In Newton, Iowa in 2022, disgraced police officer Nathan Winters falsely arrested Tayvin Galanakis, a completely sober college football player for DUI. A local kid, Noah Peterson, was outraged and calmly criticized the Newton Police Department, as well as the Newton Mayor, during a city council meeting. The ignorant and corrupt mayor ordered his arrest, in violation of the First Amendment. The Institute for Justice took on his case, filed a lawsuit, and just scored a huge win for free speech. I got the chance to speak with Patrick Jaicomo, Senior Attorney with the Institute for Justice about Noah’s case.
This man goes into a Walmart to buy his elderly mother some over-the-counter arthritis medication. Meanwhile, this woman is riding around on a mobility scooter, even though she’s not disabled. Her kids are literally hanging off it as she puts around the store. The man can’t find what he’s looking for, so when he sees this woman, he asks her if she knows where he can find it. Then, all hell breaks loose. The man, “Mick” Patel, ends up spending 47 days in jail over what were obviously-false accusations (and as it turns out, this may not have been her first time). A lawsuit was just filed. I got the chance to speak to his civil rights attorneys.
Cops respond to a silent alarm coming from within their own county courthouse, where they find intruders locked inside the dark, closed building. After taking them into custody, the ‘burglars’ tell the cops they are actually professional hackers, hired by the State Judicial Branch to test the courthouse’s security measures.
Then the local sheriff arrives, apparently embarrassed by the fact that the hired hackers were able to just walk right in an unlocked door in the middle of the night, and angry that he wasn’t informed of the security testing ordered by the state. So instead of releasing them, he orders handcuffs put on them and has them taken to the county jail and charged with burglary.
Then it gets even worse. The bureaucrats at the state judicial branch then get worried about their own jobs, and they attempt to throw the hackers they hired under the bus, initially claiming they did not authorize the “burglary,” even though they did. Eventually the State Supreme Court admits they hired the hackers and apologized for the confusion.
But the county still wanted to prosecute the two innocent hackers, who were caught in the middle of this government power struggle. Even up through the day before trial, the county prosecutor was refusing to drop the charges. He finally had to though, because they were innocent. So then the two hackers filed a civil lawsuit, which took years to litigate. Now, that just settled, with the two hackers receiving $600,000 from the county for their false arrest and malicious prosecution.
This is an absolutely insane story out of Iowa.
The official statement of facts from Justin and Gary’s lawsuit that was presented to the Court, much of which is quoted in the video:
This is Part 2 of the update on the viral video arrest of Demetrius Kern from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, which I originally covered in July of 2023, along with Mr. Kern’s attorney, Chris Wiest. Mr. Kern had been falsely arrested and charged after he was almost hit by a police cruiser driven by Officer Carly Lewis, whose video deposition was featured in Part 1 of this update. That arrest was primarily at the direction of Officer Lewis’ supervisor, Sgt. Naftali Wolf, whose video deposition is detailed in this video.
Here is the main brief by Mr. Kern’s attorneys that I walked you through in the video, using the video deposition excerpts they actually cited in the brief:
If you want to go further into the weeds, here is the motion for summary judgment filed by Defendant Wolf’s lawyers (to which the above brief is responding in opposition):
As I mentioned in the video, as of this date, the Court has not yet ruled on the pending motions. Which means that the case is just hanging in limbo with nothing happening, until such time as there is a ruling. The ruling will decide whether or not the lawsuit gets dismissed, or whether it proceeds to a jury trial. This is fairly unusual for a delay of this length to occur in federal court – though sometimes does happen).
Remember the video I did back in July of 2023, with attorney Chris Wiest, about the lawsuit that he had just filed for a guy named Demetrius Kerns? Kerns was almost hit by a police officer who was driving recklessly. Then when he stopped to get her information afterwards, and she apologized to him, her supervisor then showed up and began to escalate the situation, demanding Mr. Kerns’ ID and ultimately putting him in handcuffs – and later falsely charging him with obstruction, in retaliation for the fact that he was filming and being critical of the police. As Chris and I discussed, eventually he would have the opportunity to take the depositions of these two officers.
Well, it’s been a couple of years now and I have an update for you. The case isn’t over yet. It’s still pending. These things can take years. But I actually have the full video depositions of these two officers, and I’m going to go through them with you so that you can hear exactly what they had to say when confronted under oath. First, part 1 – the sworn testimony of Officer Carly Lewis. And then in Part 2 we’ll get to the rather-unbelievable video testimony of her supervisor, Sergeant Naftali Wolf.
By now we’ve also seen footage of the Alex Pretti incident, from multiple angles, and we’ve also seen clips showing federal officials clamoring to convince the public that what they’ve seen was completely justified – even prior to any investigation occurring. We see both sides pushing politics and sowing division, rather than looking objectively at the facts to figure out what happened, and then fairly applying the law.
I’ll walk you through what we actually know happened, based on the currently-available video footage, and then let one of the best civil rights lawyers in the country – Patrick Jaicomo, with the Institute for Justice – who is literally at the forefront of the efforts at holding federal officials accountable for civil rights violations, cut through all the b.s., all the propaganda, and give you the actual information that you need to know right now. And there’s a lot of it – that you’re not hearing anywhere else right now.
You may have seen in the news, a federal jury in Michigan just awarded 4 million dollars to a man who got his eyeball squished like a grape, after being sucker-punched by a police officer for no reason. Daniel Reiff was on his way to a roofing job. He and his coworker, Ryan, stopped at Ryan’s house to get some tools. As they walked through the neighborhood, a neighbor got suspicious and called the police on a non-emergency number, reporting that she didn’t recognize two “younger looking kids.”
The Clinton Township police apparently didn’t have much going on that day, so they sent the cavalry – 8 police cruisers in total, who scrambled to the scene, even speeding and weaving through oncoming traffic, as if they were headed to a bank robbery. When Daniel saw this, having had prior bad experiences with the police, he left Ryan’s house and headed towards his bus stop. But Officer Broc Setty spotted him, got out of his car and chased him down, whooping a battle cry, as if he was a Viking about to murder some monks at a monastery. And actually Officer Setty wasn’t all that far off. When he caught up to Daniel, he sucker-punched him in the face, which ended up squishing Daniel’s eyeball like a grape, permanently blinding him.
This couple is sound asleep in their bed, inside their home, located in a quiet, safe neighborhood. Meanwhile, their paranoid, elderly neighbor calls 911, thinking there is an intruder inside her home. Rather than going to the elderly neighbor’s home, which was very well described by the 911 dispatcher, and relayed to the officers, the officers instead opted to just guess. They guessed wrong, and entered into the home of an innocent family, guns drawn…
On a sunny day in St. Cloud, Florida, police officers gathered, like storm clouds, around an upscale residential neighborhood. They were heavily armed, quick response teams waiting around every corner; helicopter on overwatch. K9 at the ready. They were prepared for anything. Everyone involved had been briefed on the operation. It was go-time. They converged on their suspect with clock-like precision. But why were they there? They were about to foil a terrorism plot? Armed and dangerous fugitive? Escaped serial killer?
Or was it an innocent guy in his home who wasn’t under arrest, and they just had some questions for him about a bar fight earlier in the day?
Imagine that a law abiding, completely innocent, Texas oilfield worker is just driving to a worksite and back one day as a part of his job, and his government, who is spying on him from some secret base somewhere, where a spy named Kiki is wondering why he was making the trip in one day, as opposed to two… And so he directs a secretive unit of Texas deputies, who were trained by the highly respected legal scholar, “Dennis,” a former cop who runs Street Cop Training – since banned from training police in his home state of New Jersey – to pull over the innocent oilfield worker, and using the Jedi-mind tricks they learned from Dennis, along with an alert from a drug dog who has never NOT alerted for them, reveal the truth that the innocent oilfield worker is actually a mastermind cartel smuggling kingpin… Except that he isn’t.
After detaining him for an hour and searching every inch of his truck, the deputies let the guy go. But the guy is pissed, and he complains. Internal Affairs said they did nothing wrong. So he calls the Institute for Justice. They investigate and file a lawsuit. They also tell this West Virginia lawyer with a YouTube channel, who is sort of just starting out, about the case, and he does a video on it that goes viral… Which in turn causes Internal Affairs to reopen the case and fire the deputy. And at his termination hearing, the deputy complains that the YouTube video left a lot of stuff out of the video – and that it’s just not fair… That would be crazy, wouldn’t it? Well it all happened, just like that. And more….
My original video:
Raw footage and documents coming soon…
Alek Schott’s Raw Dash Cam:
Deputy Joel Babb’s Raw Bodycam – Part A:
Deputy Babb’s Bodycam Part B:
Deputy Martin Molina’s Raw Bodycam:
Deputy Joe Gereb’s Raw Bodycam:
The Complaint (which has links in a footnote to the raw bodycam and dash cam):
Screenshots from the termination documents used in my video, showing the significance of Street Cop Training on what Deputy Babb ended up doing to Alek Schott, and others:
My 2024 Video on Street Cop Training and Dennis Benigno:
