Category: crime and punishment

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Accountability crime and punishment property rights

Half-Win for Forfeiture Victim

Civil Asset Forfeiture

In August 2020, Jerry Johnson made a mistake: he carried a large sum of money while flying from Charlotte to Phoenix to buy a semi truck for his business. Police grabbed the cash when he arrived in Phoenix.

Mr. Johnson had decided to use cash to avoid certain fees and on the assumption that traveling with cash is legal.

Perhaps it is legal according to mere law. But police often grab any large amount of cash they see someone carrying. They accuse the naïve owners of drug-running and care nothing about actual evidence.

Threatened with jail when interrogated, Johnson signed a form that, he later understood, stated that the $39,500 was not his. The government kept the cash until he could wrest it back in court.

This, you may remember, is par for the course for civil asset forfeiture in America, where government agents behave like highway robbers.

But in this case — this course — the story didn’t end well for the robbers, for Jerry Johnson has gotten back his money. 

But he has not been made whole. As Land Line points out, in addition to all the time and trouble, there were the legal expenses that Johnson incurred before he obtained the help of Institute for Justice. 

And Johnson also lost business revenue: “There were a lot of business opportunities I’ve missed out on because that money was just sitting in a government account.”

Thankfully, the story is not over, yet, for there are organizations like Pacific Law Foundation and Institute for Justice to help victims of government predation at no charge. In this case, it was Institute for Justice that represented the victim in court.

IJ will continue the case to press for compensation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom insider corruption

If It Can Happen to Trump

freedom, law, justice

If it can happen to former President Donald Trump — something like the politically motivated ham-sandwich indictment issuing from an avid Trump-hating Democratic DA — can it happen to you and me?

It already happened to me. Fifteen years ago.

Handcuffs and leg-irons. Paul Jacob, Rick Carpenter, Susan Johnson.

The Oklahoma Three. Indicted by an arch enemy of citizen initiative, Oklahoma Apparatchik and Attorney General Drew Edmondson.

No, we hadn’t robbed a bank or gunned down the sheriff.

We were accused of not following all regulations in conducting a 2006 petition drive in Oklahoma. The fictional charge: “conspiracy to defraud the state of Oklahoma.”

The possibility of ten years in prison hung over our heads for a year and a half. In all that time, the AG started but never completed a preliminary hearing after which a judge could decide whether the indictment had enough evidence to warrant a trial. (Because it didn’t.) Then, the federal 10th Circuit declared unconstitutional the law we had allegedly violated, residency requirements for signature gatherers. 

Gritting his teeth and with smoke pouring out of his ears, Drew Edmondson dismissed the charges.

If somebody with official power like Edmondson or New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg wants to wield it against you and is indifferent to the requirements of justice, he might just do that.

Can it happen to you? Maybe not. Keep your head down, never say anything somebody somewhere could dispute, don’t leave the house, always wear a disguise, never exercise your political rights in a way that might draw the attention of thin-skinned and scared denizens of the political establishment.

Do all this, and you’ll probably almost certainly be fine. Maybe.

Or just fight them anyway.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights ideological culture

No Mystery, Just Confusion

woke, pc, woke culture

This week, two examples of “woke” political correctness shot across my visual field.

First, there was another classic 20th century writer bowdlerized by publishers and copyright holders so as not to offend the easily offended: Dame Agatha Christie.

As Robby Soave wrote in Reason, the great mystery writer has had her texts altered before, in the form of the title to her 1939 novel, And Then There Were None, which was originally published as Ten Little Indians. No, that’s not right. It was something far more offensive in America — but in U.S., one edition did use the less-offensive Ten Little Indians.

But now interior content of a much more innocuous sort has been changed. “A character in The Mysterious Affair at Styles who was referred to as a Jew — because, well, he is a Jew — is now just a person,” Soave explains. “And a servant identified as black no longer has a race at all.”

Nicety-mongering went much further in the second case, however, after the shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee. The young woman who murdered three students and three adults at the school, and was then herself shot dead, sported, online, the pronouns “he/him.” In between blaming Republicans and the talking heads of The Daily Wire for this trans-gendered person’s suicide-by-cop murder spree, some journalists couldn’t help but scold others for mis-gendering . . . him?

At least one report referred to the perpetrator (whose name I see no reason to publicize) as a “trans-woman,” though, in current lingo, she (“he”) was a “trans-man.”

It does get confusing — but as sad as it can get, there’s no mystery here. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Assumptions Attack

police, general freedom

Officers of the law are suing a rapper because his house attacked them, invading their privacy.

The rapper, Afroman, known for songs like “Crazy Rap” — and now “Will You Help Me Repair My Door,” about post-raid maintenance and the easy availability of lemon pound cake in his kitchen — claims otherwise.

The home of Afroman, aka Joseph Foreman, was raided by the Adams County sheriff’s office in August of 2022. They grabbed money. There was a paper warrant authorizing the action, but, he says, no actual justification, just “assumptions.”

He wasn’t home at the time. His family was.

Afroman admits to smoking blunts and said after the raid that he would have cooperated if asked about the contents of his ash trays. But he had no significant amount of marijuana in his home.

“You shouldn’t kick people’s doors down over speculation,” he said, “and you shouldn’t kick people’s doors down with an AR-15 over assumptions. You shouldn’t kick people’s doors down traumatizing kids over an assumption.”

The sheriff’s office found no evidence of “drug trafficking” and filed no charges.

Now officers are suing Afroman, who seems to be a plucky sort, for incorporating footage taken by his wife and security cameras during the raid into rap videos. The lawsuit says the video evidence is causing them “emotional distress, embarrassment, ridicule, loss of reputation and humiliation.”

Apparently, they were all just standing around minding their own business when this thing happened to them.

Countersue, Afroman.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Court Invokes First Amendment

hate speech, free speech, 1st Amendment

This is where we’re at. We must be in suspense about whether a judge will object when governments act to repress speech in the name of combatting “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “hate speech.”

Fortunately, Judge Andrew Carter sees the obvious and has blocked a new New York State law to regulate “hateful” online speech. The law was challenged by anti-censorship video platform Rumble and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Carter says: “The First Amendment protects from state regulation speech that may be deemed ‘hateful,’ and generally disfavors regulation of speech based on its content unless it is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest.”

The alleged “compelling governmental interest” exception is vague and not really consistent with the First Amendment. But the judge otherwise makes sense.

Laws like New York’s constitute a cart blanche for government to repress speech — any speech.

Any controversial words can be labeled hateful, misinformative, disinformative. People have been censored for asseverating that there are only two sexes, that the COVID-19 injections aren’t really vaccines, that the U.S. shouldn’t send more than $100 bazillion to Ukraine, etc.

It’s hatefully misinformative disinformation to proclaim that debates about such questions are impermissible. But people in any case have a right to be wrong; others, the right to refute them.

When the truth is on your side, you have an advantage. But you can’t beam your understanding into the minds of others.

You must be free to speak.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Last Shall Be First

Iowa Speech

The Iowa house has acted to make it easier for persons in the state to speak without getting sued into oblivion.

By a 94-1 vote, representatives passed House File 177, an anti-SLAPP bill that provides for prompt dismissal of lawsuits intended to intimidate people into silence rather than to redress wrongdoing. (A SLAPP is a “strategic lawsuit against public participation.”)

The bill seeks to protect “the exercise of the right of freedom of speech and of the press, the right to assemble and petition, and the right of association.”

One lawmaker behind the bill, Republican floor manager Steven Holt, said that he made it a priority after the Carroll Times Herald was litigated into penury for reporting on the case of a local married police officer, Jacob Smith, who had pursued inappropriate relationships with teenage girls.

Just before the paper published its findings, Smith resigned from his job. Then he promptly sued the Herald for libel. The reporting would make things tough for him, he attested.

The suit failed, but not before a year in court that cost the small-town newspaper about $140,000 in legal fees and related expenses. (The paper has launched a GoFundMe campaign to recover this amount.)

David Keating, president of Institute for Free Speech, says that if the anti-SLAPP bill is enacted, “Iowa would leap from last to best in the nation at preventing frivolous lawsuits from threatening free speech.”

Let’s hope that all other states then play catch-up.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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