No one is free, everyone is a criminal, and flowers are Very Scary.
So scary in fact, armed federal agents raided a senior's home ... looking for orchids.
Federal SWAT Raid
So as it turns out, even the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has its own SWAT team.
You don't need to know. You can't know." That's what Kathy Norris, a 60-year-old grandmother of eight, was told when she tried to ask court officials why, the day before, federal agents had subjected her home to a furious search.
The agents who spent half a day ransacking Mrs. Norris' longtime home in Spring, Texas, answered no questions while they emptied file cabinets, pulled books off shelves, rifled through drawers and closets, and threw the contents on the floor.
The six agents, wearing SWAT gear and carrying weapons, were with - get this- the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.
That's right. Orchids.
Do you own a knife? Because if you do, you're probably a criminal.
School Suspends Eagle Scout For Being Prepared
An Eagle Scout, an honor student, an Army soldier who is applying to enter West Point, has been suspended from his high school where he is a senior because he had a pocket knife locked in his car that was parked on school grounds. So much for the Boy Scout
motto of “Be Prepared”!
The craziest thing is, the school said they would let him return if he could produce a letter from either the U.S. Army or the Boy Scouts saying that he required the pocket knife. He promptly got a letter from his scoutmaster and then was informed he was suspended for an additional three weeks.
Uh, oh ... we have an artist among us ... better call the police!
When Art Becomes a Crime
It was May 11, 2004. He had no reason to expect that his wife's fatal heart attack and his call to the authorities would mark the beginning of a four-year odyssey to the belly of the criminal-justice system.
The paramedics and police detectives who arrived at Kurtz's home that morning to tend to his wife found more than they expected. Off the upstairs bedroom was a small table on which was arranged a home laboratory containing Petri dishes and various items of lab equipment. The detectives spent hours-- nearly the entire day--interrogating Kurtz about the equipment and his relationship with his wife and then called in local health department officials, who ran tests on the cultures in the Petri dishes. They were harmless.
The next day, three or four vehicles came screeching up to Kurtz as he walked across a funeral home's parking lot, intending to make arrangements for his wife's cremation. It was the FBI. Kurtz was detained on suspicion of bioterrorism ...
Agents from the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense, as well as officers from the local police and fire departments and the state marshal's office, arrived on the scene and cordoned off the entire block with crime-scene tape. As the TV cameras looked on, federal agents wearing hazmat suits and bearing guns entered Kurtz's home and seized all of his equipment, as well as books, personal papers, and his computer. Authorities went door-to-door, questioning Kurtz's neighbors about his habits and their impressions of him.
Crime and justice. A government racket.
Copyright Absurdity
I just walked down the street in my little home town of Lewistown, Montana, to the local coffee shop called “The Rising Trout” to get a cup of coffee. On the door was a new sign that read: “Open Mic Night is cancelled until further notice due to an ASCAP [American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers] order.” Apparently, some member of this asinine protectionist non-profit organization found out that a few local patrons of this little coffee shop were singing songs in public. Unless this small shop owner forks over a large sum of cash to this extortionist operation, no one in my town is allowed to sing.
There's no way out. Prosecutors can get away with anything they want.
You're Probably a Federal Criminal
[The problem] is that the scope of federal criminal law is so broad that the feds could probably find a crime to pin on almost any American adult.
Judge Alex Kozinski and Misha Tseytlin have an excellent essay entitled "You're (Probably) a Federal Criminal." As they put it, "most Americans are criminals, and don't know it, or suspect that they are but believe they'll never get prosecuted."
The vast scope of federal criminal law is a very serious problem. Because of it, most Americans are effectively at the mercy of federal officials whenever they might choose to come after us. We are used to thinking of "criminals" as a small subset of the population. In that happy state of affairs, criminal law threatens only a small number of people, most of whom have committed genuinely heinous acts. But when we are all federal criminals, perfectly ordinary citizens can easily get swept up in the net simply by being unlucky or because they ran afoul of federal prosecutors or other influential officials. Overcriminalization also leads to the longterm imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of nonviolent people ... In addition, the ability to convict almost anyone of a federal crime means that federal officials have wide discretion to punish people who are unpopular, politically weak, run afoul of the current administration, or otherwise become tempting targets ...
[T]he amazing thing is not that federal prosecutors sometimes abuse their enormous powers, but that they don't do so far more often. However, as federal criminal law continues to expand, it will be more and more dangerous to keep relying on their self-restraint or that of the Department of Justice.
Prosecutors: A Protected Criminal Class
There is no legal or civil recourse for innocent people framed for murder by corrupt, ambitious prosecutors. This is the position taken by respondents — including the Obama administration, 28 state governments, and “every major prosecutors organization in the country” — in a lawsuit scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court, reports NPR.
Plaintiffs Terry Harrington and Curtis McGhee served 25 years in prison for the murder of a retired police officer in Council Bluffs, Iowa, before critical, long-buried police records were pried loose through Harrington’s persistent campaign for exoneration.
The suppressed records documented a conspiracy by police and prosecutors to suborn perjury against Harrington and McGhee while suppressing evidence that pointed at another suspect — Charles Gates.
It should surprise nobody that the Supreme Court has confected a doctrine of plenary immunity for prosecutors, who cannot be sued for anything they do at trial — such as lying, concealing evidence, suborning perjury from the witness stand, and the other familiar tactics found in the arsenal of every government-employed lawyer.
Stephen Sanders, the attorney for the respondents in the lawsuit, insists that there is “no freestanding constitutional right not to be framed.” Even when prosecutors file charges they know are false and malicious, “that’s an absolutely immunized activity,” he claims.
Immunizing prosecutors against such crimes is entirely typical of the culture of corrupt impunity that has enveloped the “justice” system.
Consider as well that in a dissenting opinion written just a few months ago Supreme Court “Justice” Antonin Scalia made the remarkable claim that there is no constitutional prohibition against executing a wrongfully convicted individual: “This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”
The people operating the government’s apparatus of prosecution, imprisonment, torture, and official murder are a specially protected criminal class far more threatening than their private sector competition.
Unfettered government ... prosecutors, police, and courts simply make up the rules as they go along. They can make anybody into a criminal. Yes, even you.
