Tag: police state

Constitutional Attorney Issues ‘Opt Out’ Letter to Preserve Rights at Home During ‘Virtual Learning’

The Rutherford Institute has issued a precautionary “opt out” letter as a means by which families whose children are taking part in remote learning / virtual classes might assert their Fourth Amendment privacy rights and guard against intrusive government surveillance posed by remote learning technologies.

The Institute released its model “Parental Reservation of Rights – Remote Learning Surveillance” letter in the wake of a growing number of incidents in which students have been suspended and reported to police by school officials for having toy guns nearby while taking part in virtual schooling.

“Remote learning should not justify the expansion of draconian zero tolerance policies to encompass so-called ‘violations’ that take place in students’ homes and home environments. Nor should remote learning be used as a backdoor means of allowing government officials to conduct warrantless surveillance into students’ homes and home environments,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People.

“While COVID-19 has undoubtedly introduced significant challenges for the schools, the protocols adopted for navigating these circumstances demand a heightened degree of caution lest government officials heedlessly, needlessly and unlawfully violate key constitutional safeguards established to protect the citizenry against invasive and warrantless intrusion into the home.”

In issuing the model Reservation of Rights letter for use by parents with children enrolled in virtual classes, Rutherford Institute attorneys warned government officials against leveraging the current public health situation to further erode the privacy of American citizens: “At a minimum, schools must not use virtual learning platforms to conduct unwarranted surveillance of students’ homes nor use observations made from within the home as a basis for alleging a crime has been or is being committed.”

The issue arose after Isaiah Elliott, a seventh grader at Grand Mountain School in Colorado Springs, Colo., was reported to police by school officials for playing with a toy gun in the privacy of his own home during a virtual class on the morning of August 27, 2020.

Not only was the 12-year-old suspended for five days for “bringing” a “facsimile of a firearm to school,” but he was also traumatized when a police officer showed up at his home to interrogate him. School officials reported the incident to the El Paso County Sheriff’s office, and a deputy was dispatched to the school.

The deputy reviewed a video of the art class that was recorded without the knowledge or consent of students or their parents and saw the boys playing with the toy gun. A police officer was then dispatched to the Elliott home, where he confronted Isaiah, warning him that he could face criminal charges in the future.

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Innocent Mom, Baby Homeless After Cops Destroy Home in Raid for Man Who Was Already in Jail

After the raid was over, no arrests were made because the man police were looking for was already in custody — for allegedly participating in a protest that devolved into a riot. Colorado Springs Police had already arrested Lloyd Porche at his place of work on charges of menacing and engaging in a riot at a Black Lives Matter protest on August 3.

“There’s a lot of ways they could have went about it that could never have endangered my child,” she said. “My roommate Lloyd, I know he has been to protests, but I didn’t think that was illegal.”

Pruiett says the raid has left her life in shambles as she’s now being evicted for the damage cops did to her apartment. Multiple windows were blown out, glass covered the floor, the front door was smashed in and the house was ransacked — for an allegation of a misdemeanor crime.

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NJ’s property tax and it’s collectors are ruthless pigs

An 89-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s nearly lost her Ocean Twp house over six cents. SIX F&$#ING CENTS! She had mistakenly underpaid her 2019 property taxes by six cents. September 9th, she received noticed that the township put her house up for sheriff’s sale, according to a report on NBC New York.  Of course the interest grew at a far faster rate than any of us could hope to gain in savings and the bill quickly grew to $300.

The woman is Glen Kristi Goldenthal and her daughter, Lisa Suhay, who lives in Virginia, spent a whole day on the phone with township officials trying to save her mother’s house from being sold out from under her. Thankfully she was successful and Ocean Twp Mayor Chris Siciliano was quick to apologize and admitted something must be done to change the system.
Even when the tax collector called Mrs. Goldenthal to tell her of the delinquent tax, he knew something wasn’t right. But that didn’t stop the machinery of New Jersey government from rolling full steam ahead to try and take the poor old woman’s home.

Shameful doesn’t even begin to describe, not only this incident, but the entire property tax situation in our state. It’s disgusting! It’s also not the first time it’s happened here. Luckily Lisa Suhay was able to stop the confiscation. Some other elderly residents were not as lucky. At the time, 90-year-old Gloria Turano of Lawrence Twp lost her home in 2017, after the loan she took out to pay the property taxes ran out. Her husband had built the home with his own hands in 1953. It almost happened to 107-year-old Rose Eastwick of Cranford until generous strangers stepped in to save her from losing her home last year.

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Democrats Scuttle Marijuana Decriminalization Vote Over Fears of Not Being Deferential Enough to Cop Lobbyists

A planned House vote on a bill to decriminalize the possession of marijuana was canceled on Thursday under pressure from law enforcement lobbyists and other pro-prohibition special interests.

The expected floor vote on the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act would have been the biggest accomplishment yet for cannabis reformers, but the effort has been postponed until after Election Day, Politico reports. Democrats have gotten weak-kneed about a bill that they once saw as a major criminal justice reform.

Indeed, it would have been. The MORE Act, sponsored by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D–N.Y.), would remove cannabis from the schedules of the Controlled Substances Act and make that change retroactive, effectively expunging any federal marijuana offenses and convictions. The bill also orders federal courts to lift all sentences for people currently locked up due to a marijuana conviction.

As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum explained when the bill was introduced last year, the MORE Act was in many ways superior to other marijuana legislation, because it “completely deschedules marijuana rather than moving it to a lower schedule or making exceptions to the ban for state-legal conduct, and it seeks to lift the burdens that prohibition has imposed on people caught growing, distributing, or possessing cannabis, a vital project that too often has been treated as an afterthought.”

This year, the bill had collected more than 100 co-sponsorships in the House—it even had support from three Republicans—and appeared on track to pass the lower chamber. Even though the bill was expected to die in the Senate, that House vote would have been historic.

Unfortunately, cop lobbyists seem to have convinced House Democratic leaders that it would also be a liability. A coalition of law enforcement special interests and other proponents of the drug war sent a letter to congressional leaders last week warning about the potential dangers associated with legalizing and “commercializing” marijuana.

That, combined with vague fears about how Republicans might weaponize the legalization vote for negative ads in swing districts, was apparently enough to convince Democrats to scuttle the vote.

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No consequences after Florida officers admit to sexually abusing inmates, lawsuit says

Within a month of arriving in federal prison, Lauren Reynolds says she was targeted by an officer. He told her he’d protect her if she gave him what he wanted.

He wanted sex.

After the first time Officer Daniel Kuilan forced himself on Reynolds, she said he told her not to tell anyone or she’d be in trouble and sent to another facility with fewer work and education privileges, according to a lawsuit filed in December in federal court by Reynolds and 14 other femaleinmates.

Reynolds said she was raped by Kuilan for six months — every Wednesday at a warehouse before her work shift began.

The lawsuit contends that Bureau of Prisons officers repeatedly sexually assaulted and abused the inmates at the Federal Correctional Complex Coleman in Sumter County.

In some cases, the women allege, the abuse lasted for years. The women, who range in age from 26 to 59, were threatened if they didn’t comply, the suit maintains.

Six of the accused officers admitted to having sexual contact with inmates but denied some claims in the lawsuit, according to a government response filed in July.

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