Tag: police state

The Supreme Court’s latest opinion means innocent people must remain in prison

The Supreme Court just ruled that at least some federal prisoners who are completely innocent must serve out their entire sentence, with no meaningful way to challenge their unlawful conviction.

One of the most fundamental principles of criminal law is that no one may be convicted of a crime unless the legislature previously passed a law making their actions illegal. If there is no law on the books that, say, marijuana possession is unlawful, then a judge cannot toss someone in jail because they were found with a joint.

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Jones v. Hendrix, handed down Thursday, does not directly attack this foundational principle. Instead, it does so indirectly by prohibiting many prisoners from ever challenging their convictions in court.

The case centers on Marcus DeAngelo Jones, a federal prisoner who was convicted in 2000 of possessing a firearm after being convicted of a felony. Nineteen years later, in Rehaif v. United States (2019), the Supreme Court held that no one may be convicted under this felon-in-possession statute unless they knew they had a felony conviction at the time that they possessed the gun.

Jones says that he (incorrectly, but genuinely) believed that his previous felony conviction had been expunged when he purchased a gun, and thus his conviction was invalid under Rehaif. In essence, he claims that no federal law criminalized his possession of a firearm, because he did not know he had a felony conviction.

Thanks to Thomas’s opinion in Jones, however, we will never know if Rehaif invalidates Jones’s conviction — that is, if he is innocent of the crime that caused him to spend nearly a quarter-century in prison — because the Court held that Jones may not challenge his conviction at all.

The reason why is a federal law, known as Section 2255, which ordinarily prevents federal prisoners from challenging their conviction or sentence more than once.

After he was sentenced, but before Rehaif raised a cloud of doubt over whether Jones belonged in prison at all, Jones successfully petitioned a federal court to vacate part of his sentence. Thomas’s opinion holds that Jones’s pre-Rehaif challenge to his sentence blew his only chance to challenge his conviction — even though Jones couldn’t have known before Rehaif was decided that he had a potentially valid claim that he is innocent.

Section 2255 contains several exceptions which allow some federal prisoners to bring a second challenge — one of which provides that Jones may bring a second challenge if § 2255’s usual process “is inadequate or ineffective to test the legality of his detention.”

But Thomas construes this “inadequate or ineffective” language very narrowly — so narrowly, in fact, that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson mocks Thomas in her dissenting opinion for ruling that someone like Jones may only seek relief “if the courthouse where a § 2255 motion would have otherwise been filed has burned to the ground or been carried away by a mudslide.”

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Police Let Their K-9 Maul on the Wrong Guy. They Arrested Him Anyway.

Last year, a police officer sicced his K-9 on Sean Davis as he slept in a wooded area in Covington, Kentucky, mauling his arm and causing severe injuries. Officers had mistaken Davis for a different individual who had allegedly violated a protection order and detained him even after he provided police with his ID. Last month, Davis filed a lawsuit against the officer responsible for Davis’ mauling, claiming that he was subject to unreasonable force, negligence, and battery.

According to the Covington police incident report, on June 8, 2022, police received a call from a woman who said she believed that her violent ex-boyfriend, whom she had a protection order against, was sleeping in a wooded area near a campsite at which she was staying. When police arrived, they found Sean Davis—not the woman’s ex-boyfriend—sleeping in a hammock in the woods. Without warning, a police officer released a K-9 on Davis, which bit his arm and brought him to the ground. While the dog continued to maul Davis’ arm, police got on top of Davis.

According to WCPO, a local news station, body camera footage of the incident shows that officers handcuffed Davis and demanded he identify himself. In the footage, Davis repeatedly gives officers his name, social security number, as well as his photo ID, proving that he was not the person in the protection order. Nonetheless, police kept Davis handcuffed for 37 minutes. 

“Try to scoot your butt straight over so you don’t get blood all over the car,” one officer told Davis as he directed him to get inside the police vehicle. “Try to keep that arm off the seat.”

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Ron DeSantis Says He Would Not Decriminalize Marijuana If Elected President

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), a 2024 GOP presidential candidate, said he would not federally decriminalize marijuana if elected to the White House—arguing that cannabis use hurts the workforce, inhibits productivity and could even lead to death if contaminated.

At a campaign event in South Carolina on Thursday, a person who said they were representing wounded veterans asked DeSantis if he would “please” decriminalize cannabis as president.

The governor responded directly: “I don’t think we would do that.”

He then talked about Florida’s medical marijuana program that was enacted by voters, saying veterans are “actually allowed access” to cannabis under that model. But he said the issue is “controversial because obviously there’s some people that abuse it and are using it recreationally.”

DeSantis rattled off a number of concerns he has about cannabis use, starting with the potency of marijuana that “they’re putting on the street” and his understanding that illicit products are being laced with other drugs such as fentanyl.

“If you do something with that, it could be goodnight right then and there,” he said. “You could die just by ingesting that, so I think that that’s problematic.”

Experts and advocates have questioned law enforcement claims about the prevalence of fentanyl-tainted cannabis in the illicit market. In any case, DeSantis also didn’t acknowledge that creating a regulatory regime where marijuana is subject to testing before consumers can buy it could mitigate instances of contamination.

“I think that we have we have too many people using using drugs in this country right now. I think it hurts our workforce readiness. I think it hurts people’s ability to prosper in life,” he said, adding that people he knew in high school who used marijuana “suffered.”

“All their activities, all their grades and everything like that—so particularly for the youth, I just think we have to be united,” the candidate said. He also plugged a Florida program overseen by his wife that involves sending athletes to schools to warn students about “the stakes of using some of these drugs nowadays, and this is not something you want to mess around with.”

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Elderly artist forced to vacate shack he’s maintained for nearly 80 years

An elderly Massachusetts artist is being kicked out of the Cape Cod shack he maintained for nearly 80 years as the National Park Service begins granting long-term leases to new renters.

Salvatore Del Deo, 94, resided in the Provincetown dune shack for the past 77 summers, where he paid taxes and was deeded the dwelling, according to CBS News.

But the Park Service does not recognize Del Deo as the owner and has ordered him to vacate the shack.

The artist and veteran arrived in Provincetown in 1946, where he met Jeanne “Frenchie” Schnell, who built a remote dune shack along the Cape Cod National Seashore as Del Deo helped maintain the abode.

In 1953, after serving in the Korean War, Del Deo returned to Provincetown, where he met his future wife, Josephine, at a party.

Schnell gifted the shack to Del Deo and his wife as a honeymoon suite.

The Park Service took possession of 19 dune shacks in the ’60s through eminent domain, offering the current owners lifetime leases, and the new renters signing long-term leases, while others only leased year-to-year.

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8 Signs That The Futuristic Control Freak Agenda Of The Globalists Is Rapidly Moving Forward

“Digital identification” is one of the primary areas the globalists are focusing on right now, and as you will see below, the radical changes that are now being proposed are extremely scary.  But most Americans have no idea that any of this is happening.  Instead, many of them are obsessing over the relatively meaningless dramas that our corporate news outlets are constantly pushing.  Meanwhile, the globalists are achieving their goals at lightning speed, and there is hardly any resistance at all. 

The following are 8 signs that the futuristic control freak agenda of the globalists is rapidly moving forward…

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Maryland Supreme Court Limits Testimony on Bullet-Matching Evidence

The Maryland Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that firearms experts will no longer be able to testify that a bullet was fired from a particular gun. The decision is likely the first by a state supreme court to undercut the widespread forensic discipline of firearms identification, which is used in criminal cases across the country.

In a 4–3 decision first reported by The Baltimore Sun, the Maryland Supreme Court overturned the murder conviction of Kobina Ebo Abruquah after finding that a firearm expert’s trial testimony linking Abruquah’s gun to bullets found at a crime scene wasn’t backed up by reliable science. In the majority opinion, Maryland Supreme Court Chief Justice Matthew J. Fader wrote that “firearms identification has not been shown to reach reliable results linking a particular unknown bullet to a particular known firearm.”

The ruling is a major victory for defense groups like the Innocence Project, which works to overturn wrongful convictions and limit what it calls faulty forensic science in courtrooms. It’s also not the only one: Radley Balko recently reported at The Watch on a similar ruling from a Cook County circuit judge in Illinois.

But Tuesday’s ruling is the first by a state supreme court limiting such testimony that Tania Brief, a senior staff attorney at the Innocence Project, which filed an amicus brief in the case, is aware of.

“One of the tensions in our work is that the law is always playing catch-up with the current scientific understanding,” Brief says. “And this is a real step forward in the law catching up with what the current scientific understanding is.”

Forensic firearms identification includes well-established uses such as determining caliber and other general characteristics, but examiners are also frequently called on to testify whether a particular bullet was fired from a particular gun. A gun’s firing pin and the grooves on the inside of a gun barrel leave marks on cartridge casings when a bullet is fired, so a firearm examiner compares crime scene bullets to samples fired from the suspect gun and looks for matching patterns under a microscope.

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Wearing Shirt Saying ‘There Are Only Two Genders’ Not Protected Speech, Rules Obama-Appointed Judge

School administrators were not infringing on a student’s constitutional rights when they ordered him to remove a shirt that said, “there are only two genders,” a district judge ruled on June 17.

Massachusetts middle-schooler Liam Morrison’s lawyers said the order violated his First Amendment rights to free speech and his Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process, but U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said the violations have not been proven.

The school “permissibly concluded that the Shirt invades the rights of others,” Talwani, an Obama appointee, said.

Schools can bar speech that is in “collision with the rights of others to be secure and be let alone,” Talwani said, quoting from the 1969 ruling in Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. School Dist.

That means the administrators appropriately exercised their discretion when concluding the statement “may communicate that only two gender identities–male and female are valid, and any others are invalid or nonexistent, and to conclude that students who identify differently, whether they do so openly or not, have a right to attend school without being confronted by messages attacking their identities,” she added.

Talwani’s ruling rejected a request from the boy for a temporary restraining order that would have stopped administrators from prohibiting the student from wearing the shirt at John T. Nicholas Middle School.

The case has not been thrown out and Talwani could ultimately rule in the boy’s favor.

Tyson Langhofer, senior counsel and director of the Center for Academic Freedom at Alliance Defending Freedom who is helping defend the plaintiff, said that the ruling was disappointing.

“Public school officials cannot censor a 7th grader’s free speech by forcing him to remove a shirt that states a scientific fact,” Langhofer told The Epoch Times via email. “Doing so is a gross violation of the First Amendment and we will be appealing this ruling to the First Circuit Court of Appeals.”

Lawyers for the defendants, which include acting principal Heather Tucker and Middleborough Public Schools Superintendent Carolyn Lyons, did not return an inquiry.

First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh said the ruling does not appear to be consistent with the Tinker ruling, which held that school officials in Iowa illegally ordered students to remove armbands amid protests against the Vietnam war. Lawyer Hans Bader, who is not involved in the case, said the ruling was wrong, noting that previous cases have upheld students’ rights to convey messages “as long as they weren’t vulgar or likely to cause a disruption,” including a ruling in favor of wearing a shirt that said “Be Happy, Not Gay.”

“The judge suggested that the T-shirt interfered with other students’ ‘right to attend school without being confronted by messages attacking their identities,’” Bader said. “But other courts have refused to recognize a right to attend school without being confronted by messages attacking one’s identity, when the messages don’t disrupt school, and don’t involve ‘independently tortious speech like libel, slander or intentional infliction of emotional distress.’”

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FDA warns stores to stop selling Elf Bar, the top disposable e-cigarette in the US

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday said it has sent warning letters to dozens of retailers selling fruit- and candy-flavored disposable e-cigarettes, including the current best-selling brand, Elf Bar.

It’s the latest attempt by regulators to crack down on illegal disposable vapes that have poured into U.S. stores in recent years.

Last month, the FDA issued orders allowing customs officials to seize shipments of Elf Bar, Esco Bar and two other brands at U.S. ports. None of the products have received FDA authorization and they come in flavors like cotton candy, which regulators say can appeal to teenagers.

In the latest action, the FDA said it issued warnings to 189 convenience stores, vape shops and other retailers.

“We’re not going to stand by as bad actors are profiting off the sale of illegal products that are addicting our nation’s youth,” Brian King, the FDA’s tobacco center director, said in an interview. “Today’s action is just part of our long-standing efforts to address those products, particularly flavored disposable products.”

The FDA has tried for years to regulate the multibillion-dollar vaping industry, but separate data released by government researchers Thursday shows unauthorized e-cigarettes continue to launch.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis showed the number of e-cigarette brands in the U.S. grew from 184 in early 2020 to 269 by late 2022.

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LEXISNEXIS IS SELLING YOUR PERSONAL DATA TO ICE SO IT CAN TRY TO PREDICT CRIMES

THE LEGAL RESEARCH and public records data broker LexisNexis is providing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement with tools to target people who may potentially commit a crime — before any actual crime takes place, according to a contract document obtained by The Intercept. LexisNexis then allows ICE to track the purported pre-criminals’ movements.

The unredacted contract overview provides a rare look at the controversial $16.8 million agreement between LexisNexis and ICE, a federal law enforcement agency whose surveillance of and raids against migrant communities are widely criticized as brutal, unconstitutional, and inhumane.

“The purpose of this program is mass surveillance at its core,” said Julie Mao, an attorney and co-founder of Just Futures Law, which is suing LexisNexis over allegations it illegally buys and sells personal data. Mao told The Intercept the ICE contract document, which she reviewed for The Intercept, is “an admission and indication that ICE aims to surveil individuals where no crime has been committed and no criminal warrant or evidence of probable cause.”

While the company has previously refused to answer any questions about precisely what data it’s selling to ICE or to what end, the contract overview describes LexisNexis software as not simply a giant bucket of personal data, but also a sophisticated analytical machine that purports to detect suspicious activity and scrutinize migrants — including their locations.

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