(Not) Keeping Up with the Cardassians: The Regime's Failed Show Trial in Portland

"A salutary experience": Residents of Cardassia give audience to a show trial.

Cardassia is a fictional planet in the Star Trek universe ruled by a totalitarian state with a court system quite similar to our own. Trials on Cardassia do not to examine the charges against the accused, since a guilty verdict is foreordained. The defendant is assigned an attorney called a “public conservator” whose role is not to represent the interests of his client, but rather to assure “the productive functioning of our courts.”

“I’m here to help you concede the wisdom of the state, to prepare you to accept the inevitable with equanimity,” one conservator explained to a bemused client unfamiliar with the system. “Whatever you’ve done, whatever the charges against you, none of that really matters in the long run…. This trial is to demonstrate the futility of behavior contrary to good order. Everyone will find it most uplifting.”

The federal conspiracy trial of Ammon and Ryan Bundy and five of their associates was supposed to follow the Cardassian script – but the prosecutors lost the plot when they encountered defendants they couldn’t bluff or bully, defense attorneys who conscientiously represented their clients, and a jury that demanded actual proof of the charges being considered. 
 

Wallow in your failure, you smug loser.

After spending $12 million plundered from tax victims, US Attorney for Oregon Billy Williams had to wallow in his own failure when the jury acquitted the defendants of all charges but one (it deadlocked on a theft of government property charge against Ryan Bundy). This was not jury nullification – the act of refusing to apply an unjust law, or setting aside a legitimate law because of exceptional circumstances. 

Had the prosecution sought a conviction on trespassing charges, it would have won – but Williams and his minions arrogantly assumed that it wouldn’t be necessary to prove every element of its case. They mistakenly believed that they were putting on a show trial, but the jury wasn’t on the same page. 

In search of consolation the armored geldings from the US Marshals Service assaulted and briefly detained defense attorney Marcus Mumford when he impudently reminded trial Judge Anna Brown that in the absence of the proper warrant all of the defendants were free to leave. 

“I said `if the marshals have something to say about it let’s see what orders they have, let’s see what papers they have to take [them] into custody again,’” Mumford told the media following the assault. “Next thing I know they took a hold of me and [were] talking about how I was resisting arrest. They were twisting my legs and put me to the ground and then they tased me.”

One of Mumford’s putative colleagues in the criminal defense bar apparently believes that he deserved a beating.

“It’s a good result from the defense lawyer viewpoint,” sneered attorney Bob Reid in an email to Mumford and his colleagues following the not-guilty verdicts. “You all stood up to the overly arrogant prosecution and outplayed them, which is your job, and you did that very well.”
“But don’t drink the Kool-Aid which the defendants have been drinking,” Reid continued. These defendants “are not `good guys’…. Take your victory and feel great – you deserve it – but remember what it is, and what it isn’t.”

It is profoundly doubtful that Reid has ever written a snotty note of that kind to a defense attorney who obtained an acquittal for a defendant accused of an actual crime of violence – such as robbery, rape, or murder. The source of Reid’s revulsion is not the idea that a tangible crime against an individual victim remains unavenged, but rather that political offenders escaped punishment for “behavior contrary to good order.”

Mumford after being assaulted by marshals.

The protest occupation of vacant administrative buildings in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was a political act, not a crime of violence. It was a gesture defying the supposed authority of the federal government to put certain questions off-limits, such as this: By what supposed right does Washington claim to own most of the land in the western states, and to regulate most of the productive land that remains?

Mumford’s demand to see a warrant before surrendering his acquitted clients into federal custody was a manifestation of exactly the same commendable defiance, which is why he was on the receiving end of an immediate reprisal by tax-fed purveyors of officially sanctioned criminal violence. 

For reasons that should be obvious to the unprejudiced mind, the jurors who dared to subject the federal case to critical scrutiny are also concerned about potential reprisals. Their not-guilty verdicts place the jurors in incredibly rarefied company. By becoming a prosecution-driven enterprise, the federal criminal “justice” system has effectively abolished trial by jury. More than ninety percent of federal cases end with a plea bargain, and of the remainder a comparable percentage end in conviction – not because of the strength of the federal case, but because of the Regime’s insuperable material advantages. 
 
Decades ago, at the depth of Stalin-era tyranny, Soviet procurators were admonished to pursue a one hundred percent conviction rate. Despite the advantages attendant to a one-party state, that goal evaded those who operated the Soviet “justice” system. Given that roughly one in 212 defendants in federal trials wins acquittal, it’s clear that the contemporary US system has come much closer to achieving Stalin’s ambition that its Soviet antecedent ever did. 

In his Seattle University Law Review essay “Reflections on Russia’s Revival of Trial by Jury,” John C. Coughenour, the Chief United States District Judge for the Western District of Washington, describes how Russia embraced the western model of trial by jury in the late 19^th Century, witnessed its destruction by the Soviets in 1917, and then saw its revival – however unlikely this may seem – under the rule of Vladimir Putin, who in December 2001 signed legislation mandating jury trials in all of Russia’s eighty-nine regions. 

Immediately after seizing power in 1917, the Soviets “abolished the professional bar and trial by jury,” Coughenour recalls. Just sixteen years earlier, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin praised the jury system as the “court of the street.” That was when he and his faction were the “whom,” rather than the “who.” When those roles reversed, Lenin had no compunction about disposing of the jury. 

In its place the Soviets imposed an inquisitorial system of “people’s courts” consisting of one judge and six “assessors” who were locally elected after being screened by the Party apparatus. Although supposedly analogous to a jury, the assessors “became known as `nodders’ for simply nodding in agreement with the judge,” who “answered to telephonic instructions from Party officials,” Coughenour observes. 

Where evidence was insufficient to achieve a conviction even under those circumstances, a judge “would usually return the case for `supplemental investigation,’ thus providing the prosecutor multiple bites at the apple,” continues Coughenour’s account. In our quasi-totalitarian system, this advantage is built into nearly every federal criminal case, in which US Attorneys front-load multiple charges, each containing draconian prison sentences, in the indictment. 

Eleven of the original defendants in the Portland case succumbed to this familiar form of prosecutorial intimidation – but one of them, Ryan Payne, was emboldened by disclosures in the trial to file a motion to withdraw his guilty plea. Payne, who like Ammon and Ryan Bundy faces a separate trial in Nevada on charges arising from the April 2014 standoff in Bunkerville, entered a guilty plea as part of what is called a “global offer” dealing with both prosecutions. His federal public defender, Rich Federico, points out that the Feds did not fulfill their part of the bargain by making a plea offer on the Oregon charges.

When Payne signed the Oregon plea agreement, the Nevada plea offer was still “only in a draft format,” the motion recalls. “Notably, the entire `statement of facts’ section of the Nevada plea offer had been left blank.” It wasn’t until after Payne had signed the deal that he was told the stipulated facts to which he would be agreeing – and then given only a day to accept the deal or face a possible mandatory minimum seven-year sentence.

Political dissidents celebrate court victory over the Regime.

This arrangement, once again, brings to mind the unctuous assurances of the Cardassian “conservator” as he explains the rules of a show trial to his doomed defendant: “Whatever you’ve done, whatever the charges against you, none of that really matters in the long run.” All that mattered in that fictional dystopia was the need to vindicate the “authority” of the state. The same is true in the police states, both historic and contemporary, that inspired that science fiction allegory. 

Unlike the Anglo-American adversarial system, “the Soviet inquisitorial criminal justice system neither prioritized nor emphasized the rights of individual defendants, but instead paid homage to the interests of the state,” concludes Judge Coughenour. 

The same can, and should, be said of the system that routinely coughs up viscous specimens of statist arrogance like Billy Williams. To them, the most troubling aspect of the Portland acquittals is not merely the missed opportunity to demonstrate “the futility of behavior contrary to good order,” but the possibility that the “nodders” have awakened and are starting to think for themselves. 

                                                 This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast
The FBI are the Regime's political police -- yet some self-described patriots see the Bureau as an ally because a faction within it seeks to bring down Hillary Clinton. They're forgetting that we should focus on the tyranny, not on an individual tyrant:


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Free Kelsey Osborne!

Victims of the Prohibitionist Cartel: Kelsey with her abducted children.

If 23-year-old Gooding, Idaho resident Kelsey Osborne is sent to prison for using medicinal cannabis to treat her daughter’s seizures, Governor Butch Otter should immediately grant her a pardon. If he fails to do so, he should be dragged into a public square in Boise and horsewhipped. 

Madyson Osborne, Kelsey’s young daughter, has suffered from seizure-like symptoms since she was 18 months old. Doctors prescribed Risperidone for the child’s condition, despite its serious potential side effects. On October 4, Madyson suffered an unusually severe fit that involved vomiting and disruptive behavior her mother had not previously seen. 

Desperate to obtain relief for her child, and understandably concerned about the cumulative effect of the dangerous antipsychotic drug she had been taking, Kelsey made the girl a smoothie with marijuana butter – which immediately calmed her down and helped her get to sleep. During a medical appointment the following day, Madyson tested positive for marijuana. At this point, the doctor – acting as an agent of the state, rather than a physician bound by Hippocratic ethics to protect his patients – contacted the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, which seized Kelsey’s children. 

The mother now faces a charge of inflicting “injury on a child” by substituting a healthy but officially banned treatment for a toxic pharmaceutical product that has been approved by the state. Since this happened in Idaho, a felony drug charge will almost certainly be imposed as well. 

Last year, acting on behalf of the pharmaceutical cartel, Idaho’s Republican Governor Butch Otter vetoed a measure that would not have decriminalized the use of medicinal marijuana but would have allowed parents a positive legal defense of necessity if they are charged with an offense for using medicinal cannabis to treat children suffering from seizures.  At the same time, Otter issued an executive order allowing a tiny number of families to participate in an officially sanctioned test project using a marijuana-derived product offered by a government-licensed pharmaceutical company. What this means, of course, is that providing medicinal cannabis to a child is only a “crime” if this is done in a way that circumvents state-approved gatekeepers. 

If Kelsey Osborne were able to use the defense offered by the bill Otter vetoed, it’s profoundly doubtful that the Jerome County Prosecutor’s Office would bother pursuing the case. 

Owing to the corrupt entente between the pharmaceutical cartel and the state’s prohibitionist Pharisees, Idaho is burdened with anti-marijuana laws worthy of Saudi Arabia. The irony of this situation is lost on the full-time “creeping Sharia” alarmists who canker the Gem State, the sort of people who are reliably deaf and blind to most varieties of native-grown authoritarian sanctimony. Such people irrigate their skivvies at the thought that somewhere in the state a woman might be wearing a hijab as a gesture of religious commitment, but they aren’t unduly troubled by the thought of children being abducted at gunpoint from a young mother who faces prison for trying to wean her daughter from a foul psychoactive drug that routinely wrecks both minds and bodies. 

Six years ago, Detroit resident  Maryanne Godboldo – who, like Kelsey Osborne, is a single mother -- held off an attempt by police and “child protection” bureaucrats to abduct her teenage daughter, Ariana, so that she could be forcibly drugged with Risperidone. Godboldo, a college dance instructor, had attempted to school her daughter at home, but was eventually compelled by her financial circumstances to place the youngster in a local government school. This meant subjecting the already troubled child to the government-dictated suite of vaccinations. Shortly after receiving the injections, the girl experienced severe side-effects, including behavioral problems she hadn’t previously experienced. 

In entirely predictable fashion, the government’s medical functionaries decided to add one more noxious chemical to the cocktail by prescribing Risperidone as the “remedy” for the damage caused by the injections. Within a few days, the victim began to display suicidal impulses. 

Maryanne sensibly decided to withdraw her child from the local mind-laundry and take care of her at home. The so-called Child Protective Service, decreeing that this motivated, loving, and well-educated mother was “in denial,” authorized itself to kidnap the child and finish the job of destroying her mind.

When the child snatchers came for her daughter, Maryanne — exercising the natural and plenary authority of a mother defending her child — denied them entrance to their home. Rather than obeying her lawful order to leave, the CPS contacted a SWAT team — complete with automatic weapons, armored personnel carriers, and helicopters — that laid siege to her home for ten hours.

Maryanne, who took up arms against the invaders, eventually surrendered and was charged with several felonies. All of those charges were dismissed a few months later when the Wayne County District Court ruled that the search of her home was illegal.
Seething with frustration over his thwarted desire to make an example of Godboldo, the DA tried to revive those charges in 2014. On July 12 of that year they were finally, and definitively, dismissed. 

“In the end, it is a basic human right for parents to choose if they want to medicate their children,” observes Godboldo’s attorney, Allison Folmar. “When the state steps in and says `hey, mom and dad, we know what’s better for your child,’ that’s wrong.”

Victorious: Goldbodo (center) with friends.

Significantly, an appeals court that heard Godboldo’s case acknowledged that citizens in “imminent danger” as a result of illegal police action have the right to use lethal force in protection of their homes. The true purpose of the right invoked in the Second Amendment, after all, is to protect one’s self and one’s family from the criminal violence of those who claim to rule us. 

If Idaho were the state it pretends to be, its residents would not permit its government to punish Kelsey Osborne for choosing a safe and healthy treatment regimen for her daughter’s seizures – and they would not allow Governor Otter to escape accountability for the harm he has inflicted on that family, and many others, in the service of the pharmaceutical-prohibitionist axis.

This essay has also been published at the newly inaugurated website of The Libertarian Institute -- which is where you will also find the archives of the weekly Freedom Zealot Podcast. Please check it out -- and tell your friends!

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Sheriff David Clarke: The Warlord of Milwaukee County

Now that Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona’s Maricopa County faces a possible federal felony conviction that would dislodge him from office, the floor is open for nominations to replace him as the preening figurehead for the Punitive Populist constituency. Milwaukee County, Wisconsin Sheriff David Clarke, who has been auditioning for that role over the past several years, is the prohibitive favorite for that position. 

Like Arpaio, Clarke is a part-time sheriff and full-time media whore, tirelessly seeking opportunities to favor Fox News viewers with a visage set in a sullen pout that he mistakes for an expression of Churchillian pugnacity. Where Arpaio advertised himself as the “World’s Toughest Sheriff,” Clarke has become the most visible exponent of the view that law enforcement officers should be provided with an institutional “safe space” befitting members of a specially protected class.

Perhaps the most remarkable facet of Clarke’s public persona is his studied rejection of the idea that sheriffs and other police officials should be peace officers. He espouses the view that law enforcement is a tribe that is at war not only with criminal offenders, but with its law-abiding critics. 

Clarke, an FBI-indoctrinated prohibitionist fanatic who was awarded a Master’s Degree in “Security Studies” through the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security in Monterey, California, has issued an explicit demand for the suppression – and, if necessary, the “eradication” --  of Black Lives Matter activists and others giving voice to what he calls “anti-cop rhetoric.” Such people, he maintains, are “vulgar, vile, [and] vicious … slime” who should be characterized as “domestic terrorists.”

Following a prominent speaking role at the investiture of God-Emperor (in waiting) Donald Trump, Clarke published an essay urging the public and the political class to mobilize for a literal war of extermination – and insisting that citizens must rally to the defense and protection of the police officers whose advertised role is to protect them.

“It’s time to come to the aid of our police, our front-line soldiers, by calling this war, and not terrorism,” exhorted Clarke in an essay for The Hill. “Avoiding the truth through wordsmithing – the false narrative of the lone-wolf – is contemptible as more innocent officers perish while our politicians hem and haw. We as a people need to declare that we stand with the rule of law, and not with the false tales of the revolutionary Marxist forces, who most recently have rebranded themselves from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter.”

A poseur on horseback.

Those who refuse to enlist in that war are “accomplices” in league with “an enemy within our borders [and] without our borders,” Clarke insists.

“This slime needs to be eradicated from American society and American culture,” Clark insisted during an August 29, 2015 interview with Fox News host Jeanne Piro. While professing to “love the First Amendment” and “freedom of speech,” Clarke maintained that the right is “not absolute.” You can’t say anything you want in the United States. You cannot threaten people’s lives…. This is not First Amendment-protected.”

As he explained in the same interview, Clarke believes that the spectrum of impermissible speech may end with overt death threats, but it begins with the “disparagement” of police in social media.

It should be noted that as a Law-and-Order Leninist, Clarke does not object to insurrectionist speech or activism in principle: It’s all a question of who does what to whom. As Donald Trump’s presidential prospects have dimmed, Clarke’s ardor for order has waned, and his appetite for retaliatory violence has waxed. 

“It’s incredible that our institutions of gov[ernment], W[hite] H[ouse], Congress, DOJ, and big media are corrupt & all we do is bitch,” wrote Clark in an October 15 post on Twitter. “Pitchforks and torches time.” 

After successfully baiting media critics into condemning his hypocrisy, Clarke published an essay commending himself for emulating the courage of the Founding Fathers. Those men, Clarke apparently forgets, were disreputable radicals who opened fire on law enforcement officers in the performance of their duties on the morning of April 19, 1775, and whose revolutionary exemplars included a black felon named Crispus Attucks (he “stole” himself by escaping the custody of a man with a “lawful” claim to own him) who was killed while assaulting a law enforcement officer and trying to seize his firearm. 

Patriot martyr Crispus Attucks acted in self-defense, but his actions were an obvious threat to “officer safety.” If cornered and compelled to contemplate the matter at adequate length, Clarke might well dissolve into a puddle of cognitive dissonance. 

Yes, the sheriff professes to revere the colonial-era patriots, but he also subscribes to the “officer safety uber alles” dogma, under which the use of hostile language toward officers by a Mundane can justify the use of lethal force by the former. This was made clear in Clarke’s interview with Megyn Kelly in which he discussed the arrest and subsequent death in detention of Chicago activist Sandra Bland.

Bland was stopped in Hempstead, Texas by State Trooper Brian Encinia on July 10, 2015 for allegedly failing to signal a turn. The already tense encounter deteriorated when Encinia ordered Bland to extinguish her cigarette. She was not legally forbidden to have a lit cigarette in her car, but police officers are often trained to perceive lit cigarettes, car fresheners, or even heavy colognes and perfumes as masking agents to cover up the smell of marijuana.

When Bland refused to put out the cigarette, Encina (who had previously been warned about “unprofessional” behavior) needlessly escalated the encounter, ordering her from the car, bellowing the incantation “I am giving you a lawful order,” then pulling a Taser and threatening to “light you up.” 

Bland’s violent arrest led to a three-day incarceration in the Waller County Jail that ended with a death that has been described as a suicide, despite a number of documented irregularities and derelictions on the part of the guards.

Asked by Kelly if he considered Trooper Encinia’s actions to be appropriate, Clarke said that he “wholeheartedly” supported the officer. This encounter, he continued, was a “classic case of a citizen who did not comply with an officer’s lawful commands.”

Although she was armed only with a lit cigarette – an object some exceptionally inventive police apologists describe as a dangerous weapon – and her own sense of self-ownership, Clarke described Bland as “loaded for bear from the time she was pulled over.”

“I expect an officer to go into arrest mode” in dealing with a citizen exhibiting such impudent self-possession in the presence of a uniformed overseer, Clarke told Kelly. “And once you go into arrest mode, you get to move up on the force continuum – it’s no longer verbal commands, you can use intermediate weapons. He chose a Taser.”

While the violence employed by Trooper Encinia was entirely appropriate, Clarke opined, “I was more appalled with the language [Bland] was using with an authority figure…. She did some things that caused an officer to move up in terms of his response to keep her safe and to keep himself safe.” (Emphasis added.)

Disdainful language hurled at “an authority figure” is to be treated as a “threat,” from Sheriff Clarke’s perspective – and a violent assault with a reliably lethal weapon by an officer on an unarmed woman suspected of a trivial traffic violation is merely a responsible exercise of that “authority.”

Trooper Encina was subsequently fired and charged with perjury for lying in the official report describing his assault on Bland. This would not change Clarke’s opinion of the ex-trooper and his conduct, given that the sheriff consistently condemns – on the basis of purely tribal considerations -- legal action against abusive law enforcement officers.

“I’m tired of qualifying these statements [by talking] about `bad apples’ within the law enforcement profession,” complained Clark in another Fox News appearance after a Texas prosecutor offered a fleeting acknowledgement that corrupt police officers exist. Clarke perceives law enforcement as an undifferentiated mass of heroic virtue – or at least he insists that the public should embrace that official fiction. 

It has been said that no honest cop ever struck it rich, and no wealthy cop could possibly be honest. (For the purposes of discussion, I will stipulate to the possibility that the words "honest" and "cop" can be used in proximity without violently annihilating themselves as if they were matter and anti-matter.) Clarke is a stranger to the penury that frequently is virtue’s unwelcome companion.

 

During 2015, Clarke was paid a more than adequate plunder-derived salary of $132,290. He also received speaking fees, travel reimbursements, gifts, and other benefits amounting to more than $150,000, reports the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. This includes trips overseas to Israel and Russia sponsored by the National Rifle Association.

The Sheriff was given more than $9,000 in travel reimbursements to attend the annual Herb Allen & Company conference, a four-day gathering of moguls and media figures in Sun Valley, Idaho. In November, he was paid a $5,000 honorarium to offer a 48-minute presentation at the annual Restoration Weekend, a neocon assembly in Charleston, South Carolina. During that visit he was given nearly $3,000 in travel reimbursements, $1,212 for lodging, and almost $800 for meals. 

Clarke told the Journal-Sentinel that “I reported everything that I was required to report.” Milwaukee attorney Jeremy Levinson, who focuses on campaign finance and ethics issues, argues that “It looks like Clarke’s banking money he shouldn’t or is a part-time sheriff with a side job.” 

However, continued Levinson, the latter possibility “would require one to believe he’d get those lucrative speaking gigs and travel even if he weren’t an elected official.” 

Sheriff Clarke has been warmly embraced by a segment of the population that looks upon all government agencies and officials – except for the police and the military – with incurable suspicion and no small amount of hostility. This includes some people who really should know better:  Clarke was named 2013 “Sheriff of the Year” by the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, a group that opposes federalization of law enforcement.

That honor is a dubious fit for someone who clearly sees himself as a warlord, rather than a peace officer.


                                        Introducing The Libertarian Institute

Some people I greatly respect and admire -- Scott Horton, Sheldon Richman, and Jared Labell -- have invited me to participate in the newly created Libertarian Institute as managing editor. They have done me a tremendous honor, and I am deeply grateful. Scott's radio program is a national treasure, Sheldon is a man of deep and expansive learning and wisdom, and Jared has been aptly described as a "force of nature in the freedom movement."

My essays and podcasts will be available at The Libertarian Institute's website, and will continue to appear here, as well. That site will also host a blog featuring the insights offered by dozens of the most perspicuous and principled people in the individualist movement.

Once again, I am honored to be part of this undertaking, and thankful to those who have found my work worthwhile. God bless you all.

This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast:

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