Tag: police state

Chicago man has murder conviction overturned after nine years behind bars when key witness who put him away admitted that he is BLIND

A Chicago man spent close to a decade behind bars for murder – thanks to the eyewitness testimony of a witness who’s since admitted to being blind.  

Darien Harris was locked up in 2011 aged 18, just a week before he graduated high school, and accused of shooting dead a man at a Chicago petrol station.

He now has a chance at freedom after star witness Dexter Saffold was revealed to be legally blind, and will get a new trial with his conviction vacated. 

Harris, now 30, was jailed for 76 years for the murder of Rondell Moore after a trial in 2014 despite there being no physical evidence tying him to the crime.

All prosecutors had was Saffold’s claim that Harris was the man seen in CCTV from the BP station in South Side Chicago, who then fired the fatal shots off-camera.

‘I was trying to tell the people all this time he’s lying… and here’s what came about. He was really lying,’ Harris told CBS.

Saffold was asked about his eyesight during the trial and told the court he had no vision problems and could see clearly.

But in a 2019 CBS interview he admitted he was legally blind, though still insisted he saw Harris pull the trigger.

‘I got glaucoma due to an eye disease,’ he said.

‘They didn’t do anything wrong, because they didn’t know. I didn’t have to tell nobody about my medical history.’ 

Saffold also filed a federal disability lawsuit in 2003 in which two doctors confirmed he was legally blind.

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Ohio prosecutors broke rules to win convictions and got away with it

Ernie Haynes never imagined that taking care of his three grandsons after his daughter’s drug overdose death would turn him into a felon at the hands of a longtime Ohio prosecutor known to sidestep the rules intended to protect a defendant’s rights in criminal trials.

A week after his daughter died in December 2017, the court granted temporary custody of the children to their biological father, a man Haynes said also struggled with drug addiction. When Haynes refused to give up his grandchildren, Wood County authorities arrested him and charged him with six counts of abduction. The action sparked a five-year legal battle to clear his name.

“We never got to grieve … because immediately we were plunged into this hell,” said Haynes’ wife, Marcella Haynes.

Ernie Haynes, 59, didn’t know it, but the assistant prosecutor who would try his case, Thomas Matuszak, had a track record of repeatedly violating legal standards to sway juries at trials and win convictions, according to court findings. He would do the same in Haynes’ case.

And it wouldn’t be the last.

Matuszak is one of about 100 prosecutors across Ohio who the courts found had violated standards meant to preserve a defendant’s civil rights in criminal trials, an investigation by Columbia Journalism Investigations, NPR and member station WVXU in Cincinnati, and The Ohio Newsroom found. He is one of 13 who did so more than once. Together, these 13 prosecutors accounted for nearly one-third of the 104 cases in the state where courts found that prosecutors acted improperly.

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Off-duty cop killed witness trying to assist police at scene of shooting who ‘did not present a threat of any kind’: DA

A 37-year-old police officer in Pennsylvania has been indicted by a grand jury for allegedly killing a 48-year-old “good Samaritan” who was attempting to help a shooting victim in a Walmart parking lot last year. Center Township Police Officer John J. Hawk, who was off-duty and dressed in plain clothes at the time of the incident, has been charged with one count each of involuntary manslaughter, aggravated assault, simple assault, reckless endangerment, and perjury in the death of Kenneth Vinyard, authorities announced.

According to the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office, Vinyard on the night of Nov. 6, 2022, was in the parking lot of a Beaver County Walmart when an individual was shot and the scene became “chaotic.” With the shooter still on the loose, Vinyard “made attempts to show a responding officer something on his telephone that he believed would assist them with the capture of the shooter.”

When Vinyard then interrupted an officer who was speaking to another witness, prosecutors say Hawk placed his hand on Vinyard’s arm and began to physically move him away.

“Vinyard disengaged from Hawk and told Hawk words to the effect of ‘take your hands off me’ but otherwise continued to move backward,” prosecutors wrote in the criminal complaint. “Vinyard did not act aggressively toward Hawk, not make any contact with him. Nevertheless, a few seconds later while the men were standing next to each other, Hawk struck Vinyard in the chest area and simultaneously executed a leg sweep technique which forced Vinyard to fall to the asphalt parking lot and hit his head, He died upon arrival at the hospital.”

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Blaze journalist who covered Jan 6 to be charged by Biden DOJ

Journalist for The Blaze Steve Baker has been notified by the FBI that he is going to be charged by Biden’s Department of Justice for his work covering the protest and riot at the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. He was told to surrender to authorities on Tuesday and has not yet been made aware of the charges.

He said that he entered the Capitol on that day, “like about 60 other journalists, but “Did no damage or parading or violence.”

Info Wars journalist Owen Shroyer just served a nearly 2 month sentence for having been on the Capitol grounds on that day. Other journalists have also been arrested and tried. 

Far-left journalist John Sullivan, who sold his footage of J6 to mainstream media outlets, was also charged after covering the event. He was charged with Obstruction of an Official Proceeding; Civil Disorder; Entering and Remaining in a Restricted Building or Grounds; Disorderly and Disruptive Conduct in a Restricted Building or Grounds; Disorderly Conduct in a Capitol Building; Parading, Demonstrating, or Picketing in a Capitol Building; and Aiding and Abetting, per the Department of Justice.

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The NDAA’s ‘Warrantless Backdoor Surveillance’ of Americans Gets Approved by the Senate

In a last-minute rush to sanction spending before the end of the year, the Senate enacted a $886 billion defense spending proposal Wednesday, sponsored by President Joe Biden, that includes financing for Ukraine, yearly pay hikes for personnel, and most controversially, a reauthorization of the the National Defense Authorization Act

The NDAA funds Pentagon objectives such as training and equipment. The Act was approved by a bipartisan majority of 87-13 in the Senate. For the last 61 years in a row, Congress has advanced the must-pass defense budget measure.

“At a time of huge trouble for global security, doing the defense authorization bill is more important than ever,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “Passing the NDAA enables us to hold the line against Russia, stand firm against the Chinese Communist Party and ensure America’s defense remain state of the art at all times.”

The package now moves to the House, where some conservative Republicans have vowed to derail it after legislators removed disputed elements that would have changed the Pentagon’s abortion policy and provide certain so-called “transgender” medical procedures.

The NDAA approved by the Senate is a compromise version of the budget package passed by the House earlier this year. The House version includes elements aimed at the Pentagon’s transgender health care regulations, as well as an amendment to repeal a Pentagon policy that reimburses out-of-state travel for service members who have abortions.

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Spain considers banning smoking and vaping on ALL beaches

Spain is considering banning smoking on all beaches as it presses ahead with tough new measures.

The Spanish Ministry of Health has confirmed a new crackdown on both smoking and vaping and says people’s health has to be protected.

One of its new priorities is to resurrect the anti-smoking plan which will include extending smoke-free spaces to terraces, beaches and cars in the presence of minors and pregnant women.

‘We must look at the law again because we cannot turn our backs on the only measure that can give the population more years of life and a better quality of life, which is to reduce smoking,’ said Health Minister Mónica García.

The Comprehensive Plan for the Prevention and Control of Smoking 2021-2025 was finalised a year and a half ago but has not yet seen the light of day.

The Ministry of Health says it wants to ‘remove it from the drawer’ and expand the ban on tobacco consumption to more areas.

‘The first steps are to get it out of the box,’ said Monica García. ‘We will have to look at each of the cases and each of the assumptions.

‘What we plan to is study what that plan is going to be, if it needs to be expanded, if it needs to be modified, but we do have a firm commitment to those recommendations.’

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ESG, DEI, and the Rise of Fake Reporting

We know that the modern West has developed a jaw-dropping degree of totalitarianism, wherein the bureaucracies of the state and the corporate sector coordinate together to cripple humans outside their power networks and media channels. But what are the mechanics of this coordination? To understand one of the games they play, consider the rise of measures and standards associated with DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) – both occupants of a highly abstract thought dimension and the latter an especially incomprehensible word salad.

ESG as a phrase was coined in a 2006 United Nations report, gradually gaining adoption by private companies like BlackRock via the production of annual ESG reports. Governments then started supporting these voluntary efforts, and eventually began making them mandatory. Since early 2023, corporations in the EU have been compelled to report on ESG. Many US companies with subsidiaries in the EU must observe both US and European rules, and those in the Asia-Pacific region too are starting to follow the ESG reporting pantomime.

In brief, ESG originated at the level of the international and intellectual stratosphere and then grew, unchecked by tedious real-world constraints like scarcity and tradeoffs, as a kind of malignant joint venture between large government bureaucracies and large corporations.

This JV is a serious industry, offering lucrative money-making opportunities for consulting companies, fund managers, and assorted professionals who ‘help’ companies comply. Bahar Gidwani, co-founder of a company called CSRHub, a compiler and provider of ESG company ratings, estimates that the collection of ESG data alone is already costing companies $20 billion worldwide.

It is an expanding industry too, since the reporting requirements keep increasing: according to recent reports, the head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission estimates that the cost of ESG reporting by the companies it oversees could quadruple to $8.4 billion this year, primarily due to the introduction of more ESG requirements. And that’s just in the US.

Large reporting costs are easier for large companies to bear, which offers a clue to why they’re interested: this sort of burden, particularly when made compulsory by the state, helps them dominate their smaller competitors.

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How Did The US Government Become So Big?

How big is the federal government?

Two measures are the number of civilian employees (nearly two million) and the number of agencies (now exceeding 440).

These numbers barely hint at their massive meddling into business activities and the personal lives of Americans.

While government was relatively small and less intrusive during its first hundred years, the Constitution held defects. In part, they resulted from the unavoidable compromises of consensus. The founders knew this, and some had anticipated civil war decades before the first shots were fired. Many other problems emerged during the great expansion of the nineteenth century due to the industrial revolution, the growth of America’s land area, and several political factors, mostly unanticipated. As population grew from about five million in 1800 to more than seventy-six million in 1900, government gained accordingly.

It was during the early twentieth century that the government acquired many extraconstitutional powers to intervene in our lives. This was accompanied by a great expansion of its jurisdiction and cost: new agencies, more government workers, more taxes. To give you a hint of this growth, here is an excerpt from the Congressional testimony of Doctor Roger Pilon of the Cato Institute in 2005:

We come, then, to the nub of the matter. Search the Constitution as you will, you will find no authority for Congress to appropriate and spend federal funds on education, agriculture, disaster relief, retirement programs, housing, healthcare, day care, the arts, public broadcasting—the list is endless. That is what I meant at the outset when I said that most of what the federal government is doing today is unconstitutional because it is done without constitutional authority. Reducing that point to its essence, the Constitution says, in effect, that everything that is not authorized—to the government, by the people, through the Constitution—is forbidden. Progressives turned that on its head: Everything that is not forbidden is authorized.

Almost fourteen years have elapsed since Doctor Pilon’s testimony. Today, the federal government is far larger and more intrusive, having enlisted the support of Big Tech, Big Pharma, academia, the legacy media, and others. But still, how did the government grow so large?

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America’s largest pharmacies are handing over medical records to police WITHOUT a warrant, congressional probe finds – amid fears women could be hunted down for taking abortion drugs

America’s biggest pharmacies have been quietly sharing Americans’ private medical records with police without their knowledge.

In what is being described as a ‘staggering’ breach of privacy, a congressional probe found the seven largest chains released people’s sensitive information to law enforcement or federal investigators without a warrant. 

While some of the pharmacy chains required their lawyers to review law enforcement requests, three of them — CVS, Kroger and Rite Aid which have 60,000 stores nationwide — said they allowed staff to hand over the records in their stores.

Senator Ron Wyden, who led the investigation, said it raised grave concerns because medical records were among the ‘most personal’ information for patients — revealing long-term conditions, sexual behavior and birth control.

There are now concerns that women could be hunted down by officials in states where abortions are illegal for taking abortion drugs.

Sen Wyden warned the current rules allowed for a ‘full blown witch hunt’ by Republican states against women.

This week mother-of-two Kate Cox was forced to travel out of Texas after a court denied her an abortion for her fetus which has a fatal genetic complication.

Current rules allow law enforcement to request medical records using a subpoena.

These can be issued by court clerks or government agencies but, unlike a warrant, do not require the approval of a judge.

And unlike subpoenas, warrants require law enforcement to establish a probable cause to believe a crime has been committed before making the request.

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China’s online censors target short videos, artificial intelligence and ‘pessimism’ in latest crackdown

China’s internet censors are targeting short videos that spread “misleading content” as part of its latest online crackdown.

The Cyberspace Administration of China said on Tuesday that it would target short videos that spread rumours about people’s lives or promoted incorrect values such as pessimism – included for the first time – and extremism.

The campaign would also target fake videos generated using artificial intelligence, the watchdog said.

The country’s top censorship body has been running an annual online crackdown known as “Qing Lang”, which means clear and bright, since 2020.

It said this year’s crackdown would benefit people’s mental health and create a healthy space for competition that would help the short video industry develop.

The country’s best known short video platform is Douyin – the Chinese sibling of TikTok – but content is shared on a number of other Chinese social media platforms, including major players such as WeChat and Weibo.

The watchdog said one of the targets of the latest campaign would be content producers who make up stories about social minorities to win public sympathy. It would also crack down on people staging incidents, “making up fake plots and spreading panic”.

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