Extremists’ on SCOTUS Are ‘Screaming’ About Rulings that Follow Liberal Principles.
On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” Harvard Law Professor, author, and Newsmax Legal Analyst Alan Dershowitz stated that the Supreme Court’s rulings on President Joe Biden’s loan program, racial preferences in college admissions, and free expression are consistent with liberal views, but “it’s extremists, both on the court and off the court, that are screaming and yelling that somehow this ends democracy in America.”
Dershowitz said, “All three of these decisions are close cases that — I’m a liberal, I’ve been a liberal for 60 years, I happen to agree with all of these three cases. I have been arguing against using race in affirmative action since 1974. I have always preferred free expression and the First Amendment over any other laws, whether it be public accommodation laws or hate speech laws. So, many civil libertarians, people who are left and right, support the decision in the web case, it’s a close case. And many civil libertarians also support the decision that says that, in a democracy, important decisions about spending fortunes of money should be made by the legislature, not by the unelected executives. So, these are all close cases that many liberals agree with, and many Democrats agree with.”
He continued, “And it’s extremists, both on the court and off the court, that are screaming and yelling that somehow this ends democracy in America.” He added that “the color of a person’s skin, the accident of race should never be a factor. That’s the liberal perspective. That’s the constitutional perspective.”
North Carolina’s Democrat Governor Roy Cooper has vetoed three bills related to transgender issues, one banning sex changes for minors, another keeping biological males out of girls’ sports, and a third that would limit school instruction on gender ideology. Maybe it’s time for impeachment?
Now hopefully with super majority the legislature will override his veto. This isn’t the first time that good legislation has been passed and he’s vetoed it. So just maybe it’s time for a change in NC.
Doughty bitch slapping the Biden administration. Again.
Views: 13
DOJ files an appeal. Wishes to continue having Social Media block Conservatives. It looks as if the DOJ is upset that the federal judge put a clamp on their ability to spread false information using Social Media. Well the judge had good reason to do this.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre lashed out at the Trump judge for granting a preliminary injunction, blocking the federal government from censoring conservatives online.
The State Department canceled its future meetings with Facebook just one day after US District Court Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee who still honors the US Constitution, accused the Biden Regime of violating the First Amendment by censoring unfavorable views in a blistering 155-page opinion.
So let’s see if it comes out that the government had other secret meetings with other Social Media Venues.
Bowers was convicted on all 63 charges, including 11 counts of hate crimes resulting in death. Bowers offered to plead guilty if the death penalty was taken off the table, but prosecutors turned him down.
The jury deliberated for less than one day. Jurors will next weigh if Bowers should be sentenced to death.
Bowers stormed the Tree of Life synagogue on Oct. 27, 2018, gunning down 11 people in the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. Bowers allegedly told investigators after his arrest that he wanted to kill Jewish people, according to a criminal complaint.
Prosecutors said Bowers, armed with a semi-automatic assault-style rifle and three handguns, moved “methodically” through the synagogue and shot many of his victims at close range.
In opening statements in May, defense attorney Judy Clarke admitted that Bowers was the shooter and said he “shot every person he saw … and injured first responders who came to their rescue.”
“There will be no question that this was a planned act and that he killed 11 people,” Clarke said, but she asked the jurors to “scrutinize his intent.”
The jury, comprised of 11 women and seven men, included an intensive care nurse, a new father and a veteran.
Just a slap on the wrist. “We have decided to close this matter without further action.”
Views: 15
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has been ever-so-gently reprimanded for politicking from the podium.
The Office of Special Counsel last week ruled that Jean-Pierre’s attack on the “Make America Great Again” wing of the Republican Party — largely associated with former President Donald Trump — violated the Hatch Act, according to NBC News. The Hatch Act seeks to prevent federal employees from using their official positions for political purposes.
Jean-Pierre attacked that group prior to the 2022 midterm elections (and has continued to do so with regularity).
“Unfortunately, we have seen mega MAGA Republican officials who don’t believe in the rule of law,” she said in the Nov. 2 comment that triggered the complaint against her. “They refuse to accept the results of free and fair elections and they fan the flames of political violence through what they praise and what they refuse to condemn. It remains important for the president to state strongly and unequivocally that violence has no place in our democracy.”
The complaint was filed on Nov. 3 by the watchdog organization Protect the Public’s Trust.
“We have decided to close this matter without further action.”
In a letter Wednesday to the group’s director, Michael Chamberlain, Ana Galindo‐Marrone, who leads the OSC’s Hatch Act Unit, wrote, “Because Ms. Jean‐Pierre made the statements while acting in her official capacity, she violated the Hatch Act prohibition against using her official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.”
But despite the finding, Galindo‐Marrone said, “we have decided not to pursue disciplinary action and have instead issued Ms. Jean‐Pierre a warning letter.”
The letter said Jean-Pierre “used the phrase ‘MAGA Republicans’ repeatedly during official press briefings prior to the November 2022 midterm election.”
“Although Ms. Jean‐Pierre never expressly instructed viewers to vote for or against Republican candidates for elected office, OSC concluded that the timing, frequency, and content of Ms. Jean‐Pierre’s references to ‘MAGA Republicans’ established that she made those references to generate opposition to Republican candidates. Accordingly, making the references constituted political activity,” it said.
The letter said that “we have decided to close this matter without further action.”
By way of explanation, the letter said that “the White House Counsel’s Office did not at the time believe that Ms. Jean‐Pierre’s remarks were prohibited by the Hatch Act, and it is unclear whether OSC’s contrary analysis regarding the use of ‘MAGA Republicans’ was ever conveyed to Ms. Jean‐Pierre.”
Getting tough will take place the next time, Galindo‐Marrone said.
“We have advised Ms. Jean‐Pierre that should she again engage in prohibited political activity, OSC would consider it a knowing and willful violation of the law that could result in OSC pursuing disciplinary action,” the letter said.
Chamberlain derided the letter, according to NBC News.
“This episode illustrates exactly what people hate about Washington, DC and why they increasingly distrust the Biden Administration’s promises to be the most ethical in history,” he said in a statement.
“The Hatch Act was a law used to pillory previous administrations but officials now appear content to sweep it under the rug,” Chamberlain said, referring to multiple complaints about Hatch Act violations made during the Trump administration.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement, “As has been made clear throughout the administration, we take the law seriously and uphold the Hatch Act. We are reviewing this opinion.”
Other Hatch Act violations in the Biden administration took place when Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra made a public show of support for Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California and when former Chief of Staff Ron Klain retweeted a political message using his official Twitter account.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy offered a masterclass in regard to how to deal with hostile reporters on Monday when he obliterated one of them from CNN.
The California Republican’s argument was one that CNN and its partisan coverage of the federal indictment of former President Donald Trump over his handling of classified documents is disingenuous.
CNN anchors, contributors and guests routinely feign outrage at Trump by portraying him as playing loose with national security.
But the network also platforms a classified documents leaker in former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe and one who abused his power in 2020 in former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
That wasn’t lost on the speaker in the Capitol on Monday when a CNN reporter asked him about Trump’s indictment.
McCarthy said he was concerned the government was being “weaponized” by the Biden administration for political purposes and that he and other Republicans are working to ensure there is not a two-tiered justice system in the country.
McCarthy just LIT UP this CNN reporter about them hiring McCabe and Clapper after they leaked classified information and interfered in 2020 pic.twitter.com/JyZg171M0z
“You’re with CNN, right?” McCarthy asked the CNN reporter during an interview in which she interrupted him repeatedly.
After the reporter confirmed her affiliation, the speaker grinned and pointed out that it was only appropriate to speak about the two CNN contributors.
When he invoked the name McCabe, the reporter cut in and made a perilous attempt to redirect the conversation.
She asked the speaker about topics such as defunding the FBI and defending Trump.
McCarthy ignored every word she said and hit her with his own line of questioning. It took him all but one minute to put her on the defensive.
“Are you prepared to defend your network, CNN?” he asked.
After a number of interruptions, McCarthy then took command of the conversation and lit CNN up.
“You can’t put words in my mouth, even though your network hired Andrew McCabe, who was fired from the FBI for leaking classified documents,” he said.
McCarthy followed up, “Did you remove him from your network? No, you continue to put him on to give judgment against President Trump.”
In spite of multiple interruptions, McCarthy continued his criticism of the beleaguered network:
“So your network hires Clapper, who literally lied to the American public — one of 51 other individuals that had briefings — and used it politically to tell the American public that a laptop was Russian collusion, even though it had all this other information about the Biden administration.”
He then asked, “Are you prepared to get rid of those people from your network?”
After he received no answer to his question, he laid into CNN for weaponizing information in the same manner Clapper and McCabe weaponized their access to intel.
“My concern as a policymaker is that when you weaponize government and now you’re weaponizing networks, that is wrong,” he said.
He concluded, “I have a real problem that your network actually pays people who [used] classified information and then lied to the American public to try to influence a presidential election, and then you put him on your network to try to give an opinion about a president.”
Had McCarthy been holding a microphone, an appropriate measure would have been to drop it and then walk away.
The corporate media has been up in arms about Trump and his relationship to classified information since the FBI raided his home last summer.
The same people have not been concerned by the fact then-Vice President Joe Biden made off with classified documents — none of which he was authorized to declassify — when he left office in 2017.
Clapper’s signature on a letter that falsely portrayed the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation also never bothered anyone at CNN.
Nor did the fact McCabe was fired from the FBI in 2018 for leaking classified information to the media.
The answer to the discrepancies here are obvious: the establishment media mostly exists to protect the Democratic Party and its interests and to target people such as McCarthy — the most powerful Republican in the country.
While the speaker is often maligned by people on both sides of the aisle, he can’t be accused of being dull.
Not one person at CNN has the privilege of speaking about Trump’s classified documents case from any position of moral authority.
McCarthy was savvy enough to know that and to turn what could have become a hit job on him into a referendum on the blatant bias in media.
Why Trump shouldn’t be charged. And if he is, he walks. Pence who didn’t have the power to declassify wasn’t charged. Biden will not be charged, so Trump who had the power (and did) declassify should not be charged. And that phony obstruction charge? If Trump declassified the documents, he was correct in saying he had no classified documents.
Parlatore said that even if the report is true that there is a tape where Trump acknowledges the existence of a classified document in his possession connected to Iran and that it reveals the former president knew the material was classified and that he was not permitted to share it, prosecuting Trump might not be the best decision “because there are all of these other problems. Classification is not binding on the jury. You have to actually take these documents, show them to the jury, and then prove to them that it constitutes national defense information.” Former Trump attorney said.
Edward Smith outside his home. (Jason Franson for The Free Press)
Views: 9
Edward Smith didn’t think the color of his skin had anything to do with it.
He was 23, and he’d come to Canada in 2005 from West Africa. Now, he lived with his mother and sister in Edmonton, the capital of the western province of Alberta.
Racism—overt or systemic—didn’t make him take part in an armed robbery of an Airbnb in July 2019, he said. He’d decided on his own to help his cousin, who had told Smith that the people staying at the Airbnb had robbed him and that he was trying to get his money back. Smith agreed to help, but he didn’t want any guns involved. So they compromised: they’d bring a gun, but it would be unloaded.
Things didn’t go as planned, and Smith was arrested. At his trial, Smith pleaded guilty to the two charges—theft and robbery with a firearm—filed against him.
Since Smith is black, he also submitted an Impact of Race and Culture Assessment, or IRCA—a presentencing report in which “Black and racialized Canadians” can demonstrate how systemic racism led them to commit their crime.
The logic behind Smith’s IRCA was clear: as a black man, it was assumed that he had been subjected to a great deal of hate, and that that hate had limited his job opportunities, housing opportunities, opportunities to build a meaningful and law-abiding life.
Dunia Nur, the activist who wrote Smith’s IRCA, told me the report was meant to help the judge appreciate the convict’s “background” and “history.”
I obtained Smith’s IRCA from Smith himself. Oddly, the four-page report cites no concrete instances of racism—no violence, no untoward remarks, no employers or schools that turned Smith down because of his skin color. Not even any microaggressions.
It also fails to mention that, in a separate incident in January 2018, Smith was arrested and charged with theft, robbery, and kidnapping.
What it does say is that Smith had a rough childhood and adolescence—the refugee camp in Ghana, his father’s absence, immigrating to Canada, his early run-ins with the law. It further notes that “Edward identifies as an African Canadian” who is of “Liberian heritage,” and that he has “a feeling of disconnection with his culture.”
The judge apparently sympathized with Smith. In February 2020, after six months in prison, he was allowed to go free with court-appointed supervision. If he’d been white, he would have been looking at eight years behind bars.
“I didn’t face racism,” Smith admitted to me in a recent phone call. He’s now a sales representative at a debt-collection company. Referring to the IRCA, Smith said, “It was my only way out of this situation. I took full advantage.”
Canada’s first official IRCA was submitted in the now-famous case of R v “X” in 2014—a case in which a 16-year-old black boy in Nova Scotia was charged with attempted murder after shooting his 15-year-old cousin in the abdomen with a rifle. This was not long after Black Lives Matter was formed, in 2013, to protest the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida.
At the time, it was mostly confined to progressive circles in Nova Scotia, which has a higher concentration of African Canadians than any other province. Now, it’s taken for granted among Canadian criminal defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, and law professors that the assessments are a necessary tool for curbing the “overrepresentation” of black and indigenous prisoners.
Danardo Jones, a University of Windsor law professor who has written extensively on criminal justice reform, said that when it comes to IRCAs, there is “institutional buy-in.” For now, there are no statistics on the number of IRCAs being filed nationwide or on a province by province basis. Criminal defense attorneys in Ontario estimated that IRCAs run up to $4,500 and that there’s a nine-month waiting list to obtain one.
Canada is at the forefront of a broader movement that seeks to reimagine police, prisons, and the nature of justice—a movement that gained much greater momentum and cohesiveness in the wake of George Floyd’s May 2020 killing in Minneapolis.
“The protests of 2020 marked the new way in which many people thought about criminal justice,” Daniel Fryer, a University of Michigan criminal justice law professor, said. “The thing about the protests of 2020 is that they reached a global audience. Although the problem was at least ostensibly domestic, everyone in the world was watching.”
In the United States, the new thinking was reflected in the push for “decarceration” and the rise of progressive district attorneys—Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, George Gascón in Los Angeles, Alvin Bragg in Manhattan, Kim Foxx in Chicago, and others. Central to the progressive prosecutor movement, Fryer said, was a rejection of “the gladiator, adversarial model.” Instead, he said, “the prosecutor’s role should be to seek justice in society.”
On top of that, a handful of states sought to impose justice from the top down: Virginia and Washington barred police from using choke holds and no-knock warrants. Minnesota adopted a law meant to make police more accountable. California, the country’s progressive laboratory, enacted the Racial Justice Act, which enables anyone convicted of a crime to challenge that conviction on the grounds of racial bias.
But Canada has gone further, insisting that judges explicitly consider race when meting out justice.
As far as Nadia Robinson was concerned, there is nothing fair or just about that. The father of her two boys was killed eight years ago by a driver in Ottawa, and he had gotten off with a lighter sentence because he was black.
“I’m not trying to be a ‘Karen’ in any way, shape, or form,” Robinson, who is white, told me. “I believe that when you do something wrong, you stand up and say you did something wrong.”
I suggested IRCAs were an effort to undo decades, even centuries, of racism that had been baked into the criminal justice system. “You can’t rewrite the past,” Robinson said. Then, she added: “We’re all equal.”
Nadia Robinson. (Dan Aponte for The Free Press) Race-based sentencing in Canada did not emerge in a vacuum.
It started in 1996, when Canadian lawmakers, upset that so many indigenous people were in prison, amended the Criminal Code, hoping to prod judges into considering indigenous people’s history of colonization—and dispensing less punitive sentences. In 1993, aboriginal peoples accounted for 17 percent of prisoners even though they were less than 4 percent of the total population.
In 1999, in R v Gladue—the first case to make its way to the Supreme Court following the amendments to the Criminal Code—what started as a suggestion became the law of the land. The Criminal Code, the Court ruled, “mandatorily requires sentencing judges to consider all available sanctions other than imprisonment and to pay particular attention to the circumstances of aboriginal offenders.”
In the wake of that case, courts started to require so-called Gladue reports when sentencing indigenous defendants. Gradually, the idea of building on Gladue reports to acknowledge African Canadians’ history started to gain traction.
Fast-forward to the mid-2010s and the rise of the IRCA. The whole point of the IRCA, Robert Wright, a social worker and early pioneer of IRCAs, told me, was to level the proverbial playing field.
“Some people think we’re trying to get a race-based discount for people,” said Wright, who wrote the first official IRCA, in R v. “X.” IRCAs, he said, are “real tools” that enable judges to “be more thoughtful” and “sentence black people more appropriately.”
Ryan Handlarski, a criminal defense attorney in Toronto, added: “How can we pass judgment on a person without at least trying to understand what led them to that place?”
Judge Anne Derrick, who presided over R v “X,” was apparently persuaded by this logic.
“I find that when ‘X’ shot ‘Y’ he was an immature, dependent 16 year old caught up in the dysfunctional dynamics of his community,” Derrick wrote. She sentenced “X” as a minor, giving him two years in prison and another year of supervision at home. Had he been sentenced as an adult—as the prosecutor requested—he would have received a life sentence.
While R v “X” influenced thinking among judges, attorneys, and prosecutors, its impact was limited because it took place on the local, trial court level.
But in 2017, Derrick was promoted to Nova Scotia’s Court of Appeal—where her future rulings would have an automatically binding effect on lower courts across the province.
And then, in 2021, she got her chance—with the case of R v Anderson—to make race-based sentencing the standard across the province.
During a traffic stop in Halifax three years earlier, Rakeem Rayshon Anderson was found carrying a .22-caliber handgun. He was charged and convicted of five offenses related to possession and transportation of a loaded weapon.
Prosecutors asked for Anderson to be given a prison sentence of two to three years. Being African Canadian, Anderson filed an IRCA—co-authored by Robert Wright, who had written the IRCA for R v “X.” The trial judge who heard Anderson’s case gave him a lesser sentence—house arrest and probation—based, in no small part, on the IRCA. (Judge Pamela Williams said as much, adding that the dearth of “Afrocentric services” contributed to her ruling.)
Prosecutors appealed to the Court of Appeal—where now-Justice Anne Derrick was presiding.
Derrick was unsympathetic to prosecutors.
“Even where the offense is very serious, consideration must be given to the impact of systemic racism and its effects on the offender,” Derrick wrote in August 2021, upholding the lower court’s decision.
Brandon Rolle, senior legal counsel at African Nova Scotian Justice Institute and one of Anderson’s attorneys, called the decision “historic,” adding that “this decision will directly impact every African Nova Scotian being sentenced from this point forward.”
I asked Mark Scott, the lead prosecutor in Anderson, what he made of Derrick’s ruling. “People’s culture and background are something that is essential to recognize when you’re looking at a just result,” Scott told me, sounding like a defense attorney. “If you’re going to say that justice has to be colorblind, I think there are people who would disagree with that.”
Chris Rudnicki, a criminal defense attorney in Toronto, told me: “If Justice Derrick’s decision in ‘X’ can be seen as opening the door to systemic considerations in Canadian sentencing, then her majority opinion in Anderson—now sitting as a judge at the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal—can be seen as leading us all through it.”
Since Anderson, federal authorities have tried to nudge the rest of Canada to follow Nova Scotia’s lead. In April 2021, the Department of Justice announced $6.6 million to subsidize IRCAs. Since then, the sense of urgency has grown, with everyone from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Correctional Investigator Ivan Zinger saying more must be done to combat the “overrepresentation” of minority inmates.
This urgency is fueled, in part, by an awareness that over the course of the first two decades of this century—from the first Gladue reports in 1999 to 2020—the percentage of indigenous prisoners has jumped, from 17 percent to more than 30 percent.
To Nadia Robinson, the idea that the man who had killed her partner should be given a lesser sentence because of his race felt “surreal,” she said, as if the people in charge were speaking one language, and she were speaking another.
Robinson’s partner, Andy Nevin, had been riding his bike on the morning of June 28, 2015, when he was killed in a hit and run.
In court, the driver, Deinsburg St.-Hilaire, testified that he’d been out all night at a wedding. It was almost six a.m., and he was speeding home—going almost 20 miles over the limit—when he nodded off. He came to when he heard a thud. He didn’t see anything in his rearview mirror. He said he thought he’d hit a mailbox.
Except that when he got home, St.-Hilaire covered his Ford F-250 pickup truck in a tarp, and, within a few days, he had the hood and side panel changed.
It seemed as though he knew what had happened.
This was what Nadia Robinson couldn’t accept. “If I knew it was my son who did something like that, I’d be like, ‘You need to come forward, you need to tell this family—you don’t hide,’ ” she told me.
After repairing his truck, St.-Hilaire decamped to an airport hotel, hoping to evade the cops. Nine days after the accident, he was arrested.
Later, when he tried to explain why he hadn’t turned himself in, St.-Hilaire noted that he had emigrated at age 7 from Dominica, in the Caribbean. “Being the only black child in his class, and not speaking English proficiently, resulted in Mr. St Hilaire being bullied at school,” according to a court document.
At the trial, Judge Catherine Aitken said she believed the defendant “wanted to do the right thing but did not have the confidence to do so out of fear.” She added: “I also accept that this fear was likely heightened as a result of Mr. St. Hilaire’s experience with racism as a black person growing up in this community.”
Ultimately, Aitken found St.-Hilaire guilty of obstructing the police investigation into the collision but, parroting the defendant, added that his “experiences earlier in life when he was subjected to racism and bullying in the school context” as well as “experiences more recently when he did not feel fairly treated by police officers during traffic stops” were mitigating factors.
It seemed not to matter to the judge that St.-Hilaire, 39, didn’t provide any details about the racism he had suffered: names, dates, comments that were made, pain that was inflicted. Nor did he say how it had affected him over the years.
St.-Hilaire could have wound up spending two years behind bars. Instead, he was sentenced to 100 hours of community service and left the courtroom, in November 2018, a free man.
St.-Hilaire hadn’t even filed an IRCA. All that was required to get a lighter sentence was to bring the defendant’s race to the judge’s attention—to obtain “judicial notice,” Danardo Jones, the University of Windsor law professor, told me. “Failure to consider race and anti-Blackness,” Jones said in an email, could lead to a sentence being overturned on appeal.
The Ottawa police chief, Charles Bordeleau, was furious about the sentence and issued a terse statement voicing frustration—something he almost never did. “It’s unfortunate that these comments were made putting into question the professionalism of our members during this difficult investigation,” he said.
Nadia Robinson told me the court’s judgment made her feel like Andy Nevin’s life didn’t matter. Did anyone care that on the morning of his death, he was biking to the new apartment they planned to live in? They were moving out of the dump they’d been in, starting a new chapter. The boys were so excited, she said.
“Are you kidding me?” Robinson said. She was crying. She felt as if she were living a parallel life, a life that wasn’t supposed to happen. Her sons, now 26 and 24, she said, have had a lot of trouble since their father’s death: alcohol, drugs, a seemingly bottomless grief. “My kids are devastated,” she said.
Among prosecutors and even some criminal defense attorneys, it felt as though the country were crossing the Rubicon.
“The judge basically calls the system out for being systemically racist even though the system bends over backwards to be reverse racist,” a prominent defense attorney in Toronto told me.
The attorney, who asked me not to publish his name out of fear of backlash, found it galling that the judge had portrayed St.-Hilaire’s actions during the course of those nine days between the hit and run and his arrest as a “momentary lapse of judgment.”
“The idea that somehow this cover-up had anything to do with racism or this never-demonstrated canard of systemic racism is patently false,” the attorney said. “To use language we’d normally associate with murder, this was not a momentary lapse in judgment but planned and deliberate. That’s what makes the judge’s ruling so egregious, and the idea that the defendant gets some kind of break because of something that happened years ago, something completely unprovable and possibly untrue that has nothing to do with Andy Nevin’s death—that’s absurd. Actually, it’s offensive.”
He added: “This is the scam of scams.” He said that lots of people knew it, and no one would say it openly. Including him. “Criticizing IRCAs would mean career suicide.”
I asked Chris Rudnicki, the criminal defense attorney, whether the subtext of the whole IRCA phenomenon was that black people from poor neighborhoods have less control over the decisions they make.
He emailed back: “In some cases, yes.” He added, “To the extent that systemic discrimination has a material impact on people’s lives—restricting access to housing, education, and employment, for example—it can render them more susceptible to criminal influences. You are more likely to steal a loaf of bread if you’re poor, for example. Or more likely to join a street gang if your school has expelled you. Etc. So a sentencing court will treat a person who has experienced the material impact of systemic discrimination differently than a person who has not suffered that impact.”
(Jason Franson for The Free Press) Edward Smith, who robbed the Airbnb, insisted the problem was never systemic discrimination. It was him. It was his family.
In high school, he’d started stealing candy and clothing from local stores. Partly, he said, this was because his mother, who packed chickens for minimum wage, couldn’t afford to buy him stuff. But mostly, he said, it was because he could. He was a latchkey kid surrounded by other latchkey kids. “It was just me and my friends,” Smith said. “If we were going to make bad decisions, we were going to do it together.”
It was in the summer of 2019 that his cousin asked him to help rob this Airbnb to get his money back. He didn’t ask questions.
So, the three of them—his cousin, some other guy, and Smith—showed up at the Airbnb, and the two other guys had guns, and they robbed the place and got out and drove away before Smith could catch up with them. He got arrested. It turned out his cousin had never been robbed. He just wanted to do some robbing. (He was later arrested, too.)
Smith was happy to have avoided a longer sentence but seemed almost embarrassed by it. “It didn’t have anything to do with race,” he told me for the third or fourth time. (But Temitope Oriola, a University of Alberta sociologist, said it wasn’t uncommon for black victims of racism to deny they had been victims of racism. “They refuse to acknowledge the existence of racism as a particular way of navigating the world and holding onto their sense of self,” he told me.)
Two months after being released from jail, Smith was arrested again, in April 2020, for possession of stolen goods. In September 2022, he was arrested once more and charged with two counts of assault and one count of damaging property, according to court records.
All these charges were subsequently dropped, but that wasn’t the point, the criminal defense attorney in Toronto said. “The police don’t arrest innocent people,” the attorney said. Referring to Smith, the attorney added: “Is he a ticking time bomb and going to keep reoffending? One million percent.”
It seems odd that liberals, who spent decades trying to deracialize society, are now re-racializing it.
Jonathan Simon, a University of California–Berkeley law professor, explained that, when it comes to criminal justice reform, it’s hard to sidestep race.
“The criminal-legal system is the equivalent of a toxic-waste disaster with over decades of institutional focus on communities of color,” Simon said. The public, Smith added, tends to view “crime” and “blackness” as one and the same. “There’s overwhelming evidence from psychologists that blackness and crime are fused in a cognitive way,” he said.
It was necessary to acknowledge that “the criminal-legal system has been jacked up on racism,” so society—in Canada or the United States—can start down the long path of decarceration, Simon said. That was the point of IRCAs, its defenders explained.
John Medeiros, the staff sergeant at the Ottawa Police Department who had overseen the St.-Hilaire case, said he understood why black defendants were skeptical that the system would treat them fairly. There was a long history. There had been discrimination. There had been a great deal of institutionalized oppression.
But he’d been dismayed by the judge’s ruling in the hit and run. According to Nevin’s postmortem examination, the 39-year-old cyclist had been struck from behind and flown into a ditch. He had a laceration on his head, and abrasions on his shoulders, waist, and legs; his spinal cord had been severed, and one of his lungs punctured. The only good news, perhaps, was that he had been killed instantly.
“I don’t think race ought to have been a factor here,” Medeiros told me.
Referring to St.-Hilaire, Medeiros added, “He left a human being on the side of the road, like he drove over a skunk.”
Rupa Subramanya is a reporter for The Free Press. Her last article, Trudeau’s Battle Against a Free Internet, examined Canada’s effort to curb free expression online.
Peter Baldrige, former Assistant General Counsel of the Calif Dept of Public Health, notified the agency they were violating the law by not investigating COVID vaccine injuries and deaths. They ignored him. So I will be filing a writ of mandamus, a court order to force them to do their job. If the court grants the writ, we will likely get to have input on how they do it. That will be a nice change, won’t it?
Executive summary
The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) hasn’t investigated any link between the COVID vaccines and death. That’s a violation of California law to look the other way.
Peter Baldridge, former Assistant Chief Counsel of the CDPH, expressly brought this violation to the attention of the head of the department. As you might expect, the CDPH ignored him and did absolutely nothing.
We have proof of this.
Since the California government is not doing its job in following the law, I will be filing a writ of mandamus to compel the CDPH to do their job. The California court should also award me attorney fees. Also, the investigation should be under the supervision of the court and they should be required to:
do the requisite histopathology tests to assess causality
produce the death-vax records.
In addition, Mr. Baldridge and I have both made a FOIA request to see the death-vax records; something that no state or world government has ever produced.
One way or another, the truth will be exposed soon for all to see.
Peter Baldridge’s requests
By letter dated December 17, 2022, Mr. Baldridge requested under the Public Records Act (Govt. Code, §§6250, et seq.) all records pertaining to any and all special investigations conducted or being conducted by the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) into the COVID vaccine adverse events.
On January 10, 2023, he received CDPH’s response: CDPH provided no records of any special investigation in Covid-19 vaccine adverse events after January, 2021, and had no records of any other investigation for periods later than June, 2021.
So in a letter dated April 17, 2023, Mr. Baldridge requested, under the California Public Records Act (Govt. Code, §§7920, et seq.), any and all records pertaining to special investigations into Covid-19 vaccine adverse events commenced after January 10, 2023, the date of the Department’s first response in order to see if anything happened.
On April 27, 2023 the Department responded that it had no responsive records to his request:
In other words, they were informed of what the law required them to do and they chose to do nothing.
Peter Baldrige’s letters to CDPH
Here is the full text of the letters Mr. Baldridge sent to the CDPH:
December 17, 2022: Peter requests to produce the records of the investigations that were required by law
Jan 29, 2023: Peter points out that the response to his previous request was inadequate and the department has not done its duty under the law. He reminds them again what is required.
April 17, 2023: Peter asks for the records of the investigation that the department should have commenced after receiving his previous letter.
May 5, 2023: Peter recounts what has happened to date and points out that there was again nothing done in response to his request to comply with the law. Peter shifts gears and makes a FOIA request for the correlated death and vaccination records.
My FOIA request filed on May 5, 2023
I also decided to make a FOIA request using the official CDPH portal:
It appears that the Department has little interest in or intention to investigate the reports of deaths in California related to Covid-19 vaccinations as required by law. I believe it is in the public’s interest that the correlation of vaccination and subsequent deaths be explored, particularly since, as of April 27, 2023, the Department continued to promote the Covid-19 vaccines as both safe and effective.
The Department has in its possession records related to deaths in California commencing January, 2021, when the vaccine rollout began. The Department also has in its possession vaccination records for Californians. The Department also possesses the ability to correlate this data using personally identifying information including, but not limited to: Social Security Number, street address, zip code, date of birth, name, and gender.
Accordingly, I hereby request under the California Public Records Act (Govt. Code, §§7920, et seq.) that the Department correlate these data sets and provide for each individual who has died since January1, 202l the following data fields for each individual as follows:
Date(s) of COVID-19 vaccination(s): <if any>
Five year age range of the individual who died (e.g. 50-54)
Date of death
In lieu of personally identifying information, I request that the Department create a random identification number for each individual so that the identity of the individual remains confidential.
You may contact me at xxxxxx if you have any questions.
Note: the JOIN of the databases cannot be done through the CAIR because they do not have the death records. CDPH controls both databases, so if this is not the proper request portal, please let me know which is the correct place to submit the database JOIN request.
Here is the receipt from my FOIA request: P018493-050523
Who wants to see the data?
As Ryan Cole is fond of saying, “You will never find what you don’t look for.”
Let’s be clear. California is not looking into any injuries or deaths caused by the vaccines. They are looking out for the interests of the drug companies, not your health. They don’t care how many people in California have been injured or died, and your injuries and deaths are immaterial. They don’t care, and they don’t even want to look.
The medical community in California is not better. They don’t want an investigation, either. Have you heard of a single doctor, Dean of Medicine, or medical association in California calling for an investigation? Of course not!
Does Governor Newsom want an investigation? No way. Newsom himself is vaccine injured, so he knows the vaccines cause harm, and that’s why he dropped out of sight for weeks after his booster shot. A proper investigation would show that the vaccines killed people, which means that Newsom instituted policies that likely led to the untimely demise of tens of thousands of innocent residents of California and the injury of many times that number.
The only person who called for an investigation, as required by law, is the former Assistant Chief Counsel of the California Department of Public Health. He worked there for 27 years and is appalled by what is happening there now. They can’t take away his medical license because he’s not a doctor. They could try to take away his license to practice law, but he’s retired. This is a problem for them. They ran into someone they couldn’t intimidate.
The vaccination rollout data
The vax-death data is good, but you need the vaccination data by age pictured below. This allows me to normalize the deaths of the unvaccinated since people move from unvaccinated to vaccinated over time. Without an upward adjustment, it will look like the unvaccinated are not dying at an even rate. With normalization, I can compare death curves for people who got the shot with those who didn’t. I can also compute the death rate of people in the vaxxed group with the death rate of people in the unvaxxed group.
Summary
It is clear at this point that neither the CDPH, the governor, the California legislature, the medical community, nor the mainstream media have any interest or intention to investigate the reports of injuries and deaths in California related to the COVID vaccinations.
This is why I’ll be bringing a writ of mandamus action against the CDPH for not investigating the injuries and deaths.
In addition, I have sent a FOIA to the CDPH for the death-vax records. If the CDPH does not comply with my FOIA request, I will bring another writ of mandamus request action against them.
*This post has been lightly edited for grammar from its original form.*
Considering CA is already a lawsuit hotbed, why wouldn’t they want to hide their culpability? — TPR