Celebration in Portland
The Friday Letter / No. 437 / Orlando, Florida
In Portland, Ore., Tuesday night, anarchists punched and took down a city police sergeant to celebrate Derek Chauvin's conviction in faraway Minneapolis for the murder of a convicted felon while making an arrest. The violence came as a surprise to nobody except perhaps Portland's leftist municipal leadership.
Last September, the Multnomah County's District Attorney dismissed charges on 90 percent of the 213 rioters arrested for burning and looting the city and attacking police officers. The thugs who continue to terrorize Portland can confidently go about their business, knowing that punishment is unlikely.
Meanwhile, 2808 miles to the east in Washington, D.C., the Capitol Police have excused the shooting death of Ashli Babbitt, 35, an unarmed Air Force veteran and Trump supporter who was guilty of no more than exercising poor judgment when she joined a crowd of protesters who occupied the Capitol on Jan. 6. The usual practice in a police-action shooting is to disarm the officer, take him downtown for interrogation, and place him on administrative leave during a probe of the incident. The officer's personnel file, including his disciplinary record, is put on full pubic view.
Babbitt's rank at the end of her 14-year active and reserve duty career was E-4, senior airman.
Ashli Babbitt's killer has never been identified beyond his rank as a lieutenant. The ruling class that wants to disarm the American public made exceptions to public disclosure for the armed police who protect them. Capitol Police report to the Congress, not to the public.
Babbitt’s killer hasn’t been identified because there is no public outrage, and there is no public outrage because corporate media never pushed the story. Had a white officer shot and killed a Black Lives Matter terrorist on that day, Washington would have burned to the ground.
We don't know if the officer who shot her dead was even interrogated or put on administrative leave. We don't know why he shot her, except that she was white, and all white people are known to be racist white supremacists. Apparently it is OK to shoot white supremacists.
We sought details of George Floyd's criminal record. This is not easy. News reports tell of his 5-year jail term in Houston for a violent, armed home invasion. He has a long list of encounters with the police, but most of the public reports appear at Internet websites we don't consider reliable. Most of the legacy media stories on Floyd are sympathetic accounts of the “gentle giant” who loved his children. Minneapolis arrested him on suspicion of passing a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store.
Big Media reports of Floyd's encounter with Officer Derek Chauvin last May 25 couldn't conceal that Floyd had many times the lethal dose of fentanyl and amphetamines in his system when he resisted arrest. Said one lawyer, commenting on the trial, George Floyd was going to die that day, whether he was arrested or not.
If we had legitimate news reporting in this country, journalists would track down Derek Chauvin's jurors and ask them about any pressure they felt to convict Chauvin on all three counts. Were they or their families threatened? But we don't have legitimate reporting today, not for the most part. Rather, Big Media is staffed with stenographers for the left, propagandists, not reporters in search of the truth.
We wonder what got said in that jury room. Did any of the 12 remind fellow jurors that their job was to deliver a verdict based on facts, not emotion? Of course it is human nature to worry that your house might find itself on the business end of a Molotov cocktail at 3 a.m. if you voted against the mob. This is understandable. But did anyone in that room come forth to say that if the city of Minneapolis burns to the ground because of our verdict, that is not our concern, but that of the police? We'll go out on a limb here and guess not.
Derek Chauvin did something really stupid last May 25, because in the nearly nine minutes he held George Floyd's neck to the ground, EMTs urged him to back off, according to one news report. He had time to consider. Could he have allowed George Floyd to sit on the curb, handcuffed and of no threat to himself or anybody else? Probably, although we weren’t there as witnesses.
In the coming weeks we will see whether appeal grounds have merit. There are many possibilities: Joe Biden's call for conviction; Maxine Waters' incitement of riot, a felony; the judge's acknowledgment that the conviction could be overturned on appeal because of her incendiary remarks while refusing to declare a mistrial himself; the judge's decision not to allow a change in venue; and the judge's decision to allow details of Chauvin's disciplinary record but not Floyd's criminal record to be introduced as evidence.
There are other viewpoints on this story. “I don't think it would have made a damn bit of difference if he was tried anyplace in the country,” says Tom Thibodeau, a trial attorney now of counsel in Trial Group North, a civil trial firm in Duluth and Minneapolis of which he is a founder. Though he claims no expertise in criminal law, Thibodeau has tried hundreds of civil cases and understands how juries work.
“Everybody saw the video,” Thibodeau says. “The chief said Chauvin violated protocol.” In response to our inquiry, he asked a Minnesota judge friend to shed some light on the Chauvin case. The judge, whom Thibodeau did not identify, has presided in 29 murder trials.
We were curious to know why Chauvin was charged with three different crimes for the single accused act of causing the death of George Floyd. Thibodeau's friend confirmed that all three charges are for a single act. “The judge will sentence on the most serious act,” Thibodeau explained. “The jury doesn't know that.”
In other words, although the jury convicted Chauvin of second degree murder, second degree manslaughter, and third degree murder, the judge will sentence him only on second degree murder.
(The judge noted that the jury was sequestered during in its deliberations, when President Biden called for conviction.)
We were also curious to know why trial Judge Peter Cahill declined to declare a mistrial, even after he declared that Rep. Maxine Waters' incendiary comments could be grounds for appeal. “I give you that Congresswoman Waters may have given you something on appeal that may result in this whole trial being overturned,” he told defense attorney Eric Nelson on Monday.
“After you have invested all that time and effort with the jury, the prosecutors, the witnesses, etc., it's better to let it go to the jury and clean it up at the appellate level or in post-trial motions,” Thibodeau told us in an interview Thursday. “We pay the trial court to make the decision and the appellate court to be right. If there is some error there, that's where you look at it, on appeal.”
And, “If the trial judge thinks he was wrong, he can rule on the post-trial motions.”
The Left’s dream: a fluid constitution
Socialist Democrats don’t have the Constitution on their side as they move to seize permanent power by making the District of Columbia a state. That doesn’t stop them from trying, and one has to think they may be counting on their newest friend in the federal judiciary, the spineless Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts, to help ease the way. Roberts gave us the deciding SCOTUS vote in declaring Obamacare a tax, and he allowed his contempt for President Trump to help persuade the Court to ignore overt violations of constitutionally protected state election law in Pennsylvania and other states to ensure Trump’s defeat. And so it is with trepidation that we await the outcome of the Senate’s vote on H.R. 1, a bill that would unconstitutionally federalize presidential elections and legalize what Democrats openly seek: corruption of elections by removing all barriers to voting by anyone who feels like it, including illegal aliens, children, dogs, and dead people.
Our trepidation is explained by a lack of confidence in SCOTUS ruling on the law’s constitutional merits. You can read more about the bill’s Soviet-style repeals of our liberties at the Heritage Foundation website.
A January piece at the Daily Caller quotes constitutional scholar Roger Pilon’s 2019 testimony before a congressional committee in which he explained the meaning of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17. The 10-cent explanation is that the District was carved from land ceded from Maryland and Virginia as the seat of government. The federal government may not later use this land to form another state. It would be like re-gifting a piece of land.
“The basic question now is whether ... Congress has a power to create a new state from the greater portion of that land that was ceded by Maryland for the purpose of creating a district for the seat of the federal government,” Pilon told Daily Caller reporter Andrew Trunsky in an email. “There is no such power to be found in the Constitution.”
We will have to see if the Supreme Court, which ultimately will decide this case, goes with the Constitution or with the mob.