the mob, habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have its hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbours, as soon as it has got a leader sufficiently ambitious and daring, being excluded by poverty from the sweets of civil honours, produces a reign of mere violence. Then come tumultuous assemblies, massacres, banishments, redivisions of land; until, after losing all trace of civilisation, it has once more found a master and a despot....

This is the regular cycle of constitutional revolutions, and the natural order in which constitutions change, are transformed, and return again to their original stage. If a man have a clear grasp of these principles he may perhaps make a mistake as to the dates at which this or that will happen to a particular constitution; but he will rarely be entirely mistaken as to the stage of growth or decay at which it has arrived, or as to the point at which it will undergo some revolutionary change.... POLYBIUS

Polybius The Histories Book 6 Hilites

https://sites.google.com/site/korruptlaw/home/books/Polybius%20The%20Histories%20Book%206%20Hilites.rtf

Polybius The Histories Book 6 Hilites

https://sites.google.com/site/korruptlaw/home/books/Polybius%20The%20Histories.rtf

Modern Law has made the

U.S. Constitution illegal.

Your government, law enforcement, courts, and military no longer supports and defends the Constituiton. Instead they traitorously enforce modern laws of perversion which criminalizes your activities which were guaranteed by the Constitution.

They do not obey the Constitution. Instead they obey Money. The enforcers of our Freedom are mercenaries. Paid defenders which have criminalized the militia by dis-arming America through trickery traitorous gun control laws, and by criminalizing activities which defend the true intent of the Constitution.

Your Government, Law Enforcement, Courts, Miltary, and everyone else foreign and domestic who are not defending and supporting the U.S. Constitution are guilty of perjury to the oath they swore, and by definition of the true law of the land should be considered enemies of the United States Constitution, and guilty of Treason.

Todays America = Hitler's Germany

https://sites.google.com/site/nodakwc/home/toomanylaws/nazi_usa%20similarities.rtf?attredirects=0&d=1

Mother Jones on Overcriminalization

Chase Madar:

If all you’ve got is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. And if police and prosecutors are your only tool, sooner or later everything and everyone will be treated as criminal. This is increasingly the American way of life, a path that involves “solving” social problems (and even some non-problems) by throwing cops at them, with generally disastrous results. Wall-to-wall criminal law encroaches ever more on everyday life as police power is applied in ways that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago….

The term “police state” was once brushed off by mainstream intellectuals as the hyperbole of paranoids. Not so much anymore. Even in the tweediest precincts of the legal system, the over-criminalization of American life is remarked upon with greater frequency and intensity. “You’re probably a (federal) criminal” is the accusatory title of a widely read essay co-authored by Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit of the US Court of Appeals. A Republican appointee, Kozinski surveys the morass of criminal laws that make virtually every American an easy target for law enforcement. Veteran defense lawyer Harvey Silverglate has written an entire book about how an average American professional could easily commit three felonies in a single day without knowing it.

The daily overkill of police power in the US goes a long way toward explaining why more Americans aren’t outraged by the “excesses” of the war on terror, which, as one law professor has argued, are just our everyday domestic penal habits exported to more exotic venues. It is no less true that the growth of domestic police power is, in this positive feedback loop, the partial result of our distant foreign wars seeping back into the homeland (the “imperial boomerang” that Hannah Arendt warned against).Many who have long railed against our country’s everyday police overkill have reacted to the revelations of NSA surveillance with detectable exasperation: of course we are over-policed! Some have even responded with peevish resentment: Why so much sympathy for this Snowden kid when the daily grind of our justice system destroys so many lives without comment or scandal? After all, in New York, the police department’s “stop and frisk” tactic, which targets African American and Latino working-class youth for routinized street searches, was until recently uncontroversial among the political and opinion-making class.

If “the gloves came off” after September 11, 2001, many Americans were surprised to learn they had ever been on to begin with.A hammer is necessary to any toolkit. But you don’t use a hammer to turn a screw, chop a tomato, or brush your teeth. And yet the hammer remains our instrument of choice, both in the conduct of our foreign policy and in our domestic order. The result is not peace, justice, or prosperity but rather a state that harasses and imprisons its own people while shouting ever less intelligibly about freedom.

Read the whole thing. The article by Judge Kozinski appears in my book, In the Name of Justice, found on the home page here.

These States Have Stopped Locking Up Crooks -- And Their Crime Rates are Down Dramatically

http://www.mainstreet.com/article/these-states-have-stopped-locking-up-crooks--and-their-crime-rates-are-down-dramatically/page/2

NEW YORK (MainStreet) — America has gotten tough on crime – and crime rates are falling significantly. You might think that would mean prisons full of offenders. In fact, the opposite is true. While over the past five years most states have been reducing imprisonment rates, crime has been reduced significantly as well, according to Pew research.

How can that be? A combination of factors are in play, including a wrenching recession which tightened state budgets, changing public attitudes toward drug enforcement and fewer violent crimes being committed.

But one overriding reason could be: More than two thirds of people recently surveyed by the Pew Research Center said government should focus more on treating drug offenders rather than jailing them. In fact, crime has declined most – by an average of 13% -- in the 33 states where imprisonment rates have decreased.

While more states consider or enact measures to decriminalize marijuana possession, prisons are less crowded with offenders once charged with a felony who are now facing simple misdemeanors. Mandatory minimum sentences are being shortened and automatic sentence enhancements are being eliminated, according to Pew's research.

That means a reduction in the prison population held at the state level – which houses six times more offenders than federal lockups. California, Hawaii and Rhode Island all reduced their imprisonment rates by 19-25% and saw crime rates fall from 11-14%. The states with the largest reductions in prison populations all saw their crime rates fall significantly.

Costs have been a big driver of the incarceration reconsideration. States just couldn't afford to keep locking up its citizens in growing numbers. Total costs per inmate can top an average of $31,000 a year when all expenses are factored in. That ranges from a low of $14,603 in Kentucky to a high of over $60,000 in New York, according to a 2012 study conducted by the Vera Institute of Justice.

Nationally, imprisonment rates are down 6% from their peak in 2008. The crime rate has plunged by 16% over the same period, according to a Pew analysis of statistics released by the FBI this week. While reduced crime statistics don't always correlate to lower imprisonment rates -- reflecting what Pew says is the "complex relationship between incarceration and crime" – governments facing the budget realities of continuing to build more and bigger prisons and locking up more offenders for longer periods of time are causing voters and officials to seek other solutions.

Most States Cut Imprisonment and Crime

http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/about/news-room/news/2014/12/most-states-cut-imprisonment-and-crime

Thirty-two states reduced both their imprisonment and crime rates over the past five years, according to a Pew analysis of crime data released by the FBI on Monday, November 10. With the national imprisonment rate down 6 percent from its peak in 2008 and the crime rate falling 16 percent over the same period, these […]

Ben Carson:

U.S. should rethink Supreme Court review of laws

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-ben-carson-constitution-20150510-story.html

— Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson says the United States should rethink the notion that a president must enforce laws the Supreme Court declares constitutional. Carson said Sunday that "we need to discuss" the court's long-held power to review laws passed by Congress. That authority was established in the 1803 landmark case Marbury v. Madison.

However... when one looks up Marbury vs. Madison, it does not get strong reviews on its own merits, so there may be more here than first perceived, such as promoting a legal argument that he finds interesting. The decision went further than the court...

Carson, the former head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins and a longtime resident of Baltimore County, announced his candidacy for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination last week in Detroit. He now lives in Florida. He was asked on "Fox News Sunday" whether the executive branch is obligated to enforce laws that the Supreme Court declares constitutional. "We need to get into a discussion of this because it has changed from the original intent," he said. Carson has said a president is obliged to carry out laws passed by Congress, but not what he called "judicial laws" that emanate from courts.

Did you know that 80% of the world’s lawyers are located right here in the United States?

Which is probably why there were 15 million lawsuits filed last year alone.

That’s one new lawsuit every two seconds.

That means you have about a 10% chance of getting sued, every year.

Even if you’re not in the super-rich category, as long as you’ve got decent savings … a lawyer — somewhere out there — is fixing to seize it.

They’ll ALWAYS Find SOMETHING on You

Over-criminalization: converting trivial, harmless acts into major felonies.

Federal appellate judge Alex Kozinski wrote an essay entitled “You’re (Probably) a Federal Criminal.”In it he gives numerous examples of federal felony statues that are so absurd that no one with a sense of justice would ever use them. Indeed, if all these laws were enforced as written, “Any attempt to go after all criminals would sweep up millions of people.”

But selectivity is precisely the point of many of these laws. As crusading lawyer-journalist Glenn Greenwald points out, “When everything — even trivial transgressions — can become a serious felony, it empowers law enforcement to punish whomever they want.”

When federal prosecutors want to punish someone for a crime they can’t prove, they just rummage around in their “bottomless bag of federal offenses” to turn that person into a criminal — for something else entirely.

Freedom and central planning can never coexist

http://personalliberty.com/freedom-and-central-planning-can-never-coexist/

...When a government becomes a power mechanism for a select few, it has lost all relevance. When a government like ours here in America violates the tenets of individual liberty despite its constitutional mandate in the name of “protecting” individual liberty, that government no longer serves any purpose. Even further, when a government’s policies are designed only to ensure its own continued dominance rather than the freedom and prosperity of the citizenry, that government becomes separate from the people and is, by extension, an enemy to the citizenry.

...Governments and the elites behind them retain control over populations through the use of central planning. Central planning is essentially a bureaucratic structure that bottlenecks productivity, resources, academia and ideas until all progress and expression require approval. That is to say, central planning is a machine that turns rights into privileges. It also sets up bureaucracy as the final arbiter of who is considered an authority in any particular field and who is a “layman.” These designations are not based on individual ability, intelligence or accomplishment. Rather, they are based on subservience and the level of blind faith in the establishment each person is willing to display in order to attain professional status.

...We will lose our advantage of independent action if we allow the following changes to occur within our culture: ...

8 Reasons Why America is NOT "The Land of the Free" - A 4th of July Special

http://blog.happierabroad.com/2014/07/reasons-why-america-is-not-free.html

The notion that America has "special freedoms" that the rest of the world doesn't, like many concepts in America, turns out to be a baseless myth upon examination.

In actuality, America is one of the least free countries in the world, compared to most other countries. Yet Americans are brainwashed to believe that they live in "the land of the free" without reason or basis.

Here are good logical reasons why America is not "the land of the free", but is in fact one of the most unfree countries:

1. America has the highest number of laws in the world.

2. The size of the US government has increased in size by 20 times since the dawn of the 20th Century.

3. The US has one of the highest costs of living in the world.

4. America has the highest prison population in the world.

5. US social culture is way too politically correct, which greatly reduces your ability to speak freely and honestly.

6. American social culture is fake, artificial, phony and toxic, which doesn't allow you to be your true self.

7. The social vibe in America is permeated with high levels of fear and paranoia, creating segregation between people, and making the country socially unfree.

8. People in modern America seem repressed, robotic and zombie-like, like they have no soul and are not alive.

"The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom."

-John Locke

“The first thing we do,

let’s kill all the lawyers.”

-Shakespeare (King Henry VI)

Jury nullification

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

Jury nullification occurs in a trial when a jury acquits a defendant, even though the members of the jury may believe that the defendant did the illegal act, yet they don't believe he or she should be punished for it. This may occur when members of the jury disagree with the law the defendant has been charged with breaking, or believe that the law should not be applied in that particular case....

Some maintain that it is an important safeguard of last resort against wrongful imprisonment and government tyranny....

In the United States, jury nullification first appeared just before the American Revolutionary War when colonial juries frequently exercised their nullification power, principally in maritime cases and cases implicating free speech. Jury nullification became so common that many British prosecutors gave up trying maritime cases because conviction seemed hopeless. In the pre-Civil War era, juries sometimes refused to convict for violations of the Fugitive Slave Act. Later, during Prohibition, juries often nullified alcohol control laws, possibly as often as 60% of the time. This resistance may have contributed to the adoption of the Twenty-first amendment repealing Prohibition, the Eighteenth amendment....

In the 21st century, many discussions of jury nullification center on drug laws that some consider unjust either in principle or because they are seen to discriminate against certain groups. A jury nullification advocacy group estimates that 3–4% of all jury trials involve nullification, and a recent rise in hung juries is seen by some as being indirect evidence that juries have begun to consider the validity or fairness of the laws themselves....

Jury nullification in the United States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification_in_the_United_States

Jury nullification in the United States has its origins in colonial British America. Similar to British law, in the United States jury nullification occurs when a jury in a criminal case reaches a verdict contrary to the weight of evidence, sometimes because of a disagreement with the relevant law. The American jury draws its power of nullification from its right to render a general verdict in criminal trials, the inability of criminal courts to direct a verdict no matter how strong the evidence, the Fifth Amendment’s Double Jeopardy Clause, which prohibits the appeal of an acquittal, and the fact that jurors can never be punished for the verdict they return....

In a 1998 article, Vanderbilt University Law Professor Nancy J. King wrote that "recent reports suggest jurors today are balking in trials in which a conviction could trigger a three strikes or other mandatory sentence, and in assisted suicide, drug possession, and firearms cases."...

Nullifying juries more interested in justice than some prosecutors

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/08/06/jury-nullification-prosecutorial-discretion-column/31124011/

If you are a member of a jury in a criminal case, even if you think the defendant is guilty of the crimes charged, you are entirely free to vote for acquittal if you think that the prosecution is malicious or unfair, or that a conviction in that case would be unjust, or that the law itself is unconstitutional or simply wrong. And if you do so, there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Judges and prosecutors know this. But they don’t want jurors to know it, which is why we occasionally see cases like this one, in which jury-information activist Mark Iannicelli was arrested and charged with “jury tampering” for setting up a small booth in front of a Denver courthouse labeled “Juror Info” and passing out leaflets. Putting up a sign and passing out leaflets sounds like free speech to me, but apparently Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey feels differently.

The last time I noticed a case like this was in 2012, where a retired chemistry professor did pretty much the same thing. Federal District Judge Kimba Wood dismissed the indictment. At the time, NYU Law professor Rachel Barkow commented, “I don’t think sensible prosecutors should have even brought this case.” Well, sensible prosecutors didn’t.

And UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh wrote: “It seems to me that such speech is constitutionally protected, and that the indictment therefore violates the First Amendment. One can debate whether jury nullification is good or bad for the legal system, but it’s clear that it’s not a crime for jurors to refuse to convict even when the jury instructions seem to call for a guilty verdict. So Heicklen is encouraging a jury to engage in legal — even if, in the view of some, harmful — conduct.” It’s legal, but prosecutors don’t want jurors to know about it because if jurors knew they were free to acquit in the interest of justice, it would weaken prosecutors. (Prosecutors don’t even like billboards aimed at educating jurors.)

Of course, prosecutors have essentially the same power, since they’re under no obligation to bring charges against even an obviously guilty defendant. But while the power of juries to let guilty people go free in the name of justice is treated as suspect and called “jury nullification,” the power of prosecutors to do the exact same thing is called “prosecutorial discretion,” and is treated not as a bug, but as a feature in our justice system. But there’s no obvious reason why one is better than the other. Yes, prosecutors are professionals — but they’re also politicians, which means that their discretion may be employed politically. And they’re repeat players in the justice system, which makes them targets for corruption in a way that juries — laypeople who come together for a single case — aren’t.

As Clay S. Conrad notes in his Jury Nullification: The Evolution Of A Doctrine, to the framers of our Constitution, jury nullification was itself a feature, not a bug. Distrustful of the bureaucracy and even of the judiciary, framing-era Americans viewed a jury’s refusal to convict as an important protection for liberty. This remained the case until, Conrad notes, juries began refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, because they thought returning escaped slaves to their owners was unjust. In response, the system began trying to get around juries’ power not to convict. These efforts increased when juries were reluctant to convict labor leaders, or to enforce Prohibition. And though there were racist juries that refused to convict racist defendants in the civil rights era, Conrad notes that those juries were part of a system that also involved racist prosecutors, racist police, and racist judges.

Nowadays, jury nullification is less important because, as I recently wrote in the Columbia Law Review, so few cases even go to a jury anymore. Instead, prosecutors draft massive “kitchen sink” indictments charging dozens or hundreds of crimes, then bludgeon defendants into accepting a plea bargain rather than risk a trial in which conviction on even a single count out of hundreds of charges could be disastrous. A different kind of jury — the grand jury — is supposed to discipline prosecutors on indictments, but in practice, they’ve turned into rubber stamps for the most part.

If we value justice in this nation, the solution isn’t to give prosecutors a freer hand. It’s to hold them more firmly to the limitations our nation’s founders intended. That’s not “tampering.” It’s setting things right.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself.

Jury Nullification:

Why Every American Needs to

Learn This Taboo Verdict

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23929-jury-nullification-why-every-american-needs-to-learn-this-taboo-verdict

Did you know that, no matter the evidence, if a jury feels a law is unjust, it is permitted to “nullify” the law rather than finding someone guilty? Basically, jury nullification is a jury’s way of saying, “By the letter of the law, the defendant is guilty, but we also disagree with that law, so we vote to not punish the accused.” Ultimately, the verdict serves as an acquittal....

The Law - Frederic Bastiat

https://mises.org/sites/default/files/thelaw.pdf

The Law Hi-lites

https://sites.google.com/site/korruptlaw/home/books/The%20Law%20by%20Frederic%20Bastiat%20%28Hilites%29.rtf

"The Socialists say, since the law organizes justice, why should it not organize labor, instruction, and religion? Why? Because it could not organize labor, instruction, and religion, without disorganizing justice. ...

But when the law, through the medium of its necessary agent—force—imposes a form of labor, a method or a subject of instruction, a creed, or a worship, it is no longer negative; it acts positively upon men. It substitutes the will of the legislator for their own will, the initiative of the legislator for their own initiative. They have no need to consult, to compare, or to foresee; the law does all that for them. The intellect is for them a useless encumbrance; they cease to be men; they lose their personality, their liberty, their property.

Try to imagine a form of labor imposed by force, that is not a violation of liberty; a transmission of wealth imposed by force, that is not a violation of property. If you cannot succeed in reconciling this, you are bound to conclude that the law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice." ...

"You must see, then, that the socialist democrats cannot in conscience allow men any liberty, because, by their own nature, they tend in every instance to all kinds of degradation and demoralization. We are therefore left to conjecture, in this case, upon what foundation universal suffrage is claimed for them with so much importunity.... You must observe that I am not contending against their right to invent social combinations, to propagate them, to recommend them, and to try them upon themselves, at their own expense and risk; but I do dispute their right to impose them upon us through the medium of the law, that is, by force and by public taxes." ...

THE LAW

The law perverted! The law—and, in its wake, all the collective forces of the nation—the law, I say,

not only diverted from its proper direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary! The law become the tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its

check! The law guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish! Truly, this is a serious fact, if it exists, and one to which I feel bound to call the attention of my fellow citizens....

Frédéric Bastiat (The Law)

https://mises.org/sites/default/files/thelaw.pdf

*****

USA vs. YOU

http://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/2013/pdf/USAvsYOU.pdf

SEE THE STORIES NOW AND DEFEND YOUR LIBERTIES

Due Process When Everything Is a Crime

http://columbialawreview.org/ham-sandwich-nation_reynolds/

Prosecutorial discretion poses an increasing threat to justice. The threat has in fact grown more severe to the point of becoming a due process issue. ...

When everything is a crime

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-everything-is-a-crime/2015/04/08/1929ab88-dd43-11e4-be40-566e2653afe5_story.html

Given the principle — which itself should be reconsidered — of prosecutorial immunity, we have a criminal justice system with too many opportunities for generating defendants, too few inhibitions on prosecutors and ongoing corrosion of the rule and morality of law. Congress, the ultimate cause of all this, has work to undo.

LAW IS A CRIMINAL GANG OF RACKATEERING THIEVES AND MURDERERS....

The Demand for Money Behind Many Police Traffic Stops

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/us/police-ticket-quotas-money-funding.html

Pulled Over. An investigation into traffic stops across America and the deaths of hundreds of motorists at the hands of police. The Demand for Money Behind Many Police Traffic Stops. Busted taillights, missing plates, tinted windows: Across the U.S., ticket revenue funds towns — and the police responsible for finding violations....

A police officer saw that the light above his license plate was out. “You pulled me over for that? Come on, man,” said Mr. Brown, a security guard headed home from work at 1:30 a.m. Expressing his annoyance was all it took. The officer yelled at Mr. Brown, ordered him out of the car and threw him to the pavement. After a trip to jail that night in 2018, hands cuffed and blood running down his face onto his uniform, Mr. Brown eventually arrived at the crux of the matter: Valley Brook wanted $800 in fines and fees. It was a fraction of the roughly $1 million that the town of about 870 people collects each year from traffic cases.

A hidden scaffolding of financial incentives underpins the policing of motorists in the United States, encouraging some communities to essentially repurpose armed officers as revenue agents searching for infractions largely unrelated to public safety. As a result, driving is one of the most common daily routines during which people have been shot, Tased, beaten or arrested after minor offenses.... Fueling the culture of traffic stops is the federal government, which issues over $600 million a year in highway safety grants that subsidize ticket writing....

Many municipalities across the country rely heavily on ticket revenue and court fees to pay for government services, and some maintain outsize police departments to help generate that money, according to a review of hundreds of municipal audit reports, town budgets, court files and state highway records....

Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero#Julius_Caesar.27s_civil_war

Cicero (a Roman Republic Constitutionalist) grew up in a time of civil unrest and war. Sulla's victory in the first of a series of civil wars led to a new constitutional framework that undermined libertas (liberty), the fundamental value of the Roman Republic. Nonetheless, Sulla's reforms strengthened the position of the equestrian class, contributing to that class's growing political power. Cicero was both an Italian eques but, more importantly he was a Roman constitutionalist. ...

Julius Caesar's (a Dictatorship) civil war: Cicero favoured Pompey, seeing him as a defender of the senate and Republican tradition, but at that time avoided openly alienating Caesar. When Caesar invaded Italy in 49 BC, Cicero fled Rome. ...

In a letter to Varro on c. April 20, 46 BC, Cicero outlined his strategy under Caesar's dictatorship. Cicero, however, was taken completely by surprise when the Liberatores assassinated Caesar on the ides of March, 44 BC. Cicero was not included in the conspiracy, even though the conspirators were sure of his sympathy....

Octavian (or Augustus, as he was later called) is reported to have praised Cicero as a patriot and a scholar...

Medieval philosophers were influenced by Cicero's writings on natural law and innate rights. ... Among Cicero's admirers were Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, and John Locke....

While Cicero the humanist deeply influenced the culture of the Renaissance, Cicero the republican inspired the Founding Fathers of the United States and the revolutionaries of the French Revolution. John Adams said of him "As all the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united than Cicero, his authority should have great weight." Jefferson names Cicero as one of a handful of major figures who contributed to a tradition “of public right” that informed his draft of the Declaration of Independence and shaped American understandings of "the common sense" basis for the right of revolution. Camille Desmoulins said of the French republicans in 1789 that they were "mostly young people who, nourished by the reading of Cicero at school, had become passionate enthusiasts for liberty". ...

(51 BC) De Re Publica (On the Commonwealth)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_re_publica

Book one: Contains a discussion between the protagonists of the political situation of their time. The theme of the work is given and some comments are made about the theory of constitutions.

Book two: An outline of Roman history and the development of the constitution.

Book three: The role of justice in government is examined, as are the different types of constitutions.

Book four: A discourse about education.

Book five: The characters converse about the qualities of the ideal citizen in government.

Book Six: Little of this book survives except the Somnium Scipionis, which functions as the conclusion to the work.

(?? BC) De Legibus (On the Laws)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Legibus

The De Legibus (On the Laws) is a dialogue written by Marcus Tullius Cicero during the last years of the Roman Republic. ...Cicero's beliefs in Natural Law, recasts the religious laws of Rome (in reality a rollback to the religious laws under the king Numa Pompilius) and finally talk of his proposed reforms to the Roman Constitution....

Book One: To Cicero, law was not a matter of written statutes, and lists of regulations, but was a matter deeply ingrained in the human spirit, one that was an integral part of the human experience.

Book Two: Book Two begins with Cicero espousing his beliefs on Natural Law.

Book Three: Where the manuscript breaks off, is Cicero's enumeration of the set up of the government, as opposed to the religious laws of the previous book, that he would advocate as the basis for his reformed Roman state.

"Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt;

and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted."

[Lat., Cavendum est ne major poena quam culpa sit; et ne iisdem de causis alii plectantur, alii ne appellentur quidem.]

- Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero) (often called "Tully" for short), De Officiis (I, 23)

"Let the punishment be equal with the offence."

[Lat., Noxiae poena par esto.] (III, 11)

- Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero) (often called "Tully" for short), De Legibus (bk. III, 20)

"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have rejoiced in their loss of freedom who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious." Marcus Cicero

*****

SECOND TREATISE OF GOVERNMENT

by JOHN LOCKE

https://sites.google.com/site/korruptlaw/home/books/Second%20Treatise%20of%20Government%20by%20John%20Locke.rtf?attredirects=0&d=1

The First Treatise (Book 1) attacks patriarchalism in the form of sentence-by-sentence refutation of Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, while the Second Treatise (Book 2) outlines Locke's ideas for a more civilized society based on natural rights and contract theory.

Two Treatises of Government - An Overview

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Treatises_of_Government

"force without right, upon a man's person, makes a state of war, both where there is, and is not, a common judge."

"when they are hindered by any force from what is so necessary to the society, and wherein the safety and preservation of the people consists, the people have a right to remove it by force. In all states and conditions, the true remedy of force without authority, is to oppose force to it. The use of force without authority, always puts him that uses it into a state of war, as the aggressor, and renders him liable to be treated accordingly."

"Where there is no longer the administration of justice, for the securing of men's rights, nor any remaining power within the community to direct the force, or provide for the necessities of the public, there certainly is no government left. Where the laws cannot be executed, it is all one as if there were no laws;"

"Whosoever uses force without right, as every one does in society, who does it without law, puts himself into a state of war with those against whom he so uses it; and in that state all former ties are cancelled, all other rights cease, and every one has a right to defend himself, and to resist the aggressor."

"Must men alone be debarred the common privilege of opposing force with force, which nature allows so freely to all other creatures for their preservation from injury? I answer: Self-defence is a part of the law of nature; nor can it be denied the community, even against the king himself:"

Force without right is tyranny:

"AS usurpation is the exercise of power, which another hath a right to; so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which no body can have a right to. And this is making use of the power any one has in his hands, not for the good of those who are under it, but for his own private separate advantage. When the governor, however intitled, makes not the law, but his will, the rule; and his commands and actions are not directed to the preservation of the properties of his people, but the satisfaction of his own ambition, revenge, covetousness, or any other irregular passion."

-- John Locke (Second Treatise of Government)

*****

The Social Contract - Jean Jacques Rousseau's

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Contract

1762 treatise

http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon.htm

The stated aim of The Social Contract is to determine whether there can be a legitimate political authority, since people's interactions he saw at his time seemed to put them in a state far worse than the good one they were at in the state of nature, even though living in isolation. He concludes book one, chapter three with, "Let us then admit that force does not create right, and that we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers", which is to say, the ability to coerce is not a legitimate power, and there is no rightful duty to submit to it. A State (polity) has no right to enslave a conquered people.

Rousseau Social Contract

https://sites.google.com/site/korruptlaw/home/books/Rousseau%20Social%20Contract.rtf?attredirects=0&d=1

"...the human species is divided into so many herds of cattle, each with its ruler, who keeps guard over them for the purpose of devouring them." - Rousseau

"In a well-governed State, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a State is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a guarantee of impunity."

- Rousseau

"But when the whole people decrees for the whole people, it is considering only itself; and if a relation is then formed, it is between two aspects of the entire object, without there being any division of the whole. In that case the matter about which the decree is made is, like the decreeing will, general. This act is what I call a law." ... "Laws are, properly speaking, only the conditions of civil association. The people, being subject to the laws, ought to be their author" - Rousseau

"IF we ask in what precisely consists the greatest good of all, which should be the end of every system of legislation, we shall find it reduce itself to two main objects, liberty and equality — liberty, because all particular dependence means so much force taken from the body of the State and equality, because liberty cannot exist without it." - Rousseau

"A strong and healthy constitution is the first thing to look for; and it is better to count on the vigour which comes of good government than on the resources a great territory furnishes."

- Rousseau

"Usurpers always bring about or select troublous times to get passed, under cover of the public terror, destructive laws, which the people would never adopt in cold blood. The moment chosen is one of the surest means of distinguishing the work of the legislator from that of the tyrant." - Rousseau

"the measures which have to be taken to maintain the general authority, which all these distant officials wish to escape or to impose upon, absorb all the energy of the public, so that there is none left for the happiness of the people. There is hardly enough to defend it when need arises, and thus a body which is too big for its constitution gives way and falls crushed under its own weight." - Roussaeu

"By reason of idleness and money, they end by having soldiers to enslave their country and representatives to sell it. It is through the hustle of commerce and the arts, through the greedy self-interest of profit, and through softness and love of amenities that personal services are replaced by money payments. Men surrender a part of their profits in order to have time to increase them at leisure. Make gifts of money, and you will not be long without chains. " - Rousseau

Free peoples, be mindful of this maxim: "Liberty may be gained, but can never be recovered." - Rousseau

"Aristotle, before any of them, had said that men are by no means equal naturally... a fact on which the whole social system should rest: i.e., that, instead of destroying natural inequality, the fundamental compact substitutes, for such physical inequality as nature may have set up between men, an equality that is moral and legitimate, and that men, who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by convention and legal right.

(Under bad governments, this equality is only apparent and illusory: it serves only to-keep the pauper in his poverty and the rich man in the position he has usurped. In fact, laws are always of use to those who possess and harmful to those who have nothing: from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all have something and none too much.)"

- Jean Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract, 1762)

"...as the growth of the State gives the depositaries of the public authority more temptations and chances of abusing their power, the greater the force with which the government ought to be endowed for keeping the people in hand, the greater too should be the force at the disposal of the Sovereign for keeping the government in hand."

- Jean Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract 1762)

FORCE:

THE strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty. Hence the right of the strongest, which, though to all seeming meant ironically, is really laid down as a fundamental principle. But are we never to have an explanation of this phrase? Force is a physical power, and I fail to see what moral effect it can have. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will — at the most, an act of prudence. In what sense can it be a duty?

Suppose for a moment that this so-called "right" exists. I maintain that the sole result is a mass of inexplicable nonsense. For, if force creates right, the effect changes with the cause: every force that is greater than the first succeeds to its right. As soon as it is possible to disobey with impunity, disobedience is legitimate; and, the strongest being always in the right, the only thing that matters is to act so as to become the strongest. But what kind of right is that which perishes when force fails? If we must obey perforce, there is no need to obey because we ought; and if we are not forced to obey, we are under no obligation to do so. Clearly, the word "right" adds nothing to force: in this connection, it means absolutely nothing....

Let us then admit that force does not create right, and that we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers. ...

SINCE no man has a natural authority over his fellow, and force creates no right, we must conclude that conventions form the basis of all legitimate authority among men....

It will be said that the despot assures his subjects civil tranquillity. Granted; but what do they gain, if the wars his ambition brings down upon them, his insatiable avidity, and the vexatious conduct of his ministers press harder on them than their own dissensions would have done? What do they gain, if the very tranquillity they enjoy is one of their miseries? Tranquillity is found also in dungeons; but is that enough to make them desirable places to live in? The Greeks imprisoned in the cave of the Cyclops lived there very tranquilly, while they were awaiting their turn to be devoured.

To say that a man gives himself gratuitously, is to say what is absurd and inconceivable; such an act is null and illegitimate, from the mere fact that he who does it is out of his mind. To say the same of a whole people is to suppose a people of madmen; and madness creates no right.

- Jean Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract 1762)

"a body which is too big for its constitution gives way and falls crushed under its own weight"

-- Rousseau The Social Contract Book II

THE PEOPLE

"As nature has set bounds to the stature of a well-made man, and, outside those limits, makes nothing but giants or dwarfs, similarly, for the constitution of a State to be at its best, it is possible to fix limits that will make it neither too large for good government, nor too small for self-maintenance. In every body politic there is a maximum strength which it cannot exceed and which it only loses by increasing in size. Every extension of the social tie means its relaxation; and, generally speaking, a small State is stronger in proportion than a great one. ...

This is not all; not only has the government less vigour and promptitude for securing the observance of the laws, preventing nuisances, correcting abuses, and guarding against seditious undertakings begun in distant places; the people has less affection for its rulers, whom it never sees, for its country, which, to its eyes, seems like the world, and for its fellow-citizens, most of whom are unknown to it. The same laws cannot suit so many diverse provinces with different customs, situated in the most various climates, and incapable of enduring a uniform government.

Different laws lead only to trouble and confusion among peoples which, living under the same rulers and in constant communication one with another, intermingle and intermarry, and, coming under the sway of new customs, never know if they can call their very patrimony their own. Talent is buried, virtue unknown and vice unpunished, among such a multitude of men who do not know one another, gathered together in one place at the seat of the central administration.

The leaders, overwhelmed with business, see nothing for themselves; the State is governed by clerks. Finally, the measures which have to be taken to maintain the general authority, which all these distant officials wish to escape or to impose upon, absorb all the energy of the public, so that there is none left for the happiness of the people. There is hardly enough to defend it when need arises, and thus a body which is too big for its constitution gives way and falls crushed under its own weight.

...A strong and healthy constitution is the first thing to look for; and it is better to count on the vigour which comes of good government than on the resources a great territory furnishes.

It may be added that there have been known States so constituted that the necessity of making conquests entered into their very constitution, and that, in order to maintain themselves, they were forced to expand ceaselessly. It may be that they congratulated themselves greatly on this fortunate necessity, which none the less indicated to them, along with the limits of their greatness, the inevitable moment of their fall."

-- Rousseau (The Social Contract Book II)

On Democratic Governments:

"It may be added that there is no government so subject to civil wars and intestine agitations as democratic or popular government, because there is none which has so strong and continual a tendency to change to another form, or which demands more vigilance and courage for its maintenance as it is.

Under such a constitution above all, the citizen should arm himself with strength and constancy, and say, every day of his life, what a virtuous Count Palatine said in the Diet of Poland: Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium.

Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men."

-- Rousseau: Social Contract

"The advantage of tyrannical government therefore lies in acting at great distances. With the help of the rallying-points it establishes, its strength, like that of the lever, grows with distance. The strength of the people, on the other hand, acts only when concentrated: when spread abroad, it evaporates and is lost, like powder scattered on the ground, which catches fire only grain by grain. The least populous countries are thus the fittest for tyranny: fierce animals reign only in deserts." - Rousseau

"When the State is dissolved, the abuse of government, whatever it is, bears the common name of anarchy. To distinguish, democracy degenerates into ochlocracy, and aristocracy into oligarchy; and I would add that royalty degenerates into tyranny; but this last word is ambiguous and needs explanation.

In vulgar usage, a tyrant is a king who governs violently and without regard for justice and law. In the exact sense, a tyrant is an individual who arrogates to himself the royal authority without having a right to it. This is how the Greeks understood the word "tyrant": they applied it indifferently to good and bad princes whose authority was not legitimate. Tyrant and usurper are thus perfectly synonymous terms.

In order that I may give different things different names, I call him who usurps the royal authority a tyrant, and him who usurps the sovereign power a despot. The tyrant is he who thrusts himself in contrary to the laws to govern in accordance with the laws; the despot is he who sets himself above the laws themselves. Thus the tyrant cannot be a despot, but the despot is always a tyrant." - Rousseau

" Sovereignty, for the same reason as makes it inalienable, cannot be represented; it lies essentially in the general will, and will does not admit of representation: it is either the same, or other; there is no intermediate possibility. The deputies of the people, therefore, are not and cannot be its representatives: they are merely its stewards, and can carry through no definitive acts.

Every law the people has not ratified in person is null and void — is, in fact, not a law. The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing. The use it makes of the short moments of liberty it enjoys shows indeed that it deserves to lose them." - Rousseau

"As the citizens, by the social contract, are all equal, all can prescribe what all should do, but no one has a right to demand that another shall do what he does not do himself."

- Rousseau

"First, the supreme authority can no more be modified than it can be alienated; to limit it is to destroy it. It is absurd and contradictory for the Sovereign to set a superior over itself; to bind itself to obey a master would be to return to absolute liberty." - Rousseau

"It will be said that the despot assures his subjects civil tranquillity. Granted; but what do they gain, if the wars his ambition brings down upon them, his insatiable avidity, and the vexatious conduct of his ministers press harder on them than their own dissensions would have done? What do they gain, if the very tranquillity they enjoy is one of their miseries? Tranquillity is found also in dungeons; but is that enough to make them desirable places to live in? The Greeks imprisoned in the cave of the Cyclops lived there very tranquilly, while they were awaiting their turn to be devoured." - Rousseau

"We may add that frequent punishments are always a sign of weakness or remissness on the part of the government." - Rousseau

"Rome, when it was most prosperous, suffered a revival of all the crimes of tyranny, and was brought to the verge of destruction, because it put the legislative authority and the sovereign power into the same hands." - Rousseau

"Such equality, we are told, is an unpractical ideal that cannot actually exist. But if its abuse is inevitable, does it follow that we should not at least make regulations concerning it? It is precisely because the force of circumstances tends continually to destroy equality that the force of legislation should always tend to its maintenance." - Rousseau

"The author of The Spirit of the Laws has shown with many examples by what art the legislator directs the constitution towards each of these objects. What makes the constitution of a State really solid and lasting is the due observance of what is proper, so that the natural relations are always in agreement with the laws on every point, and law only serves, so to speak, to assure, accompany and rectify them. But if the legislator mistakes his object and adopts a principle other than circumstances naturally direct; if his principle makes for servitude while they make for liberty, or if it makes for riches, while they make for populousness, or if it makes for peace, while they make for conquest — the laws will insensibly lose their influence, the constitution will alter, and the State will have no rest from trouble till it is either destroyed or changed, and nature has resumed her invincible sway." - Rousseau

"You sacrifice more for profit than for liberty, and fear slavery less than poverty... . As for you, modern peoples, you have no slaves, but you are slaves yourselves; you pay for their liberty with your own. It is in vain that you boast of this preference; I find in it more cowardice than humanity. ... I do not mean by all this that it is necessary to have slaves, or that the right of slavery is legitimate: I am merely giving the reasons why modern peoples, believing themselves to be free, have representatives, while ancient peoples had none. In any case, the moment a people allows itself to be represented, it is no long free: it no longer exists." - Rousseau

"As the citizens, by the social contract, are all equal, all can prescribe what all should do, but no one has a right to demand that another shall do what he does not do himself." - Rousseau

"The institution of government is not a contract, but a law; that the depositaries of the executive power are not the people's masters, but its officers; that it can set them up and pull them down when it likes." - Rousseau

"Finally, when the State, on the eve of ruin, maintains only a vain, illusory and formal existence, when in every heart the social bond is broken, and the meanest interest brazenly lays hold of the sacred name of "public good," the general will becomes mute: all men, guided by secret motives, no more give their views as citizens than if the State had never been; and iniquitous decrees directed solely to private interest get passed under the name of laws." - Rousseau

*********

On Crimes and Punishments

Cesare Beccaria in 1764

http://www.constitution.org/cb/crim_pun.htm

http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Cesare-Beccaria-On-Crimes-and-Punishment.pdf

"the war of a nation against a citizen ... It appears absurd to me that the laws, which are the expression of the public will and which detest and punish homicide, commit murder themselves, and in order to dissuade citizens from assassination, commit public assassination."

- Cesare Beccaria

This is not something Jefferson wrote, but rather comes from a passage he included in his "Legal Commonplace Book." The passage is from Cesare Beccaria's Essay on Crimes and Punishments. It appears in Jefferson's commonplace book as follows:

"A principal source of errors and injustice are false ideas of utility. For example: that legislator has false ideas of utility who considers particular more than general conveniencies, who had rather command the sentiments of mankind than excite them, who dares say to reason, 'Be thou a slave;' who would sacrifice a thousand real advantages to the fear of an imaginary or trifling inconvenience; who would deprive men of the use of fire for fear of their being burnt, and of water for fear of their being drowned; and who knows of no means of preventing evil but by destroying it.

The laws of this nature are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons."

"If it can only be proved, that the severity of punishments, though not immediately contrary to the public good, or to the end for which they were intended, viz. to prevent crimes, be useless, then such severity would be contrary to those beneficent virtues, which are the consequence of enlightened reason, which instructs the sovereign to wish rather to govern men in a state of freedom and happiness than of slavery. It would also be contrary to justice and the social compact." - Cesare Beccaria (Essay on Crimes and Punishments)

"Every punishment which does not arise from absolute necessity, says the great Montesquieu, is tyrannical. A proposition which may be made more general thus: every act of authority of one man over another, for which there is not an absolute necessity, is tyrannical." - Cesare Beccaria (Essay on Crimes and Punishments)

"Any action which is not comprehended in the above mentioned scale will not be called a crime, or punished as such, except by those who have an interest in the denomination. The uncertainty of the extreme points of this scale hath produced system of morality which contradicts the laws, multitude of laws that contradict each other, and many which expose the best men to the severest punishments, rendering the ideas of vice and virtue vague and fluctuating and even their existence doubtful. Hence that fatal lethargy of political bodies, which terminates in their destruction.

Whoever reads, with a philosophic eye, the history of nations, and their laws, will generally find, that the ideas of virtue and vice, of a good or bad citizen, change with the revolution of ages, not in proportion to the alteration of circumstances, and consequently conformable to the common good, but in proportion to the passions and errors by which the different lawgivers were successively influenced. He will frequently observe that the passions and vices of one age are the foundation of the morality of the following; that violent passion, the offspring of fanaticism and enthusiasm, being weakened by time, which reduces all the phenomena of the natural and moral world to an equality, become, by degrees, the prudence of the age, and an useful instrument in the hands of the powerful or artful politician." - Cesare Beccaria (Essay on Crimes and Punishments)

"Two ambitious princes contend for a crown: the strongest gains the prize, and punishes with death the partizans of the weaker. The judges become the instruments of vengeance of the new sovereign, and the supports of his authority."

"The credibility of a witness, then, should only diminish in proportion to the hatred, friendship, or connexions subsisting between him and the delinquent. "

"What right, then, but that of power, can authorise the punishment of a citizen, so long as there remains any doubt of his guilt? The dilemma is frequent. Either he is guilty, or not guilty. If guilty, he should only suffer the punishment ordained by the laws, and torture becomes useless, as his confession is unnecessary.

If he be not guilty, you torture the innocent; for, in the eye of the law, every man is innocent, whose crime has not been proved. Besides, it is confounding all relations, to expect that a man should be both the accuser and accused; and that pain should be the test of truth, as if truth resided in the muscles and fibres of a wretch in torture. By this method, the robust will escape, and the feeble be condemned. These are the inconveniencies of this pretended test of truth, worthy only of a cannibal;..."

"Torture is used to make the criminal discover his accomplices; but if it has been demonstrated that it is not a proper means of discovering truth, how can it serve to discover the accomplices, which is one of the truths required. Will not the man who accuses himself, yet more readily accuse others? Besides, is it just to torment one man for the crime of another?"

"Even an useful injustice can never be allowed by a legislator, who means to guard against watchful tyranny; which, under the flattering pretext of momentary advantages, would establish permanent principles of destruction, and, to procure the ease of a few in a high station, would draw tears from thousands of the poor. The law which ordains confiscations, sets a price on the head of the subject, with the guilty punishes the innocent, and by reducing them to indigence and despair, tempts them to become criminal. Can there be a more melancholy spectacle, than a whole family, overwhelmed with infamy and misery, from the crime of Their chief? a crime, which if it had been possible, they were restrained from preventing, by that submission which the laws themselves have ordained." Cesare Beccaria

*****

Tacitus

Tacitus: Agricola

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Agricola

"Step by step they were led to things which dispose to vice, the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance, they called civilization, when it was but a part of their servitude." -- Tacitus

Tacitus favorably contrasted the liberty of the native Britons to the corruption and tyranny of the Empire; the book also contains eloquent and vicious polemics against the rapacity and greed of Rome.

Tacitus: The Annals • The Histories

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Tacitus/home.html

Tacitus: The End of the Republic

http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/ancient/tacitus-ann1a.asp

(The Annals of Tacitus Book I)

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Tacitus/Annals/1A*.html

2 When the killing of Brutus and Cassius had disarmed the Republic; when Pompey had been crushed in Sicily, and, with Lepidus thrown aside and Antony slain, even the Julian party was leaderless but for the Caesar; after laying down his triumviral title and proclaiming himself a simple consul content with tribunician authority to safeguard the commons, he first conciliated the army by gratuities, the populace by cheapened corn,º the world by the amenities of peace, then step by step began to make his ascent and to unite in his own person the functions of the senate, the magistracy, and the legislature. Opposition there was none: the boldest spirits had succumbed on stricken fields or by proscription-lists; while the rest of the nobility found a cheerful acceptance of slavery the smoothest road to wealth and office, and, as they had thriven on revolution, stood now for the new order and safety in preference to the old order and adventure. Nor was the state of affairs unpopular in the provinces, where administration by the Senate and People had been discredited by the feuds of the magnates and the greed of the officials, against which there was but frail protection in a legal system for ever deranged by force, by favouritism, or (in the last resort) by gold.

Tacitus:

"Idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset."

Because they didn't know better, they called it "civilization," when it was part of their slavery.

Variant translation: Step by step they were led to things which dispose to vice, the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance they called civilisation, when it was but a part of their servitude.

"Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant."

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

More colloquially: They rob, kill and plunder all under the deceiving name of Roman Rule. They make a desert and call it peace.

"Upon the Suiones, border the people Sitones; and, agreeing with them in all other things, differ from them in one, that here the sovereignty is exercised by a woman. So notoriously do they degenerate not only from a state of liberty, but even below a state of bondage." - Tacitus - Germania

"A rich enemy excites their cupidity;

a poor one, their lust for power.

East and West alike have failed to satisfy them. They are the only people on earth to whose covetousness both riches and poverty are equally tempting.

To robbery, butchery and rapine, they give the lying name of 'government'; they create a desolation and call it peace...”

― Tacitus

“They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger.

... they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich;

by ambition, if poor.

They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace.” ― Tacitus

*****

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

by Henry David Thoreau

[1849, original title: Resistance to Civil Goverment]

https://sites.google.com/site/korruptlaw/home/books/Resistance%20to%20Civil%20Goverment%20-%20Thoreau.rtf?attredirects=0&d=1

Civil Disobedience (Thoreau)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Disobedience_(Thoreau)

Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice....

Thoreau asserts that because governments are typically more harmful than helpful, they therefore cannot be justified. Democracy is no cure for this, as majorities simply by virtue of being majorities do not also gain the virtues of wisdom and justice. The judgment of an individual's conscience is not necessarily inferior to the decisions of a political body or majority, and so "[i]t is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.... Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice." He adds, "I cannot for an instant recognize as my government [that] which is the slave's government also."

The government, according to Thoreau, is not just a little corrupt or unjust in the course of doing its otherwise-important work, but in fact the government is primarily an agent of corruption and injustice. Because of this, it is "not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize."...

He exhorts people not to just wait passively for an opportunity to vote for justice, because voting for justice is as ineffective as wishing for justice; what you need to do is to actually be just. This is not to say that you have an obligation to devote your life to fighting for justice, but you do have an obligation not to commit injustice and not to give injustice your practical support....

In a constitutional republic like the United States, people often think that the proper response to an unjust law is to try to use the political process to change the law, but to obey and respect the law until it is changed. But if the law is itself clearly unjust, and the lawmaking process is not designed to quickly obliterate such unjust laws, then Thoreau says the law deserves no respect and it should be broken....

"That government is best which governs least...

*****

Natural Law; or The Science of Justice:

by Lysander Spooner

https://sites.google.com/site/korruptlaw/home/books/Natural%20Law%20by%20Lysander%20Spooner.rtf?attredirects=0&d=1

CHAPTER II. THE SCIENCE OF JUSTICE

(IS JUSTICE NATURAL LAW OR NOT)

"If justice be not a natural principle, it is no principle at all. If it be not a natural principle, there is no such thing as justice. ... If justice be not a natural principle, then there is no such thing as injustice; and all the crimes of which the world has been the scene, have been no crimes at all; ...If justice be not a natural principle, governments (so-called) have no more right or reason to take cognizance of it, or to pretend or profess to take cognizance of it, ... If there be no such science as justice, there can be no science of government; and all the rapacity and violence, by which, in all ages and nations, a few confederated villains have obtained the mastery over the rest of mankind, reduced them to poverty and slavery, and established what they called governments to keep them in subjection, have been as legitimate examples of government as any that the world is ever to see."

CHAPTER III.

NATURAL LAW CONTRASTED WITH LEGISLATION.

(LAW AS PLUNDER AND TO ENSLAVE.

LEGISLATION IS TO MAINTAIN THE STATE OF SLAVERY.)

NL.3.2.5 "These tyrants, living solely on plunder, and on the labor of their slaves, and applying all their energies to the seizure of still more plunder, and the enslavement of still other defenceless persons; increasing, too, their numbers, perfecting their organizations, and multiplying their weapons of war, they extend their conquests until, in order to hold what they have already got, it becomes necessary for them to act systematically, and cooperate with each other in holding their slaves in subjection.

NL.3.2.6 But all this they can do only by establishing what they call a government, and making what they call laws."

"Section III.

NL.3.3.1 In process of time, the robber, or slaveholding, class—who had seized all the lands, and held all the means of creating wealth—began to discover that the easiest mode of managing their slaves, and making them profitable, was not for each slaveholder to hold his specified number of slaves, as he had done before, and as he would hold so many cattle, but to give them so much liberty as would throw upon themselves (the slaves) the responsibility of their own subsistence, and yet compel them to sell their labor to the land-holding class—their former owners—for just what the latter might choose to give them.

NL.3.3.2 Of course, these liberated slaves, as some have erroneously called them, having no lands, or other property, and no means of obtaining an independent subsistence, had no alternative—to save themselves from starvation—but to sell their labor to the landholders, in exchange only for the coarsest necessaries of life; not always for so much even as that.

NL.3.3.3 These liberated slaves, as they were called, were now scarcely less slaves than they were before. Their means of subsistence were perhaps even more precarious than when each had his own owner, who had an interest to preserve his life. They were liable, at the caprice or interest of the landholders, to be thrown out of home, employment, and the opportunity of even earning a subsistence by their labor. They were, therefore, in large numbers, driven to the necessity of begging, stealing, or starving; and became, of course, dangerous to the property and quiet of their late masters.

NL.3.3.4 The consequence was, that these late owners found it necessary, for their own safety and the safety of their property, to organize themselves more perfectly as a government and make laws for keeping these dangerous people in subjection; that is, laws fixing the prices at which they should be compelled to labor, and also prescribing fearful punishments, even death itself, for such thefts and trespasses as they were driven to commit, as their only means of saving themselves from starvation.

NL.3.3.5 These laws have continued in force for hundreds, and, in some countries, for thousands of years; and are in force to-day, in greater or less severity, in nearly all the countries on the globe.

NL.3.3.6 The purpose and effect of these laws have been to maintain, in the hands of the robber, or slave holding class, a monopoly of all lands, and, as far as possible, of all other means of creating wealth; and thus to keep the great body of laborers in such a state of poverty and dependence, as would compel them to sell their labor to their tyrants for the lowest prices at which life could be sustained.

NL.3.3.7 The result of all this is, that the little wealth there is in the world is all in the hands of a few—that is, in the hands of the law-making, slave-holding class; who are now as much slaveholders in spirit as they ever were, but who accomplish their purposes by means of the laws they make for keeping the laborers in subjection and dependence, instead of each one’s owning his individual slaves as so many chattels.

NL.3.3.8 Thus the whole business of legislation, which has now grown to such gigantic proportions, had its origin in the conspiracies, which have always existed among the few, for the purpose of holding the many in subjection, and extorting from them their labor, and all the profits of their labor.

NL.3.3.9 And the real motives and spirit which lie at the foundation of all legislation—notwithstanding all the pretences and disguises by which they attempt to hide themselves—are the same to-day as they always have been. They whole purpose of this legislation is simply to keep one class of men in subordination and servitude to another.

Section IV.

NL.3.4.1 What, then, is legislation? It is an assumption by one man, or body of men, of absolute, irresponsible dominion over all other men whom they call subject to their power. It is the assumption by one man, or body of men, of a right to subject all other men to their will and their service. It is the assumption by one man, or body of men, of a right to abolish outright all the natural rights, all the natural liberty of all other men; to make all other men their slaves; to arbitrarily dictate to all other men what they may, and may not, do; what they may, and may not, have; what they may, and may not, be. It is, in short, the assumption of a right to banish the principle of human rights, the principle of justice itself, from off the earth, and set up their own personal will, pleasure, and interest in its place. All this, and nothing less, is involved in the very idea that there can be any such thing as human legislation that is obligatory upon those upon whom it is imposed."

*****

MALCOLM X: THE BALLOT OR THE BULLET (April 12, 1964)

https://youtu.be/D9BVEnEsn6Y

MALCOLM X SPEECHES: MALCOLM X NETWORK 148 videos

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-0XSsncpqHipCGFBJettrI2iL_0DlHD_

MALCOLM X: YOU'RE AFRAID TO BLEED!

https://youtu.be/YuqllQp9qrA?list=PL-0XSsncpqHipCGFBJettrI2iL_0DlHD_

MALCOLM X: THE WHITE MAN IS TRICKING YOU

https://youtu.be/Yx8P0xkO3g4?list=PL-0XSsncpqHipCGFBJettrI2iL_0DlHD_

MALCOLM X ON JESUS CHRIST

https://youtu.be/cIAcY7VpZo0?list=PL-0XSsncpqHipCGFBJettrI2iL_0DlHD_

MALCOLM X ON THE CONSTITUTION

https://youtu.be/Cz3isgUZe5Y?list=PL-0XSsncpqHipCGFBJettrI2iL_0DlHD_

MALCOLM X ON RACIST POLICE

https://youtu.be/adiy075EGOs?list=PL-0XSsncpqHipCGFBJettrI2iL_0DlHD_

MALCOLM X: THE POLICE ATTACK YOU THEN CHARGE YOU WITH ASSAULT! ***

https://youtu.be/iN61vqnjJbo?list=PL-0XSsncpqHipCGFBJettrI2iL_0DlHD_

MALCOLM X ON THE HYPOCRISY OF AMERICA

https://youtu.be/i7CAXoiqi98?list=PL-0XSsncpqHipCGFBJettrI2iL_0DlHD_

Victim of American Hypocrisy...

MALCOLM X: THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

https://youtu.be/N7m-3s1IC0A?list=PL-0XSsncpqHipCGFBJettrI2iL_0DlHD_

MALCOLM X: WHOEVER STANDS IN THE WAY OF YOUR FREEDOM IS YOUR ENEMY

https://youtu.be/K_l7dINj2LI?list=PL-0XSsncpqHipCGFBJettrI2iL_0DlHD_

MALCOLM X ON AMERICAN HYPOCRISY

https://youtu.be/TRMkmB85m1s?list=PL-0XSsncpqHipCGFBJettrI2iL_0DlHD_

MALCOLM X: WE'RE LOOKING FOR JUSTICE

https://youtu.be/ztxpq5POMjY?list=PL-0XSsncpqHipCGFBJettrI2iL_0DlHD_

MALCOLM X: WE MUST DEFEND OURSELVES

https://youtu.be/fz723nkn_vU?list=PL-0XSsncpqHipCGFBJettrI2iL_0DlHD_

MALCOLM X: “Martin Luther King Jr. is a TRAITOR”

https://youtu.be/h0ZuC0WJFzY

Martin Luther King and Malcolm X Debate

https://youtu.be/h4PqLKWuwyU

MARTIN LUTHER KING ON MALCOLM X

https://youtu.be/MwKIUMbi9Jk

MALCOLM X: THE WHITE MAN IS TRICKING YOU

https://youtu.be/s4N2BvRZKy8

Malcolm X - The House Negro and the Field Negro

https://youtu.be/7kf7fujM4ag

https://youtu.be/ENvGnsyXx8Q?list=PLhepn8qoI4IuR0imnELFjw5S_YFrERX7w

Malcolm X: You Got What's Known As White's Disease!

https://youtu.be/vTnXv7Tva18

Malcolm X Make It Plain (Full PBS Documentary)

https://youtu.be/3zIGNkR62Mo

RBG-Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary| Full Speech & Text

https://youtu.be/HfMexftulsU

White Man's Law

https://youtu.be/0kWeccWkpnE

Malcolm X: The Black Man's History (1962)

Malcolm X: Speeches and Interviews (1960-65) (120 videos)

https://youtu.be/t9AmuYqjRyg?list=PLhepn8qoI4IuR0imnELFjw5S_YFrERX7w

MALCOLM X ON THE SECOND AMENDMENT

https://youtu.be/hG1tlJBGMes?list=PLhepn8qoI4IuR0imnELFjw5S_YFrERX7w

MALCOLM X ON POLICE CORRUPTION

https://youtu.be/mnZOcaGyzUQ?list=PLhepn8qoI4IuR0imnELFjw5S_YFrERX7w

Malcolm X A Declaration of Independence March 12, 1964

https://youtu.be/EV5toJilHac?list=PLhepn8qoI4IuR0imnELFjw5S_YFrERX7w

Malcolm X You Will Never Get Protection From the Government!

https://youtu.be/QipDgRKN2G4?list=PLhepn8qoI4IuR0imnELFjw5S_YFrERX7w

Malcolm X Exposes Media Manipulation

https://youtu.be/NgWP2u5FkD4?list=PLhepn8qoI4IuR0imnELFjw5S_YFrERX7w

MALCOLM X BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY

https://youtu.be/6aHl_kXRGS4?list=PLhepn8qoI4IuR0imnELFjw5S_YFrERX7w

MalcolmX- Coffee n Cream analogy (Integration)

https://youtu.be/N9cjG7PwDZU

MALCOLM X: Prosecute America at the United Nations

https://youtu.be/6fWHLNXtcCg

If You Vote Democrat You Are A Traitor To Your Race And A Political Chump MalcolmX

https://youtu.be/FqxpY2MdNMw

"So the definition of a criminal is someone who breaks the Law,

and you want me to believe that more Laws will somehow make less criminals?"

Brief look at Marijuana Laws:

Zero overdose from marijuana

http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Causes_of_Death#sthash.0B0n4KRY.dpbs

No recorded cases of overdose deaths from cannabis have been found in extensive literature reviews, see for example Gable, Robert S., "The Toxicity of Recreational Drugs," American Scientist (Research Triangle Park, NC: Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, May-June 2006) Vol. 94, No. 3, p. 207.

Marijuana Prohibition Cost

http://www.prohibitioncosts.org/

**New Report Projects $10-14 Billion Annual Savings and Revenues

**Replacing marijuana prohibition with a system of legal regulation would save approximately $7.7 billion in government expenditures on prohibition enforcement — $2.4 billion at the federal level and $5.3 billion at the state and local levels.

Drug War Statistics

http://www.drugpolicy.org/drug-war-statistics

**Amount spent annually in the U.S. on the war on drugs: More than $51,000,000,000

http://norml.org/aboutmarijuana

* In 2013, more than 693,000 people were arrested in this country for marijuana-related offenses alone.

Drug War Victims

http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/drug-war-victim/

Our drug war results in staggeringly tragic losses. Drugs, when abused, can be dangerous, but they are not nearly as lethal as the drug war itself. In addition to the blights of an imprisoned population, lost rights, broken families, and economic waste, people are dying in this war. No, these are not deaths from drugs, but from prohibition. It is important to realize that the vast majority of deaths in the drug war simply would not happen without prohibition....

deaths of tens of thousands

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/five-reasons-cops-want-to-legalize-marijuana-20130627

"Competition over the profits to be made from this illicit industry has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of individuals in that country, and an ever-increasing amount of violence spilling over into the United States, where the Justice Department estimates Mexican cartels now operate in more than 1,000 American cities."

The Murders Don't Stop - War on Drugs Responsible for Outrageous Death Toll in Mexico

http://www.drugpolicy.org/blog/murders-dont-stop-war-drugs-responsible-outrageous-death-toll-mexico

A recently released report by the Mexican government showed that there were 165,000 documented cases of homicide between 2007 and 2014 in Mexico — “a period that accounts for some of the bloodiest years of the nation’s war against the drug cartels.”...While not all of the killings can be directly linked to the war on drugs, some counts have attributed over 55 percent to the failed drug war.

The Most Outrageous Drug War Deaths Of 2015

http://stopthedrugwar.org/taxonomy/term/258

2015 Drug War Chronicle's drug war death toll tally, bringing it to 56 for the year.

This is the fifth year the Drug War Chronicle has tallied drug war deaths. There were 54 in 2011, 63 in 2012, 41 in 2013, and 39 in 2014. That's an average of just a hair under one a week during the past five years.

The Chronicle's tally only include deaths directly related to US domestic drug law enforcement operations -- full-fledged, door-busting, pre-dawn SWAT raids, to traffic stops turned drug busts, to police buy-bust operations. Some of the deaths are by misadventure, not gunshot, including several people who died after ingesting drugs in a bid to avoid getting busted and two law enforcement officers who separately dropped dead while searching for marijuana fields.

The dead included three other police officers, two Hattiesburg, Mississippi, cops gunned down in a traffic stop turned drug search in May and a Memphis cop gunned down over a $20 pot deal in August.

But 90% of the drug war dead are civilians. While some of the deaths are accidental and some are clearly justifiable, as when people are actually shooting at police, others are more questionable. Were all those guys in vehicles who got killed because police "feared for their lives" really trying to run down and kill cops over a drug bust, or were they just trying to get away?

And some are just downright outrageous -- one might even say criminal, although local prosecutors generally seem to disagree. In only one of the cases listed below was the police officer arrested, and in that case, she walked. Here are the worst drug war killings of 2015: ...

Why Is Marijuana Banned? The Real Reasons Are Worse Than You Think

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-influence/real-reasons-marijuana-is-banned_b_9210248.html

“The scientific evidence suggests cannabis is safer than alcohol. Alcohol kills 40,000 people every year in the U.S. Cannabis kills nobody.”

Crazy laws around the world

http://www.dawn.com/news/1109338

Here we have put together some pretty weird laws from around the world that make little sense — both to lawmakers and lawbreakers. ...

"Without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression."

- James Wilson

Cobra effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

The cobra effect occurs when an attempted solution to a problem actually makes the problem worse. This is an instance of unintended consequences. The term is used to illustrate the causes of incorrect stimulation in economy and politics

Not Many People Realize That These 7 Things Are Illegal In North Dakota

http://www.onlyinyourstate.com/north-dakota/crazy-weird-laws-nd/

"Ultimately, the law will collapse under its own weight"

-- Paul Ryan

Thoughtless crimes still require attention

http://www.dailytargum.com/article/2016/02/thoughtless-crimes-still-require-attention

Court proceedings ... have become rote and turn defendants and victims alike into mere blurs and docket numbers. And clearly guilty criminals can walk away with no punishment through an arcane rule or the maddening vagaries of a jury.

Yet another area where unintended consequences are a cause for concern is criminal intent. Generally, a person must have some level of intention to be convicted of a crime, and there are various levels of intent for different laws. The highest level of intent, sometimes called "mens rea" (Latin for “guilty mind”), requires a knowing and willful violation of the law to be convicted. The lowest level, or “strict liability,” requires only that a prohibited act be done to be found guilty.

Hundreds of new laws to take effect in North Dakota

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/31/hundreds-of-new-laws-to-hit-the-books-in-north-dak/

Hundreds of new laws are set to take effect in North Dakota,...309 new laws passed by the 2015 Legislature kick in...

ND Legislation | 2017-2018 | 65th Legislative Assembly

https://legiscan.com/ND/legislation/2017

Search Legislation for any State:

https://legiscan.com/

12 Emerging Trends from the 2016 State Legislative Sessions

http://cqrollcall.com/statetrackers/12-emerging-trends-from-the-2016-state-legislative-sessions/

By the time most statehouses wrapped proceedings at the end of July, state lawmakers had approved nearly 29,122 of the approximately 171,608 bills introduced during the 2015-16 biennial session....

"DOMESTIC ENEMIES CREATE THE DANGERS THEY CLAIM TO PROTECT US FROM."

"EXPERIENCE TEACHES US TO BE MOST ON GUARD TO PROTECT LIBERTY WHEN GOVERNMENT CLAIMS ARE BENEFICENT."

Making homelessness a crime is no way for Los Angeles to fix its crisis

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-myers-criminalizing-homelessness-in-los-angeles-20180914-story.html

I met Joe at a presentation I did in Koreatown on the criminalization of homelessness. He told the gathering about his experiences with the Los Angeles Police Department. He had lost all of his belongings in one of the countless sweeps of homeless encampments that take place every day in L.A. He just didn’t see a posted notice announcing the cleanup. He left his property for the morning, and when he came back, it had been thrown away....In the weeks before he died, Joe was caught up in more than one of these sweeps. The city justifies its actions in part by pointing out that people who are homeless are breaking the law. And they are right. Every day Joe lived on the streets of Los Angeles, he was breaking any number of laws that criminalize homelessness....And as we sat on the sidewalk and talked about his experiences, we were both in violation of Municipal Code Section 41.18(d), which outlaws sitting, sleeping and lying on the sidewalk....

Every Corrupt Judge uses this ruling to stifle free speech....

Schenck v. United States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

The phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" has since become a popular metaphor for dangers or limitations of free speech. ...

Victims' Rights Laws Being Abused To Hide The Identities Of Cops Involved In Use Of Force Incidents

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20181023/08223340893/victims-rights-laws-being-abused-to-hide-identities-cops-involved-use-force-incidents.shtml

GOVERNMENT UNCHECKED:

THE FALSE PROBLEM OF JUDICIAL ACTIVISM AND THE NEED FOR JUDICIAL ENGAGEMENT

http://www.ij.org/images/pdf_folder/other_pubs/grvnmtunchkd.pdf

SUMMARY:

Contrary to popular belief, the Supreme Court rarely strikes down government enactments or Overturns its own precedents—and this is consistently true over the past 50-plus years. If anything, fewer state laws and federal regulations are being struck down now than ever...

• Congress passed 15,817 laws from 1954 to 2002. The Supreme Court struck down 103 or just two-thirds of one percent.

• State legislatures passed 1,006,649 laws over the same period. The Court struck down 452 or less than one twentieth of one percent.

• The federal government adopted 21,462 regulations from 1986 to 2006. The Court struck down 121 or about a half of a percent.

  • In any given year, the Court strikes down just three out of every 5,000 laws passed by Congress and state legislatures.

  • The Supreme Court overturned earlier precedents in just two percent of the cases it considered from 1954 to 2010.

In our system of government, the courts, most especially the Supreme Court, serve as a critical check on the legislative and executive branches. They are intended to be “bulwarks” of liberty, keeping the other branches within the bounds of the Constitution and ensuring individual rights are not trampled by over reaching government. The years examined in this report saw more than a Million federal and state laws passed and more than 20,000 regulations adopted. Many of these restrain liberty in significant ways.

Decades of the Supreme Court’s abdicating its duty to enforce the Constitution have made this growth in the size and scope of government possible. ...

YOURE GUILTY SLAVES, PERIOD!

IF NOT WE WILL FIX THE LAW TO MAKE IT SO....

Canada is using online outrage to make dangerous changes to the criminal code

https://www.thepostmillennial.com/canada-is-using-online-outrage-to-make-dangerous-changes-to-the-criminal-code/

While the public can be emotionally and politically rallied to support changes to the criminal code when they are convinced a specific verdict was wrong, it is the job of lawyers and journalists to help the public understand what those changes will mean. In a time when public distrust towards lawyers and the legal system is palpable, the allure of hashtag activism gives people a sense of participation in our justice system without concern for research or consequences. Most citizens don’t worry about the resulting legal changes from the ensuing outrage because most people don’t expect to find themselves facing criminal charges in a court of law. Especially if they are innocent. Indeed, by the time the legal changes are made most people have forgotten the original cause or source of outrage.... We were told Stanley was wrongfully acquitted because the jury was all white. As a result, most Canadians support a new bill that will prevent an accused from reshaping a randomly selected jury. But the public is being misled.

Wilson-Raybould later tempered her Twitter pronouncement by saying she wasn’t talking about any specific case, but the message was clear: she would “fix” the law so future Gerald Stanleys would be convicted....

known as Marsy's Law and similar laws have been passed by many states around the country...

Florida police are now withholding crime victim information

https://www.wftv.com/news/florida/florida-police-are-now-withholding-crime-victim-information/907322792

open government advocates say this interpretation conflicts with existing public records law...."I understand their dilemma and I understand there's not a lot of clarity right now," Barbara Petersen, president of the Tallahassee-based First Amendment Foundation told the newspaper. "But they cannot willfully deny access to a request for public records unless there is specific constitutional or statutory authority, and this amendment does not provide that authority."...

"Usurpers always bring about or select troublous times to get passed, under cover of the public terror, destructive laws, which the people would never adopt in cold blood. The moment chosen is one of the surest means of distinguishing the work of the legislator from that of the tyrant."

Rousseau

‘Lock the S.O.B.s Up’: Joe Biden and the Era of Mass Incarceration

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/us/joe-biden-crime-laws.html

WASHINGTON — In September 1994, as President Bill Clinton signed the new Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in an elaborately choreographed ceremony on the south lawn of the White House, Joseph R. Biden Jr. sat directly behind the president’s lectern, flashing his trademark grin... “The truth is,” Mr. Biden had boasted a year earlier in a speech on the Senate floor, “every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress, every minor crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic senator from the State of Delaware: Joe Biden.”...

Mr. Biden apologized in January for portions of his anti-crime legislation, but he has largely tried to play down his involvement, saying in April that he “got stuck with” shepherding the bills because he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But an examination of his record — based on newly obtained documents and interviews with nearly two dozen longtime Biden contemporaries in Washington and Delaware — indicates that Mr. Biden’s current characterization of his role is in many ways at odds with his own actions and rhetoric.... and Republicans thought punishment was the answer...

The Justice Department Can’t Keep Its Own Law Secret Forever

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/29/the-justice-department-cant-keep-its-own-law-secret-forever-227984

But it turns out there’s a whole category of American law that is above such checks and balances. The public knows nothing about it and there’s no way to challenge it in court, let alone debate it in the halls of Congress. For decades, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has flexed its interpretive power as the ultimate arbiter of what the law is for the executive branch, building a whole body of secret law that remains shielded from public view. Very little is known about these opinions—which carry the force of law, resolve disputes between agencies, direct the conduct of federal officials and can even affect civil rights and liberties. In the view of one scholar, these opinions date “to the beginning of the Republic” and can even “rival the opinions of the Supreme Court.” These decisions number in the thousands... Indeed, without transparency to test these legal opinions in a court of law or the court of public opinion, it is often the case that the Justice Department has the final say on the actions of federal agencies and officers, and there’s not much anyone can do about it....Understanding past overreach could help us better understand today’s...

Judge Rules Terrorism Watchlist Violates Constitutional Rights

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/us/politics/terrorism-watchlist-constitution.html

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that a federal government database that compiles people deemed to be “known or suspected terrorists” violates the rights of American citizens who are on the watchlist, calling into question the constitutionality of a major tool the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security use for screening potential terrorism suspects. Being on the watchlist can restrict people from traveling or entering the country, subject them to greater scrutiny at airports and by the police, and deny them government benefits and contracts....

As of 2017, about 1.2 million people were on the watchlist, which is maintained by the F.B.I.’s Terrorist Screening Center. Although a vast majority of them were foreigners abroad, about 4,600 were American citizens who are protected by the Constitution....

Exclusive: Document reveals the FBI is tracking border protest groups as extremist organizations

https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-document-reveals-the-fbi-is-tracking-border-protest-groups-as-extremist-organizations-170050594.html

The FBI is monitoring groups on the border that are protesting U.S. immigration policy...The FBI has gathered intelligence from people with “direct access” to the organizations and is monitoring their social media, according to the document, called an “external intelligence note,” that was obtained by Yahoo News. The note, which was produced by the FBI office in Phoenix and sent to other law enforcement and government agencies, said there are indications these groups are “increasingly arming themselves and using lethal force to further their goals.” However, almost all of the evidence cited in the report involved nonviolent protest activity. The intelligence collected and cited in the FBI document, dated May 30, 2019, is worrisome to activists and civil rights advocates who say that the government is classifying legitimate government opposition and legally protected speech as violent extremism or domestic terrorism....“If you’re investigating antiwar and anti-Trump groups, you run the risk of interfering with free speech rights,”...

“For several years after 9/11, the FBI called environmental activists the No. 1 domestic terror threat, even though there’s not a single homicide related to environmental ‘terrorists’ in the United States.”... the antiwar movement... border protest groups... domestic protest groups... civil disobedience... white supremacists... “antifascist”... anarchist extremists ...

militia organization... left-wing protest groups... Gun Club... “Anti-colonial & Anti-capitalist Community Space.” ... far-right groups....

Colton Lester served 2 years in prison under an invalid law. Now, he's seeking restitution.

https://www.statesman.com/news/20191126/colton-lester-served-2-years-in-prison-under-invalid-law-now-hersquos-seeking-restitution

There is no doubt East Texas teenager Colton Lester got a raw deal when he served two years in prison for breaking a state law that had been declared unconstitutional almost a year before his 2014 court date. After the mistake was discovered and he was freed, Lester says he got a second raw deal when he tried to collect from a state fund that provides $80,000 for every year a wrongfully convicted inmate spends behind bars.

State officials denied his request, saying the fund is reserved for people who were found to be innocent of their crimes. Lester, however, had pleaded guilty to attempted online solicitation of a minor, unaware — as were his lawyer and prosecutors — that the law had been invalidated by the state’s highest criminal court in 2013. The situation is unfortunate, officials acknowledge, but the guilty plea made Lester ineligible for state compensation.

Lester disagrees, arguing that once a statute is declared unconstitutional, it’s as if that law never existed. No law means no crime was committed, and that means an innocent man served time in prison, he says....

LAW USURPS THE CONSTITUTION ALLOWS ANYONE, INCLUDING THE COLOR OF LAW, TO DENY RIGHTS...

New California laws for 2020

https://www.latimes.com/projects/new-california-2020-laws

California will ring in 2020 with hundreds of new state laws addressing a range of issues including monthly limits on gun purchases...Gov. Gavin Newsom signed almost 1,200 new laws this year...

Employers, co-workers and teachers will be able to ask for a gun-violence restraining order against a person beginning in September — no longer leaving the gun seizures only to families and law enforcement. If a judge agrees, one-year gun seizures from those who are thought to pose a danger to themselves or others could be extended annually for up to five years....

Law enforcement officers can use deadly force only when it’s “necessary in defense of human life,” a standard created following fatal officer-involved shootings across California....

UNEQUAL ENFORCEMENT OF LAWS IS JUST ANOTHER CRIMINAL ACT OF GUBMINT PIMPS. SLAVES IN SOME STATES ARE FORCED TO PLEAD GUILTY TO CRIMES HE DID NOT DO WHILE SLAVES IN OTHER STATES HAVE CHARGES DROPPED FOR ACTUAL CRIMES THEY DID DO. MAKES BACKGROUND CHECKS NOTHING MORE THAN A WORTHLESS SLAVE DATABASE.

NIGGAZ IN NORTH DAKOTA ARE FORCED TO PLEAD GUILTY TO FALSE ACCUSATIONS TO THE CRIME OF EVERYTHING BUT, THE NIGGAZ IN N'ORLEANS DONT.

THAT MEANS NIGGAZ IN N'ORLEANS WILL HAB GUNZ AND RIGHTS. WHILE THE NIGGAZ IN N. dAKOTA WILL BE SLAVE NIGGAZ WITH NO GUNZ AND NO RIGHTS.

SIMPLY PUT N'ORLEANS NIGGAZ WILL BE MASTAS WHILE N. dAKOTA NIGGAZ WILL BE SLAVES FOR N'ORLEANS NIGGAZ...

90% of domestic violence cases dropped in Orleans Parish

https://loyolamaroon.com/10025783/showcase/90-of-domestic-violence-cases-dropped-in-orleans-parish/

More than 90% of domestic violence cases are dropped by prosecutors in Orleans Parish according to a report presented to New Orleans City Council last month. The conviction rate for cases that do make it through court is only 6%... half of dropped charges were due to victims refusing to prosecute the case, while another 37% were dropped because they were not considered suitable for prosecution...

IF LAW SAYS IT CAN KILL YOU ANYTIME YOU EXERCISE YOUR BILL OF RIGHTS IS THE LAW RIGHT?...

Port: Why should it be a crime for Superintendent Baesler to refuse a sobriety test?

https://www.inforum.com/opinion/4974764-Port-Why-should-it-be-a-crime-for-Superintendent-Baesler-to-refuse-a-sobriety-test

The Fourth Amendment gives us the right to decline warrantless searches, but is it a right if the government can charge you with a crime for exercising it?...

In addition to prohibiting the operation of a vehicle with "an alcohol concentration of at least eight one-hundredths of one percent by weight" or "under the influence of any drug or substance" the statute also makes it a crime to refuse a "chemical test, or tests, of the individual's blood, breath, or urine." The tests referred to in the statute are searches, and the law itself makes refusing those searches, even in the absence of a warrant, a crime equivalent to driving under the influence.

Let's apply this legal reasoning to another situation. Suppose law enforcement suspects you of stealing your neighbor's snowblower. They knock on your door and ask you to consent to a search of your shed voluntarily. You refuse, as is your right, and the cops then arrest you for a crime equivalent to theft of a snowblower for refusing the search. Does that sound like justice to you? Baesler may well be guilty of driving under the influence, but should she be guilty of a crime for refusing a warrantless search?

The Fourth Amendment gives us the right to decline warrantless searches, but is it a right if the government can charge you with a crime for exercising it?

The Fifth Amendment also prohibits the government from compelling us to incriminate ourselves (the "I plead the fifth" thing from your favorite gangster movie). What is the status of that civil right if the government can make it a crime to exercise your Fourth Amendment rights?...

The courts are not infallible. The lawmakers are not infallible. The cops are not infallible. Just because all of this is legal under our current laws and jurisprudence doesn't make it right.

"...its always been a problem for our country. They get together and they create a series of documents no body's been able to read because it was just done. Now tell me how can they read it that quickly. It takes a long time to read it...." Donald Trump said in response as congressional leaders unveiled the “omni”: a massive 2,232-page, $1.3 trillion spending bill covering everything from defense to border security to opioids. In Congress, a spending bill spanning multiple budget areas is known as an “omnibus.”

GUBMINT PIMPS PLAYING POLITICS AGIN UNDER THE GUISE OF BENEFICENCE.

IT COMES DOWN TO WORDS THAT THE LEFT, THE RIGHT, THE MIDDLE AND EVRYTHING INSIDE AND OUTSIDE CAN TWIST AND SHAPE INTO ANYTHING THE MOST POWERFUL ONLY WINS NO MATTER THE INTENT. THE DISHONEST AND MOST CORRUPT ALWAYS WIN. IS THIS A LONG TERM HIDDEN DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST AGENDA DISGUISED AS AID TO A NATIONAL CRISIS? IS THIS THE CRAFTY ABORTIONISTS, DV HOLOCAUST VICTIM INDUSTRY, AG INDUSTRY, MEDICAL INDUSTRY, AND OTHER HIDDEN GROUPS WHO WILL BENEFIT HEAPS MORE THAN THE ACTUAL INTENT. USA GUBMINT PIMPS: ONE BILLION FOR ME, ONE FOR YOU...

No, There Was NOT Abortion Funding In the Coronavirus Bill

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2020/03/no-there-was-not-abortion-funding-in-the-coronavirus-bill.html

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sought to include a potential way to guarantee federal funding for abortion into the to the Daily Caller, those officials alleged that while negotiating the stimulus with U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Pelosi tried to lobby for “several” provisions that stalled bipartisan commitment to the effort. One was a mandate for up to $1 billion to reimburse laboratory claims, which White House officials say would set a precedent of health spending without protections outlined in the Hyde Amendment....Turns out, while Democrats are bashing the president for not working fast enough, they’re bogging down the debate with secret language on abortion.... “Pelosi wanted to sneak in a billion dollars in funding for abortion programs through the coronavirus stimulus package....

it’s worth noting that writers at left-wing publications responded to conservative’s claims with articles of their own, warning that Republicans were trying to “sneak abortion restrictions into the coronavirus bill.”.... On Twitter, abortion rights activists expressed dismay, warning that by falsely claiming that the bill would fund abortions, Republicans were actively blocking much needed coronavirus relief...Those on the right will believe the Family Research Council when they say the bill would have funded abortions. Those on the left will believe Mother Jones when it quotes abortion rights activists explaining that this was absolutely not what happened....

Claim 1: COVID-19 Testing Funding Could be Used for Abortions... Claim 2: Violence Against Women Act Provisions Could Fund Abortions...

WHEN MASTA HO FALSELY ACCUSES HER JOHN SLAVE OF PUTTING HER IN GAS CHAMBER WITH THE HELP OF SLAVE PATROL FABRICATIONS THE TWO ARE IMPERMEABLE PARTNERS IN CRIME BOTH CLAIMING VICTIM STATUS AFTER MULTIPLE CRIMES AGAINST AN INNOCENT JOHN SLAVE. MARSEY LAW WILL ONLY ADD MORE IMMUNITIES TO THE MANY EXISTING. IMMUNITIES FOR THE ACTUAL CRIMINALS PLAYING THE VICTIM...

Marsy's Law is creepy and cruel

https://www.tonemadison.com/articles/marsys-law-is-creepy-and-cruel

Wisconsinites should vote no on this perverse, dishonestly worded ballot question. ....

Marsy's Law takes us further down the path of carceral feminism, conflating the interests of vulnerable people with the interests of predatory state actors. It takes all that pain and twists it into a very misleading narrative. ...

It flies in the face of the federal Constitutional rights of the accused (despite proponents' disingenuous claims to the contrary). It can allow governments, cops, and corporations to claim "rights" under an absurd "victim" status. Most importantly, it blatantly invites cops and prosecutors to hide evidence from the defense, by creating the following "right" "for" victims: "to refuse an interview, deposition, or other discovery request made by the accused or any person acting on behalf of the

accused."...

Cops and prosecutors already lie and withhold evidence all the time, despite the fact that these behaviors are illegal and violate their own purported rules and ethics. Imagine how much worse it'll get if we literally enshrine an invitation to withhold evidence in the state constitution. Imagine what it's like for the victim of a crime, by the way, if the cops have an even easier time railroading the wrong suspect to prison....

ONE DULLA FOR YOU. ONE BILLION FOR ME. ONE DULLA FOR YOU. ONE BILLION FOR ME...

You might get $1,200 from the $2-trillion stimulus bill. What will special interests get?

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-03-26/coronavirus-stimulus-special-interests

In the days before the Senate unanimously passed a roughly $2-trillion bailout bill for the nation’s nosediving economy, lobbyists and special-interest groups flooded Congress with long-standing wishes and wants — though couched as urgent needs in a time of crisis. The 880-page bill that emerged... it does include provisions plucked from the wishlists of hotels, restaurants, retailers and over-the-counter drug manufacturers, among others.... Aerospace giant Boeing Co. appears the chief beneficiary of a $17-billion loan program intended for what the bill calls “businesses critical to maintaining the national security.”... Small banks won lower requirements for capital reserves, a longtime goal for their lobbyists... Democrats also attached measures that are not directly tied to the coronavirus. The bill includes $75 million each for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which give grants to museums and artists. It also provides $7.5 million for the Smithsonian Institution and $25 million for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. And the long-troubled U.S. Postal Service will get a $10-billion loan... Other tax provisions could provide a bonanza for wealthy real estate investors, potentially including the president and members of his family. Senate Republicans inserted a provision that would permit wealthy investors to use real estate losses to minimize their taxes. The estimated cost of the change over 10 years is $170 billion... “There is a big risk of secret favoritism,”... “Certainly this administration has not been shy about picking winners and losers and rewarding friends and punishing enemies,” Ellis said. “Once this gets in the hands of the executive, who knows how they’re going to allocate the funding.”

A Brief Criminal History of the Mask

https://newrepublic.com/article/157370/brief-criminal-history-mask

The maskless cops stood out for another reason. “There’s also an anti-mask law on the books,” Wong explained, meaning that once the governor’s order went into effect, mask-wearing was now officially mandated and prohibited. “How are individual officers going to be enforcing this new executive order?” she asked. “And how is that going to play out with the existing anti-mask law?” Another question follows: Will they be enforcing it equally in every New York neighborhood, among all New Yorkers?

Laws prohibiting mask-wearing, on the books across the United States, passed in some states as a response to the Ku Klux Klan. New York’s law was different. Sam Feldman, an appellate public defender, noted this history on Twitter: Prohibitions on mask-wearing in New York were a direct response, in 1845, to anti-rent riots....

Such selective enforcement is part of the anti-mask law’s history. As originally passed in 1845, it prohibited disguising oneself in public, as well as public assemblies of three or more people while disguised. ...

Protesters in Multiple States Are Facing Felony Charges, Including Terrorism

https://theintercept.com/2020/08/27/black-lives-matter-protesters-terrorism-felony-charges

Prosecutors and lawmakers in several states have responded to mass protests against police brutality by charging demonstrators with committing felonies, including terrorism charges. The trend of criminalizing protest has been on the uptick since the 2016 protests against the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock, during and after which numerous states upped charges for protests “near critical infrastructure” as felonies. Since 2016, 14 states have enacted new laws to restrict the right to peaceful assembly...numerous states have increased the severity of criminal penalties for protesters along political lines and are prosecuting them more aggressively, as demonstrations continue with no sign of slowing down.... In Tennessee, people convicted of felonies lose their voting rights — making the new law a tool for disenfranchisement.... numerous counts, including terrorism....The terrorism charges reveal a “false equivalency between people who kill, and people who commit acts of property damage,”...“To say that the power of the state will be wielded in this way against political enemies is incredibly frightening,” Chatfield said, drawing a parallel to the post-9/11 era, when many people who had never committed an act of violence were prosecuted for terrorism. “Let’s not ignore the fact that we have a history of this in this country. A very recent history. And a continuing history, unfortunately.”...

MARSEYS LAW SAYS ALL MASTAS IS VICTIMS AND ALL SLAVES AND NIGGERS ARE GUILTY, PERIOD....

Meet the Billionaire Who Wants Stronger Victims' Rights Laws

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/05/22/nicholas-law

The origins of the so-called “Marsy’s Law” for victims....

Defense attorneys argue it upends the presumption of innocence, giving alleged victims a say before it has been established that there was a crime in the first place. Using Marsy’s Law, prosecutors have blocked defense attorneys from getting basic information, such as where a crime took place....

HYPOCRAT BIDEN DENOUNCES HIS SLAVE LAWS HE IMPLEMENTED IN 1994 WHICH MAKES ALL HOS MASTAS AND ENSLAVES ALL NIGGERS AND SLAVES FOR THE CRIME OF EVERYTHING. BUT IT WAS REALLY THE CORRUPT STATES AND THEIR LOCAL WHORES WHO ABUSED THE LAW AS LEGAL AND POLITICAL PLUNDER WHICH WRONGFULLY CONVICT THE INNOCENT SLAVES AND GIVES IMMUNITY TO THE ACTUAL GUILTY MASTAS.

IT NOW COMES DOWN TO WHO SHOULD PAY FOR USA TYRANNY TO MAKE NIGGER A SLAVE AND KEEP THE CURRENT SLAVES IN THEIR SLAVERY, THE RICH MASTAS, OR THE SLAVES. AND WHO SHOULD GET THE MOST WELFARE, CORPORATE WELFARE FOR THE RICH MASTAS, OR SOCIAL WELFARE AS FOR THE NIGGERS AND SLAVES. AND THEN IS MEDICAL A RIGHT FOR RICH MASTAS ONLY, OR A PRIVILEGE FOR NIGGERS AND SLAVES....

A combative Trump and a deliberate Biden spar from GOES ON TO SAY IT WAS afar at town halls

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/10/15/nation/combative-trump-deliberate-biden-spar-afar-town-halls

In his appearance, Biden seemed to briefly acknowledge that it was a mistake to support the 1994 crime bill,

a measure in which he played a central role, though he went on to immediately suggest the perceived problem came in how the states implemented it. “Yes it was,” he said, when asked if it was a mistake to support it. “But here’s where the mistake came: The mistake came in terms of what the states did locally.”...

Biden, the former vice president, was speaking about corporate tax rates and citing the business-analysis service Moody’s, underscoring the extraordinary gulf separating the two candidates in their worldviews, policies and connections to factual reality....

ACTUAL CRIMINALS PLAYING THE VICTIM GET MORE IMMUNITIES UNDER MARSEYS LAW....

Could Marsy's Law in Kentucky be used to keep secret the names of police in shootings?

https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/crime/2020/10/29/marsys-law-could-kentuckys-law-shield-officer-shootings/6044995002/

In at least three states, police departments have used Marsy's Law to withhold the identity of officers who shot and killed suspects, contending the officers were threatened first. The department said the officers deserve protection just like any other crime victims.

But critics say those decisions — in Florida, North Dakota and South Dakota — undermine transparency at a time when many communities are increasingly concerned about police accountability....In those states, Marsy’s Law gives victims the right to “prevent the disclosure of information or records that could be used to locate or harass the victim or the victim’s family.” ...

In South Dakota, when a state trooper shot a motorist in August 2018, state officials refused to release the officer’s name, saying he was attacked first and had invoked his right to privacy under Marsy’s Law. Voters eventually amended the amendment to narrow the definition of "victim" and make other fixes.

In North Dakota, which enacted Marcy’s Law in 2016, most of the police officers in the eight police shootings over the ensuing two years invoked their right not to be identified, according to news accounts.

In Florida, in separate cases in May, when officers returned fire in Tallahassee against suspects who had threatened them — one with a knife, the other with a gun — the city police department refused to disclose their names, citing Marsy’s Law. ....

How a Man Serving Life Without Parole for $20 of Weed Gained His Freedom

https://theintercept.com/2020/12/25/fate-winslow-louisiana-law/

Fate Vincent Winslow was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole after selling an undercover officer $20 worth of marijuana in 2008. As the middleman between the cop and a dealer, he made $5 in the transaction. For 12 years, Winslow, who is now 53 years old, was imprisoned at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola — a prison complex roughly the size of Manhattan that sits atop a former slave plantation. During that time, more than a dozen states legalized recreational marijuana. While Winslow made 80 cents a week cleaning crowded prison dorms, pot entrepreneurs made millions selling the same drug that landed him in prison. The reason was not a mystery to him. “We both [know] no money no justice that’s just the way the world is,” he told the Intercept in 2018.....

US Legislation | 2019-2020 | 116th Congress

https://legiscan.com/US/legislation/2019

ND Legislation | 2019-2020 | 66th Legislative Assembly

https://legiscan.com/ND/legislation/2019

TO THE "VICTIM" GO THE SPOILS....

Florida Cops Use a Victims' Rights Law To Conceal Their Names

https://reason.com/2021/04/07/florida-cops-use-a-victims-rights-law-to-conceal-their-names/

The laws, as written, are vague and have been subjected to significant criticism by organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union for undermining the constitutional rights of defendants and treating them with the presumption of guilt in criminal court cases. Then there's the matter of who actually counts as a "victim," and that's where the police secrecy comes in. Police officers are declaring themselves to be victims of crimes when they are involved in violent incidents on the job. They then claim that Marsy's Law allows them to keep their identities secret....

THE REASON EVRY NIGGER OR SLAVE HAS NOT BEEN WRONGFULLY CONVICTED YET IS BECUZ SLAVE PATROL AND SLAVE AUCTIONS USING SELECTIVE PROSECUTION DO NOT ENFORCE THE CRIMES OF EVERYTHING EQUALLY...

NYPD inspector faces internal charges after skipping meeting about his ‘troubling’ performance

https://nypost.com/2021/12/01/nypd-inspector-faces-internal-charges-after-skipping-meeting/

A top NYPD inspector under scrutiny for “troubling” failures with his response to domestic violence cases in his precinct has been hit with departmental charges after skipping a mandatory meeting to answer for the lackluster performance, sources said.

Terrell Anderson, commanding officer of Brooklyn’s 73rd Precinct... At the time of the meeting, 355 domestic incident reports in the Brownsville precinct were left unaccounted for, sources said. “Those are victims that had no follow-up,” a source fumed.

In the 28-day period leading up to the meeting, the source said, “there was no effort” to arrest an estimated 178 outstanding suspects in domestic violence crime....