Tag: police state

FBI and DHS Heads Are Slammed for Pressuring Big Tech to Censor Americans

During a recent Senate Homeland Security Committee on “Threats to the Homeland,” the heads of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were blasted for their agencies’ roles in pressuring Big Tech companies to censor Americans.

In his opening statement, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) pointed to the 1976 Church Committee final report that documented decades of “widespread abuse by federal intelligence agencies against U.S. citizens” and expressed his fear that now, almost half a century after this report was published, “our federal government is still undertaking many of the same tactics that the Church Committee found to be unworthy of democracy, and occasionally reminiscent of totalitarian regimes.”

He continued by highlighting the ways the FBI, DHS, and other federal agencies operated “in a manner that is outside the scope of their authorities, wasting taxpayer dollars and infringing on the rights of Americans.” The senator from Kentucky pointed to the Fifth Circuit’s finding that the FBI and other federal agencies likely violated the First Amendment when coercing Big Tech companies to censor speech and noted that much of the speech the FBI flagged for censorship was truthful.

Paul also took aim at the FBI’s “misuse [of] its authority” under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a warrantless surveillance law that the FBI has used to spy on millions of Americans, including a senator, a state senator, and a judge.

Keep reading

 House Speaker Mike Johnson’s ‘adopted’ 40-year-old son Michael Tirrell James in court on charges of running illegal cannabis business and possession of brass knuckles – as it’s revealed rap sheet goes back to 2003

The ‘adopted’ black son of new House Speaker Mike Johnson has spoken out for the first time in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com.

Michael Tirrell James said he would ‘probably be in prison’ were it not for Johnson – after he appeared in a Los Angeles court Wednesday on charges of running an illegal cannabis business and possessing brass knuckles.

James has never taken part in publicity for Johnson’s political campaigns, and little has been known about the 40-year-old father of four.

But now DailyMail.com can reveal how the top GOP lawmaker and his wife Kelly informally adopted James after meeting him while doing charitable community work in Louisiana in the 1990s.

James went on to have a string of conflicts with law enforcement, beginning just a few years after the Johnsons took him in, and continuing to this day.

His rap sheet extends back to 2003 and includes a long list of drug-related and other petty crimes, some of which landed him in jail, DailyMail.com can reveal.

The 51-year-old House Speaker, elected October 25 after three weeks of confusion following the ousting of previous Speaker Kevin McCarthy, has revealed he informally adopted James, a Baton Rouge then-teenager, and raised him during the first few years of his marriage.

James told DailyMail.com: ‘If the Johnsons hadn’t taken me in as a teenager, my life would look very different today. I would probably be in prison or I might not have made it at all.’

The Louisiana Republican congressman first met James in 1996 while volunteering with Young Life, a Christian ministry catering to middle and high school teens.

The future speaker, then a 24-year-old law school student, became a mentor for the 14-year-old boy, a source close to the Speaker’s office said.

When James became homeless in 1999 age 16, newlyweds Mike and Kelly Johnson took him in, filing papers with the local Baton Rouge district court to become his legal guardians.

His life appears to have gotten back on track after the informal adoption. He earned his G.E.D. and graduated from a Job Corps program in 2002, and even ‘began to refer to the Johnsons as his parents, and they regarded him as a son,’ the source said.

The Johnsons later had four biological children: Jack, Will, Hannah, and Abigail.

Keep reading

The story of a horrendous injustice and the three people who tried to expose it begins with a suicide note

Two years into his 25-year sentence for attempted aggravated rape, Nathan Brown could tell the man sitting across from him — a jailhouse lawyer improbably named Lawyer Winfield — was not going to help him get out of prison. It was astounding to Brown that he was pinning his hopes on a fellow inmate who had an eighth grade education and whose formal legal training amounted to a prison paralegal course. “But he knew more than I did,” Brown said.

Brown laid out for Winfield the details of his case. In the summer of 1997, a woman was assaulted in the courtyard of the apartment complex in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, where Brown was living with his mother. The woman, who was white, fended off the attacker with her high-heeled shoe until he fled on a bicycle. When sheriff’s deputies arrived, a security guard suggested they question Brown — one of the few Black tenants in the complex.

Brown, 23 at the time, was in his pajamas, rocking his baby daughter to sleep. The deputies put him in handcuffs and brought him to the victim. When she couldn’t identify him, the officers allowed her to get close enough to smell him. She had told them her attacker had a foul body odor. Brown, she would later testify, smelled like soap; he must have showered immediately after, she speculated. In a trial that lasted one day, the jury found him guilty. After his appeal was rejected, he no longer had a right to an attorney provided by the state.

Winfield began translating Brown’s grievances into a legal petition. He argued that Brown’s lawyer had provided ineffective counsel: He had overlooked the most basic defense strategies, failing to challenge the discrepancies in the victim’s story and to insist on DNA testing. The two of them worked on the petition for months, so Brown was surprised when the Louisiana 5th Circuit Court of Appeal delivered a rejection just a week later. The denial — a single sentence that didn’t address any of Brown’s claims — bore the names of three judges. But something didn’t feel right. How could they return the ruling so quickly? Why was it so vague?

The answer to those questions would come years later, in the suicide note of a high-level court employee who disclosed that the judges of the 5th Circuit had decided, in secret, to ignore the petitions of prisoners who could not afford an attorney. It was a shocking revelation. In a state where police and prosecutorial misconduct frequently make national headlines and a stream of exonerations has revealed a criminal justice system still functioning in the shadow of slavery and Jim Crow, a group of white judges had decided that the claims of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of inmates — most of them Black — were not worth taking the time to read.

Among those petitions was Brown’s claim that a DNA test would have proven his innocence.

Keep reading

Illinois Family Files Lawsuit After Police Execute Wrong-Door Raid and Allegedly Detain Them for 6 Hours

A family in Joliet, Illinois, says they were terrorized by police, held at gunpoint, and detained for six hours after officers executed a search warrant on the wrong house.

A federal civil rights lawsuit filed Wednesday by the law offices of Al Hofeld Jr. accuses the town of Joliet and nearly two dozen police officers of unlawful search, excessive force, false arrest, and conspiracy, among other rights violations.

On November 2, 2021, 62-year-old Adela Carrasco and her family were awakened by the sound of banging and shouting at their front door. Carrasco, whom her lawsuit says suffers from asthma and uses a cane due to a hip injury, hobbled toward the door to see what the commotion was.

Carrasco discovered 21 armed law enforcement officers from the Joliet Police Department, Will County Sheriff’s Office, and U.S. Marshals Service. The officers were investigating a deadly Halloween-night shooting two days prior and had decided to execute an outstanding warrant for 18-year-old Elian Raya, one of Carrasco’s grandsons.

“I asked them to show me a warrant; they didn’t show me nothing. They just pushed me aside and went in,” Carrasco said at a press conference Thursday announcing the lawsuit. “And I’m screaming at them the whole time to put down their guns because they’re going to shoot my grandkids.”

The lawsuit says the officers barged into the bedrooms of Carrasco’s grandchildren, who ranged in age from 12 to their early twenties, and pointed guns at them while shouting obscenities.

There was only one problem: The search warrant for Raya listed his address as 226 South Comstock. Carrasco lived at 228 South Comstock. The building is a duplex with two separate front entrances, both with addresses clearly marked.

The lawsuit alleges that although officers knew or quickly realized that they were not in the right unit, they continued to ransack Carrasco’s house, cutting open couch cushions, flipping mattresses, and dumping drawers. 

Keep reading

It’s Hard To See How the 9th Circuit Can Manage To Uphold California’s ‘Assault Weapon’ Ban

Over the weekend, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit stayed a permanent injunction against California’s “assault weapon” ban that a federal judge issued on October 19. That means the law, originally enacted in 1989 and subsequently broadened, will remain in effect while the appeals court hears the state’s appeal in Miller v. Bonta. But if the 9th Circuit carefully considers U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez’s reasoning in issuing the injunction, it is hard to see how the appeals court can conclude that California’s ban is consistent with the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment precedents.

Benitez had previously ruled that the “assault weapon” ban was unconstitutional. In August 2022, the 9th Circuit vacated that June 2021 decision and instructed Benitez to reconsider the case in light of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the June 2022 case in which the Supreme Court concluded that New York had violated the Second Amendment by requiring residents to show “proper cause” before they were allowed to carry handguns in public for self-defense.

Bruen explicitly rejected the “interest-balancing” tests that federal courts had commonly used to uphold gun control laws. It instead prescribed a historical test aimed at determining whether a given regulation is consistent with the right to keep and bear arms as it was traditionally understood. “When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority. “The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Only then may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s ‘unqualified command.'”

Applying that test to California’s “assault weapon” ban, Benitez first considers whether the targeted firearms are “in common use,” meaning they are “typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes.” Beginning with its landmark 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court has said weapons fitting that description are covered by the Second Amendment.

Keep reading

Lawmakers still divided over marijuana legalization

As almost half of all states allow recreational marijuana, it sometimes feels inevitable that Pennsylvania will follow the lead of their neighbors.

During a committee hearing, though, opposition remains significant.

The House Health Subcommittee on Health Care heard testimony on Wednesday, with Democrats more supportive of recreational use and Republicans more wary of its dangers.

“We want to right some of the wrongs of the past by ensuring that those who have been the target of cannabis criminalization don’t continue to carry the stigma,” Rep. Dan Frankel, D-Pittsburgh, said. “We’d like to see our economy benefit from legal sales rather than illegal sales … and think about how we might mitigate (concerns) through appropriate regulation and oversight. Fundamentally, any proposal that we put forward must prioritize the health of Pennsylvanians.”

Legalizing marijuana would, if nothing else, give more control of the market to legislators, experts argued.

“There’s a very common fallacy … that drug prohibition equals drug control,” Amanda Reiman, chief knowledge officer of New Frontier Data, which focuses on the marijuana industry, said. “In prohibition, you don’t get to control anything.”

What brings control, she said, is regulation.

“The only way to trump that illicit market is to continue to allow adult-use regulation,” Reiman said.

Without a legal market, legislators argued the demand wouldn’t dissipate.

“Whether marijuana’s legal or illegal, folks who are dealing with trauma and finding ways to manage that without access to care are gonna find it wherever they’re gonna find it,” Rep. Danielle Friel Otten, D-Exton, said.

Keep reading

A Montana Case Tests the Constitutionality of the Gun-Free School Zones Act

Last summer, Gabriel Metcalf alarmed passersby in Billings, Montana, by “pacing his front lawn holding a rifle.” When local police approached him, Metcalf said he was protecting himself from a neighbor he thought was stalking him. The officers conceded that Metcalf was not violating any state laws but asked him to cut it out. Because Metcalf was not inclined to follow their advice, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) got involved. Noting that Metcalf lived across the street from an elementary school and admitted walking on the sidewalk near his home with the rifle, the ATF charged him with violating the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act.

That law, 18 USC 922(q), makes it a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison, to possess a firearm within 1,000 feet of a school. Since schools are scattered throughout communities across the country, those gun-free zones cover a lot of territory—including the sidewalk outside Metcalf’s home. But in seeking dismissal of Metcalf’s indictment, his public defender, Russell Hart, argues that his conduct is not covered by the statute and, in any case, is protected by the Second Amendment. The latter argument seems promising in light of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the 2022 decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right to publicly carry firearms for self-defense.

In the 1995 case United States v. Lopez, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had exceeded its power to regulate interstate commerce when it passed the original version of the Gun-Free School Zones Act in 1990. “The Act neither regulates a commercial activity nor contains a requirement that the possession be connected in any way to interstate commerce,” Chief Justice William Rehnquist noted in the majority opinion. Congress responded in 1995 by amending the law to specify that it applies only to “a firearm that has moved in or that otherwise affects interstate or foreign commerce”—boilerplate that had no practical effect on the statute’s broad reach.

The law includes several exceptions. It does not cover unloaded guns kept in “a locked container” or “a locked firearms rack that is on a motor vehicle.” It does not apply to guns “on private property” that is “not part of school grounds.” And it does not allow prosecution “if the individual possessing the firearm is licensed to do so by the State in which the school zone is located or a political subdivision of the State, and the law of the State or political subdivision requires that, before an individual obtains such a license, the law enforcement authorities of the State or political subdivision verify that the individual is qualified under law to receive the license.”

Keep reading

‘No money would ever tempt me to kill my XL Bully’: Furious dog owners blast government £200 ‘puppy scrappage scheme’ to euthanise their pets – as charities face an impossible task to rehome animals before December 31 deadline

Livid Bully XL owners are refusing to accept a £200 Government handout to euthanise their soon-to-be-banned pets, branding the plan ‘absolutely disgusting’.

The breed will be banned under the Dangerous Dogs Act by the end of the year, following a spate of recent fatal and horrific attacks. 

Owners can apply to have their pets exempt from the crackdown – which means they would have to pay £92.40 for a certificate and the dog would need to be microchipped and neutered, among other rules.

The second option would be to have their dogs put down, with the government offering £200 in compensation to these owners. 

But news of the measures this week triggered fury from Bully owners, who branded the move a ‘puppy scrappage scheme’. 

Fuming Bully XL owner Ashley Oxley from Brighton told MailOnline: ‘No money would ever tempt me into putting my girl down she’s fine the way she is and that’s how it’s staying can’t believe in this generation this kind of brutality is even allowed.’ 

Mother-of-three Dani Harland added: ‘This breaks my heart. I own an XL Bully and I would never ever even dream of putting her down. I find this absolutely disgusting that they [the government] are even offering to pay people money to have their dogs put to sleep.’

The outcry comes as animal charities today warned they face an impossible task of trying to rehome hundreds of Bully XLs stuck in rescue centres before the December 31 deadline, after which it will become illegal to rehome, breed, or sell the dogs.

Mel Kermode, operations manager of Freshfields Animal Rescue in Liverpool, said: ‘It is a desperate race against time to try and save these dogs. The clock is very much ticking,’ 

Keep reading

Man in his 40s is arrested after ‘dressing up as Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi for Halloween and posting it on Facebook’

A man in his 40s has been arrested after allegedly dressing up as Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi for Halloween and posting it on Facebook. 

Pictures posted by David Wootton show him wearing an Arabic-style headdress, with the slogan ‘I love Ariana Grande’ on his T-shirt, and carrying a rucksack with ‘Boom’ and ‘TNT’ written on the front.

The disturbing Halloween costume which was captioned ‘bet I get kicked out of the party’ caused fury on social media. 

North Yorkshire Police confirmed the man arrested had been released on conditional police bail to allow for further enquiries to be carried out. 

Abedi killed 22 people – some of them children – as well as himself when he detonated his device in the foyer of Manchester Arena at the end of an Ariana Grande concert in May 2017. 

In a statement, the force said: ‘North Yorkshire Police can confirm that a man has been arrested after the force received complaints about a man wearing an offensive costume on social media, depicting murderer, Salman Abedi who killed 22 people at Manchester Arena.

‘The man, who is aged in his 40s, was arrested on 1 November on suspicion of a number of offences including using a public communication network to send offensive messages.’

Keep reading

US Marshals releases first report on shootings by officers

The U.S. Marshals have for the first time released data on how many people were shot by their officers or other police working with them.

A total of 147 people were shot over the course of three years, from 2019 to 2021, according to the report released by the agency this week. Almost all of those happened as the federal agency tasked with fugitive searches arrested people on warrants, including for crimes like assault and homicide. The total includes shootings that killed people and those that left people injured.

It’s a step toward transparency for federal law enforcement, and comes at a time when data about police shootings remains scarce, years into a national reckoning over police brutality and racial injustice. Experts say detailed data is essential to tackling the issue, but comprehensive information for the U.S. is still lacking.

U.S. Marshals Service Director Ronald Davis ordered the review last year, saying it reflects the seriousness of shots fired by officers. The report does not include information on whether the shootings were deemed legally justified nor data on more recent shootings, though it does say that those outlined in the report were independently investigated.

The aim was to study policies, training, tactics and equipment to figure out ways to make shootings less likely or destructive in the future, the report released Tuesday states.

One deputy U.S. Marshal was killed during the three-year period: Chase White, who was fatally shot serving a fugitive arrest warrant against a man accused of stalking a female police sergeant in Tucson, Arizona. Officers were injured by gunfire 13 times and suffered other injuries six times during the period of the report, which was composed on a fiscal year schedule. The shootings were spread across the country, with the largest number happening in regions in the West and in Texas.

It found that more than half of the officers who fired shots were from other police agencies working with the deputies on task forces. Of the 266 officers involved with shootings, just under 40% were deputies. That finding has the Marshals “committed to enhancing USMS federal oversight” of task-force officers. The Justice Department began allowing local officers working with federal law enforcement to begin wearing body cameras in 2020, reversing a policy that had strained its relationship with some law enforcement agencies quicker to adopt their usage.

There are nearly 4,000 deputy U.S. Marshals, and they work with more than 3,500 task force officers from departments around the U.S., the report states. The Marshals also transport federal prisoners, protect witnesses and provide court security.

The agency will also review their policies about making arrests involving cars after finding that nearly half of the shootings happened as Marshals tried to arrest people in or around vehicles. Ten percent of those shootings also left officers injured. The report doesn’t specify whether any of the cars were moving at the time; federal use-of-force policy discourages shooting at or from moving vehicles.

Keep reading