Yes, there are all sorts of arcane legal arguments being made here (most of which I will openly admit to not understanding), but the gist of this story is that a judge tinkered with a jury in order to get the verdict the state wanted.
That was the outcome. Period.
Then you have this:
The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.
The proposed changes would revise the federal government’s rules for police intelligence-gathering for the first time since 1993 and would apply to any of the nation’s 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive roughly $1.6 billion each year in federal grants.
Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.
Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush’s successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.
Welcome to the police state, bitches. And in case they do decide to go to trial, the judges will be happy to help the jury convict you.
All together now- “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.” Our collective wars are killing this country.
*** Update ***
Notorious P.A.T.
What cracks me up about stuff like this is the assumption that we need more information. Our president had all the information he needed to stop 9/11 but was too f**king stupid and lazy and callow to do anything about it. “Bin Laden determined to attack inside US? What does that mean? We better tap Mr and Mrs Jones’s phone to learn more.”
spork_incident
Cheye Calvo and family had nothing to fear from police state tactics.
My take on the WaPo article.
.
demkat620
This is not intended for sane people. This is for the bedwetters who still fear the commieislamorusskiepotsmokinghippieliberal fascists under their beds.
But it does beg the question again, Bush is done in 156 days. Who are they consolidating all this power for?
jake
Think of the biggest police fuck up in your state. Then imagine those same psychotic bozos with access to your personal information.
Let the blackmail, intimidation and identity theft begin!
montysano
Fuck……… you beat me to it.
However, since Bush has endorsed that concept of Thoughtcrime, I’m a bit concerned, because……….. in that model, I have indeed done something wrong.
jake
The next Republican dickhead. Just wait. 20, 40, 60 years from now another brain-dead frat boy will be looking for a vice president and he’ll ask his good friend Dick Cheney to pick them man…
Xenos
That juror was clearly a crypto-nutball who lied on his juror questionnaire and who broke his oath. And Judge Young is smarter and more honest than 99% of the appeals court judges, including the US Supreme Court.
OK, I am a bit of a Young fanboy. But there are lots of us out there.
Gay Veteran
Jake: “Think of the biggest police fuck up in your state. Then imagine those same psychotic bozos with access to your personal information.”
indeed:
Former Grant County, Kentucky, Detention Center Officers Found Guilty of Civil Rights Violations in Teenager Rape Case
WASHINGTON – A Kentucky jury convicted Wesley Lanha and Shawn Freeman, both former deputy jailers, on federal civil rights, conspiracy, and obstruction charges, the Justice Department announced today. The defendants, former deputies at the Grant County Detention Center were found guilty of conspiring to violate the civil rights of a teenage traffic offender when they arranged for him to be raped by inmates. The jury convicted the defendants on all charges and specifically found that the defendants were responsible for the aggravated sexual assault carried out by the inmates….
realbtl
Remember, everything about Bush/Republicans is politics. When the dems take over and attempt to undo all, or even some of the craziness the Repubs can scream about not protecting the country. They get bonus (political) points after the next terror attack.
Bob In Pacifica
demkat620, excellent point. This is why when some blogs were whining about the Dems selling out to the Republicans over FISA, I was asking, why are the Republicans giving all this spying power to Prez Obama? And if you look at the B. Clinton administration you’ll find extensions of FISA, or the establishment of the ECHELON program, or any number of expansions of state power. And yet characters with histories of involvement in the intelligence community (for ex, Lucy Goldberg and her Delta Force friend, Linda Tripp) had no problem trying to sink his horny ass. Guess who held the power. Not Clinton.
The point is that these powers don’t accrue to the Presidency. Being the son of the former DCI may put you in consonance with the program, but that shouldn’t interpreted as Bush actually controlling the program.
It has been my firm belief for a couple decades now that post-WWII the intelligence services have been slowly taking control of our government, that many of the political events along the way, the assassinations of the sixties, Watergate, the October Surprise, all of these events were part of this slow, methodical swallowing of our freedoms and the corruption of our political process. The more dire our situation economy-wise, the greater need for the control of the government and the media.
I guess the greatest success has been the intelligence community’s ability to control the news and hide its own omnipresence. You know, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.
So, again, the question: “Who are they consolidating all this power for?”
Seanly
Wow, just wow. I don’t like it, but I have to admire the crazy fuggin’ huge brass balls of these evil motherfuggers. If this is the world that we live in, can we at least name the Big Brother apparatus? My vote is for Central Scrutinizer.
southpaw
I have a different reading of that story than “a judge tinkering with a jury.” It seems to me like some libertarian cheeseball was trying to run a political operation from the jury room and getting a rightful result.
Dickering with the trial judge over the Supreme Court’s view that the Commerce Clause authorizes the Controlled Substances Act appears, by my lights, to be something separate and apart from simple jury nullification–a process that played a starring role in some of the more sordid history of these United States.
frogspawn
I imagine John and Cindy McCain didn’t think they were doing “anything wrong” when they adopted a little orphan girl from Bangaladesh. How’d that work out for him in the 2000 South Carolina GOP primary?
Bottom line, if you haven’t done anything wrong, something you have done will be distorted beyond recognition or fabricated outright.
Scott H
The collective wars aren’t killing this country: it’s how much you will put up with.
Pass around some more of that delicious libertarian cheeseball, please.
D. Mason
Maybe that’s true(though I highly doubt it) but he should still be stripped of his seat because he clearly violated the Constitution. Personally speaking I would love to read a story in a decade or so about how a guy who was convicted through jury tampering carved some … justice out of this fascist.
Xenos
There are some excellent discussions of these issues at the link at Volokh.com, a place frequented by few lefties like me. If it makes your heart glad to hear about violence on judges, there was a federal judge in Chicago who had her family killed by some nutball whose medical malpractice case she had dismissed. Check it out, it should make pretty cheery reading to an asshole like you.
Young is no fascist. Mukasey, that is another story.
As for this case, maybe Young should declared a mistrial and started over. Since that would have cost taxpayers a couple million dollars, it is probably a good thing that he did not.
ATinNM
Obviously Mr. Thomas Eddlem has problems – unresolved issues with authority, no doubt – and needs to be sent to a re-education camp. There he can be guided, with the help of trained counselors, to psychological maturity in an kindly, yet stern, atmosphere.
(Or have his kidneys punched out through his nose. One or the other.)
Fortunately, the Federal Government is constructing the necessary means, staffing the various police and legal structures, to protect the rest of us from this kind of person.
Libby
Young is no fascist but I know him as a judge. My old firm tried many cases before him and he’s a hard nosed prick who favors the prosecution at any given moment. I’m not surprised he fucked with the jury, but I am very surprised to see Judge Gertner agreed with what he did. I know her too, on a much more personal level and she’s very fair and normally favors defendant’s rights.
All that being said, I think the kid was showboating a bit and picked the wrong case to make an issue of in terms of advancing the practice of jury nullification. Not because his legal points were wrong, but because the defendant wasn’t likely to engender any public sympathy. So in the end the kid makes nullification advocates look like attention whores.
srv
What Bob said, people with their hands on ~$40B+ per year and oversight by maybe 6 or 7 elected officials can pretty much do whatever they want.
Senate Intel Committee (Rep):
Kit Bond Missouri
John Warner Virginia
Chuck Hagel Nebraska
You know what is in Virginia. The question you should ask is why those two other states always have someone at the top of the committee. Been that way for a long time.
Obama may not even know that answer, and he’s smart enough not to ask. Change doesn’t mean rocking the boat.
D. Mason
It makes my heart glad to hear about violence against ANYONE who goes around ruining other peoples lives simply because they have the power to do so. That gladness does not carry over when it happens to their family who had nothing to do with the ruination.
This defendant probably deserved to be convicted, but this judge took extraordinary means to see to it that he was. To my eyes this judge is no different than a cold blooded murderer who uses his position to destroy people instead of traditional weapons.
Conservatively Liberal
Thanks for posting about this John. This is bullshit in too many ways to count. Any representative of mine who votes for this will never get my vote back. Never. I am writing my representatives to make this very clear. I will tell everyone I can about this, and I mean everyone. Family, friends, customers and anyone I can get to listen.
America is slowly circling the drain, and it ain’t the sink drain. It’s the toilet.
Charming indeed.
Marshall
It is interesting how most of the lawyer types at Volokh.com are almost hysterically against trusting people with using their consciences to make decisions.
As I posted there, the only reason for a trial by jury is to prevent egregious prosecutions by the state. Conversely, any law that cannot, as a general rule, get support from 12 randomly selected citizens does not deserve to be a law.
JR
Umm, what exactly did you think the role played by judges at trial was? Unless the accused is a major celebrity and there are cameras in the back, most criminal court judges seem to think helping the jury to convict IS their real job. See also: Daubert challenges.
AkaDad
You need to watch what you say. I’ll be upset if you get rendered to Syria.
Probably.
ET
Can’t say I am all the surprised by the fact that the Bush administration is trashing the house (more than it already was which is saying something) on their way out the door.
Bruce Webb
D. Mason, Marshall et al. It is not the trial juries responsibility to decide on the constitutionality of a law. Jurors are triers of facts and that is all they are. Making the following legal and historical nonsense:
“As I posted there, the only reason for a trial by jury is to prevent egregious prosecutions by the state. Conversely, any law that cannot, as a general rule, get support from 12 randomly selected citizens does not deserve to be a law.”
First Marshall is clearly confused between a Grand Jury which does serve the theoretical role of preventing egregious prosectutions and Trial Juries which pass judgement on the facts. Second it is not as if the law in question did not get support ‘from 12 randomly selected citizens’, it didn’t get support from one citizen who was non-randomly selected from a larger pool of potential jurors and got there by lying besides.
Really a huge waste of outrage going on here. The guy was totally confused about what the actual role of a juror was. The judge’s only mistake was to try to explain the constitutionality of the law via a discussion of the Commerce Clause instead of telling the guy that his question was out of bounds and assuming a role that was properly limited to the defence attornies who could appeal to judiciary if they had any question about constitutionality. That the guy wouldn’t budge even after getting explicit instruction about the state of the law from the judge meant he could and should have been removed.
In any event to put this incident into the same context as the Bush plan to turn all police forces nationwide into intelligence gathering agencies serving the National Security State is nutty.
calipygian
If it’s McCain, it’s the Bush years on muthafucking steroids.
If it’s Obama, it’s an impeachment trap for “executive branch overreach”.
Mark my words.
w vincentz
re: the Emptywheel link…chilling.
So sad to see these mothafuckas turning the good ol’ USA into 1938 Germany.
Xenos
Impeachment trap for Obama?
If Obama is elected, it will be part of a pretty big sweep. I don’t think the Democrats are likely to let some republican reps pull off an impeachment drive too easily.
Then again, we are talking about Democrats, who might find some difficulty in organizing a piss-up in a brewery.
bfranky
“You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide. You have nothing to hide if you have nothing to fear. So fear nothing and you need not hide. Hide nothing and you need not fear.”
from “The Department of Homeland Decency: Decency Rules and Regulations Manual,” a hilarious satire of all things Bush. Available at bookstores everywhere.