Kelli Ward contends that the Jan. 6 select committee subpoena would chill her First Amendment rights and serve as a backdoor for the panel to explore her political contacts as head of the Arizona GOP. | Ross D. Franklin/AP Photo
The much to do about nothing January 6th Democrat committee went fishing again. For now the Supreme court smacked their hand.
Kagan’stwo-page orderstayed the subpoena “pending further order of the undersigned or of the Court.” Similar requests in high-profile cases are almost always referred to the full court.
Of all people, Justice Kagan said not happening. Kagan gave the Loon panel until Friday at 5 p.m. to respond.
Ward asserted her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in an appearance before the Jan. 6 select committee, a fact that the appeals court panel majority noted could be held against her in the civil lawsuit.
An upstate New York judge ruled that citing fear of catching COVID-19 is no longer a valid excuse to continue thwarting the state’s election law regarding absentee ballots.
Saratoga County Supreme Court Justice Dianne Freestone, ordered local election boards to stop counting absentee ballots they’ve already received. Freestone directed the election officials to preserve the absentee ballots until after Election Day, November 8, or after a Republican lawsuit is resolved.
Her ruling did not invalidate ballots already mailed, according to a Fox News report.
New York’s Republican and Conservative parties, along with many like-minded officials, filed a legal challenge in Saratoga County’s Supreme Court one year after a proposed state constitutional amendment allowing no-excuse absentee voting was rejected by voters.
The plaintiffs asked the court to rule Chapter 763 of 2021 state laws and Chapter 2 of the state’s 2022 laws unconstitutional, further arguing Chapter 763 conflicts with other existing state statutes.
Republicans claim Chapter 2, which authorizes absentee voting on the basis of fearing COVID-19, violates the state Constitution.
Freestone ruled in favor of the Republican and Conservative plaintiffs, declaring the Election Law changes challenged in the lawsuit violate New York’s Constitution.
The state legislature “appears poised to continue the expanded absentee voting provisions of New York State Election Law … in an Orwellian perpetual state of health emergency and cloaked in the veneer of ‘voter enfranchisement,’” Freestone wrote Friday in her ruling.
Democrats, who control both houses of New York’s legislature, have said their Election Law changes regarding absentee ballots were both for safety and to enable early counting of them.
Republicans gleefully greeted news of the favorable ruling, which comes just two weeks before Election Day.
“What we object to is mass mailing of paper ballots when they are not necessary,” NYS Assemblyman Robert Smullen told Schenectady, NY-based WRGB. “Look, the president of the United States has said the COVID-19 pandemic is over.” Smullen is one of the plaintiffs who brought the legal action.
New York Republican Chairman Nick Langworthy holds a rally in Saratoga County to highlight the party?•s opposition to November election ballot propositions that could transform New York?•s voting laws on Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2021, in Ballston, N.Y.Will Waldron/Times Union
A state Supreme Court justice issued a split ruling Friday that found New York’s absentee ballot laws are partially unconstitutional, a decision that will hurl an element of disorder into the midterm election in which mail-in voting is already underway.
State Supreme Court Justice Dianne L. Freestone’s decision stopped short of overturning a change in Election Law that allows someone to vote by absentee ballot if they fear contracting COVID-19, a measure that she highly criticized but said could not be undone at this time.
Freestone’s ruling struck down a 2021 state law around the “canvassing” of absentee ballots. For now, the ruling will reinstate some of the laws that were in effect prior to last year’s changes, including allowing someone to vote in-person on Election Day to override any absentee ballot they may have submitted.
Republican officials contend that is an important provision because it enables a voter who learns something damning about a candidate before the election to change their vote.
The ruling also gives clearer ability for poll watchers, candidates and others to contest a ballot in the court, something that Republicans argued was curtailed under the 2021 law.
Freestone opinion noted that the COVID-19 excuse to vote by mail, which was passed into state law after voters rejected a no-excuse voting ballot proposition last year, presents an “Orwellian perpetual state of health emergency.” She described the measure as “cloaked in the veneer of ‘voter enfranchisement.'”
She said the Democrat’s argument that the coronavirus poses a current health risk is “replete with alarmist statistics.”
The Supreme Court recently ruled that the ballot had to be signed and dated. The Secretary of state said my house my rules. Stated she and the counties were to go by the state laws. All ballots received on time would be counted.
A group of Pennsylvania voters, the Republican National Committee, and the Pennsylvania Republican Party filed the lawsuit (pdf) with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, asking justices to quickly declare illegal guidance from the Pennsylvania Department of State regarding ballots that do not have dates.
In a judicial race in Pennsylvania, they tried to accept ballots that weren’t dated. The 3rd circuit of appeals ruled it was immaterial. But the US Supreme Court ruled differently.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday invalidated a ruling by a lower court on a Pennsylvania case that involved the counting of undated mail-in ballots, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
The Supreme Court ruled on a decision that the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made in May in a case involving the 2021 election of Judge Zachary Cohen,
NEW YORK, NY – JUNE 25: Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner speaks to a reporter at of the election party of public defender Tiffany Caban moments before she claimed victory in the in the Queens District Attorney Democratic Primary election, June 25, 2019 in the Queens borough of New York City. Running on a progressive platform that includes decriminalizing sex work and closing the Rikers Island jail, Caban narrowly defeated Queens Borough President Melinda Katz and scored a shocking victory for city’s the progressive grassroots network and criminal justice movement (Photo by Scott Heins/Getty Images)
Adam Klasfeld For Law & Crime Sep 14th, 2022, 7:03 pm
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (D), one of the first of a wave of progressive prosecutors elected on a criminal justice reform platform, made “false” claims that his office communicated with the family members of the victims of a man that he sought to free from death row, a federal judge found.
The following day, in what could only be described as a rough week for the top prosecutor, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives voted to hold him in contempt for failing to cooperate with the committee investigating his possible impeachment.
“Extremely Disappointed to Learn of the District Attorney’s Stance”
According to a scathing 28-page memorandum opinion, the district attorney’s office wrongly suggested the relatives of the Pennsylvania couple killed by Robert Wharton supported his release from death row. In fact, U.S. District Judge Mitchell Goldberg found, Krasner’s office did not even contact the sole surviving victim of the attack: Lisa Hart-Newman, who was an infant when Wharton killed her parents, turned off the heat, and left her inside the house to die.
“This Court (which only learned of the family’s opposition through the Attorney General’s Office) is not the only one who considered the District Attorney’s representations misleading,” the opinion states. “Lisa Hart-Newman, the infant, now age thirty-seven, who was left to die by Wharton after her parents were murdered, stated she was ‘extremely disappointed to learn of the District Attorney’s stance and very troubled that he implied that the family approved of his viewpoint.’ […] Michael Allen, one of the brothers of the deceased, also noted, ‘[I]t would appear that there was a substantially deficient briefing by the DA’s office regarding the significance and implications for vacating Wharton’s death penalty.’”
Krasner, who worked at the Federal Public Defender’s Office before becoming an elected prosecutor, is an opponent of capital punishment, and one of his early actions in office was to drop dozens of drug charges as the city braced to decriminalize marijuana. His office sided with Wharton in his federal habeas death penalty case on the grounds that his lawyer failed to properly investigate and present evidence of his positive adjustment to prison.
The DA’s office argued they did not they did not need to present a full investigation of the facts for and against Wharton, but Judge Goldberg noted that the Third Circuit gave prosecutors precisely the opposite instruction.
“Trial courts and lawyers take direction from appellate judges,” wrote the judge, who — ethics disclosure here — is the father of Law&Crime’s director of podcasting Sam Goldberg. “This is such a basic legal principle that no precedential or statutory citation is needed.”
“‘Egregious’ and ‘Exceptional’”
Finding Krasner’s office committed “egregious” and “exceptional” violations of the federal rules of procedure, the judge ordered the DA to “send separate written apologies” within 30 days of the ruling to victim family members Tony Hart, Michael Allen, Patrice Carr, and to victim Lisa Hart-Newman. Goldberg, who is approaching his 14th anniversary of his appointment to the federal bench by George W. Bush in 2008, also ordered more candor from the DA in future cases in his courtroom. He declined to impose financial penalties.
The day after Monday’s ruling, a committee of the GOP-dominated Pennsylvania House of Representatives voted to hold Krasner in contempt. Calling itself the Select Committee on Restoring Law and Order, the body was formed over the City of Brotherly Love’s rising crime and murder rates. One Republican lawmaker called for Krasner’s impeachment over what he called the top prosecutor’s “dereliction of duty.”
According to the New York Times, Krasner spurned the legislature’s investigation as antidemocratic and illegitimate. He was voted into office twice by significant margins. The Philadephia Inquirer reported that even large members of his party supported the contempt resolution over his refusal to comply with a subpoena, which passed by a 162-38 margin with almost all Republicans and some 49 Democrats.
The Times reported that the resolution could subject Krasner to a range of penalties — up to imprisonment, but the legislature has not decided upon what to pursue.
Krasner’s office did not immediately respond to Law&Crime’s email requesting comment.
Read the ruling below:
[photo by Scott Heins/Getty Images]
Law&Crime’s managing editor Adam Klasfeld has spent more than a decade on the legal beat. Previously a reporter for Courthouse News, he has appeared as a guest on MSNBC, BBC, NPR, PBS, Sky News, and other networks.
Ukraine Seeks Corridor to Evacuate Civilians Near Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant – Scores of people tried to evacuate villages near the power plant following an explosion that cut power and water supplies in a nearby town, and U.N. inspectors released a report that detailed damage that has been done to the nuclear plant. A6
According to the Washington Post (albeit a discredited newspaper but a reliable shill for the Washington political elite), the FBI was looking for nuclear documents in the Presidential collection Donald Trump stored at his Palm Beach estate. This speaks to the frantic desperation of the anti-Trump crowd, especially the corrupt officials that infest the leadership of the FBI and the Department of Justice. They used this ludicrous pretext to obtain a search warrant with the help of a credulous, cretinous Judge, Bruce Reinhart.
The nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago tale was more desperate than usual.
It lasted less than 12 hours.
U.S. federal agents were looking for documents relating to nuclear weapons when they searched former President Donald Trump’s home in Florida this week, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
Having failed to produce any evidence that Trump was working with good old Vladimir Putin to destroy America’s democracy with Russiagate 1.0, the anti-Trump crowd apparently has decided to trot out another Russia-tainted meme, the ultimate red herring, to portray Donald Trump as a 21st Century Dr. Strangelove. We now know the truth.
Donald Trump was trying to build a nuclear weapon in his wine cellar at Mar A Lago.
Seriously, the theory was that Trump was building a bomb for Putin, because — you know — Russia is a technologically backward country and needs outside help. Really???
And if you believe that, I have some oceanfront property located just outside Winslow, Arizona for sale. Cash only and small bills.
Maybe we now know why the FBI was pawing through Melania Trump’s lingerie. Did they intercept a text from Trump telling his wife that she looked like a nuclear tipped cruise missile in her red Teddy. Of course, the FBI had to assume that was code word for something far more nefarious. I had to wonder why the FBI spent so much time handling and sniffing Melania’s panties and negligees.
(Maybe they are members of a “J. Edgar Hoover Cross Dressing Club,” and were looking to upgrade their outfits before their next Monkey Pox rave.)
The Deep State-Fake News cabal needs to work harder on their conspiracies.
Scott Adams, the cartoonist and author behind the Dilbert comic strip, posted a list of the most prominent deep state-fake news lies and conspiracies attacking President Donald Trump.
Here is a list of 11 previous fake news conspiracies that fell flat.
If you believe Trump squirreled-away some nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago -- and refused to return them -- because you heard the Washington Post say two anonymous sources (that CNN can't confirm) told them it was true, I give you some useful context. . . pic.twitter.com/EVTLy8VyLz
If only there were 51 principled former intelligence officials who could verify the authenticity of the latest claim.
Here is the common thread in all of the fake news hoaxes.
In the final phase, which one might call The Mueller Report Phase, we learn the story was a political hoax, but the damage has been done, and half the country doesn't hear about the debunking. Their news sources will simply say some other version of the story was true.
What this whole episode shows us is that Kamala Harris is no longer the dumbest member of the Biden team. Nope. That honor goes to Merrick Garland. He apparently believed that this scheme would discredit Trump and elevate Garland as the Clausewitz of the Biden Presidency. Warner Brothers may file a copyright infringement lawsuit against the mad Attorney General for adopting a Wile E Coyote plot. Garland strapped himself to the tip of the missile before activating the fuze that ignited the rocket. He failed to recognize that he would be riding a political nuclear bomb to his own political demise. Maybe he is just a secret admirer of Slim Pickens and wanted to recreate Pickens’ iconic moment in Dr. Strangelove.
Alright, back to serious. Trump may be right that someone may have planted a document related to nuclear weapons or nuclear technology in the boxes he had locked up. That does not incriminate Trump and is no crime. The prosecutors would have to show that Trump instructed someone on his staff to put such a document in one of the boxes. Trump may be a lot of things, but stupid and reckless are not how he became a billionaire and beat the dickens out of Hillary in 2016. Is there another Alexander Vindman lurking in the shadows keen on helping create a pretext to discredit Trump?
Trump may be a lot of things, but stupid and reckless are not how he became a billionaire and beat the dickens out of Hillary in 2016.
If Trump really was trying to hide such information why would he have instructed his attorneys to negotiate with the National Archives on getting an agreement to return the records to the Feds? In fact, if he had mens rea*, do you really think Trump would keep something so figuratively radioactive on his estate?
[*mens rea Latin, literally ‘guilty mind’; in the law “criminal intent”.]
Merrick Garland, despite his Harvard education, is not a smart man. He signed off on a warrant rather than ask Trump and his lawyers if he had such documents in his possession. Are they going for the old – he lied to me tactic that they used on General Michael Flynn? Lying to Federal Agents is a crime unless you are former FBI Chief Andrew McCabe.
Instead of doing the reasonable, lawyerly thing, Garland chose the nuclear option. It will come back to haunt him.
Trump lawyer Christina Bobb said in interviews Thursday night (8-11) that President Trump and his family in New York watched the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago Monday via closed circuit TV security cameras. Bobb said the FBI had ordered staff at Mar-a-Lago to turn the cameras off but that Trump lawyers had the cameras turned back on. [Now we know why the FBI wanted them turned off. — TPR]
Former President Donald Trump’s legal team is weighing whether to release the search warrant and inventory of material seized at Mar-a-Lago before a federal judge rules on the matter, according to a Florida-based attorney for Trump, Lindsey Halligan.
Earlier Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Justice Department had filed a motion to unseal the warrant and related documents, “absent objection from the former president.” Trump has until 3 p.m. Friday to respond.
His legal team is also discussing whether to release video and photos of the search, Halligan said. Two sources familiar with Trump’s legal strategy said that before FBI agents executed the warrant, they asked that Mar-a-Lago’s private security cameras be turned off. Trump’s team refused to comply.
The U.S. Secret Service, which maintains a permanent presence at the former president’s home, was not a party to the dispute over the cameras because the private club owns and controls the cameras, not the government.
It isn’t clear what any video that may have been captured by Mar-a-Lago’s cameras would show. According to Halligan, there were security cameras in Trump’s office, but not in all of the areas that were searched. She also said that there are photos of FBI personnel on the grounds.
Why does the fake news insist on lying to the American public?
Data on the Murder Accountability Project’s website. Photos by Cait Oppermann for Bloomberg Businessweek.
Thomas Hargrove is building software to identify trends in unsolved murders using data nobody’s bothered with before.
On Aug. 18, 2010, a police lieutenant in Gary, Ind., received an e-mail, the subject line of which would be right at home in the first few scenes of a David Fincher movie:
“Could there be a serial killer active in the Gary area?”
It isn’t clear what the lieutenant did with that e-mail; it would be understandable if he waved it off as a prank. But the author could not have been more serious. He’d attached source material—spreadsheets created from FBI files showing that over several years the city of Gary had recorded 14 unsolved murders of women between the ages of 20 and 50. The cause of each death was the same: strangulation. Compared with statistics from around the country, he wrote, the number of similar killings in Gary was far greater than the norm. So many people dying the same way in the same city—wouldn’t that suggest that at least a few of them, maybe more, might be connected? And that the killer might still be at large?
The police lieutenant never replied. Twelve days later, the police chief, Gary Carter, received a similar e-mail from the same person. This message added a few details. Several of the women were strangled in their homes. In at least two cases, a fire was set after the murder. In more recent cases, several women were found strangled in or around abandoned buildings. Wasn’t all of this, the writer asked, at least worth a look?
The Gary police never responded to that e-mail, either, or to two follow-up letters sent via registered mail. No one from the department has commented publicly about what was sent to them—nor would anyone comment for this story. “It was the most frustrating experience of my professional life,” says the author of those messages, a 61-year-old retired news reporter from Virginia named Thomas Hargrove.
Hargrove spent his career as a data guy. He analyzed his first set of polling data as a journalism major at the University of Missouri, where he became a student director of the university’s polling organization. He joined an E.W. Scripps newspaper right out of college and expanded his repertoire from political polling data to practically any subject that required statistical analysis. “In the newsroom,” he remembers, “they would say, ‘Give that to Hargrove. That’s a numbers problem.’ ”
In 2004, Hargrove’s editors asked him to look into statistics surrounding prostitution. The only way to study that was to get a copy of the nation’s most comprehensive repository of criminal statistics: the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, or UCR. When Hargrove called up a copy of the report from the database library at the University of Missouri, attached to it was something he didn’t expect: the Supplementary Homicide Report. “I opened it up, and it was a record I’d never seen before,” he says. “Line by line, every murder that was reported to the FBI.”
This report, covering the year 2002, contained about 16,000 murders, broken down by the victims’ age, race, and sex, as well as the method of killing, the police department that made the report, the circumstances known about the case, and information about the offender, if the offender was known. “I don’t know where these thoughts come from,” Hargrove says, “but the second I saw that thing, I asked myself, ‘Do you suppose it’s possible to teach a computer how to spot serial killers?’ ”
“linkage blindness”
Like a lot of people, Hargrove was aware of criticisms of police being afflicted by tunnel vision when investigating difficult cases. He’d heard the term “linkage blindness,” used to describe the tendency of law-enforcement jurisdictions to fail to connect the dots between similar cases occurring right across the county or state line from one another. Somewhere in this report, Hargrove thought, could be the antidote to linkage blindness. The right person, looking at the information in the right way, might be able to identify any number of at-large serial killers.
Every year he downloaded and crunched the most recent data set. What really shocked him was the number of murder cases that had never been cleared. (In law enforcement, a case is cleared when a suspect is arrested, whatever the eventual outcome.) Hargrove counted 211,487, more than a third of the homicides recorded from 1980 to 2010. Why, he wondered, wasn’t the public up in arms about such a large number of unsolved murders?
To make matters worse, Hargrove saw that despite a generation’s worth of innovation in the science of crime fighting, including DNA analysis, the rate of cleared cases wasn’t increasing but decreasing—plummeting, even. The average homicide clearance rate in the 1960s was close to 90 percent; by 2010 it was solidly in the mid-’60s. It has fallen further since.
These troubling trends were what moved Hargrove to write to the Gary police. He failed to get any traction there. Sure enough, four years later, in October 2014, in Hammond, Ind.—the town next door to Gary—police found the body of 19-year-old Afrikka Hardy in a room at a Motel 6. Using her phone records, they tracked down a suspect, 43-year-old Darren Deon Vann. Once arrested, Vann took police to the abandoned buildings where he’d stowed six more bodies, all of them in and around Gary. Anith Jones had last been seen alive on Oct. 8; Tracy Martin went missing in June; Kristine Williams and Sonya Billingsley disappeared in February; and Teaira Batey and Tanya Gatlin had vanished in January.
Before invoking his right to remain silent, Vann offhandedly mentioned that he’d been killing people for years—since the 1990s. Hargrove went to Gary, reporting for Scripps, to investigate whether any of the cases he’d identified back in 2010 might possibly be attributed to Vann. He remembers getting just one helpful response, from an assistant coroner in Lake County who promised to follow up, but that too went nowhere. Now, as the Vann prosecution slogs its way through the courts, everyone involved in the case is under a gag order, prevented from speculating publicly about whether any of the victims Hargrove noted in 2010 might also have been killed by Vann. “There are at least seven women who died after I tried to convince the Gary police that they had a serial killer,” Hargrove says. “He was a pretty bad one.”
Hargrove has his eye on other possible killers, too. “I think there are a great many uncaught serial killers out there,” he declares. “I think most cities have at least a few.”
The police have never been great at leveraging the power of their own statistics. Police culture is notably paper-based, scattered, and siloed, and departments aren’t always receptive to technological innovation. The National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database gives police access to information such as fugitive warrants, stolen property, and missing persons, but it’s not searchable for unsolved killings. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Violent Death Reporting System compiles death-certificate-based information for homicide victims in 32 states, but, again, can’t be searched for uncleared cases. Some states have their own homicide databases, but they can’t see the data from other states, so linkage blindness persists.
Lightfoot Wants Chicago Drivers Under Constant Surveillance, But Look at What a Camera Caught Her SUV Doing
Chicago drivers are increasingly subjected to speed limit and red-light cameras that automatically send out millions in fines every year, and if they don’t pay, they can lose their driver’s license.
Meanwhile, Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s motorcade reportedly has racked up hundreds of dollars in fines that she has refused to pay — without any consequence at all.
According to a review of public records by CWB Chicago, Lightfoot’s police-driven SUVs have been recorded exceeding the speed limit and going through red lights by the city’s traffic camera system several times in the last year — and none of the fines has been paid.
Several other cars registered to her motorcade also have had fines assessed but never paid, the report said.
CWB Chicago even found that one of the vehicles is now eligible for booting and being impounded because the fines are so far in arrears.
Worst of all, two of the speeding incidents occurred while Lightfoot’s SUVs were driving through school zones while exceeding the speed limit.
The report said none of the $658 in fines accumulated by the mayor’s motorcade since May 2021 has been paid.
But this is not just a recent habit. Her motorcade cars have a long history of breaking traffic laws, getting tickets and fines, and never paying them. It has been so bad that the city has gotten in a habit of just forgiving them because they never get paid anyway, the Chicago Tribune reported in 2020.
The mayor’s office released a statement after this latest news claiming that Lightfoot’s motorcade sometimes breaks the law for the mayor’s “safety.”
“The Mayor’s Detail is responsible for the safety and security of Mayor Lightfoot. Members of the Mayor’s Detail are trained in a variety of safety and security techniques to keep the Mayor safe and that includes both vehicles staying in formation while en route,” the statement said, according to CWB Chicago.
The office said fines are often paid late because the tickets go through an “administrative process to review if City vehicles were in use for safety or security reasons.”
Fines are paid after that process, and the detail’s drivers are responsible to pay them, Lightfoot’s office said.
Of course, even as she refuses to pay her traffic fines, the mayor has fought to make sure her constituents aren’t allowed any breaks from paying theirs.
Recently, for instance, a Chicago alderman tried to push through a rule giving drivers a 10 mph buffer in driving over the limit before tickets are sent in the mail. But Lightfoot fought against that idea because she wants more revenue from tickets.
“The last thing we need is to give people who are breaking the law the license to go faster,” the mayor said last month, according to the Chicago Tribune. “No one likes speed cameras. I get it. But this is life or death that we’re talking about here, and we’ve got to step up as a city and address this.”
Lightfoot also mined the Democrat’s favorite excuse for more rules by claiming it’s “for the children.”
“It makes no sense for us to increase the speed around the parks and schools when we know what the horrific consequences are for pedestrians and other drivers,” Lightfoot said, according to WBBM-TV.
But it’s for the children, don’t you know?
The conservative Illinois Policy Institute reported that since the threshold was lowered to 6 mph last year, Chicago has issued an additional 3.8 million tickets that have brought the city $80 million in revenue. But it’s for the children, don’t you know?
All this is nothing new. Chicago in particular and Illinois in general have had a long, dirty history with red-light cameras. As Chicago Sun-Times columnist Phil Kadner wrote in 2020, “Red-light cameras have been one of the slickest scams ever perpetrated on citizens by their own government.”
The state’s traffic cameras have been rife with corruption, with public scandals, bribery charges and criminal indictments of the red-light camera industry in Illinois that make a mockery of the typical Democratic claim that these cameras are unbiased arbiters of traffic laws.
In 2016, a Chicago official was sent to jail for corruption in the city’s red-light camera program. More recently, Martin Sandoval, who was an Illinois state senator, pleaded guilty to taking $250,000 in bribes for a red-light camera company, the Illinois Policy Institute noted.
Meanwhile, Illinois drivers continue to lose billions of their hard-earned money to these electronic surveillance state devices.
Between 2008 and 2018 alone, drivers were forced to pay $1.1 billion in fines — which amounts to $100 every 33 seconds, the institute said.
In the end, though, it appears that only the little people have to pay these fines, with Lightfoot and others seemingly exempt from the laws they force upon others.
Do you think Democrats feel their political office exempts them from following the law?
