Renewable Revolution

I learned a neat trick while I was having pro se fun with civil court judges. When you file a motion, NEVER ask for more than one thing. There "keen" legal minds have difficulty concentrating on more than one item at a time. 

 Not really!    They get it just fine.  They just use multiple points of law on ONE motion to IGNORE the ones they don't wish to "discuss", shall we say. It's an old trick. It worked for a while and then bank lawyer decided to play fast and loose with the one of two Court orders I got the judge to generate (to get the bank to take a firm legal - i.e. illegal  - position of debt solidarity involving multiple signatures on a note so I could stop their claim to conditio iuris basis in law for the lawsuit).

After the ten days to answer went by and the bank lawyer was still sitting on her hands fishing for a summary judgement, I  tried to get the judge to slap a contempt charge on the bank lawyer by being VERY specific about times and dates with the old ONE motion per charge trick. Knowing she couldn't dance around it, the bank lawyer whipped off a motion claiming she HAD answered the Court order in a timely fashion. The judge accepted it.  :emthdown:

But get this, the Court Order she had answered was ANOTHER Court order issued six days before that and the judge TOTALLY played dumb, stupid and ignorant. She is nothing of the kind. She is just a dancing POS in a corrupt court system that will ignore whatever they want to ignore, no matter how well you present your case. The amended bank lawsuit rubber stamped by the judge was the sloppiest piece of **** I have ever seen with duplicated text and several nunc pro tunc (typographical mistakes that can, and do, get ignored UNLESS you are pro se, of course  ).

But, all in all, it was quite educational, enlightening, revealing (and so on. etc. ) of the amazing amount of pretzel logic, rampant, socially  corrosive bank ass kissing that goes on in our dysfunctional court system. It has enabled me to, shall we say, have a better grasp of our suicidal trajectory. Unfortunately (depending upon your point of view  ), it is having a deleterious effect on my ignorance of the LAW. 

Uhm,, I think I have a graphic that explains the Court System at present. It is, after all, the result of a long, long, long tradition of coercive power granted for our good, peace, civilization, equitable (see definition of "legal" LOL!) society (and so on)  of course.  Gott mit uns! 

 

GO, this one is for you!   

SEE BELOW: TRUTH that provides EVIDENCE supporting your charge that the Courts ARE NOT stopping the LAWLESSNESS of COP BEHAVIOR:    ).

 Despite court rulings, people are still getting arrested for recording on-duty copsBy Radley Balko May 13, 2014    

The Associated Press reports that police in Chicopee, Mass., have arrested and charged a woman for allegedly recording her arrest with her cellphone surreptitiously.  :emthdown:

When you see one of these stories, please remember that it is perfectly legal to record on-duty police in every state in the country.  That includes states that require all parties to a conversation to consent in order for that conversation to be recorded. Those laws all also contain a provision that the non-consenting party has a reasonable expectation of privacy. So far, every court to rule on this issue has found that on-duty cops in public spaces have no expectation of privacy and that recording them is protected by the First Amendment.   (The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to weigh in on the matter.  ) In nearly all cases, the charges are eventually dismissed. (The exception may be if you’re arrested under some broad, catch-all law such as “interfering with a police officer” or disorderly conduct.  But even those charges don’t usually stick.)

But Massachusetts is the one state where the right is still just a little bit ambiguous.  At one time, some of the state’s courts did allow for citizens to be arrested for recording cops under the state’s wiretapping law (which, again, required all parties to consent before a conversation could be recorded). Illinois also once had an even more onerous law, but it was struck down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 2012 on First Amendment grounds.

In 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit issued a similar decision. The court allowed Simon Glik’s lawsuit against the police officers who arrested him for recording them to go forward, again finding a First Amendment right to record on-duty law enforcement. But in that case, Glik was recording the officers openly. The court’s ruling applied only to that case, leaving open the possibility that someone could still be arrested for making a surreptitious recording of an on-duty cop.   And that’s what happened in this latest case. 

If this case gets to the First Circuit, I suspect this charge will also be thrown out. It’s notable that the Glik decision didn’t even deal with whether there is a legal right to record police in Massachusetts. It dealt with whether cops who illegally arrest someone for recording them should be protected by qualified immunity. In order to get into court against a police officer, you have to demonstrate not only that the officer violated your constitutional rights, but also that the rights violated were well established at the time. (Perversely, this provides a financial incentive for police organizations to keep cops in the dark about the latest court decisions with respect to constitutional rights.)

So while the First Circuit ruling in Glik didn’t apply to surreptitious recording of police officers, it did find that not only is the right to record on-duty police permitted, it’s a well-established right that police should be aware of by now, and that if they violate that right, they can be sued for doing so. It seems unlikely that the same court will then turn around and uphold a separate arrest simply because the woman didn’t tell the police she was recording them.

If I lived in Chicopee, however, I’d wonder why this woman was charged for allegedly recording her arrest in the first place.  :icon_scratch:   Prosecutors have lots of discretion about when to charge someone and about what charges to bring. They are under no obligation to charge every person who breaks every law — it would be impossible for them to do so. And there’s certainly no obligation to latch on to the narrowness of a court decision that otherwise indicated a First Amendment right to record police as an opportunity to charge someone for doing just that, simply because she might fall slightly outside the scope of that particular ruling. Just because the courts haven’t yet ruled that police and prosecutors can’t do something doesn’t mean it’s something they should do. 


So if I lived in Chicopee, I’d want to know why Hampden County District Attorney Mark G. Mastroianni charged this woman. Does he believe it should be illegal to record the police? And if so, why?


Radley Balko blogs about criminal justice, the drug war and civil liberties for The Washington Post. He is the author of the book "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/05/13/despite-court-rulings-people-are-still-getting-arrested-for-recording-on-duty-cops/

Agelbert Note: So now the cops invent OTHER charges to get an EXCUSE to confiscate your video.  :  Do you see how this works? I do.     The cops will continue to HARASS people because, regardless of the Court decisions, if a JUDGE does not FORCE the DAs to read the riot act to all the COPS, they will continue to do this **** BECAUSE THEY CAN.  :emthdown: Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.    The Court System is USELESS as **** on a boar hog!

Don't believe anybody that claims there is no alternative UNLESS they agree to discuss the MERITS of present fascist LAWLESS (but legal  ) LAWS and proposed replacements to our Court System in a clam and respectful, rather than a disdainful and dismissive manner. To claim no alternative has merit when they refuse to discuss the merits of the present system as opposed to a replacement is circular logic of the most entertaining table pounding sort. But it don't make a lick of sense.  :icon_sunny:

police state definition. A nation whose rulers maintain order and obedience by the threat of police  or military force; one with a brutal, arbitrary government. The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.