Category: crime and punishment

Bosworth Sentenced

Last week, Judge John Brown sentenced Dr. Annette Bosworth, a neophyte candidate for U.S. Senate from South Dakota, to twelve concurrent two-year prison terms … to be suspended provided she successfully completes three years of probation, pays the cost of her prosecution, and performs 500 hours of community service providing medical care to the poor.

Note: that final punishment is what she has been doing on her own for years, and is sort of why she is in this mess in the first place.

The case isn’t an innocent person being unjustly accused. I’ve met Annette Bosworth; I’m proud to call her a friend. But she wasn’t exactly innocent. She got bad advice and made a faulty decision to sign as the circulator of petitions when not every signature was affixed in her presence.

That’s a mistake. It shouldn’t be a felony.

The bigger issue? The over-the-top prosecution. Attorney General Marty Jackley’s heavy-handed, multi-felony approach sends a chilling message to anyone in South Dakota considering political participation.

More ominous is the apparent long-running personal feud between Jackley and Bosworth. In a statement after her sentencing, Jackley declared that Bosworth had “crossed the line of exasperation.”

But it is South Dakotans who should be exasperated with the AG: “Jackley had said before her sentencing,” the Capitol Journal reported, “that he might recommend prison time depending on Bosworth’s attitude after conviction.”

Meanwhile, State Rep. Steve Hickey, a chief Bosworth accuser, appears to have committed her same sin: signing a petition as circulator and not witnessing each signature. Jackley hasn’t bothered to investigate, but defensively told reporters, “I’ve never said that I won’t look into it.”

Tellingly, Mr. Hickey just resigned his seat in the legislature.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Previous commentary:

Common Sense: No Part Justice
Townhall: One Dangerous Doctor
Video: Paul Jacob at the Capitol in Pierre, SD
Citizens in Charge Foundation: Report on the Prosecution of Dr. Bosworth
Townhall: Minor Infractions, Felony Prosecution
Common Sense: Time to Drop the Charges
Townhall: An Egyptian Crackdown in South Dakota
Action: Help Dr. Bosworth

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Tags Annette Bosworth, democracy, Dr. Annette Bosworth, elections, injustice, trial

Accountability crime and punishment government transparency

Impeach IRS Boss Now

Last week National Review reported that Republicans in the U.S. House have long been pondering impeachment of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen for stonewalling about whether Lois Lerner’s emails were lost and irretrievable.

Lerner is the former IRS official who oversaw the obstructing of applications for non-profit status by right-leaning and Tea Party organizations. The timeline that has the GOP considering impeachment of the IRS boss goes like this:

March 2014: Koskinen testifies before Congress to the effect that it would take quite a while to retrieve Lois Lerner’s archived emails.
June 2014. Koskinen tells Congress (eliciting “audible gasps”) that many of Lerner’s scandal-relevant emails had been lost in a “computer crash.” (What happens when you hit hard drives with hammers.…)
June 2015. Congress learns from the Treasury Department’s inspector general that IRS wasn’t merely lethargic about finding the emails, and didn’t accidentally lose them to a sweeping Lerner-targeting technical glitch, but actively sought to destroy files “most likely to have contained Lerner’s emails.”

However, investigators have recovered data, including 30,000 Lerner emails, that probably do contain many scandal-related epistles. Which anybody who knows anything about the Internet and servers and backups knows had never been lost to begin with — not prior to specific attempts to lose them.

How many weeks must drag on before Congress does what is necessary? Koskinen strung Congress along for his benefit, not ours — giving him more time only plays into his hands.

Stop procrastinating, Congress. Do it. Now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags emails, impeachment, IRS, Koskinen, Lois Lerner

crime and punishment national politics & policies too much government

Armed Americans

Scared? “July 4 terrorist attack on U.S. soil a legitimate threat, officials warn” — headlines the Washington Times.

Scared now?

Last weekend on Fox News Sunday, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mike McCaul (R‑Tx.) expressed his extreme concern that “Syrian and ISIS recruiters can use the Internet at lightning speeds to recruit followers in the United States … and then activate them to do whatever they want to do. Whether it’s military installations, law enforcement or possibly a Fourth of July event parade.”

Michael Morell, former CIA deputy director, told CBS This Morning, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re sitting here a week from today talking about an attack over the weekend in the United States. That’s how serious this is.”

In the last three weeks, the FBI has arrested ten U.S. citizens allegedly plotting attacks here — in solidarity with the Islamic State.

Just a week ago, I suggested we dump the Department of Homeland Security and start anew, because the DHS bureaucracy is hardly the best way to organize government to stop terrorist attacks.

Yet, no matter how well organized, government cannot possibly stop every act of violence.

While contemplating the Independence Day prospect of lone-wolf lunatics or homicidal decapitators and suicide bombers organized “at lightning speeds,” a thought came to mind: We had better depend on ourselves.

If those who will heed “the siren calls” of the Islamic State do get past Homeland Security and our alphabet quilt of security agencies, let’s do everything we can to make certain they still have to face us, armed Americans.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags CIA, Homeland Security, Islam, terrorism

crime and punishment general freedom too much government

Marauding Cops

Policemen who perpetrate acts like those I am about to describe should be imprisoned.

That’s not an anti-police statement, it’s a pro-law-and-order one. Anybody who vandalizes the property of innocent people and pointlessly terrorizes them, whether flashing a badge as prelude or not, should be arrested, prosecuted, convicted and punished.

Santa Ana police raided a medical-marijuana dispensary, a legal business in California. Why? Solely because it lacked a license.

Techdirt.com, which has videos of the raid, suggests that although “having the proper paperwork in place is important” — and it sure seems to be if not-being-raided is also important to you — the shop was in line to get the license. The process had been bogged down by local politics.

Nevertheless, officers on site “treated this lack of proper paperwork like it was the Zeta Cartel operating under its nose. The video captured by the dispensary’s cameras shows heavily-armed cops — some wearing ski masks — smashing through two doors and yelling at the peaceably-assembled customers to lie on the floor.”

We then see the jolly officers sampling the shop’s foodstuffs, playing darts, and ripping cameras off the wall.

They missed a couple. (Hence Techdirt’s extensive video coverage.)

Motive? It seems apparent that they engaged in all this abusive authority-flaunting just because they could.

And there is no real doubt that they knew what they were doing was wrong, and they knew that we would know. That’s why they went for the cameras.

Just like any gang trying to get away with something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Drug War, law, marijuana, police, police abuse

crime and punishment

Cops as Robbers

If there’s anything that cops should not be, it’s robbers.

By “cops” I mean anyone, including prosecutors, charged with protecting us against criminals. The guardians should not become predators themselves.

Thankfully, these two presumptively opposite categories of men have not become wholly indistinguishable — yet. But every day brings more evidence that we’re skating closer to that abyss.

Consider the police raid on the Michigan home of Ginnifer Hency, whose alleged crime was possession of marijuana with “intent to deliver,” i.e., to use it to assuage her own disease-caused pain, as well as that of others for whom she is a registered caregiver. Hency is fully compliant with all state law. A judge has therefore dismissed the charges wrongly brought against her.

At least one official involved in the case, then, has exhibited the respect for rights and justice that all should be exhibiting.

Good.

But questions remain.

Why was her home raided to begin with? Why was she charged? Why did police use the raid to grab loot, everything from TV sets to her kids’ cell phones and iPads?

And why, after the charges were dismissed, did a prosecutor gloat that he didn’t have to return Hency’s belongings, that “I can still beat you in civil court”?

Actually, we don’t need to know the motives of such thugs to know that they must be stopped.

The Michigan House is considering bills that would make this type of legalized robbery harder.

It should also be punishable.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags crime, Drug War, police

crime and punishment

Life in Prison [x 2]?

As I worried, this weekend, about Dr. Annette Bosworth, and her future sentencing for the “felonies” (minor infractions) she committed in South Dakota, others were similarly anguished about Ross Ulbricht.

A judge just gave him two life sentences in prison for setting up the “Dark Web” anonymous trading service “The Silk Road.” He begged for leniency — “just give me my old age,” the 31-years-old pled — but District Judge Katherine Forrest proclaimed “lawlessness must not be tolerated,” judging Ulbricht “no better a person than any other drug dealer.”

According to the BBC, “Prosecutors say that six people who died from overdoses bought drugs via the site and that such untraceable deals earned Ulbricht at least $18m.” This is supposed to make us hate him as a “drug dealer.”

Which he wasn’t. He set up a trading website — albeit a no-tax, black-market one. The actual trades were the responsibility of the traders. Like on eBay. Emptors caveated, knowing what they were doing.

Curiously, his site could only be accessed using software produced by the U. S. government. Using the judge’s rationale, maybe the federal government should be tried?

Some would say that drug overdoses are the responsibility of the drug users — but more to the point, the main factor in illegal drug overdoses remains their illegality. Not given the sunshine of a legit market, actual dosages are hard to manage: producers don’t usually bother with consistency, immune as they are to the reputation aspects of legal markets, not to mention any regulation or tort law influences that affect legal products’ safety.

In reality, those six deaths are more a result of the government than Mr. Ulbricht.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob

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