The Death-Dealing "Divinity" in the White House

“I could be well moved, if I were as you
But I am constant as the Northern Star,
Of whose true fixed and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks;
They are all fire, and every one doth shine.
But there's one in all doth hold his place.
So in the world: 'tis furnished well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive.
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds onto his rank,
Unshaked of motion; and that I am he....”

 

Shakespeare placed those words in the mouth of Julius Caesar as the dictator arrogantly dismissed a plea to pardon Publius Cimber, who had been exiled from Rome. The merits of that request mattered not at all; the only issue, where Caesar was concerned, was his primacy and the need to display resolution in all things, to “show it, even in this: That I was constant Cimber should be banished, and constant do remain to keep him so.”

Caesar, in his own view, wasn't a servant of Rome; he was Rome. He wasn't subordinate to the law; the law was an emanation of his sovereign will. He was self-enraptured, self-fixated, megalomaniacal – in a word, presidential.

Barack Obama rarely indulges in public displays of dictatorial arrogance. He leaves it to underlings like Eric Holder, Leon Panetta, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. In testimony before separate congressional committees on the same day (March 7), Panetta and Mueller made clear the president’s view that his power to kill people is not subject to congressional checks or legal restraints of any kind. 

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta pointedly refused to recognize that Congress, not the president, has the constitutional authority to commit the United States military to war overseas. Panetta provoked outrage among conservatives by claiming that the UN Security Council or NATO could authorize military intervention abroad. However, less attention was paid to the fact that Panetta’s formulation cut Congress out of this matter entirely – a logical and predictable extension of the Bush administration’s claim that the president, in his role as Grand and Glorious Decider, has plenary authority to wage war wherever he chooses, against whatever target he selects. 

On the same day, FBI Director Robert Mueller was asked about Holder’s claim – made before an audience of law students at NorthwesternUniversity a few days earlier -- that the president can order the execution of American citizens without trial or due process of any kind. Mueller was specifically asked if that applies to Americans living at home, as well as abroad. He artlessly ducked the question by claiming he would “have to go back” and check if that was addressed in administration policy. 

The president has not been granted the authority to order the assassination of anyone, of course. Doing so is (in descending order of seriousness) an act of criminal homicide and an impeachable offense. Or at least it would be considered as much by anybody other than those who subscribe to the perverse idea that the president is a figure who transcends the law, who “unassailable holds onto his rank,” irrespective of the moral nature of his actions.

This was the essence of Eric Holder’s detestable claim that a presidential kill order, made in secret on the recommendation of an anonymous, unaccountable panel of underlings, satisfies the requirement of “due process.” That vile notion was reiterated by Senate Majority Leader Reid in a March 11 CNN interview.

Correspondent Candy Crowley, after reviewing Holder’s spurious distinction between “due process” and “judicial process,” asked Reid: “Do you understand what that means?”

“No I don’t – but I do know this – the American citizens who were killed overseas were terrorists, and if anybody in the world deserved to be killed, those three did,” Reid said, his eyes bright with the murderous fanaticism that burns away all critical thought. After all, if Reid retained the capacity for skepticism he would wonder if 16-year-old U.S. citizen Abdulraham Al-Awlaki really “deserved” to be murdered while enjoying a barbecue at the home of a friend.

Evangelist for the Leader Principle: Harry Reid.

 Crowley, to her credit, persisted:

“Are you slightly uncomfortable with the idea that the United States President – whoever it may be – can decide that this or that U.S. citizen living abroad is a threat to U.S. security, and kill them?”

“Well, I don’t know what the Attorney General meant by the term – I’d have to study it,” Reid said in a moment of equivocation before the cult conditioning re-asserted itself. “But I think the process is in place, I think it is one … we can live with….”

“Do you think the president should be able to make that decision … without going to court, without going to you all, without anything?” Crowley asked in one last attempt extract a clear answer from Reid.

“There is a war going on,” Reid recited, his face drawn into a sanctimonious smirk. “There is no question about that. He is the Commander-in-Chief, and there have been guidelines set. If he follows those, I think he should be able to do it."

At least some of Obama’s Republican critics are genuinely horrified by these assertions of unrestricted presidential power; some have even called for Obama’s impeachment, which would be an entirely appropriate course of action. 

It should be acknowledged, however, that with the honorable exception of Ron Paul (and perhaps Rep. Walter Jones), no congressional Republican who served during George W. Bush’s administration has standing to criticize Obama’s dictatorial abuses of power. The same is true of the GOP-aligned conservative punditocracy, particularly its talk radio auxiliary. The neo-totalitarian tendencies that took root during the reign of Bush the Dumber were lavishly fertilized by the diaper filling emitted relentlessly by the likes of Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Mark Levin and the glossy herd-poisoners at Fox “News.” They cultivated the seeds from which blossomed Obama’s nettlesome regime.

Bless me, Dear Leader: A True Believer prays to Obama.

 Harry Reid’s nauseating praise for presidential despotism is the same paean to Leader-worship sung by Bush’s chorus pitched in a slightly different key. In fact, some of Bush’s more passionate adherents considered him to be an adjunct member of the Trinity – a delusion he occasionally seemed to share.

During a campaign stop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania prior to the 2004 election, Bush told the audience: ''I trust God speaks through me.” Some of Bush’s acolytes regarded that self-description to be too modest.

 "I've voted Republican from the very first time I could vote,'' Gary Walby, a retired jeweler from Destin, Florida, during a campaign appearance. ''And I also want to say this is the very first time that I have felt that God was in the White House.” A New York Times Magazine account of that exchange records: “Bush simply said 'thank you' as a wave of raucous applause rose from the assembled.” 

 Every U.S. President since the abhorrent Woodrow Wilson has used the media to create a sense of “institutionalized awe.” One illustration of the Bush administration’s effort to propagate a global Leader cult was offered by an English-language textbook used by 16-year-old Pakistani students, which contained an anonymous poem entitled “The Leader.” The poem's rhyming couplets, which extolled a transcendent figure who personifies every virtue, formed an acrostic for “President George W. Bush”:

Patient and steady with all he must bear,
Ready to meet every challenge with care,
Easy in manner, yet solid as steel,
Strong in his faith, refreshingly real.
Isn't afraid to propose what is bold,
Doesn't conform to the usual mould,
Eyes that have foresight, for hindsight won't do,
Never backs down when he sees what is true,
Tells it all straight, and means it all too.
Going forward and knowing he's right,
Even when doubted for why he would fight,
Over and over he makes his case clear,
Reaching to touch the ones who won't hear.
Growing in strength he won't be unnerved,
Ever assuring he'll stand by his word.
Wanting the world to join his firm stand,
Bracing for war, but praying for peace,
Using his power so evil will cease,
So much a leader and worthy of trust,
Here stands a man who will do what he must.

 The instrument has yet to be invented that can measure the infinitesimal odds that this poem reflects the spontaneous admiration of a private author, either American or Pakistani. Given the Bush regime's documented efforts, working through the Rendon Group, the Lincoln Group, and similar propaganda mills, to seed “positive” stories in both the domestic and international media, it's a near-certainty that this hymn to Bush the Magnificent was extruded by an employee of, or contractor for, his regime. 

There is no ambiguity about the origins and intentions of “The Road We’ve Traveled,” an Obama administration campaign film produced by Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim and narrated by Tom Hanks.

Guggenheim is the Leni Reifenstahl of the Obama administration – a talented artist entirely devoted to the cult of the Dear Leader. His 17-minute  pseudo-documentary  promises to be a work of unalloyed Leader-worship in which Obama is wreathed in sanctity and his every deed is depicted in a heroic light. The clinching evidence of Obama's divinity, as portrayed in his work of cinematic worship, was the supposed courage he displayed in ordering the summary execution of Osama bin Laden, which was a precursor to the assassination of three U.S. citizens.

When CNN host Piers Morgan asked the filmmaker, “What are the negatives in your movie about Barack Obama?” Guggenheim replied: “The negative for me was that there were too many accomplishments.” The only other “negatives” he could perceive resulted from what he called the “toxic environment” created by those who dare oppose the Dear Leader’s infallible will and transcendently noble purposes. 

The Versailles court of Louis XIV, France’s self-described “Sun King,” included hundreds of sycophants and lickspittles who shamelessly sought his favor. In his book The Great Upheaval, historian Jay Winik has described how some of them would literally fight each other for the privilege of "presenting the chair for his daily `natural functions'.”

Guggenheim is the sort of person who would fight for the privilege of hauling the king’s intestinal residue, which – he would insist – emits the enchanting aroma of fresh-cut flowers.

Louis XIV’s famous self-description was “L’etat, c’est moi” (“I am the state”). His final pre-Revolution successor, Louis XVI, offered a similar summation of his view of the law: “C’est legal parce que je le veux” (“It’s legal because I will it”). Royal absolutism of this kind, after being refined in the crucible of revolution, was eventually remolded into the basic tenets of totalitarianism – a system, Lenin said, that rested on “Power without limit, resting directly on force, restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestricted by rules.”

Lenin would recognize in  value of Holder’s sophistical distinction between “due process” and “judicial process” an effort to abolish any remaining legal limits on the lethal power of the State, as incarnated in the Dear Leader. He would admire the audacity displayed by the Obama administration (as well as its predecessor) in asserting the unlimited power of the executive to kill, torture, and imprison people at whim. He would covet the instruments of mass annihilation wielded by the executive branch, and its equally destructive apparatus of mass indoctrination. And he might even spare a moment of incredulous pity for a population that is ruled by such a system while clinging to the illusion of freedom.

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Dum spiro, pugno! 

The Resistance Rises: Reinstating the "Castle Doctrine"

As the lower house of the Indiana State Legislature approved Senate Bill 1 on March 1, Representative Linda Lawson lamented that if it were passed the measure would signal that it’s “open season on law enforcement.”

 “You have men and women in your community who are willing to die for you, willing to die for your family,” insisted Lawson, who – as a former police officer herself –spoke on behalf of 15,000 members of the police union. The only suitable way to display proper gratitude to the heroic paladins of public order, according to Lawson, is to protect their purported authority to invade your home and kill you with impunity – a privilege that would be undermined by SB 1. 
 
The text of SB 1 states that its legislative purpose “is to protect citizens from unlawful entry into their homes by law enforcement officers or persons pretending to be law enforcement officers. Both citizens and law enforcement officers benefit from clear guidance about the parameters of lawful home entry, which will reduce the potential for violence and respect the privacy and property of citizens.” 
 
To that end, the bill recognizes that an individual “may use force … to prevent or terminate a law enforcement officer’s unlawful entry.” 

Tool of the Police Union: Rep. Lawson (right foreground).

 Although Lawson’s hunting metaphor was probably used because it was a convenient cliché, it contains a deeper significance that should not be ignored: Like the rest of the State’s exalted brotherhood of coercion, she assumes that the privacy of the individual’s home falls within the police officer’s natural habitat. 


SB1 is not an innovation; it simply restores an explicit understanding of Indiana’s “castle doctrine,” which was subverted last year in the Indiana State Supreme Court’s Barnes v. State ruling. As a wire service report observed at the time, that ruling effectively nullified the core protections contained in the Fourth Amendment and the equivalent provision in the Indiana constitution, as well as protections and immunities recognized by "common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215.” The 3–2 decision last May 12 held that Indiana residents have no right to obstruct unlawful police incursions into their homes.

As summarized by a legislative report last November, the incident that gave rise to the Barnes ruling occurred four years earlier, when police were summoned to the home of Richard Barnes and his wife by a 911 call reporting a domestic disturbance. 

Barnes was in the parking lot arguing with his girlfriend when the police arrived. She had already thrown a duffel bag of his belongings outside the apartment, and told him to “take the rest of his stuff.” As Barnes re-entered the apartment to do so, the police attempted to follow him inside. Barnes quite properly told the police to stay out, and enforced that lawful order by shoving a police officer who disobeyed. 

 Barnes was charged with Battery on a Police Officer, Resisting Law Enforcement, Disorderly Conduct, and Interfering with the Reporting of a Crime. The judge rejected a proposed jury instruction that Barnes had the right to resist unlawful police entry, and he was convicted on the second and third charges. The Court of Appeals ruled that the trial court committed a reversible error by rejecting that jury instruction. The state, frantic appealed to the Supreme Court, which upheld Barnes’s conviction.

 “We believe … a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,” wrote Justice Steven David. “We also find that allowing resistance unnecessarily escalates the level of violence and therefore the risk of injuries to all parties involved without preventing the arrest.”

 Although the "risks" to a police officer in such an encounter are vanishingly small, we shouldn’t forget that at all times, and in all places, "officer safety" is the controlling priority. "It's not surprising that [the court] would say there's no right to beat the hell out of the officer,” commented Professor Ivan Bodensteiner of Valparaiso University School of Law.

When a cop invades a home without legal authority, he is acting as a criminal, rather than a peace officer. SB 1 recognizes that principle by focusing on the act of illegal entry, rather than the identity of the aggressor. 

The measure allows for forcible entry only when the officer has a valid warrant or legitimate probable cause; is in pursuit of a criminal suspect; or is acting with the consent or on the invitation of an adult resident. In other words: It would restore the status quo ante Barnes, which – in nullifying the Fourth Amendment – actually issued a hunting license to the police.

 Last June, 71 members of the state legislature filed a petition with the Supreme Court protesting the Barnes decision and demanding that it be revisited. In September, the Court issued a ruling reiterating the claim that “the Castle Doctrine is not a defense to the crime of battery or other violent acts on a police officer,” and recognizing that the state legislature had the authority to create statutory defenses against that supposed crime. 


“Our laws, our statutes, our Constitution, and the value of our country [were built] on one premise, and that was to defend our citizens against the government –not defend our government against our citizens,” noted State Senator Mike Young of Indianapolis, author of SB 1. “The [Barnes] ruling was a ruling that defended the government against the citizens.” 

 Rep. Jud McMillin of Dearborn, who wrote the house version of the bill, added: “The distinction here is not between police officers and citizens. The distinction to be made here is between what is lawful and what is unlawful. In a society where we value our freedoms, we cannot have a bright-line test that tells people when they cannot exercise their freedoms.”*

Such talk is intolerable to those employed by Indiana’s affiliate of the Homeland Security State, who insist that public policy must preserve the privileges of the powerful, rather that the rights of the individual.


“We believe people have the right to be secure in their homes,” testified Hendricks County Sheriff Dave Galloway, uttering a sentence pregnant with the invalidating conjunction “but” – which, of course, followed immediately. “But the people who hear about this law are going to think it’s okay to kill a law enforcement officer. What you and I think is `reasonable’ isn’t the same as somebody high on meth. They’re going to shoot first, and ask questions later.” 

 A far greater and more common danger is that posed by police officers who are high on the most lethal of all narcotics – power.  The official position of the Indiana Fraternal Order of Police is that any use of coercive force by the State’s costumed enforcers is self-validating.

 “Our position is there is never an opportunity to resist law enforcement,” insisted Bill Owensby, president of the Indianapolis FOP. A great deal is revealed in Owensby’s choice of adverb: “Never” would apply to situations in which police officers commit unambiguous crimes against person and property.

 Among the most prominent critics of SB 1 are rent-seeking activists and social engineers attached to the state’s domestic violence industry, who insist that the measure would impede the ability of police to respond to situations involving spousal abuse. Under the “no-resistance” doctrine, however, a police officer can commit domestic violence and then charge the victim with a crime if she resists. As was illustrated by the case of Jerry Cunningham, the former assistant chief of the Danville, Indiana Police Department, police and prosecutors are eager to extenuate crimes of domestic violence when perpetrated by a member of their hyper-violent sodality.

 In October 2010, Cunningham – who was in the middle of a divorce – tracked his estranged wife to another man’s home. After tearing down the screen door, Cunningham began what was described as an “altercation” in which he slapped his wife and slugged her paramour. A neighbor called 911 to report the incident, but made the mistake of identifying Cunningham as a police officer. 
 
As a result, rather than being “cuffed and stuffed” by a SWAT team, Cunningham received the personal attention of Chief Keith Gill, who displayed unaccustomed daintiness in bringing in his underling. Rather than booking him immediately into the jail, Gill took Cunningham to his home “to find out what’s going on – call for help, call for some counseling,” the Chief later recounted. 
 
After being placed on paid vacation (which was hastily redefined as “medical leave” in order to keep him on the payroll after the police merit board ruled that he be suspended without pay), Cunningham faced three charges, including a felonious unlawful home entry. He was eventually found guilty only of one count of misdemeanor battery. He was given a 363-day suspended jail sentence and slapped with a fine of $1. He was also permitted to keep his job, albeit with a reduction in rank to patrolman – a position in which, under the Barnes ruling, he would be permitted to invade homes at will and shoot anyone who resists his criminal aggression.


Cunningham was not the only domestic abuser on the payroll of the Danville PD, nor was he even the most violent offender; that distinction belongs to Officer Chris Gill, the Chief’s son. According to his ex-wife Teresa, Officer Gill repeatedly beat her, throwing her against the wall of their home and even threatening to murder her in the presence of their child.






An investigation of Officer Gill conducted by Policeabuse.com – a group composed of retired police officers, private investigators, and court-qualified expert witnesses on police practices -- revealed a long history of official misconduct and criminal behavior by the gypsy cop. Gill had been cashiered by police departments in Paris and Atwood, Illinois, before his father made room for him on the Danville PD. Sheltered behind the impregnable barricade of nepotism, Gill continues to prowl the streets of Danville despite protection orders granted to his ex-wife and ex-in-laws – and a pending criminal trial on domestic abuse charges.


As her marriage with the officer disintegrated, Teresa Gill placed their daughter with her mother and father, Joyce and Robert Abernathy. In March 2010, while Officer Gill was still on the payroll of the Paris, Illinois PD, he used his position to remove the child from the Abertnathys’ home: He filed a false police report claiming that Teresa had threatened to kill that child. As he collected the child from her grandparents, Gill lifted his coat to display his gun and badge in a vulgar display of murderous intent. 

Aiding and abetting abuse: Keith Gill, Danville's nepotistic Police Chief.

 During an April 2010 child visitation, Gill assaulted both Teresa and their son, which resulted in Teresa filing felony domestic battery charges against him. 

Gill, who stands to lose his job if he is convicted, has repeatedly barraged his soon-to-be-ex-wife and her parents with threats of lethal violence – while reveling in his sense of privilege as a member of the Brotherhood in Blue.
 
“I’m gonna do whatever it takes to f**k up your life,” Gill promised in a June 22, 2010 text message to Teresa. “I am a cop, they won’t believe you.  Have them drop [the charges] and I will stop… Nice try Whore.”

During legislative hearings about the Barnes ruling, Leo Blackwell, President of Indiana’s Fraternal Order of Police insisted that “legal disputes about the right of entry should be decided by the courts, not on the doorstep.” Under the supported by Blackwell’s police union, Gill could invade his estranged wife’s home without a warrant or probable cause -- and then arrest and charge her with a crime if she proved to be insufficiently submissive.  Sure, this would eventually get straightened out by the courts – assuming that Teresa and her children survive the initial encounter. 

“The FOP will not compromise when it comes to officer safety,” declared Blackwell in a recent legislative alert to union members. SB 1 “is terrible for law enforcement and could result in the loss of life (maybe yours) if passed.” According to the union, it is “never” permissible to resist a police officer – even when the sacred cause of preserving “officer safety"means leaving a battered and terrorized woman entirely defenseless because the terrorist is carrying a badge.

* It should be acknowledged that Rep. McMillin's zeal for uniform application of the law has its limits: He withdrew a measure proposing drug tests for welfare recipients after it was amended to include legislators. For McMillin, apparently, some tax-consumers are more equal than others.

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The "Uniformed Sexual Predator Deterrence Act"

 

 

Sarah Smith was driving to work when her car was sideswiped by a man on a motorcycle. Like many people in straitened financial circumstances, she had let her liability insurance lapse. To make matters worse, her driver's license had expired. So she was probably overwrought when Pittsburgh Police Officer Adam Skweres arrived -- and frantic when he pulled her aside. The ensuing conversation left her utterly terrified. 

Officer Skweres told Smith that "he could make it look like [the accident] was my fault or he could give the driver a ticket for failure to obey signs," she recently recounted to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The price of a favorable assessment would take the form of unspecified sexual favors, and Skweres quite generously promised that what he would demand of Smith would be "as bad as what would happen to me in jail." 

Adam Skweres, accused sexual predator.

If Smith put up a fight, Skweres insisted, she would be arrested for resisting arrest, handcuffed, and then raped in the back seat of the police car. Before the officer could make good on his threat, the situation changed, and he agreed to let the terrified young woman go -- but only after gesturing to his gun and warning her that "If you say anything about this I'll make sure you never walk, talk, or breathe again."

This incident took place on July 14, 2008. Smith reported the assault to the Pittsburgh Police Bureau, as did two other women who had endured nearly identical threats from Skweres (one of whom, a woman embroiled in a child custody dispute, was told that she could purchase a favorable recommendation to the child welfare bureaucracy in exchange for oral sex). The uniformed predator was allowed to continue patrolling the streets -- and to collect his $57,000 annual salary -- until February 17, when he was arrested for sexually assaulting a young woman in her home six days earlier.

The February 11 assault took place in the home of a young woman whose boyfriend was in jail. After asking the victim if she was wearing a wire, and turning on the kitchen faucet to conceal any potentially incriminating noises, Skweres explained the nature of the transaction: He would "help" her boyfriend in exchange for sex. After forcing the traumatized woman to service him, the cop cleaned himself up with a paper towel (which he folded and placed in his pocket, perhaps after recalling the lessons taught by Monica Lewinsky's blue dress) and left.

Skweres was as predictable as he was persistent. Last December, he had paid a similar visit to Melissa Watkins, whose boyfriend was also in jail. She was alone with her young daughter when the cop materialized to proposition her. 

"He locked my front door and everything, he said, `so no one could bother us,'" Watkins told the Post-Gazette. Unzipping his uniform trousers, Skweres offered the same arrangement: He would "help" Watkins' boyfriend in consideration of sexual services. To her considerable credit, Watkins -- despite being utterly terrified -- refused. 

"There's a man with a badge and a gun in front of you, trying to proposition you," she recalled. "You don't know which way it's going to go." 

 In his memoir Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Expose of the Dark Side of American Policing, former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper warns that "sexual predation by police officers happens far more often than people in the business are willing to admit.... My cautious guess is that about 5 percent of America's cops are on the prowl for women. In a department the size of Seattle's that's sixty-three police officers. In San Diego [where Stamper began his police career], 145. In New York City, 2,000. The average patrol cop makes anywhere from ten to twenty unsupervised contacts a shift. If he's on the make, chances are a predatory cop will find you. Or your wife, your partner, your daughter, your sister, your mother, your friend."

The most significant advantage wielded by uniformed predators is not their physical size or even their arsenal; it's their ability to criminalize even the most tentative act of resistance on the part of their potential victims. Recall what Sarah Smith was told during her encounter with Skweres: If she fled, she would be arrested for resisting and obstructing. If she fought back, she most likely would have been charged with aggravated assault.  

This is exactly what happened in the case of a single mother in Milwaukee (whose name has not been publicly disclosed) who was raped by Officer Ladmarald Cates when he responded to a 911 call after someone had hurled a brick through the woman's bathroom window. After dismissing the woman's boyfriend on an errand, Cates maneuvered the woman into the bathroom,  where he forcibly sodomized and raped her.

Immediately after the assault, the woman -- barefoot and wearing tattered clothing -- ran screaming from the house. Cates stormed out of the house and grabbed the victim by the waist, causing her feet to strike his partner. This gave the officers an excuse to arrest the battered and traumatized woman for “assaulting an officer.” 

She was taken to jail and held for 12 hours before receiving medical aid. After the hospital visit, she was sent back to jail for four days before being released without charges. 

I'd rather take my chances with private gang-bangers.

 This was not Cates's first assault -- but the department wasn't willing to take disciplinary action of any kind until DNA evidence corroborated the rape victim's account. Instead of prosecuting Cates, the department fired him for "idling or loafing on duty." He was convicted of federal civil rights charges on January 15. Cates is hardly representative of Milwaukee police officers -- not because of his casual corruption, but because he has actually been punished: The department holds down the number two spot in the national police brutality rankings. 

Cates's victim was handcuffed, jailed, and abused even further despite the fact that she had done nothing to resist. If she had put up resistance of any kind during the July 2010 encounter, she would likely be in prison -- or dead -- and Cates probably would have received a commendation for valor. This is because once a sexual predator in uniform initiates force against a Mundane, any effort to repel that aggression is treated as a crime. 

This principle, as I've noted before, was expressed by Gregory J. Babbitt, assistant prosecuting attorney for Michigan’s Ottawa County, during the October 4 oral argument before the state supreme court in the case of People v. Moreno. That case deals with the question of whether a citizen has a legally protected right to resist an unlawful search or unjustified arrest by a police officer.

Associate justice Michael Cavanaugh described a scenario in which a woman in police custody is sexually assaulted during a body search. In that situation, Cavanaugh asked Babbitt, could the victim be charged under the State’s "resisting and obstructing" statute?

 "Technically, you could do that," Babbitt admitted, hastily adding that "as a prosecutor, I wouldn’t do that." Rather than offering physical resistance and thereby risking both lethal retaliation and criminal prosecution, the victim should simply endure the assault and then file a civil complaint after the fact. 

That's what Ladmarald Cates's victim did -- and, as long as resisting arrest is treated as a criminal act, that's the best outcome future victims can expect. 

There is  another alternative: We can restore legal protection for the right to resist unlawful arrest and other criminal aggression by police officers.


Ideally, police departments as we know them wouldn't exist: "Law enforcement" agencies are innately tyrannical artifacts incompatible with a free society. Where the use of force is concerned, peace officers should have exactly the same legal standing as any other citizen -- in other words, they can employ force (including arrest and detention) for the exclusive purpose of protecting innocent life and private property against criminal aggression.


We should work to abolish the "crime" of resisting arrest. Those who commit actual crimes against persons or property can't really be expected to submit to police without a struggle; people who don't commit such offenses shouldn't be required to submit to police at all. 

To that end I offer the following model statute -- which we could call the "Uniformed Sexual Predator Deterrence Act." Although the version below is based on the constitution and laws of the State of Idaho, it can provide a suitable template for similar legislation elsewhere.  



Prevailing dogma dictates that all citizens -- including isolated, vulnerable women-- have an unqualified duty to submit to anyone carrying a gun and state-issued credentials -- including sexual predators like Adam Skweres and Ladmarald Cates. The duty to submit includes allowing ourselves to be shackled and incarcerated without just cause, on the assumption that the same State that stole our liberty will agree not to take any more of it when the matter is examined in court. And submission to unlawful police violence too frequently results in injury, sexual assault, and death.

Restoring the Right to Resist Arrest: A Model Statute

An Act

Relating to the restoration of the right of a citizen to resist unlawful arrest, search, and seizure, by amending Title 18, Idaho Code, through deletion of section 18-705 and its replacement by language restoring the common law right to resist unlawful arrest and establishing penalties for unlawful assault by public officials and sentence enhancement following conviction of those who resist arrest in the course of committing crimes against persons and property.

Legislative findings:

Whereas – Article I, section 2 of the Idaho State Constitution decrees: “All political power is inherent in the people.[…] Government is instituted for their equal protection and benefit, and they have the right to alter, reform or abolish the same whenever they may deem it necessary; and no special privileges or immunities shall ever be granted that may not be altered, revoked, or repealed by the legislature” (emphasis added); and

Whereas – The authority delegated by the sovereign people to any government official, including a licensed peace officer, cannot be greater than that of any law-abiding citizen from whom that authorization is derived; and

Whereas – Title 18, Ch. 7, Sec. 18-703 of the Idaho State Code designates the arrest or detention of any individual, or the seizure, levy, or dispossession of any property “without a regular process or other lawful authority,” as a crime; and

Whereas – Title 18, Ch. 7, Sec. 18-706 of the Idaho Code defines a physical assault by a public officer “under color of authority, without lawful necessity” as a crime punishable “by a fine not exceeding $5,000 and imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding one (1) year”; and    

Whereas The Idaho Code Judicial Instructions (ICJI 1262) asserts that "it is the person's duty to refrain from using force or any weapon in resisting arrest regardless of whether or not there is a legal basis for the arrest" -- thereby creating a spurious "privilege" or "immunity" liable to revocation by the legislature; and

Whereas – Current state judicial precedent (State v. Lusby, 2008) encourages licensed peace officers to violate those statutes by provoking physical confrontations in the hope of charging citizens with “resisting arrest” in order to circumvent Fourth Amendment restrictions on search and seizure (according to the Idaho Court of Appeals, “although officers may have conducted an unconstitutional search or seizure, a subsequent attack on the officer is a new crime unrelated to any prior illegality”); and

Whereas – The Idaho State Supreme Court, in its 1973 decision State V. Richardson, explicitly acknowledged that “At common law a person unlawfully arrested could resist such an arrest by the use of reasonable force,” then – without legislative direction or other authorization by the sovereign people of the State – decreed that “the trend is, and should be, away from the traditional common law rule, and therefore we hold that if a person has reasonable ground to believe he is being arrested by a peace officer, it is his duty to refrain from using force or any weapon in resisting arrest regardless of whether or not there is a legal basis for the arrest,” thereby illegitimately abrogating what the Court itself acknowledged to be a valid and long-standing individual right; and

Whereas – In its decision in John Bad Elk v. U.S. (1900), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a police officer trying to make an unlawful arrest has “no right to unnecessarily injure, much less to kill, his assailant; but where the officer is killed in the course of the disorder which naturally accompanies an attempted arrest that is resisted, the law looks with very different eyes upon the transaction, when the officer had the right to make the arrest, from what it does if the officer had no such right” – thereby explicitly recognizing a citizen’s right to use lethal force to prevent an unlawful arrest; and

Whereas --  "The right to resist unlawful arrest memorializes one of the principal elements in the heritage of the English revolution: the belief that the will to resist arbitrary authority in a reasonable way is valuable and ought not to be suppressed by the criminal law” (Paul G. Chevigny, The Right to Resist an Unlawful Arrest, 78 Yale L.J. 1128,1129 [1969]);

Therefore, be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Idaho:

SECTION 1. That Title 18, Chapter 7, sec. 18-705 of the Idaho Criminal Code dealing with “Arrests and Seizures of Persons or Property – Special Officers,” is hereby amended by removing the offense of “Resisting and obstructing officers,” and replacing it with the following:

18-705. Resisting lawful arrest, and the crime of unlawful arrest. Every person who willfully resists, delays or obstructs any licensed peace officer in the course of executing a valid warrant or conducting a lawful arrest (or any citizen seeking to execute a lawful citizen's arrest) will – upon conviction of a property crime or crime of violence – be subject to an additional penalty of up to one year imprisonment in the county jail, and/or a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000). These penalties are of secondary effect and cannot be imposed in the absence of a predicate offense against person or property.

SECTION 2. That any individual – whether licensed peace officer or member of the public – who assaults or detains another, or presumes to seize or levy property, without a valid warrant or court order, or legitimate probable cause that a crime against person or property has been or is about to be committed, is guilty of the crime of false arrest, as well as other related offenses, and is liable to appropriate criminal prosecution and civil action.

SECTION 3. Notwithstanding any previous judicial ruling or administrative finding or policy, the right of the individual to resist unlawful arrest will be recognized as a valid defense in all criminal and civil proceedings. 

(Note: A version of this model statute was published in an on-line edition of Republic magazine.) 

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