Gangsters in Blue

Yesterday I was arraigned on three counts of felony wiretapping – click here to read about Pete’s and my year long fight on MA wiretapping charges. If convicted I face anywhere from 11.5 to 21 years in prison and up to $12,000 in fines. I say IF because the only way I’ll be convicted is if the state (the system itself) protects it’s own. The three people claiming that I wire tapped them are public officials, whom I recorded while acting in their “public” capacities, but we’ll get more into that as we approach trial.

An arraignment is pretty basic, it’s a hearing where the state decides your bail – a place holder essentially – which is to secure your appearance at future hearings/trial. If you can think of any reason you need to be outside of jail, this is where you explain that to the judge. If you’re representing yourself, the goal here is to make the judge understand that you WILL be present at the scheduled dates/times.

As seen in the video above, I stated to the judge that a) I feel the charges are frivolous b) I’ve never missed a court date in the past – and I’ve had plenty c) I’m a full time activists/blogger and have ever intention of highlighting the silliness of the state’s aggression toward me. The judge seemed to agree because not only did he lower my PR bond from $10,000 to $1,000 but he also removed the clause banning me from possessing firearms. Though the DA made it clear that federal law still permitted it and I told them both that I’m a convicted felon. So the squabble was for nothing.

The only other thing I’d like to note about in the video is how the DA – Michael Valentine – stated that I wasn’t a harm to the community. Yet is going to spend alot of tax dollars attempting to cage me and a lot more if he actually secedes.

I encourage anyone being charged with a victimless crime to visit NeverTakeAPlea.org – that’s where I’ll be posting my court hearings and where you can network with others facing similar charges.

More to come from the magical land of Manchester Superior Court.

Meta Post with current information and backstory – HERE.
 

Ademo’s Arraignment on Wiretapping Charges is a post from Cop Block - Badges Don't Grant Extra Rights

Early last month, Cop Block covered the horrible charges that Michael Allison is facing (read the in depth coverage here), but since the podcast reaches a different audience, I thought it would be a good idea to get Michael’s story to as many ears as possible. Listen to the podcast below, and if you feel so inclined, contact Tom Wiseman, the Crawford Co. state attorney that is pursuing these charges… 5 counts of felony eavesdropping that could put Mr. Allison behind bars for 75 years, basically a life sentence for this middle aged man.

Tom Wiseman
Crawford County Courthouse
105 Douglas St.
Robinson, IL 62454
phone: 618.546.1505
fax: 618.544.4912
email: twiseman@crawfordcountycentral.com

Special thanks to YouTube user MikeHansonArchives for compiling all of the NBC 2 news clips in one easy place that made this podcast possible. You can watch the full 15 minutes of coverage here.

If you would like to submit a story or record a segment for the Police Accountability Report (on lack of accountability for police in your area) please email podcast[at]copblock[dot]org. We also welcome feedback.

You can also hear the podcast and other great liberty minded programs on LRN.FM. If you have an Apple iPhone or iPad, you can download the free LRN.FM app and have access to the live LRN stream as well as quick and easy access to the podcast archives for all of the shows in the LRN family.

Police Accountability Report – Episode 38 – Michael Allison is a post from Cop Block - "Something must be done about vengeance, a badge, and a gun"

Ziggy Marley recently did an interview with US Magazine with the release of his fourth solo album on the horizon. They talked about the new album, his family, the 30th anniversary of his fathers death, and of course his views on marijuana. Here is an excerpt of the interview:

US: Marijuana is also a topic on the album and your new comic book, Marijuana Man. Why do you think it should be legalized in America?

ZM: Alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical drugs are legal but they can hurt a lot of people. People get high from cough syrup that they can easily purchase at the pharmacy. Marijuana has a lot of benefits that we should utilize. People shouldn’t go to jail for smoking marijuana in the privacy of their homes or be criminalized or demonized by that. I don’t think it is as detrimental as alcohol in terms of the effects it has on society and people’s lives. Anything can be abused and overdosed so you have to be responsible. Plus, the industrial aspect of marijuana has had a bigger impact on society than even the recreation or medicinal uses. If people can utilize a natural resource properly, the impact it would have on the environment and the economy would be great. The argument against marijuana is confusing and hypocritical and stupid. It is a natural resource that we should use.

Ziggy nails it on the head, it’s absolutely disgusting that people think they can rule over your own body, that they know what’s best for you. People got upset over the NYPD confiscating 2.5 tons of illegal fireworks and blowing them up, claiming freedom this and that. But a plant? No, no, no, confiscate that shit, we can’t have people making their own decision there, that’s dangerous. Ziggy also spoke about his comic book

US: Why did you launch the comic book?
ZM: It was a creative outlet for me since I had a lot of ideas my head. I grew up in the comic book world and I used to read comics all the time. It was just a way for me to express the ideas I have about hemp. I have also always wanted to have a superhero. The superhero in my book is just like a kin to Superman and the Green Lantern guys, a superhero for the next generation.

Enforcement of the Drug War in the United States has resulted in 32 deaths so far in 2011, the latest being Nelson Reeves, a 17 year old in the Bronx who was shot by a NYPD narcotics officer when a drug deal went awry. Whenever you outlaw something, the demand does not go away and the supply, manufacture and selling goes underground to the black market, which attracts many shady people.

Some people are block-headed enough to think that drugs need to be illegal because of all the violence associated with people who use or sell them. They aren’t with it enough to realize it’s the illegality that leads to all the violence. Before alcohol prohibition you never had gangs running around and killing each other over alcohol, and you don’t have it now that it’s legal. Without alcohol prohibition you never would have had Al Capone and events like the St. Valentines Day Massacre.

Alcohol prohibition brought us bathtub gin, gin made by amateurs in their bathtubs and contaminated with god knows what. Just the same, drug prohibition has brought us amateurs cooking meth in their kitchens and lacing other drugs with deadly chemicals whether on purpose or by accident, leading to medical related deaths. Deaths that most likely would not happen if all drugs were legal and able to be made in controlled environments by professionals.

Drug prohibition, just like alcohol prohibition, leads to a number of cops becoming corrupt. Drug dealers are always looking for ways to get their products past law enforcement in order to meet their customers demand, so they buy off easily corruptible cops to look the other way as they move their merchandise. The more the government cracks down, the more expensive the drugs become and the more they have to pay the cops to allow them to continue business. The police are even sometimes just as bad as the drug dealing gang members they vow to fight, as one teenager in Pakistan just found out when he reported on some local cops dealing drugs.

The insane Drug War has caused a lot of damage to cops reputations across the United States and around the world as well. With so much money to be made due to the black market aspect, some cops will become drug dealers themselves, often selling drugs confiscated during raids of other dealers homes. Three Philadelphia police officers were arrested for this very thing last summer. And two years ago a undercover cop in North Carolina was caught selling drugs to another undercover cop. I could go on and on, or you could look it up for yourself. I googled  ”Cops Dealing Drugs” and received over 62 million results.

There is more to the rise in crime than just selling drugs. As the prices continue to rise with every crackdown, a drug users habit becomes more and more expensive and they get more desperate. They begin robbing places like convenience stores and banks and break into homes, and some even kill during the robberies. And nothing highlights the governments failure in the War on Drugs better than their inability to keep drugs out of their own prison. Prison guards are arrested constantly for smuggling drugs into prison, and why not, it pays well and they have a family to feed during a recession.

And then there is the jails where they keep all these drug offenders. In what is always labeled as the Land of the Free, prisons are constantly overcrowded as some holler for more prisons to be built to house all these lawbreakers. The “Land of the Free”(sic) over 2.5 million people were in jail as of 2006, the number of people in prison in the entire world at that time was estimated at 9.25 million. If you do the math it comes out to 27% of the worlds prison population(The US has less than 5% of the worlds total population), many of them peaceful people who chose to put something into their body the government decided to say they couldn’t.

To better put those numbers into perspective, nations generally regarded as being totalitarian and oppressive like Russia and China have far less people in prison. Russia’s prison population was just under 870,000 in October of 2006, down from over 1 million in 2002. China’s prison population was estimated at 2 million in 2005. But as you can see in the map below, China only had between 100-150 people per 100,000 in prison in 2008. Russia has nearly 600 per 100,000 people. The “Land of the Free” is the only country with over 700 people per 100,000 in prison.

 

You might think that we just have a lot of violent people who are doing terrible things, except that of the over 2.5 million people in US prisons, nearly half of them are drug users. According to Drug Sense, over 967,000 people have been arrested in the United States so far in 2011 for Drug War offenses. That number is expected to exceed the 1,663, 582 arrests in 2009.  And that budget crisis everyone is worried about, well the Feds spent $15 billion last year on the Drug War alone, or $500 a second. So far they have spent $8.75 billion this year. The prison population in this country has grown by more than 43,000 prisoners a year on average since December 31,1995. Twenty-five percent of that are people who violated some form of drug law. The number of people in state prisons for drug offenses has increased 550 percent over the last 20 years. (A Salon article last year put the number in federal prison at half the total population

If you support the drug war, you are supporting gangs, corrupt police, robbery, murder and overcrowded prisons. So don’t blame us when we judge you for it.

Supporting the drug war means supporting innocent deaths at the hands of police, who sometimes get the wrong addresses. Some of those stories have been covered here at Cop Block (see here, here, and here)

There are many brutal consequences to this War on Drugs and it’s time to end this abject failure. Some state governments are beginning to realize this, my state of Indiana being the latest.

Ziggy Marley is the man for speaking out and for that we should all support this man

Ziggy Marley: Why Marijuana Should Be Legal is a post from Cop Block - "Something must be done about vengeance, a badge, and a gun"

According to CIA estimates, approximately 50,000 human beings were trafficked into the United States for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation in 2010. The victims of human trafficking are subject to cruel treatment and are given little hope of escape.

It is a shame that this form of human trafficking receives little attention from the media and is almost ignored by society, and in fact, many people are likely unaware that this type of thing goes on.

There is another type of human trafficking, which occurs right in front of us. Victims of this type of human trafficking are also often used for the purposes of forced labor, and many of them are sexually exploited. This type of human trafficking is also largely ignored as an issue. When not ignored, it is often cheered by much of the public.

In 2007, the latest year for which government statistics are available, a whopping 14,211,500 arrests took place in the United States. Many of those who were arrested were likely arrested multiple times, but this number is still quite a large figure. This is especially worrying considering that less than two million of these arrests were for violent crimes, the rest being property and victimless crimes.  Many of these 14 million plus arrests result in someone being sent to prison.

The media never refers to this as human trafficking, but lets be clear: it is.

These people are taken against their will by armed members of paramilitary organizations. They are stripped of they rights, often brutally. Many times these situations end with these people being taken away from their families for months or years at a time. Many of these people are forced to live in cages. Additionally, many of these caged individuals are subjected to brutal and dehumanizing treatment by other prisoners or guards. Perhaps worst of all, many of these people are subjected to violent sexual assaults while kept in their cages.  Mention prison to the typical American male and his first thought will have something to do with prison rape.  Americans know that this type of thing occurs regularly, but few people seem to care.

And this kind of thing isnt just happening to a few people or even a few thousand people. According to the U.S. Government’s own Bureau of Justice Statistics [page 2], 2,284,900 people were incarcerated in 2009. This number represents about 1% of the adult population. Additionally, around 5 million more Americans were on probation, meaning that if they engage in activities deemed inappropriate by the State, they will be sent to prison as well.

Police officers who arrest people for their involvement in nonviolent, victimless, and/or property crimes know full well that the person who they are arresting could very well end up in prison. Furthermore, these officers know what goes on in these prisons—that the person who they arrested will be subjected to forced labor and possible forced to participate in unwanted sexual activities.  Police officers and much of the general public may claim that these officers are “just doing their jobs,” but this argument is a false one which ignores the issue at hand.

Because it would be impossible for this type of human trafficking to take place without the active participation of police officers, we must be quick to condemn them for their actions.  We must speak out against this type of behavior and expose these people for their crimes against the populace.  This is why websites like Cop Block are important.

As the great Ludwig von Mises once said: “No one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result.”

Human Trafficking is a post from Cop Block - "Something must be done about vengeance, a badge, and a gun"

Last year I wrote about Ted White and his five year nightmare. Mr. White spent five years in prison after a police officer, who was sleeping with his wife, perjured himself in court. The officer’s testimony helped secure to Mr. White’s wrongful conviction for child molestation. Mr. White was eventually exonerated and released after it was learned that the prosecution knew of the the officer’s affair with Mr. White’s wife and that the prosecution was most likely complicit in the perjury.

After his release Mr. White filed a lawsuit against the city of Lee’s Summit Missouri, the chief of police, and the officer himself, Detective Richard McKinley. In 2006, as part of a settlement that would remove the city from the lawsuit, Lee’s Summit city government agreed to pay “any final judgment entered by the court in favor of White”, which indemnified Detective McKinley. In 2008 the court ruled that McKinley had violated White’s due process rights by withholding evidence. The court awarded White almost $16 million.  Lee’s Summit then refused to pay. Lee’s Summit’s mayor, Randy Rhoads, said that “Despite an indemnification agreement which removed the city as a defendant in this case, it has been determined after an extensive review that paying for any damages would be a violation of city ordinances.”  Rhoads went on to say that when the agreement was signed there was no way to know that the verdict would rule that McKinley violated White’s Constitutional rights and that “In light of the verdict, it’s unlawful under ordinance for the city to indemnify the defendant, Lee’s Summit city ordinances specifically state that if a city employee violates the rights of another person, the city shall not indemnify that employee.”

Earlier this this year, U.S. District Judge Nanette Laughrey threatened Lee’s Summit with a crime fraud hearing if they did not pay up. The city of Lee’s Summit has now changed course and has agreed to a settlement of $15.5 million. Mr. White will finally get some justice, but what he really wants is his children back in his life.  He has not seen them since his ordeal began.

When speaking of of moving on, Mr. White said “There is no room in a person’s heart for hate or revenge, so true forgiveness was the only way for me to take back control of my life…The detective stole my children — how hard is that for me to get past that? I haven’t seen them for years. They are worth more to me than $15 million… I used to pray for that man to take care of my children, and he was the one who put me in jail.”

Update: Cop Lies, Man Spends Five Years in Prison is a post from Cop Block - "Something must be done about vengeance, a badge, and a gun"

In 2001, a group of police officers broke into Cory Maye’s home in the middle of the night looking for drugs. Instead of announcing their presence and giving Maye time to answer the door, the police forcibly entered their way into Maye’s home. Maye, thinking he was being robbed, grabbed his gun and shot Officer Ron Jones, killing him. Maye was arrested that night and charged with capital murder.

Though Maye’s shooting of Officer Jones was done in self-defense and the police had raided his house on a questionable search warrant, a jury convicted Maye and he was sentenced to die.

After spending a decade in prison, Maye was finally allowed to plea to a lesser charge earlier this year and released from prison.

Russia Today put together this great video about Maye’s case:

And this interview with Ben Vernia, one of Maye’s attorneys:

For more on Cory Maye, check out Radley Balko’s coverage at The Agitator. Balko has been the most important journalist writing about Maye’s case.

Cory Maye finally free after a decade in prison is a post from Cop Block - "Something must be done about vengeance, a badge, and a gun"

This infographic was created by the American Civil Liberties Union (click to enlarge):

Mass incarceration infographic is a post from Cop Block - "Something must be done about vengeance, a badge, and a gun"

Sage Wisdom. Daily Brickbats (2011-06-17):

A Broward County, Florida, sheriff's deputy spotted Robin Brown when she was bird watching one day. He thought that the sage she had with her was marijuana, and a field test seemed to confirm that. He didn't arrest her then, but confiscated the sage and sent it to the crime...

Want to guess how much compensation she might be able to get from police and state prosecutors to make up for the harassment, arrest, abduction, sexual assault, torture, and confinement that they inflicted on her, a completely innocent bird-watcher, based on nothing more than belligerent ignorance, a fraudulent "field kit," and pure, callous negligence?

Ha, ha, it's a trick question. Even if she does win her lawsuit (which will be hard; the system overwhelmingly favors immunity for government violence), the police and prosecutors will never pay anything for the damages she's awarded. Government police and state prosecutors never pay for what they do to innocent people; you pay for their crimes instead, when they send the tax bill on to you.

Several Cop Block readers have been appalled we would support Bradley Manning. At least one reader has stated that due to our Bradley Manning call flood post, he will never read Cop Block again. It is not clear why this post generated so much anger, but ultimately, our support for Mr. Manning is not in [...]

That’s what happened to “M”, a 27-yr-old woman who was raped by an on-duty cop in her own home last week. It all started when she called the police after getting in a traffic accident. A cop arrived at the scene, gathered her information, and gave her a ticket. And that was the end of [...]