How the State's "Justice" System Cultivates Predators like Ibn Hunter

About to strike: Ibn Hunter winds up to assault a homeless woman.

On occasion, government-employed police can solve a crime of violence – assuming that the act is captured on video, the offender makes a point of mugging for the camera in close-up, and the clip is disseminated to a large social media audience. Closing the case is even easier when the assailant is a veteran of the criminal “justice” system, and his whereabouts are well-known. 

Given all of those advantages, police in Atlantic City were able to arrest Ibn Hunter for punching a homeless 45-year-old woman in an unprovoked attack that left the victim with serious brain trauma. Clearing this case was not beyond the police department’s competence – once others had done the leg work.

In the video, a glassy-eyed Hunter is seen taunting the unnamed victim, who had apparently warned the gibbering predator to stay away from her dog.

“I ain’t gonna do what?” he asks the cringing woman in a confrontational tone. “I ain’t gonna grab you? I ain’t gonna do what?”

“She said you ain’t gonna smack her dog,” a female onlooker shouts from the sidelines.

Goaded by an accomplice who records the scene on his cell phone, Hunter winds up theatrically and then slugs the woman in the side of the head. 

“Bing!” exclaims the cretinous sidekick. “It’s o-o-over!”

Hunter struts over to the camera, boasting in barely intelligible language through rotted dentition that this “is what happens when you say I ain’t going to smack you, bitch. So any you bitches talk that stupid sh*t gonna get knocked the f**k out like that.” 

As Hunter savored his triumph, his comrade trained the camera on the unconscious victim, whose left temple displayed what appears to be the beginning of a nasty hematoma.  The woman was hospitalized for severe head trauma. Hunter, according to The Press of Atlantic City, was arrested for aggravated assault.

The criminal “justice” system has been Hunter’s intimate companion for more than one-third of his twenty-five years. Arrested for cocaine possession at age 16, Hunter was on probation until his 18^th birthday. As a chronological adult, this depraved man-child graduated to actual crimes of violence, including burglary. This is a very familiar trajectory of people who are placed in a system that designates the fictive entity called the “state” as the primary victim, and treats offenders as fodder for the prison-industrial complex.

According to the FBI, in 2013 police made 11,302,102 arrests. Fewer than a half-million (480,360) were for crimes of violence. Arrests for property crimes (1,559,284) were more than doubled by arrests for drug-related offenses, if DUIs are included in that category, as they should be. Those figures were very representative of the criminal “justice” system’s priorities: The overwhelming majority of arrests and prosecutions deal with politically defined offenses, rather than actual crimes against persons and property. 

Furthermore, even in cases arising from criminal injury to an innocent individual, the government seizes top billing as the wounded party. This is why the “state” is named as the accuser in a criminal case, rather than the actual victim, and the alleged criminal act is described as an offense against “the peace and dignity of the state” – rather than an act of violence against a specific injured party.

In his seminal essay “Call the COPS – But Not the Police,” Carl Watner traces the pedigree of this iniquitous practice to the Norman Conquest of England. One lamentable result of that development was the replacement of the Anglo-Saxon system of justice, which focused on restitution for the victim, with a feudal order built upon the “frankpledge.” Rather than seeking restitution for victims of crime, officials in the feudal system were devoted first and foremost to royal revenue collection.  

Not even a mother could love that face.

Offenses of any kind committed in the realm were seen as opportunities to enrich the sovereign, and only incidentally as abhorrent acts that injured an innocent party. Royal courts worked tirelessly to expand the king’s jurisdiction, which was enforced by royal appointees called shire-reeves (from which the term “sheriff” is derived). Eventually, royal enactments criminalized efforts by victims to seek private restitution. This was seen as cheating the sovereign out of what was supposedly due to him.

 This concept of the “King’s Peace” was the distant but unmistakable progenitor of  the modern conceit that the abstraction  called “society” is a victim of criminal offenses – even those in which no individual has been injured. 

In a sense, Ibn Hunter, like other youthful offenders, was treated as an apprentice, rather than an offender. The prison system, including its probation and parole section, is an immensely lucrative enterprise, and recidivism is a profit multiplier. Granted, there are externalities, but those are borne by the public – such as the pathetic middle-aged homeless woman who was attacked by Hunter in a public park in the presence of several intimidated male spectators.

Like the impulse toward casual violence exhibited by Hunter, the bovine docility displayed by the males who witnessed his crime has been diligently cultivated by the state. For more than a century Americans have been relentlessly hectored about the supposed evil of people “taking justice into their own hands” – as if justice for crimes against the individual belonged in the hands of anybody else.

Writing at the turn of the 20^th Century, British scholar and prison reformer William Tallack observed that the state-centered, “scientific” approach to penology was already a proven failure:

“Imprisonment, even under its best modern conditions, is attended by grave disadvantages; whilst, in its most prevalent forms of administration, it too often tends to the deterioration of the offender, both in body and in soul, rather than to his improvement…. Meanwhile, even effectual deterrence is often lacking, as indicated by the large proportion of re-convictions in most countries.”

Furthermore, the “subject of wanton injury [is] left without reparations” – and even when fines or other punitive measures are imposed, “the offender is not [personally] subjected to these disadvantages,” nor is the victim directly compensated. If confined in prison, the offender merely enrolls in “`a school for vice and every kind of corruption.’” Upon graduation – in many of not most instances – the inmate becomes a more skillful and ruthless criminal.

The objective of any genuinely civilized society in dealing with criminal offenses, Tallack contended, is “exacting, as a primary mode of penal treatment, the satisfaction, as far as possible, of the injured party.”

Over the past eight centuries, this practice of retributive justice was supplanted by a state-centered system.

Although criminologist Stephen Schafer subscribed to the idea that “society” was a victim in every criminal offense, he agreed with Tallack that the existing legal order has removed restitution to the victim from the equation.  “As the state monopolized the institution of punishment, so the rights of the injured were slowly separated from penal law,” Schafer observed nearly six decades ago.

One predictable, albeit perverse, result of this inversion of priorities was the combination of comparative leniency in dealing with violent offenders, and severity in punishing those convicted of offenses against “society” and the state.

 

“It was chiefly owing to the violent greed of feudal barons and medieval ecclesiastical powers that the rights of the injured party were gradually infringed upon, and finally, to a large extent, appropriated by these authorities, who exacted a double vengeance, indeed, upon the offender, by forfeiting his property to themselves instead of to his victim, and then punishing him by the dungeon, the torture, the stake or the gibbet,” Tallack pointed out in 1900. “But the original victim of wrong was practically ignored.”

Even if Ibn Hunter is sent to prison for a potentially fatal assault on a helpless woman, he will not be immured for the rest of his life, spending his final days chained to his bed, separated from his family, in the agonizing final stages of cancer. That variety of sub-medieval official sadism is reserved for political prisoners such as the late Irwin Schiff. Designated a “tax defier” by the Regime, Schiff was sent to the federal prison in Angola, Indiana for the supposed crime of publicly discussing a book he had written about the Internal Revenue Service, in defiance of an unconstitutional edict by a federal judge.

Schiff’s only “victim” was the state – which is why the state showed him no leniency.

In a free society, wrote Murray Rothbard in The Ethics of Liberty, “there are … only two parties to a dispute or action at law: the victim, or plaintiff, and the alleged criminal, or defendant. It is the plaintiff that presses charges in the courts against the wrongdoer…. [T]here would be no crimes against an ill-defined `society,’ and therefore no such person as a `district attorney’ who decides to charge and then presses those charges against an alleged criminal.”

 

American Laogai: A female inmate sews a US flag. No, really.

One significant step in the direction of freeing ourselves from the murderous fallacy that the “state” is a party in the justice system would be to empty its prisons of people who have not committed crimes against persons or property, and to abolish all agencies, task forces, and other government entities involved in investigating and prosecuting victimless offenses (such as the sale, possession, and consumption of drugs, and other vices that are now treated as crimes). This would reduce the prison population by at least sixty to eighty percent, and lead to a corresponding reduction in the police state apparatus.

Restitution must likewise be re-enthroned as the central principle of an actual justice system. Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett summarizes the matter with compelling concision: “The armed robber did not rob society; he robbed the victim. His debt, therefore, is not to society, it is to the victim.”

Ibn Hunter may go to prison. During his sentencing hearing, he may expel verbiage amounting to an “apology” to the woman he could easily have killed. Neither his prison sentence nor the mangled sentences he spits in the direction of that woman will provide the victim with a particle of material compensation for her injuries and the medical bills that result.

If, on the other hand, Hunter were sentenced to a term of indentured servitude until he had earned enough to compensate the victim directly – rather than being assigned a prison job at slave wages in the employ of a politically connected corporation -- some measure of palpable justice would result.

That outcome is precisely the kind of thing the current system is designed to prevent, which is among the most compelling arguments for destroying it root and branch.

This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast examines the recent proposal that women be required to register for military slavery (more commonly called the "draft"):

Dum spiro, pugno!

Blessed Be the State's Punitive Priesthood

Pastor Jay Dennis, who  presides over the First Baptist Church on the Mall, a large and growing “mega-church” in Lakeland, Florida, urges his congregation to see police officers as angelic beings bearing a divine commission to impose summary punishment. They are to be obeyed, prayed for, and never spoken of other than in tones of chastened gratitude and unalloyed reverence. 

“It grieves me on the one hand, and makes me angry on the other hand, when I hear the criticism, and disrespect towards, and violence directed at those in law enforcement,” the pastor declared during his “Law Enforcement Encouragement Sunday” sermon on October 4. “We want law enforcement to know that First Baptist Church on the Mall supports you one hundred percent, and is committed to pray continually for you.”

Cop-worship Sunday is becoming a common observance at American Christian churches -- particularly Republican-leaning Evangelical congregations, whose communicants are especially receptive to the oft-repeated and patently false idea that we are witnessing a "War on Cops." Pastor Dennis dutifully retailed that claim, urging his congregation to “Pray for a hedge of protection around their vehicles, that angels will guard and shield them from danger.”

 

Pastor Jay Dennis.

Pastor Dennis began his homily, in predictable fashion, by citing the thirteenth chapter of the New Testament’s Epistle to the Romans, which is widely (and, according to some orthodox Christian clergy, mistakenly) construed as counseling unqualified submission to political rulers. 

 “`Do you want to have no fear of authority?’” asked Dennis, reading from the modern language translation of the passage.””` Do what is good and you will have praise from the same…. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing.’”

“When Paul speaks of `authorities,’ by application that includes law enforcement officers,” Dennis told the congregation. “So here is the idea:  When you obey the law, you have nothing to worry about; however, if you do wrong, and if you break the law, you should be fearful. The sword here is the instrument of punishment, and today that would be their weapons. God has given to these officers great authority that must always be respected.”

The problems with Pastor Dennis’s state-centered exegesis are plentiful, beginning with the fact that most government edicts cannot be obeyed without violating what ethical people – of whatever religious or philosophical background – recognize as the paramount moral law, often called the Golden Rule.

During the 1850s, to cite one obvious example, tens of thousands of Americans of good conscience – including some Christian clergymen -- systematically violated the Fugitive Slave Law by refusing to allow federal marshals to abduct black individuals and deliver them into the custody of other human beings who claimed to own them.  Many other Christian clergymen of that era condemned this as rebellion against “authority” and the “rule of law.” Had he been living at the time, Pastor Dennis – on the available evidence – would have be found among the latter.

Not Pastor Jay: Dana Carvey as Carsenio.

Secondly, it is impossible for people to obey the “law” as the government defines it. The same Epistle to the Romans cited by Pastor Dennis explains that the Old Testament law was to reveal sin (Romans 3:20) – that is, to show all of the manifold ways that fallen human beings offend their perfect Creator, so as to impress upon us our dependence on His grace. 

In what Christian believers should regard as a grave blasphemy, the State presumes to the same authority, without extending the offer of forgiveness.

As constitutional attorney Harvey Silverglate has documented, each American, during a typical day, commits at least three acts that could be construed as felonies – even when nobody else is harmed, or any property damaged. All that is necessary is a sufficiently ambitious prosecutor aided by a law enforcement officer willing to enforce the “law” even when doing so is incompatible with justice. 

In the eyes of our self-exalted rulers, all of us are criminals who fall short of the glory of the State, and are in proper peril of being detained, shackled, caged, or summarily killed by those who give tangible form to the State’s abstract righteousness. Pastor Dennis ratifies this perverse and idolatrous notion through his his casual endorsement of the idea that police are endowed with the authority to inflict summary punishment. This is the import of the pastor’s statement that the weapons carried by police are the equivalent of the “sword” that serves as “the instrument of punishment.”

Assuming any legitimate role exists for government-employed police officers, it would be purely reactive in nature – investigating criminal offenses and, where appropriate, detaining people suspected of committing them.

If police officers have unqualified power to impose punishment on people who have done no injury to the persons or property of others, why shouldn’t they be feared, and perhaps hated, rather than respected?

In his zeal to preach the gospel of submission to state “authority,” Pastor Dennis – who is also a notable anti-pornography campaigner -- minimized a multitude of sins committed by the Lakeland PD, including a huge sexual misconduct scandal implicating several ranking officers. He likewise chose to ignore numerous incidents in which innocent people have been beaten and even mutilated by the LPD’s ministering angels of divine justice – but Pastor Dennis appears to believe that nobody on the receiving end of state-consecrated violence can be regarded as truly innocent.

Florida Southern College student Joanna Youssef -- to cite one among many suitable examples -- was not committing a crime when she was encountered by two of Lakeland’s exalted emissaries of the divine state.  According to Pastor Dennis, that meant that she had nothing to fear. When Youssef got into an argument with a friend, she attracted the attention of LDP Officer Nicholas Ivancevich, who forced her to the ground and handcuffed her. While she was prone, shackled, and helpless, a police dog named Quanto escaped from a patrol vehicle and attacked her, rending her flesh and leaving her scarred and traumatized.

The victim was charged with “resisting arrest without violence,” but the county attorney dropped the case. A typically perfunctory internal review by the department found that neither of the officers involved in the episode broke department policies, and dismissed the mangling of Youssef as “unfortunate.”

Such “unfortunate” incidents will happen, Pastor Dennis might concede, but it’s not as if the officers had been doing something genuinely scandalous, such as looking at porn. If the latter is true, it’s only because they were too busy producing the equivalent of porn to be watching any.

For several years, a married civilian LPD employee named Susan Eberle was used as a sexual plaything by several officers. Eberle describes herself as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. She also concedes that at least some of the behavior in which she was involved as consensual. Much of it, however, was involuntary, and some of it constituted sexual assault. 

An investigation by the state attorney’s office found that Eberle’s efforts to get help were thwarted by superiors intent on covering up the crimes and protecting the offenders.

According to the state attorney’s report, Eberle described an incident in which LPD gang investigator Dan Jonas “asked her to urinate in a cup so he could drink it.” The officer also sexted Eberle a self-portrait in which he was wearing women’s underwear. The report abounds in material that sounds as if it could have been rummaged out of the Marquis de Sade’s wastebasket.

“As many as ten sworn LPD officers have engaged in sex acts and sexually suggestive behavior while on duty over the past seven years with an LPD civilian employee,” concluded the report filed by Jerry Hill, the State Attorney for Polk County. Seven of the officers admitted to the charges under oath; two others offered partial admissions. Several of them “are high ranking officers … directly responsible for training other officers at LPD.  While some of the acts were consensual, many others were acts of sexual violation that “would potentially constitute felony and misdemeanor crimes as defined by Florida State Statute.”

Other acts “likely rose to a level of sexual harassment and certainly are considered unbecoming conduct in the workplace.” Just as seriously, other LPD employees “failed to intervene and stop criminal misconduct that was reported to them…. Alleged sexual crimes went uninvestigated, and evidence was lost.”

For that reason, no criminal charges were ever filed against any of the officers implicated in the scandal. Hill comments that the investigation of Eberle’s allegations “sheds some light on the serious shortcomings [of the LPD] in the areas of traffic stops, search and seizure, thoroughness of investigations, preparedness for trial, and complying with Florida Records law.”

“Had these members your department been more focused on the important responsibilities of law enforcement, rather than pursuing sexual encounters with a civilian analyst, the LPD might not be in the condition it is today," Hill admonished then- Chief Lisa Womack.

One collateral result of the investigation of Eberle’s complaint was the decision to dismiss scores of criminal cases in which the stainless exemplars of civic righteousness in the LPD had perjured themselves.

Several officers were cashiered as a result of the scandal. Eberle, significantly, was one of them: She was fired in September 2013 for “conduct unbecoming, untruthfulness, and required conduct and cooperation” in the investigation of her own claims. This means, in effect, that she was punished for the refusal of corrupt superiors to take her complaints seriously. Last April the City of Lakeland quietly paid Eberle $28,500 to withdraw a discrimination complaint she had filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

To his credit, when the LPD’s institutional abscess ruptured in July 2013, Pastor Dennis said that the “light needs to be shown in this situation.” While he experienced a “gamut of emotions,” the pastor continued, “sadness prevails.” 

Lakeland PD Chief Larry Giddens at the pulpit.

While sadness is understandable, outrage would be more appropriate, and less likely to be redeemed in the coin of cheap grace. The corruption disclosed in the report had metastasized into the marrow of the LPD. Merely excising a handful of employees – including both the chief and the whistleblower – wouldn’t be an effective cure. Little more than two years later, Pastor Dennis appears to consider the department fully rehabilitated, and worthy of something perilously akin to worship.

“There is evil in this world, there are evil people in this world, and they’re everywhere,” Pastor Dennis told his audience, encouraging them to believe that the state’s vessels of sanctified violence are an exception to that rule. During his prayer at the close of the sermon Dennis asked for “a revolution of respect for those who protect and serve us.” 

Significantly, he didn’t request divine intervention that would miraculously transform police into actual protectors and servants, nor did he plead for a "hedge of protection" for innocent and helpless people who endure the ministrations of the State's emissaries of violence.

Cop-Worship Sunday is the subject of this week's Freedom Zealot Podcast.

                                                                            

                                                        A brief update

As some of you may have noticed, my family has moved to a new home on the frontier. We are profoundly grateful for the help so many of you have given to us -- and still very much in need of whatever you can provide. This is a reader-supported enterprise, and I am deeply appreciative of the support we have received. Thank you so much.

Dum spiro, pugno!