On June 27, 2022, Judge Darrell Jordan, of Harris County, Texas, was indicted on the misdemeanor state-law charge of Official Oppression for ordering the contempt arrest of journalist Wayne Dolcefino. The arrest of Dolcefino occurred exactly two years earlier, on June 30, 2020, while Judge Jordan was presiding over County Criminal Court at Law No. 16 of Harris County, Texas. Using a pen camera, Dolcefino surreptitiously recorded his arrest. I reached out to him and he gave me permission to show the footage.
Here’s the backstory. Wayne Dolcefino is a veteran former TV journalist who had entered Judge Jordan’s courtroom on June 30, 2020 to question the judge about his lack of action on a serious of public corruption complaints involving Houston Mayor, Sylvester Turner. As can be seen in the video, Judge Jordan initially greeted Dolcefino, but then told him he wouldn’t be answering his questions, and threatened to hold him in contempt if he persisted. When he persists, the judge orders Dolcefino shackled and taken to jail. Jordan subsequently sentenced Dolcefino to 3 days in jail and 180 days probation. After Dolcefino appealed, Judge Jordan added an alcohol monitor and random drug tests as probation conditions.
On November 4, 2020, the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas issued an opinion granting Mr. Dolcefino’s application for writ of habeas corpus, finding that, “After a review of the evidence and arguments, the contempt of court allegation is not supported by the . . . record” and vacating the contempt order under which Mr. Dolcefino was arrested and charged.
Not long before the indictment was issued, the judge was admonished for unrelated misconduct.
On May 13, 2022, the State Commission on Judicial Conduct issued a Public Admonition and Order of Additional Education against Judge Jordan, concluding that Judge Jordan violated several judicial ethics canons, ordering him to obtain 2 hours of instruction with a judicial mentor within 60 days. The admonishment found that Judge Jordan engaged in several unethical behaviors, including:
(1) Summoning several assistant prosecutors into his presence to “communicate to them his displeasure with their failure to treat him with sufficient respect, and to lecture them about criminal contempt penalties that could arise from acts ‘disrespectful of the court.’”
(2) Referring to himself as the “king of his court” and referring to the assistant prosecutors as “hang’ em high prosecutors.”
(3) On at least one occasion, threatening on the record to charge an assistant prosecutor with contempt, for failing to show him proper respect. At least he faces justice now after being indicted for Official Oppression, right? Wrong.
Posted just today on the Dolcefino Consulting website, Wayne announced that the criminal charge was dropped against Judge Jordan. He wrote that, “Democratic Fort Bend County District Attorney Brian Middleton bailed out a fellow Democratic judge just days after he was indicted by a grand jury for official oppression.”
“This misconduct was caught on tape and the dismissal of the indictment is a miscarriage of justice and we’re not going to let the DA off the hook like he did for Judge Jordan,” Wayne said. He’s now asking for public records from the Fort Bend County DA’s office, including emails, phone records and documents related to the investigation and case.
Apparently, the Ford Bend County DA, Brian Middleton, had been appointed to prosecute the case after the Harris County DAs office recused themselves. Then Middleton, on the Friday before the July 4 holiday weekend, quietly dropped the charges. The official reason given was that he didn’t believe enough evidence existed to prove the allegations beyond a reasonable doubt.
There seems to be a pattern of this happening, where prosecutors apparently are unable to convict public officials for misconduct that is captured with video evidence. If only they were that picky about prosecuting the peasants.
This week, following public release of the footage showing the arrest of Brian Beckett by Officer Aaron Shrewsbury, of the Mount Hope WV Police Department, the prosecutor on the case filed a motion requesting dismissal of all of the charges, which was granted by the Court. The pending charges of obstruction, disorderly conduct, speeding, and reckless driving were all dismissed and Mr. Beckett was released from bond.
The prosecutor noted in his motion that, “A review of the evidence does not support prosecution of the case.”
This is great news. Many thanks to Mr. Beckett’s criminal defense attorney on the case, Jody Wooten, for a successful conclusion. This doesn’t automatically create civil liability in a federal civil rights lawsuit, but it does foreclose the defense from using the criminal charges, or any criminal conviction, against us in a civil lawsuit. It was also the right thing to do. Our investigation continues in the meantime, both in regards to this incident, as well as into the Nathan Nelson case, where my client had his jaw fractured in two places by the same police officer. Many questions still remain, and information received is still being examined and sorted out.
One of the interesting things I’ve learned is that the police department in this tiny West Virginia town apparently takes up around 50% of the town’s budget. I’ve received lots of tips from credible sources about multiple allegations of corruption surrounding this. So I’ll be taking a deep dive into these issues.
Here’s the dismissal motion and ensuing orders from the Court:
What you see here is Bluefield West Virginia off duty police officer, James Mullins, on October 24, 2021 physically attacking multiple individuals, including a local business owner, his girlfriend, and multiple coworker police officers. He had just been involved in a shootout with multiple people in this parking lot. There are bullet holes in his car and shell casings laying around on the ground. At the end of the day, nobody was charged for the parking lot shootout, including the off duty officer. In fact, despite all the crimes you are about to see committed, only one misdemeanor charge of domestic violence resulted, for the video taped violent push of the officer’s girlfriend. And today, that charge was supposed to go to trial. Instead it was dismissed without prejudice. My original video on this was pretty long, but take a look at these few snippets, and let me know if you think the off duty officer appears to you to have committed any crimes.
For some reason, the special prosecutor assigned to the case, and the West Virginia state trooper assigned to investigate it, only saw fit to charge one count of domestic violence. Nothing for the shootout; nothing for physically assaulting the bar owner; nothing for physically assaulting the multiple police officers.
Today that case was scheduled to go to trial. A conviction for domestic battery would have prevented the off duty officer from ever possessing a firearm again legally, and therefore preventing him from ever being employed as a police officer again in the future. But that didn’t happen. The charges have been dropped and he has been released from bond. He’s currently perfectly capable of now possessing a firearm and also to work as a police officer. Unbelievably, as far as I know he’s still certified to be a police officer through West Virginia’s LEPS subcommittee on law enforcement certification. When I previously asked them if they were going to take steps to investigate or decertify Officer Mullins, they responded that he was being prosecuted criminally, so no they weren’t. Oops. Government fails us once again.
The reason given to the news media regarding the dismissal was that the victim was allegedly “uncooperative.” Okay, that’s common in domestic violence prosecutions. But why is that dispositive here, where the crime was caught on video? Do you even need the victim to testify? What if she doesn’t show up? Who cares. What is she going to show up and say, “nothing happened?” It’s on video. Is justice achieved if violent domestic abusers can persuade their victims to not cooperate? No, of course not.
Now, to be fair, the dismissal documents did note on them that the charge was being dismissed without prejudice, meaning that they can be refiled at a later date, and also noting that “related” charges are going before a grand jury. So, it’s possible that more charges are coming, including possible felony charges, which require grand jury indictment. However, the expected date for the grand jury decision is October. West Virginia has a one year statute of limitations for misdemeanor crimes. So if they wait until after October 24, 2023, he’s in the clear and cannot be prosecuted for this, or any other misdemeanor arising from this incident. That does not prevent indictment for felony charges, which do not have a statute of limitations in West Virginia.
Also, I know from past experience that the favorite way of prosecutors generally to coverup acts of police misconduct, especially shootings, is to present it to a secret grand jury where they return a “no true bill,” or a decision not to indict. This would clear the officer, and make it look like it wasn’t the decision of the prosecutor. In reality, we know that prosecutors are known to be able to indict ham sandwiches, controlling the flow of evidence and law to the grand jurors.
Make sure you subscribe to follow along to see what ends up happening. It would be a travesty of justice, as well as a clear and present danger to the public, to allow this to fade away at this point. The public and politicians should look into West Virginia’s LEPS subcommittee on law enforcement certifications and find out why they haven’t decertified this police officer.
Original full video:
Also, let’s not forget about the fact that he appears to have been drinking from an open container in his car before and during this incident:
I previously posted footage of Bluefield Police Department officer James Mullins, going on a rampage inside, and outside, my client’s bar. Here’s an update, as well as yet another piece of incriminating evidence ignored by his LEO coworkers and “prosecutors.” Maybe they’ll explain themselves at some point…..
Here’s the screenshot of the inside of Mullins’ car:
And here’s the identity of the beverage in the cup holder:
Reuters reported a few days ago on a recent set of court orders from a federal judge in West Virginia finding a troubling pattern of illegal search warrants obtained by drug task force officers.
In December, Goodwin issued an order suppressing evidence seized from a house in 2021. The judge questioned the accuracy of certain statements made by law enforcement in an affidavit to obtain a search warrant of the defendant’s house. The government has since filed a new indictment.
After the judge issued the suppression order, the U.S. attorney’s office sent two investigators to interview the state magistrate judge who issued the search warrant. Goodwin said it was “improper” for investigators to seek such an interview and for the judge to entertain it.
“It is inherently intimidating to send federal officers to question a state magistrate judge,” Goodwin wrote, “and it is clearly out of bounds for the magistrate judge to provide the interview regarding his judicial decision-making in a matter pending before this court.”
Reuters published yet another article today expanding on the earlier report, noting that more than one federal judge in West Virginia, as well as a unanimous panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals found that this particular drug task force in West Virginia has been engaged in unconstitutional violations pertaining to search warrants.
Goodwin, in fact, has criticized the practices of the Metropolitan Drug Enforcement Network (MDENT) in particular in at least three other decisions since 2017, a review of court records shows. The MDENT is composed of officers from agencies including the Charleston Police and Kanawha County Sheriff’s Office, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the state police.
The judge tossed out evidence in a drug case last year, holding that the Charleston Police, MDENT, and a Kanawha County magistrate had again failed to respect constitutional limits on searches and seizures. The MDENT’s warrant was based on “unsourced and undescribed” information that someone was selling drugs and the discovery of three marijuana stems in the trash from that person’s home – which the judge said was clearly insufficient.
“I fear this is becoming a pattern,” Goodwin wrote on April 28, 2021, pointing to a similar ruling in another MDENT case from a week earlier.
The MDENT has also been admonished for what courts described as open and purposeful disregard of the legal limits on searches and seizures by at least one other judge of the Southern District of West Virginia, and in a unanimousopinion by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
This is the same federal court who presided over the Keith Sizemore case I litigated, where the Court denied a police officer qualified immunity in a civil rights lawsuit for providing false information in a search warrant application.
What you’re about to see, demonstrated in black and white courtesy of the federal judiciary, is proof of a pattern and practice of police misconduct. This is a documented pattern of Fourth Amendment violations, where drug task force officers knowingly violate the Constitution, with the complicity, or ignorance, of multiple state-level magistrate judges, who are not required to have law degrees to hold office, and who generally don’t. Moreover, many times the state-level magistrates, elected in countywide elections, are themselves retired law enforcement officers.
West Virginia is in serious need of search warrant reform. By the way, federal investigators in West Virginia, so I’m told, are required to go to Circuit Court judges, rather than magistrates, in federal criminal investigations in West Virginia.
Here’s the Court’s ruling on the motion for reconsideration in the case of U.S. v. Lark, as cited in the Reuters article:
Here’s the original suppression order which the government was seeking reconsideration in the Lark case. Note that the federal prosecutors here are not interested in actually having the Court reconsider the admissibility of the evidence, but rather solely with the career prospects of the police officer found by the federal judge to have provided false information in a search warrant application:
And here’s the opinion from the subsequent civil lawsuit. Note that this was a different drug task force than is featured in the other opinions, but same federal Court, and same underlying issues:
It would be interesting to find out if a single one of these police officers who were determined by the federal judiciary to have provided false information in a search warrant application were ever thereafter placed on a “Brady List” for disclosure to criminal defendants in cases involving these officers…..
Update, 3/17/22: The West Virginia Record reported that the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia has an open investigation into the matter.
Deanna Eder, public affairs officer for Thompson, declined to comment in the pending case. But she did issue a statement to The West Virginia Record about Goodwin’s concerns.
“Upon taking office on October 13, 2021, U.S. Will Thompson began a thorough review of all of his office’s policies and procedures to determine what, if any, changes were needed,” Eder told The Record. “The United States Attorney served as a state circuit court judge for almost 15 years prior to his role as U.S. Attorney and brings that experience analyzing constitutional and suppression issues to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
“As a result of his review of policies and procedures, and prior to the order in the Lark case, U.S. Attorney Thompson implemented a new process for reviewing search warrant applications. The U.S. Attorney’s Office has reviewed the court’s order in the Lark matter and takes the Court’s concerns seriously.”
You may recall the West Virginia judge who was featured in traffic stop body cam footage, which resulted in the filing of formal judicial disciplinary charges against him due to his behavior during and after the stop. That judicial disciplinary litigation is apparently ongoing, as it is being contested by the judge. But wait, there’s more…. Believe it or not, the same judge has now had a separate set of formal charges lodged against him by the West Virginia Judicial Investigation Commission. The new Formal Statement of Charges, filed on February 14, 2022, and just released today, contains allegations pertaining to, of all things, the Walmart self checkout process.
To refresh your recollection, the first set of charges were filed on October 25, 2021. After finding out about their existence, I served a FOIA request on the Moorefield Police Department, where the incident occurred, and requested the body cam footage referenced in the charges. I then posted the relevant footage on Youtube, of course, so that the public could see it, which is a necessary component of government accountability. That video, as of this time, has been viewed 270,108 times, has 5.2 thousand likes and 2,452 comments, mostly appearing to be in condemnation and disgust of the judge’s behavior.
The new formal statement of charges alleges that on August 18, 2021, Judge Williams “left the Moorefield Walmart without paying for ten or so items in his shopping cart.” Moorefield Police Chief Stephen Riggleman described the allegations in a police report, where he noted that he arrived at Walmart on September 13, 2021 on an unrelated call and was informed that there was another incident which needed investigating. The chief wrote that the asset protection officer at the store provided him with evidence involving Judge Williams:
[The asset protection associate] provided this officer with a training receipt and still photograph of an individual known to me as Charles “Carter” Williams. This officer then watched video surveillance footage of Williams utilizing a self-check out register where he was observed scanning, bagging and placing the bagged merchandise into his shopping cart.
Williams is then observed pushing his shopping cart out of the store without making any attempts to pay for the items.
Chief Riggleman then wrote in his report that he notified the Hardy County Prosecutor, Lucas See, and reported the incident, given the fact that the suspect was the local circuit court judge, who he noted was already under a judicial disciplinary investigation involving the body-cam incident with the Moorefield police officer. The chief then noted that he decided the best course of action would be to contact Judge Williams and “direct him to pay for the merchandise.” He lamented, however, that this wasn’t the first time:
It should also be noted that approximately one year ago a similar incident occurred with [Judge] Williams at the Moorefield Walmart where he and his wife had pushed out a substantial amount of merchandise without paying. It was determined that neither party realized that the other had not paid for the items.
In fact, as the statement of charges alleges, the shopping buggy pushed out of the Walmart in the earlier incident was “valued at approximately $300.00 and that another individual was with [Judge Williams] when the incident took place.”
Apparently the investigators were aware of the first Walmart mishap, and they asked him about it, during his sworn statement during the body-cam incident investigation. Contrary to evidence later obtained by investigators, the judge sort of laughed it off and said that it was an incident a couple years ago where he forgot to pay for $52.00 worth of goods and that his wife was not present, but that a lady he knew, who worked at Walmart, was present, and that the lady “still works there,” claiming that, “[w]e laugh about it.”
Investigators note in the new statement of charges that the county prosecutor, who initially reported the judge on the body-cam allegations, never disclosed to them that there was actually another Walmart allegation, occurring only three weeks before the judge provided them with a sworn statement about the first Walmart allegation and the body-cam incident allegation. They only found out about the August 18, 2021 Walmart incident after Chief Riggleman disclosed its existence on February 10, 2022.
It also appears that the judge failed to disclose the existence of the second Walmart incident to the appropriate authorities. Paragraphs 19 and 20 from the new charges are redacted, but they do state that the judge “also never disclosed the August 18, 2021 Walmart incident to [somebody]” who is unnamed, claiming that the judge was unaware of the August 18, 2021 allegations until the same day as his February 11, 2022 interview by judicial disciplinary investigators. In other words, nobody advised him that he had failed to pay for the merchandise.
But wait a minute…. The judge apparently claimed during his February 11, 2022 sworn statement that he had no idea that he had left Walmart on August 18, 2021 without paying for merchandise, and only discovered the existence of the allegations on the very day of his questioning by investigators on February 11, 2022. To the contrary however, other local officials say otherwise, for which there appears to be documentation.
Chief Riggleman noted in his September 13, 2021 report that he reviewed video footage of Judge Williams pushing unpaid merchandise in a cart to his vehicle at the Moorefield Walmart, and that he subsequently contacted Judge Williams directly and directed him to pay for the merchandise. Riggleman also wrote in his report that the county prosecutor called him on September 14, 2021 and advised him that he had received a call from Judge Williams advising that he wished to pay for the items; that it was an unintentional mistake. The chief’s report is corroborated by text messages between the judge and the prosecutor, which were obtained by judicial investigators, dated September 16 and 17, 2021 (clearly prior to February 11, 2022):
Judge: If you could get that amount from [the Walmart asset protection associate] tomorrow I’d really appreciate it. Thanks so much.
Prosecutor: Gotcha!! She was supposed to call me yesterday but I guess she forgot. I’ll take care of it first thing in the morning.
Prosecutor: $42.21. Do you want me to stop by your house and get a check?
Judge: I have Covide so I’ll put a check in an envelope on my wall there at my driveway. I’m in a hearing so I probably won’t have it there until around 12:30. If you could take it up there I’d really appreciate it.
Prosecutor: I can do that.
Judge: Ok. It may be in a zip lock bag. I’ll hand sanitize good before I handle any of that. Thanks a lot Lucas.
Prosecutor: No problem!!
The next day, the texts between the judge and the prosecutor continued, even discussing the name of the lady at Walmart. The prosecutor relates that the Walmart asset protection lady wanted to communicate to the judge that she doesn’t want the judge to be “mad at Walmart about it.”
Two sayings come to mind: “where there’s smoke, there’s fire;” and also, “sometimes the cover-up is worse than the crime.” Trial lawyers often leave the the most important question unasked at the end of an important line of questioning. Where the evidence is strong, one need not even ask the ultimate question, because the answer doesn’t matter. It’s obvious. The new statement of charges appears to establish that Judge Williams provided false testimony during his February 11, 2022 sworn statement, claiming to be unaware of the August, 2021 Walmart incident (as being the reason he failed to disclose it to investigators during questioning just three weeks afterwards, on October 6, 2021).
Numerous rules of the West Virginia Code of Judicial Conduct were alleged to have been violated, according to a unanimous vote of the Judicial Investigation Commission, which found probable cause. Judge Williams has been served with the charges and has a right to file responsive pleadings with the West Virginia Supreme Court within 30 days.
This is absolutely outrageous. Apparently, there’s a secret society style organization of Family Court judges in West Virginia, who held a meeting and signed a resolution asking the West Virginia Supreme Court to fire the judicial disciplinary counsel prosecutors, who are currently engaged in the disciplinary prosecution of Judge Goldston in what has been termed the “Family Court Judge Search Case.” This was then leaked to the media by the judges, none of whom would agree to go on the record, but rather opted to work from the shadows.
Today we filed suit in the case of the “Outlaw Barber,” Winerd “Les” Jenkins, a 73 year old combat veteran and former 27-year Deputy U.S. Marshall, who was arrested for refusing to close his barbershop during the Governor’s lockdown in April of 2020. We filed a Section 1983 civil rights lawsuit in federal court, in the Northern District of West Virginia.
When Winerd “Les” Jenkins first became a barber, Neil Armstrong hadn’t yet set foot on the moon. For over five decades, Jenkins has made a living with his scissors and razor. For the past decade, he’s worked his craft from a storefront in Inwood, West Virginia. At Les’ Place Traditional Barber Shop, you can get a regular men’s haircut for $16 and a shave for $14—but come prepared to pay the old-fashioned way: in cash.
His insistence on “cash only” isn’t the only thing that’s old-school about Jenkins. He lives with his wife of 52 years on a small farm, where the couple raises rescued animals. He believes in paying his bills on time. He doesn’t use the internet, email, or text messaging. And he’s skeptical that his profession can become illegal overnight merely on the governor’s say-so.
He was ultimately arrested by two deputies from the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office, who transported Mr. Jenkins for incarceration and charged him with “obstructing” an officer. The prosecuting attorney’s office of that county then aggressively prosecuted Mr. Jenkins for the better part of a year, until the judge finally dismissed the charge in January of 2021, finding that it would be a violation of Mr. Jenkins’s constitutional rights to prosecute him for violating the governor’s executive order.
We asserted two separate violations of Mr. Jenkins’ Fourth Amendment rights (unreasonable search and seizure and false arrest), as well as a violation of Mr. Jenkins’ First Amendment rights. It’s already been assigned a case number. Read it for yourself:
On with me tonight on Freedom is Scary, Episode 18, live, is Benjamin Hatfield, Esq., the Republican Nominee for Prosecuting Attorney of Raleigh County, West Virginia. Most state level prosecutors are elected politicians with party affiliations. They are enormously powerful, as demonstrated by the Rittenhouse and McCloskey cases. You can watch read here on this Youtube link, or on our Facebook page using Facebook Live. It will be simultaneously streamed to both. You can also submit comments and/or questions on both platforms.
In this video we’ll discuss what you need to know before voting for or supporting a prosecutor candidate. There is a reason George Soros is funding radical left-wing prosecutors around the country. Prosecutors hold the keys to the criminal courtrooms, and can design prosecutions to further their social justice and radical anti-gun and anti-freedom agendas – long before they reach the judiciary. Is there a difference between Democrat and Republican prosecutors? I’ll answer that question with another question: is there a difference in the Democrat and Republican platforms in regards to a law abiding citizen defending themselves, or their homes, with firearms?
This is an urgent situation for all of us now. Join me LIVE with special guest, Benjamin Hatfield, Esq., the Republican Nominee for Prosecuting Attorney of Raleigh County, West Virginia (Beckley, WV), who is running against a career Democrat prosecutor, who hasn’t had a contested election in over a decade, and who has been a prosecutor there since 1983. The law abiding citizens there are suffering.
Hatfield is a former assistant prosecutor in that county, and currently works as a civil litigation attorney at a private law firm. If you’re in West Virginia, and if you’re anywhere near Raleigh County, you may have seen some of the issues occurring there recently. You want to pay close attention to this race, and I encourage you to take a hard look at Mr. Hatfield, and then do whatever you can to help him. Because your liberty may count on it. Tune in to see why and to ask questions.
If you can send any financial help his way, donations can be sent to the “Committee to Elect Benjamin Hatfield,” PO Box 5241, Beckley, WV 25801.
Update: Here’s the article on Soros funding the Trojan Horse prosecutors I referenced in the video:
After St. Louis erupted in violence, arson, and looting, Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner ($307,000) dismissed all charges against the 36 people arrested for that violence. In the last few days eight St. Louis police officers have been shot.
At the same time, Gardner rushed to file charges against Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the homeowners who brandished (but did not use) guns at protestors who had entered the private street where the McCloskeys reside.
In Chicago, Illinois State’s Attorney Kim Foxx ($817,000) refused to prosecute rioters who violated the curfew imposed to quell the violence. “The question it comes down to is, is it a good use of our time and resources? No, it’s not.” What does she think would be a better use of her time and resources?
You probably remember Foxx. She dismissed the charges against Jussie Smollett, the actor who reported a hate crime attack against himself that turned out to be bogus. A judge removed Foxx from the case and assigned a special prosecutor who filed six new charges.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner ($1.7 Million) announced he won’t prosecute people arrested for the violence that rocked his city for days with widespread looting and many cars torched. His excuse for not holding the mob accountable for their violence was laughable. “Prosecution alone will achieve nothing close to justice—not when power imbalances and lack of accountability make it possible for government actors including police or prosecutors to regularly take life or liberty unjustly and face no criminal or career penalty….” San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin ($620,000) is the beau ideal of the Trojan Horse prosecutors. “The criminal justice system isn’t just massive and brutal, it’s also racist,” according to Boudin…. In Portland, DA Mike Schmidt ($230,000) refuses to prosecute the rioters who have burned and looted his city for over 90 days straight…..
Since 2018, Soros has made Virginia the focus of his efforts. And it has paid dividends. Trojan Horse candidates have taken over five of the largest prosecutor’s offices in the Commonwealth: Fairfax, Arlington, Alexandria, Albemarle, Portsmouth, and Loudoun.
Kamala Harris is now the VP candidate. You may have heard her bring up the topic of systematic inequality, or injustice. Look no further than her achievements as a career prosecutor, and many others like her across the nation, to find evidence that those things indeed exist. They really do.
Harris was a district attorney in San Fransisco from 2004 to 2011. She stood out there by being tough on crime in the form of prosecuting truant school children, sending letters to San Fransisco parents each year, threatening them with citations. She sponsored a 2010 law making it a misdemeanor crime for parents whose children miss 10 percent of a school year without an excuse the State deemed acceptable. She opposed efforts to reduce mandatory minimum prison sentences. She opposed the effort to legalize marijuana in California.
She served California Attorney General from 2011 to 2017, where at least 1,560 people were incarcerated for marijuana related offenses in those years. She fought against new DNA testing in order to determine whether death row inmate, Kevin Cooper, who many believed had been wrongfully convicted. If there’s any chance at all that he is actually innocent, what is the harm in checking the DNA? According to the New York Times, over 600 criminal cases had to be dismissed over a corrupt laboratory technician who had been accused of “intentionally sabotaging” results in criminal prosecutions. Harris and her prosecutors tried to withhold this evidence from defense lawyers – and got caught.
In 2014, she declined to take a position on a ballot initiative to reduce certain low-level felonies to misdemeanors and laughed at a reporter who asked if she would support the legalization of marijuana.
That case is not an outlier. Ms. Harris also fought to keep Daniel Larsen in prison on a 28-year-to-life sentence for possession of a concealed weapon even though his trial lawyer was incompetent and there was compelling evidence of his innocence. Relying on a technicality again, Ms. Harris argued that Mr. Larsen failed to raise his legal arguments in a timely fashion. (This time, she lost.)
She also defended Johnny Baca’s conviction for murder even though judges found a prosecutor presented false testimony at the trial. She relented only after a video of the oral argument received national attention and embarrassed her office. And then there’s Kevin Cooper, the death row inmate whose trial was infected by racism and corruption. He sought advanced DNA testing to prove his innocence, but Ms. Harris opposed it. (After The New York Times’s exposé of the case went viral, she reversed her position.)
In “The Truths We Hold,” Ms. Harris’srecently published memoir, she writes: “America has a deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice.” She ironically claims in the book, “I know this history well — of innocent men framed, of charges brought against people without sufficient evidence, of prosecutors hiding information that would exonerate defendants, of the disproportionate application of the law.”
Indeed, I have also seen it first hand. The fact is that we have over-criminalized everything in this country. And who has it harmed the most? As I wrote about back in January, it didn’t start out this way. The Constitution was initially ratified in 1788. By 1790, we had only 30 federal crimes in existence, which consisted of the basics: treason, piracy, counterfeiting, murder, and so on. At that time, there was no concept in our law of the possession of an object being illegal in and of itself. That was imported from Sharia Law and Far-East authoritarian regimes, such as you see in the laws of Singapore.
The first modern drug law in the western world was in England in 1868. The first law against drug possession in the U.S. wasn’t until 1875, from San Francisco, where it was attempted to stop the Chinese immigrants from enjoying their “opium dens.” Politicians will be politicians, and now as of 2015, we now have over 5,000 federal crimes on the books – up quite a ways from the original 30 in the America as created by our founding fathers. In total, that’s 27,000 pages of descriptions of federal crimes in the U.S. code books. Although the U.S. consists of only about 5% of the world population, we incarcerate around 25% of the world’s prisoners. 40% of those are Black Americans. See The Overcriminalization of America, Charles G. Koch and Mark V. Holden, January 7, 2015.
Our laws in America derived from English common law. Courts today still turn to the old English common law to resolve some questions of law. It might surprise you to learn that the prosecution of crimes in our mother country was originally a private matter, rather than public. There was no real police force anywhere. Nor an army of prosecutors. The first real police force was created in 1829, and then that was only in London. The criminal justice system itself, was mostly privately operated and funded. So there was no such thing as a police force. And there was no such thing as career prosecutors, such as Kamala Harris.
Under English law, any Englishman could prosecute any crime. In practice, the prosecutor was usually the victim. It was up to him to file charges with the local magistrate, present evidence to the grand jury, and, if the grand jury found a true bill, provide evidence for the trial.
In some ways, their system for criminal prosecution was similar to our system of civil prosecution. Under both, it is the victim who ordinarily initiates and controls the process by which the offender is brought to justice. There is, however, at least one major difference between the two systems. If the victim of a tort succeeds in winning his case, the tortfeasor is required to pay him damages. If the victim of a crime won his case, the criminal was hanged, transported, or possibly pardoned. The damage payment in civil law provides the victim with an incentive to sue. There seems to be no corresponding incentive under the 18th century system of private criminal prosecution.
Possession crimes were used against Black Americans, throughout the Jim Crow era, by depriving them of the right to possess firearms.
The anxiety about gun control, i.e., the regulation of gun possession, arises from this tension, this uncertainty amongthose who once clearly identified themselves with the policers in their effort to control undesirables.
Privileged members of thepolitical community are appalled to find themselves treated bythe law, if not necessarily by its enforcers, as presumptively dangerous, and therefore as vagrants, felons, aliens, and “negroes.” Pointing to the Second Amendment, they challenge the state’s claim to original ownership of guns as dangerous instruments,with possession to be delegated to those deemed worthy. Men of “good moral character” balk at the requirement that they demonstrate their moral fitness to a state official.
They are, in short, experiencing the very sense of powerlessness so familiar to the traditional objects of police control. Now, they too are the outsiders who find themselves confronted with the arbitrary discretion of a superior power, the state. And this sense of alienation only grows when these state-defined sources of danger realize that state officials are exempt from the general prohibition of possession.
And again, if you want to look at systematic injustice and inequality, look no further than those individuals who have signed their names to the documents charging the people imprisoned across the county, as well as the arguments made in the courtroom to put them there. Somewhere along the way, we decided to over-criminalize America, to the point at which the Government tells us what plants, or even ideas, we can, or cannot possess. Regarding Harris’ statement in her book about the danger of prosecutors, the lady doth protest too much, methinks….
