Henry Magee, John Quinn, and the "Right of Resistance"

[The] constitutional security for `the right to keep and bear arms’ implies the right to use them … This is the only remedy suggested by the Constitution, and is necessarily the only remedy that can exist, when the government becomes so corrupt as to afford no peaceable one. The people have a legal right to resort to this remedy at all times, when the government goes beyond, or contrary to, the Constitution. And it is only a matter of discretion with them whether to resort to it at any particular time. –

Lysander Spooner, “The Right of Resistance," from "An Essay on the Trial by Jury" (chapter II).

Henry Magee was sleeping when armed intruders burst into his home at dawn last December 19. Knowing only that he and his family were at mortal risk, Magee grabbed a gun and opened fire, fatally wounding Sgt. Adam Sowders, who was part of a police task force carrying out a “no-knock warrant” in search of drugs.

Magee was arrested and charged with murder. On February 6, agrand jury in Burleson County, Texas declined to indict Magee, accepting his claim that he acted in self-defense because he believed his home was being burglarized. In defiance of recent trends, that grand jury vindicated the hope expressed by Lysander Spooner that such panels would recognize and honor the right of citizens to exercise lethal force in defending themselves against government lawlessness.

Adam Sowders was an irreplaceable human being whose family has been devastated by his death. It is a singular tragedy that Sowders died. It is compounded by the fact that Magee had a moral and legal right to kill him, just as he has the right to use deadly force in dealing with any other armed invader. 

Sowders’s death was not the result of a crime committed by the man who shot him, but rather of the criminal policy he was called upon to enforce.

Henry Magee’s case echoes an earlier one in which a resident of Texas was changed with a felony because he had tried to defend himself against a band of privileged home invaders.

Just after midnight on the morning of August 5, 2006, a SWAT team in McKinley, Texas used a battering ram to breach the front door of JohnQuinn’s home. The pretext for this crime was a warrant authorizing the police to search for narcotics allegedly in the possession of Quinn’s adult son, Brian. Awakened by the tumult, Quinn retrieved his rifle and went to confront the intruders. One of them, Officer Jesus Damian Guerrero, fired several shots in an attempt to murder the home owner.

 

McGee in custody.

The warrant named Brian Quinn, not his father, as the suspect, and it authorized a limited search of Brian's effects. Once Guerrero shot John, the cops had their excuse to search the entire home. Inside a safe they would not have been authorized to search, they found a minuscule amount of cocaine. 

Brian – who had no self-interested reason to say so – claimed that the cocaine was his, that his father had never used drugs, and was trying to help him overcome his drug habit.

Quinn, who suffered a relatively minor wound in his right hand, was arrested and charged with aggravated assault on a police officer. A test in the hospital confirmed that he had no drugs in his system. After waiting five years for a trial,  Quinn was acquitted on the aggravated assault charge. He was later found “guilty” of possessing less than a gram of cocaine (a test conducted during Quinn’s hospitalization found no evidence of drugs in his system) and given two years’ probation and a $500 fine.

The most interesting contrast between the John Quinn case and that of Henry Magee is the near role-reversal between the costumed assailant and the defender: Where a grand jury refused to indict Magee for shooting the police officer who had barged into his home, in Quinn’s case it was the assailant, Officer Guerrero, who was “no-billed” by the grand jury.

Magee and his girlfriend.

The dismissal of the murder charge against Magee suggests that at least some Texas residents recognize that a police officer who breaks down a door and terrifies people in their bed is a common burglar and should be treated as such. This represents modest but welcome progress. 

For his part, Quinn is appealing a Texas Appellate Court ruling that authorizes police to commit paramilitary home invasions anytime they learn that a citizen at a targeted address has the means to defend himself.

As is generally the case when police mount a paramilitary raid, the warrant was issued on the basis of two informants – both of whom had admitted to “activity related to Brian's drug dealing” -- who told the cops that “Brian kept a number of weapons in the house, including an AK-47 rifle.” One of the informants, at the behest of the police, sent a text message to Brian asking to buy Xanax. 

In his affidavit, Detective Christopher Grollnek (a relentless self-promoter who has gone on to carve out a lucrative niche promoting the Regime's war on the American population) claimed that neither informant was offered a deal in exchange for helping to set up Brian. This was almost certainly a lie, given that neither of the informants was prosecuted: One saw his charges dropped before trial, the other was never charged. Quinn appealed his conviction, arguing that the no-knock raid was unjustified, and that the evidence seized from his office safe was the product of an invalid search.

 

Grollnek strikes a pose.

Communications among the officers at the time of the raid proved that they were aware that Brian wasn't at the residence. Thus they had no reason to conduct a raid, let alone one involving assault rifles and a battering ram. Assuming, for the purposes of this discussion, that drug use is a crime of some sort, the police could have waited for Brian to return, taken him into custody, knocked on the door, and conducted their search.

However, according to a genuinely deranged opinion handed down last May by the Texas Fifth District Court of Appeals, a military-style assault was justified because “the circumstances presented a threat of physical violence in this case, based upon the informants' statements that Brian kept a number of guns in the home.... Unannounced entries have been upheld as reasonable when the police had information there were guns on the premises to be searched.”

Officer Safety is the paramount consideration in all public policy, so the appellate court placed particular emphasis on the fact that some of the intrepid heroes who beat down Quinn's door at midnight “testified [that] the presence of an AK-47 particularly concerned the team, because the officers' body armor would not protect them from its shots.” The mere presence of the “exceptionally dangerous AK-47,” the court insisted, “made the no-knock entry reasonable under the existing circumstances.”

Only in a universe in which the rules of logic follow the contours of a Salvador Dali painting would that warrant be considered “reasonable,” if the objective had been to avoid unnecessary violence. 

The purpose of having firearms, as Lysander Spooner pointed out, was to use them in self-defense against “bandits” and “ruffians,” a category that includes anybody who kicks in a door at midnight, armed and prepared to do lethal harm to those who reside inside the home. Staging a police raid of that kind on a home where the residents are known to be armed is a reliable recipe for a shooting, a fact underscored by the tragically necessary death of Adam Sowders, and the near-murder of John Quinn.

Mr. Quinn has filed an appeal to the Supreme Court. A richly documented and tightly argued amicus curiae brief filed on his behalf by the US Justice Foundation, Gun Owners Foundation, and several other public interest groups contends that the ruling by the appellate court in Texas “establishes a per se rule that, every time the police have a valid warrant, they can execute it without knocking, violating the Fourth Amendment at will,” if they discover that a resident has a legally owned firearm.

“If the police are now permitted to justify no-knock raids any time there is a firearm in the residence,” observes the brief, “no American home is safe from a terrifying, middle of the night home invasion.”

That state of affairs would suit the enforcement caste just fine – unless and until more victims respond with the tragic but justified efficiency of Hank Magee. If and when this happens, no rational and honest person should have any doubt as to which party is responsible.

An Update, and an Appeal 

Last September, I reported on a police riot in Idaho Falls that led to the invasion of two homes, acts of aggravated assault on several people (including a pregnant mother and a 79-year-old grandmother), and the filing of spurious charges against Victor and Delosanto Madrigal. 

All of this began when IFPD officers, led by Clark Lund, barged into the backyard of the Madrigal home (rather than knocking on the front door, like civilized people), then needlessly escalated a problem that could have been solved by a simple request. 

After the abduction of Victor and Delosanto, IFPD Chief Mark McBride wrote a libelous op-ed for the Post-Register newspaper in which he retailed unsubstantiated gossip about the family from a conveniently anonymous "source."

Victor and Delosanto, the victims, were charged with disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, and assault on an officer. Last Friday (February 7), a jury in Idaho Falls rapidly acquitted Victor of all charges. Delosanto's trial is still pending, and there's reason to hope the prosecutor will simply drop the matter, as he damn well should. 

Thanks to a friend (and Pro Libertate reader) in Idaho Falls, I was able to travel there a couple of weeks after the incident. The story published here was picked up by Joyln Thomas of East Idaho News, who gave it prominent and effective local coverage. Apart from one decent story that prompted McBride's puerile little screed, the Post-Register lost interest in the matter. (I prepared a 450-word op-ed column on the incident that was rejected by the Post-Register's editorial page gatekeeper, who insisted that the case was no longer newsworthy.)  The local TV stations that had recited the dishonest police accounts of that episode were content to defame the victims, and then move on. 

I don't want to exaggerate my role in this, but I do want to impress on you the importance of what I'm doing -- and to share my satisfaction at this small but valuable victory on the part of liberty and decency. 

The state-aligned media rarely, if ever deals honestly with stories of this kind. I suspect that this is one reason why I've never been able to find gainful employment in the "legitimate" media.

As Rabelais -- or was it Voltaire? -- is said to have written in his last will and testament: "I have nothing, I owe much -- the rest I leave to the poor." I have bills coming due, and nothing coming in, and would really appreciate any help I could get. Thank you so much for reading what I publish -- and I will continue to do this for as long as it is financially feasible. God bless. 

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Privileged Poacher on the Police Payroll

 

Officer Frank G. Bowne is at the center, with Koda.

Frank G. Bowne is a hunter by profession. Bowne is a K9 handler and SWAT operator with the Post Falls, Idaho Police Department. He and his canine companion, a German Shepherd named Koda, occasionally pursue criminal suspects. More frequently they can be found in pursuit of cash and other property that can be seized through “asset forfeiture” as part of the demented exercise called the War on Drugs. 

Law enforcement agencies have found this practice to be very lucrative in sparsely populated northern Idaho. Since the agencies conducting those seizures don’t have to prove that the property owner committed a crime – or even provide a full accounting of their haul – the practice could be considered a form of state-sanctioned poaching. 

Post Falls is a very small town in northern Idaho with an unremarkable crime rate. Yet local police and sheriff’s office have two full-time K9 units, and will soon have a third. This means job security for Bowne, whose background should have disqualified him for employment as a “peace officer.” Before being hired by the Post Falls PD as a government-licensed poacher, he was terminated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office after being found guilty of poaching -- of the private variety -- in Colorado.

SWAT cosplay for the Post Falls PD.

In October 2003, several residents of Bayfield, Colorado, a village not far from the Four Corners region, heard gunshots near a local ranch. When they went to investigate they found three men lounging by a truck with California license plates. The men took off after the residents said they were going to ask authorities to investigate a suspected act of trespass and poaching. 

Colorado Division of Wildlife investigator Cary Carron arrived the following morning and found a dead deer on private property bordering a county road. The animal had been killed after dark by a shooter who had used a spotlight. In the company of several other officers, Carron tracked down the vehicle at a hunting camp near Sauls Creek. Bowne was among the ten hunters who were questioned by the investigators, and like all of his colleagues he insisted that he knew nothing about the killing of the deer the previous night. 

The pickup truck was seized, and investigators collected sufficient forensic evidence (such as boot and tire tracks, and spent shell casings) and witness statements to identify Bowne as the shooter. In his official investigative report, Carron described how Bowne lied to him, lied to Officer Mike Stefanak of California’s Fish and Game Department, and obstructed the inquiry conducted by Lt. Rick Jennings, an internal affairs investigator with the LA County Sheriff’s Office. 

After a felony arrest warrant was issued for Bowne, the deputy agreed to a deal in which he pleaded guilty to an “illegal take” of a deer. He paid $4,199 in fines and court costs, and was fired by the LA County Sheriff’s Office. 

Bowne lost his job in May 2004. Like other disgraced California police officers before him, he followed the “gypsy cop” ratline to Idaho, where he was able to get a job a little more than two years later. According to the Idaho POST Council, Bowne received his “basic” certification in June 2006. In order for this to happen, Bowne either concealed his background, the POST Council failed to conduct a rudimentary background check, or both parties simply ignored the legally binding standards governing peace officer certification in Idaho.

The POST Council is instructed to de-certify any police officer who has committed any felony or misdemeanor, or who “Willfully or otherwise falsifies or omits any information to obtain any certified status.” If Bowne’s poaching offenses were made known to the Council, he wouldn’t have been certified. If he withheld information about that offense – and his deceitful behavior in trying to cover up that crime – he should be immediately de-certified. 

Bowne (2nd from r.) and friends strike a pose.

“I were in charge of that decision, [Bowne] never would have been allowed to go to POST in Idaho,” a former sheriff’s deputy and police officer told me after I provided the details of the case to him. “He lied about things that should have kept him from being an officer again… If he lied once he will do it again. Like if you are an officer and go to court to testify and you lie, the judge can never trust anything you say from that point.”

Another retired deputy (who has also worked in the state probation and parole system) ruefully told me that he wasn’t surprised that POST cleared Bowne despite his background.

“He could have received a waiver from POST, but his employer would have to vouch for him,” the former deputy suggested. “Unfortunately POST won't tell you if a special panel did review his case.”

That prediction was quickly vindicated. When I filed a public records request to find out if POST had granted Bowne a special waiver, the agency denied that request, insisting that it was exempt from disclosure as a “personnel” matter.

Under a strict and rational application of the law, Frank G. Bowne was never legitimately certified as a peace officer in the State of Idaho. That means he is engaged in what the state code (18-1711) refers to as “Unlawful exercise of [the] functions of peace officers,” a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. 

However, as is so often the case in the racket called “law enforcement,” Bowne and those who protect him assume that they are exempt from the laws they supposedly uphold.

“It’s a possibility that Bowne got his certification because he knows someone of importance in Post Falls or elsewhere in Idaho,” commented the second former deputy. “The fact that he lied to the LA investigators and hindered the investigation -- and yet was apparently given a waiver in Idaho -- tells me he knows someone.”

“I can tell from first-hand experience” that such corrupt “professional courtesy” is commonplace, he continued. “I have seen a Sheriff who wouldn't keep an officer on unless he or she would lie to keep their job. An officer who will lie to keep his or her job will be invaluable to a dishonest official.”

 

From Post Falls PD's 2012 Annual Report.

During the now-notorious hunting trip to Colorado, Bowne saw nothing amiss in trespassing on posted private property. That is a habit of mind he has retained as a police officer in Post Falls.

As I noted here recently, Bowne and his partner, Officer Frank Uhrig, invaded the home of Melissa Ward in a warrantless midnight raid in December 2011.

Ignoring a lawful order by Ward to stay out of her house, the officers assaulted the woman in front of her terrified daughter, then carried out an illegal search of the dwelling after claiming to smell marijuana. At a hearing several months later the judge acknowledged that the search was illegal and dismissed drug-related charges that had been filed against Ward and her boyfriend.

Two years earlier, Bowne was named in a tort claim filed by Post Falls resident Lori Denise Howard, which accused him of committing “an illegal trespass” on her property and subjecting her to “an illegal arrest” involving “excessive force and violence.”

Howard wasn’t able to pursue that claim: Charged with the spurious crime of “resisting arrest,” she was quickly processed into the Sisyphean hell called the probation and parole system.

Meanwhile, Bowne – who, unlike Howard, has repeatedly done violence to the persons and property of others -- continues to make a comfortable living as a privileged poacher in the employ of the Post Falls Police Department.

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Dum spiro, pugno!