There’s no need to make this up.
In cities across America, ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter are violating all standards of human decency to carry out increasingly-violent putchs as idiot leftists like pretty much everyone I’ve ever known in college (New College of USF), Atlanta, grad school (Emory) et.al., outside police, manual labor, and fast food jobs, remain studiedly silent in the hope of maintaining their superior class status during the next wave of violence. ...
Let’s take a little breather from talking about how Georgia Speaker David Ralston misused his legislative privilege to free child rapists while saying that WE have no souls if we don’t elect Jussie Smollet to the Supreme Court. Let’s set aside the fact that the NAACP isn’t being kicked off twitter for saying ALL police are racist sub-humans who “murder black fathers,” while people who merely re-tweet the NAACP tweet to show how bat-crazy it is are having their accounts shut down.
Let’s save for tomorrow that speech someone needs to give soon-to-be former Governor Kemp when he signs that despicable hate crimes bill that will make his daughter a lesser victim in the eyes of the law if, say, she and her gay girlfriend both get gang raped by the same gang rapists because his daughter is just a heterosexual rape victim, not someone important like a gay rape victim. ...
104 people were shot in Chicago over Father’s Day Weekend. 14 died. Among the dead were four children: 3-year-old Mehki James, 13-year-old Amaria Jones, 16-year old Charles Riley, and 17-year old Sean Francis. All the dead children were black. All the dead and likely all or almost all the injured were black too. All or nearly all the shooters were black.
None of the shootings are being counted as hate crimes, of course. Blowing the brains of 3-year old Mehki James all over the seats of a car is not hate, because, as legislators in other states and now in Georgia have decided, “hate” only counts for crimes that can be blamed on police or white people, crimes that drop cash into the pockets of the NAACP and the ADL and the HRC and the Chamber of Commerce and, of course, the legislators who sidle up to them, pockets open. ...
The Republican-led Senate Rules Committee in Georgia just screwed police all over Georgia at the behest of a mob that celebrates cop-killers. From the discussions they had, they clearly don’t even know how these laws work. Ignorance AND submission aren’t a good look. Jeff Mullis is head of Georgia Senate Rules. Flood his damn phones: (404) 656-0057. If that doesn’t work, call his home district: (706) 375-1776.
Jeff Mullis, apologist for cop-killers, or ignorant misguided guy? ...
This is Richard Smith. He’s one of Speaker Ralston’s henchmen, which means that he lies about Ralston using his legislative power to deny justice to child rape victims in order to advance his own political career. Morally, I don’t know how you live with yourself, doing that. Optically, it looks sort of like this:
House Rules Chairman Richard Smith, a Columbus Republican, abruptly adjourned Tuesday’s rules committee without putting any bills before the full House to consider, saying it “is becoming an embarrassment to the state” that a Senate committee has yet to consider House Bill 426, a hate crimes penalty bill that the House passed in March 2019. ...
Well, we know why. But let’s pretend we don’t.
Contrary to what you might read in the newspapers, watch on tv, hear on the radio, or absorb directly into your brain through freebasing the Google-censored internet, a large number of people think hate crime laws are not only unnecessary but divisive and unjust and have no place in a society where many people fought for decades to ensure that all people are equal in the eyes of the law regardless of their identity. ...
For reasons I detail throughout this blog, and in editorials including this one published in the Atlanta Journal Constitution in 2000 and this one in Insider Advantage in 2019, I have been fighting against the passage of hate crime laws since the late 1990s. I’ve lost a lot professionally by taking on this fight, yet I have every intention of opposing the legislation again this time.
But looking at the crowds outside the Georgia General Assembly’s Gold Dome yesterday, I don’t think I will be physically safe if I come down the Capitol to testify against HB 426. I think most reasonable people would agree that anyone publicly identified as an opponent of hate crime laws would not get safely through that crowd of raucous protestors who circled the Capitol demanding hate crimes laws or else. ...
Do Georgians really want hate crime laws? Because, they’re the real mob violence.
You have probably heard of Stephanie Rapkin, the Milwaukee attorney who for no reason whatsoever but her racist, putrid heart expectorated on a black teenager at an entirely law-abiding, peaceful, high-school-musical-like protest in Milwaukee. ...
Certain politicians and pundits in Atlanta — Double-Dipping Mayor I’ll take two paychecks for that one job thank you very much Keisha Lance Bottoms, disgraced GOP House Speaker David Ralston, job-threatening public-radio-triple-dipper Bill Nigut, and every single Democrat and virtue-signaling Republican want to pass a hate crime law in Georgia. Because Brunswick. Because George Floyd. Because “racism.” Purportedly against all black men. Purportedly by all police.
As of this writing, such rhetoric and the riots they birthed have resulted in serious injuries to more than 400 police and several murders of police, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and looting. ...
Un-prosecuted Weather Underground terrorist Mark Rudd has an op-ed confessing to felony murder in the leftist-terrorist paper of record, The New York Times today.
Rudd must be excited: his stock is going up. The last time the Times gave over their editorial page to a Weather terrorist, it was to his rival-in-love-tenure-and-attention, Billy Ayers. It was also the morning of 9/11, and Ayers’ wispy-bearded mug smirking from the pages of the Times as he bragged about how much fun he had bombing the Pentagon was likely the last thing many people saw before they suffocated and burned to death in the Twin Towers. And, the Pentagon. ...
Welcome back to tinatrent.com! After a years-long hiatus, I am finally ready to start blogging again. I’d like to thank people who took the time to write and ask me where I’ve been. The good news is I re-built a tear-down house in the North Georgia Mountains and tried to start a tomato farm — and will be trying again to start a tomato farm, hopefully without the weeks of 90+ temperatures, poison oak wrestling, verticillium wilt, horrible hornworms, and the dreaded chickweed.
Speaking of terrorists who keep coming back, my first offering isn’t a blog post but a very long piece about the truth about the relationship between Barack and Michelle Obama and Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. ...
In 1999, when I was lobbying to defeat Georgia’s hate crime bill for the first time, I coined the term “Apology Tour” to describe grasping politicians who try to score points by very publicly proclaiming their guilt for some racist act in their distant past.
Such timed confessions aren’t really about atoning for personal error: they are one-upsmanship attempts to project accusations of racism onto anyone who doesn’t apologize as loudly as you do — and also fall in line with your politics. ...
On Saturday, the Georgia GOP will hold their statewide convention in Savannah. Former State Senator David Shafer is one of the three candidates to head the state party. I spoke with Shafer this week at an advance event for the convention. He was gracious. He amassed a good record in the state senate. He seems like a nice guy.
But David Shafer has no business running the state party because he sponsored the National Popular Vote bill, a bill that would existentially devastate the GOP in Georgia — and everywhere else in the United States. Worse, he co-sponsored the bill with our party’s sworn enemies, people like Stacey Abrams and “Venceremos Brigade” Nan Orrock, who was my representative for 20 years, during which time I came to understand very well just how radical she is. ...
This is a post about Georgia’s 7th Congressional District. If you want to read about Lynne Homrich, you can skip to below. But first, I want to talk about the Georgia 7th District because the fortunes and failures of mainstream Republicans in the 7th speak volumes about the future of the Party itself.
Currently, Rob Woodall, a mainstream GOP foot soldier, holds the 7th. Woodall is typical of a certain type of Republican. He takes easy positions on obvious issues and refuses to take a stand on difficult ones, especially illegal immigration. ...
Judith Clark in Court Laughing about Cops and Security Officer she Murdered
Cop-hating rag of record the New York Times is once again grotesquely trying to peddle the story that Brinks Robbery cop-killer Judith Clark is now a “reformed person” who deserves the parole Andrew Cuomo just orchestrated for her. “Ms. Clark, 69 . . . evolved during her long incarceration from a left-wing extremist to a model prisoner known for good works,” the Times lied today.
The “reform” game is one they’ve been playing with unrepentant leftist terrorists like Clark for years. But as I wrote in 2012, Judith Clark’s purported prison house “good works” are no such thing: they are the same leftist extremism repackaged for a dumber generation of Times subscribers.
Curiously, in 2012, the last time the Times tried to spring Clark, they did so on the grounds that she was still a radical, but a . . . radical for good. Then, the headline read: “Judith Clark’s Radical Transformation.” Yes: they actually made a pun about killing two cops and a security guard.
This time they’re saying she “evolved.” Just like the language commissars at the Times.
Judith Clark With Dogs She Didn’t Help Gun Down Mercilessly ...
20 years ago, I singlehandedly took on the SPLC and the ADL and the NAACP and the incredibly sleazy Rural Urban Summit and the HRC and a score of other alphabet soup organizations and helped kill the hate crimes bill in Georgia with a well-placed op-ed in the Atlanta Journal Constitution that argued these laws are in fact oppressive to speech and destroy equality for victims before the law.
And, oh yeah, that the hate crime activists are bunch of liars about the real uses of these “laws.”
I’m looking at you, Bill Nigut. Unlike some of your victims, you can’t get me fired by throwing your ADL-abetted weight around, pal. And trust me, I still remember the first time you twisted a story in my presence — to my benefit because I was a Democrat at the time — but I saw it and had the decency to be appalled for the pro-life activists you were perjuring on the other side.
Some of us have non-selective scruples. Also, I know who you got fired.
A long, long time ago, when I was knee-high to a grasshopper, Bill Nigut taught me everything I needed to know about media bias. Maybe I should write a children’s book about it. Bill would be the grasshopper twisting arms and accusing people of prejudice in order to destroy their lives, then he would hop back to his nest (do grasshoppers live in nests?) and cash all his many checks from public, academic, nonprofit, and private agencies paying him to work some 900 hours a week because he’s that special kind of grasshopper. Nice gigs if you can get them. Maybe the state or the IRS should investigate exactly how much time he clocks at all those different jobs.
Probably it would be too gross to be a children’s book. For example:
Bill Nigut, Investigative Reporter
So here is my anti-hate crime bill editorial this time. Jesse Smollett helped me write it. In a way.
A sort of ecumenical hate crimes law, like those “coexist” bumper stickers, only not like the people who have them on their cars, who, oddly, strongly prefer both exclusion of and differentiation between all peoples into bloody warring sectionalism when it comes to anyplace other than the rear bumper of their Volvo.
A few years later, the Georgia Supreme Court overturned Georgia’s 2000 non-identity-specific hate crime law on the grounds of vagueness, which is an interesting story for another day.
I can’t seem to find my op-ed in the AJC’s digital archive. I think they didn’t archive all op-eds at that time because some of my other ones are there. Or, it’s a vast conspiracy. Very much likely the former.
I have a crude photocopy of a photocopy that wouldn’t do to reproduce here, so here is the text re-typed by hand. If anyone better at using this Interweb thing than I, which is virtually all people, can find a link or a legible copy, I’d certainly appreciate it. Meanwhile, my enemies will certainly attest to its legitimacy. In terms of it existing, that is.
As for me, in some ways I cringe reading this, though the younger me does make some good logical points. What a fussy feminist academic hectorer I was! I’m far less mincingly logical now, yet simultaneously no less accurate. We’re talking about legislation, for God’s sake, not reality.
Far better to be the vigorous yeoman hectorer of today.
~~~~~~~~
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March ??, 2000 ...
Note, for example, this comment from Harper’s Magazine, those well-known Bircher-Strangelove fellow travelers. You have to pay for this longer story from Harper’s, but it’s worth it.
Better yet, for free, see what James Simpson, Matthew Vadum, Renee Nal, and I have said about this organization over the years.
The tern ineffable comes to mind. Also, predictable.
This isn’t a nice blog post headline.
It’s not going to be a nice post. ...
HB 426 is sponsored by the following legislators:
Chuck Efstration, Calvin Smyre, Karen Bennett, Deborah Silcox, Karla Drenner, and Ron Stephens.
As I have documented for years, hate crime laws aren’t accidentally discriminatory and dishonest: they were designed to be discriminatory and dishonest. The drafters of hate crime legislation in 1997 — Bill Clinton, Eric Holder, Elena Kagan, and a bunch of politically motivated activists — weren’t driven by the desire to oppose hate whenever and wherever it happens. They were motivated to create a false picture of an America as a nation where ‘ordinary crime’ was not as important as the crimes they deemed “hate.”
To do this, they created hierarchies of victims.
They destroyed our highest principle of equality before the law.
They empowered unelected activists to dictate what was and was not hate, destroying the way that our democracy and our criminal justice system is supposed to work.
They made justice itself into just another identity politics shell game.
The biggest problem with selling the hate crimes racket to the American public was and is the problem of crimes committed against women for being women. There are just too many such “gender bias” crimes to … “count ’em,” as Bill Clinton laconically intoned to adoring audiences: if we counted all those crimes against women, then hate crime laws would just become about serial rapists and serial killers and other guys who snatched random women (or men, or boys, or girls) off the streets.
The hate crime activists — who were and are anti-cop leftists and race activists and gay activists and Jewish and Muslim groups and advocates for illegal immigrants — sure didn’t want that sort of outcome, especially as it carried with it the problem that many, if not most, hate crime offenders might end up being minority men. And they certainly didn’t want that, either.
So they cooked the books. Over the next few weeks as we try to stop the hate crimes bill in Georgia for the second time, I will tell the story of how the hate crimes industry started cooking the books in 1997 to get the statistics they desired, and how they have succeeded in pulling off the greatest statistical hoax in American history.
You can read the whole story right now by reading this PDF: Rape is Not A Hate Crime Against Women.
You can also read some of my earlier hate crime articles in the categories: “hate crimes” and “The Hate Crimes Racket” on this blog.
We need to get the sponsors of HB 426 to answer some hard questions about the bill they’re pushing on Georgia. If you live in their districts, please try to get them to answer the questions I have posed below for each of the bill’s sponsors. If they respond, I’ll post their responses, with or without your name. Also please feel free to ask me anything about hate crime laws and why I oppose them. If you email me with a good question, privately, I won’t use your name in my response here, but I like to know to whom I’m speaking off the blog itself.
This is a pro-cop blog, and I ALWAYS keep police and other law officials’ identities private. If you are a law enforcement officer or a state or federal statistician or prosecutor who wants to share information about the way you were taught to enforce (and not enforce) hate crime laws, I promise you I will never reveal your identity. I have references from police who will vouch for me. Believe me, I know what’s at stake.
Here are some questions for the sponsors of Georgia HB 426. Feel free to share it widely!
Questions for Sponsors of HB 426
Rep. Chuck Efstration, Dacula:
• Do you believe Ed Kramer, the infamous child predator and convicted child molester who has repeatedly eluded justice and recently was caught once again preying on a young boy in your district, should be charged with gender bias hate crime under your bill? If not, why not? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
• Why do you feel the need to prioritize so-called hate crime legislation this session when prolific sexual predators such as Kramer are still clearly not being properly monitored or incarcerated, leaving them loose in your district to prey on even more child victims?
• Why is prolific, Atlanta-based serial killer Michael Darnell Harvey, who mutilated and reportedly lynched by hanging at least some of his female victims while raping and murdering them, never cited among the notorious killers used to justify the alleged need for hate crime laws? Do you believe he should be added to the HCSA statistics as a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
• Do you believe violent serial rapist Blair Malachi Washington, arrested in your district, should be charged with gender bias hate? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
• Do you believe James Hiram Akil Watkins, arrested in your district for stabbing, beating, torturing and murdering his 77-year old neighbor, should be charged with a hate crime? If not, why not?
• Do you believe accused murderers Glenda Carter, Russell Williams, and Zarius Williams, charged with killing one man with a baseball bat and nearly murdered another in your district should be charged with hate crime murder and hate crime attempted murder under your bill? If not, why not? Do you believe they are hate criminals? If not, why not?
• Do you believe Franecha Torres, Nicholas Evans, and Khalil Miller, charged with brutally murdering a 21-year old man in your district, should be charged with hate crimes? If not, why not?
• Do you believe serial killer Charles Lendell Carter, convicted in your district, who killed three women, should be counted as a hate criminal in the federal HCSA (Hate Crime Statistics Act) statistics collection that may be updated in Georgia if your legislation passes? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
• Do you believe Samuel Little, who may be the most prolific serial killer of women in America, should be added to the federal HCSA statistics and other hate crime lists, such as those used to educate schoolchildren? If not, why not? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
• Do you believe the as-yet unidentified rapist who has left DNA at seven rape and attempted rape sites in Clayton County since 2015 should be counted as a gender bias hate criminal? A race bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
Rep. Deborah Silcox, Powers Ferry/Cobb County
• Do you believe prolific serial rapist Christopher Charles Sanders, who was released from prison five times and was most recently arrested for rape in your district, should be charged with gender bias hate crime? If not, why not? And if so, do you understand that the bill you are sponsoring will not count crimes such as his as gender bias hate?
• Do you believe Sanders’ sometimes co-conspirator, Ryan Neal Walker, should also be charged with hate crime for gang-raping at least one woman with Sanders? If not, why not?
• Although Sanders and Walker left DNA at the 2006 rape site and Sanders left DNA at other rape sites, due to lack of attention and resources, their DNA samples were not tested for years, during which time Sanders committed more rapes. How do you justify trying to pass legislation that knowingly, deceptively excludes rape victims from being counted as victims of gender bias hate (thus denying these victims and other women law enforcement resources) while rape victims in your district continue being ignored and denied justice in such egregious ways?
• Do you believe Aeman Lovel Presley, who murdered your constituent Karen Pearce in a random attack in Decatur and also killed three homeless men, should be categorized as a hate criminal for all four murders or just a hate criminal for some of his crimes, such as the crimes against homeless men?
• Do you believe serial killer Gary Michael Hilton, arrested in your district, who tortured and killed at least several women and one man, including Meredith Emerson in Cumming and Cheryl Dunlap, whom he decapitated, should be counted as a hate criminal in the federal HCSA statistics collection that may be updated in Georgia if your legislation passes? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
• Why is prolific, Atlanta-based serial killer and torturer Michael Darnell Harvey, who mutilated and reportedly lynched by hanging at least some of his female victims while raping and murdering them, never cited among the notorious killers used to justify the alleged need for hate crime laws? Do you believe he should be added to the HCSA statistics as a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
Rep. Karen Bennett, Stone Mountain:
• Do you believe the man who snatched a 13-year old child off a railroad track in your district and raped her should be prosecuted as a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
• Do you believe serial rapist Corey Griffin, who terrorized, beat, tortured and and raped multiple women in Clarkston and Stone Mountain, should be prosecuted as a hate criminal? If not, why not?
• Why is prolific, Atlanta-based serial killer and torturer Michael Darnell Harvey, who mutilated and reportedly lynched by hanging at least some of his female victims while raping and murdering them, never cited among the notorious killers used to justify the alleged need for hate crime laws? Do you believe he should be added to the HCSA statistics as a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
• Your district has one of the highest crime rates in the state. Astonishingly, your constituents have a one in 13 chance of becoming a crime victim. How many of these crimes do you view as hate crimes? How do you distinguish between hate crimes and other crimes in your district?
• How many of the murders in your district are what you would call hate crimes?
• Don’t you think you should be doing more to focus on the terrible crime rate in your district instead of advocating on the vague and politicized issue of so-called hate crimes?
Rep. Calvin Smyre, Columbus:
• Do you believe Carlton Gary, the prolific serial torturer, rapist, and murderer of women in your district, should be counted as a gender-based hate criminal in the federal HCSA statistics collection that may be updated in Georgia as a result of your proposed legislation? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
• Do you believe Samuel Little, who confessed to killing at least three women in your district, and who may be the most prolific serial killer of women in America, should be added to the federal HCSA statistics and other hate crime lists, such as those used to educate schoolchildren? If not, why not? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
• Columbus, your district, saw more than 1,000 reports of sexual assault in 2018 alone. Do you view some of these as potential gender-bias hate crimes? If not, why not? Do you view all of these as potential gender-bias hate crimes? If not, why not? How would you differentiate between gender-bias rape and non-gender-bias rape?
Rep. Ron Stephens, Savannah:
• Do you believe Reinaldo Rivera, serial killer, rapist and torturer of women, including at least two in your district, should be added to the federal HCSA statistics as a gender bias hate criminal? If not, why not? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
• Do you believe Samuel Little, who confessed to killing at least two women in your district, and who may be the most prolific serial killer of women in America, should be added to the federal HCSA statistics and other hate crime lists, such as those used to educate schoolchildren? If not, why not? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
• Do you believe Edward Charles Wilkins, convicted in 2007 of murdering three prostitutes in your district, should be counted as a gender-bias hate criminal in the federal HCSA statistics collection that may be updated in Georgia if your legislation passes? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
• Do you believe serial rapist Theron Morrell Hendrix, convicted of kidnapping and raping a child and two adult women in Savannah, should be added to the federal HCSA statistics. Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
Rep. Carla Drenner, Avondale:
• Do you believe Wayne Williams, the convicted murderer of two of Atlanta’s “Missing and Murdered” male children, some of whom disappeared in the vicinity of your district, should be counted as a race-bias and/or gender bias hate criminal in the federal HCSA statistics collection that may be updated in Georgia if your legislation passes? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
• Why is prolific, Atlanta-based serial killer and torturer Michael Darnell Harvey, who mutilated and reportedly lynched by hanging at least some of his female victims while raping and murdering them, never cited among the notorious killers used to justify the alleged need for hate crime laws? His victims include your constituents. Do you believe he should be added to the HCSA statistics as a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
• Do you believe serial killer and gay prostitute Howard Milton Belcher, who tortured and killed at least four gay men, including one in your district, should be added to the HCSA statistics as a gender-bias hate criminal? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
These are officers Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos:
They were assassinated in cold blood by an anti-cop protester in Bedford-Stuyvesant today.
Earlier in the week, protesters including Eric Linsker, a CUNY poetry professor, attacked police by trying to throw a garbage pail down on them, then kicked and stomped two police officers. Linsker ought to be tried for attempted murder. His poetry sucks too, but you don’t need to be competent to succeed in the academic humanities today: what you need to do is demonstrate the appropriate level of hatred against the appropriate scapegoats. Bad poet Linsker got a job teaching poetry at the taxpayers’ expense because his bad poetry is about killing cops. It takes a village to kill a cop, and academicians like Linsker are the idiot troubadours of that village.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama and Eric Holder, along with professors associated with Harvard School of Law, may be preparing to help pardon another cop-killer, Assata Shakur (JoAnne Chesimard).
Shakur is responsible for the murders of several cops. In 1971, she ordered the murder of a random white cop in Atlanta, and her followers went out and killed the first white cop they found: James Richard Greene. The 26-year old Atlanta cop was gunned down at random for no reason other than being white and a cop. He was eating breakfast at the intersection of Boulevard and Memorial Drive in Atlanta when he was murdered.
I lived within blocks of that intersection for 20 years. The intersection lies in civil rights icon John Lewis’ district. But Lewis is not really a civil rights leader anymore because he does not support civil rights or human rights for everyone. If he did, he would treat the racist political murders of police in New York City — and in his district — as civil rights violations more severe and noteworthy than what happened to him. He was beaten, once, but he survived.
If John Lewis really opposed race murder, he would memorialize the sacrifice of James Richard Greene. He would advocate for the murdered cop to be honored with an historical marker, at least. But instead, Lewis sides with the virulent anti-cop lynch mob. It takes a village to kill a cop, and John Lewis is a politician in that village.
If you went and spoke to the well-off hipsters who live in the area of Greene’s murder today, I believe nine out of ten of them would express solidarity with the cop-killers and at best vague discomfort or (more likely) jubilation at the mention of murdering a cop. The Occupy movement demonstrated their jubilation at killing cops repeatedly. It takes lots of idiots to populate the village of killing cops.
Shakur’s attorney, Soffiyah Elijah, was honored with a high post at Harvard Law — not because she is accomplished in any other way but because she supports the murder of cops. She is even an apologist for Castro’s prisons. This sort of garbage is what passes for legal scholarship at our Ivy League schools — advocating cop killing is a stepping-stone to a successful career at Harvard Law. It takes a village to kill a cop, and Harvard Law is the barrister of that village.
The Obamas are close to another Assata Shakur supporter — the rap artist Common. Common is famous as a “politically relevant” artist because he sings songs celebrating Assata Shakur’s cop-killing, and the Obamas invited him to the White House to celebrate that music — not despite his pro-cop killer stance but because of it. The Obamas are the aristocracy of the village that supports killing cops.
On the week Barack Obama and Eric Holder held the infamous “beer summit” to scapegoat a police officer for being white and doing his job, several cops were murdered. Obama and Holder could have used the “beer summit” to honor or at least mention these murdered police, but they didn’t, of course. Murdered police weren’t important to them on that day: what was important was the opportunity to ritually abuse a cop for the color of his skin. Holder has also, of course, been instrumental in acquiring pardons for other cop-killers and terrorists.
Eric Holder is the law in the village that supports killing cops.
The executive branch of our government is filthy with people who support cop-killing. It is time to call this bunch the name they deserve. They are a lynch mob. They are the first lynch mob to control the White House since Woodrow Wilson approvingly screened Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1915. 100 years later, all that’s changed is the target.
It is time for decent people to come together and hold a march on Washington showing solidarity for the humanity and human rights of cops. We need a pro-cop, anti-lynching-of-cops movement.
Sad that any civilized nation would need such a thing.
Disappointingly, Fox News recently featured Bill Ayers in an over-hyped interview with Megyn Kelly. Instead of challenging Ayers’ many lies about Larry Grathwohl and other subjects, Kelly gave Ayers free publicity and a national platform.
Cliff Kincaid set the record straight:
Will Megyn Kelly Help Bring Ayers to Justice?
Cliff Kincaid — July 2, 2014
Bill Ayers shouldn’t be interviewed; he should be jailed. Megyn Kelly’s interview of Ayers, made reference to the role of Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in the bombing-murder of San Francisco policeman Brian V. McDonnell. Unfortunately, Ayers lied his way through the interview, which aired over two nights on her nightly Fox News Channel show, “The Kelly File.”
But this is what happens when a professional liar like Ayers does a “shocking” TV interview. The exchange may achieve high ratings, but nothing good will come out of the interview unless Kelly now follows up with the “Justice for Victims of the Weather Underground” campaign we have been waging for five years for the “cold case” bombing murder of Sergeant McDonnell to be reopened and examined by a federal grand jury. . .
Friends of Larry Grathwohl are putting on a “Blog About Larry” day on July 18 — the first anniversary of his untimely death. You can read about it at the Bringing Down America website. If you’re a cop or a soldier, please take the time to learn about Larry Grathwohl, a Vietnam Vet who stood up to cop-killing radicals at the risk of his life. If you have a blog, or a podcast, please join us in remembering Larry on Friday, July 18.
All of this changed when Eric Holder and Bill Clinton shoved through a highly politicized hate crimes regime in the late 1990’s. From the beginning, this regime wasn’t about punishing hate wherever it happened; it was about weaponizing identity politics where they least belonged: in the courts. It was about freezing America like a scared rabbit before the image of eternal imaginary Klansmen eternally burning down black churches and eternally lynching minorities.
The hate crimes movement also helped distract from the real “tidal wave” of crimes being committed by offenders who frequently happened to be minorities (as were most of their victims). The “tidal wave of racially motivated church burnings” in the nineties which was ostensibly the motivator for creating the modern hate crimes regime actually didn’t happen, but that didn’t matter to Clinton or Holder either: they just lied about it.
Hate crime laws were really about re-racializing the justice system.
Holder and Clinton knew that these laws were never really intended to “combat hate” but to create a legal spoils system to reward political friends, punish political enemies and super-charge racial divisiveness. The winners were the various race and ethnic hustlers and the losers were everyone else.
The hate crimes regime that exists today has succeeded beyond Clinton and Holder’s wildest dreams in sowing divisiveness and inequality before the law. Sadly, nobody even expects these laws to be enforced equally anymore. Yet nobody in the Republican Party in the states — most hate crime laws are state laws — has the backbone to try to repeal these laws anymore, though doing so would likely be a popular, politically attainable goal. The racism card and various other prejudice cards, played endlessly, have successfully reduced Republican elected officials to a quivering silence.
Back in the 1990s, Holder and Clinton still bothered to assure the public that hate crime laws would be applied equally — except, they said with a wink and a nudge, where women are involved because there’s just too many female victims of random rapes, not to mention random sexual slurs and random subway assaults and anti-female graffiti and all those other serious and unserious crimes that result in federal investigations when the writing on the dorm room wall is directed at blacks, or Muslims, or (liberal) Jews, or gays, or lesbians, or transvestites, or Latinos, or homeless people, or any of the other groups selectively empowered to demand mobilization of the hate police.
The N.O.W. under Kim Gandy and several other (not all) feminist organizations cheerfully swallowed this double-standard because they:
(A) were known to cheerfully swallow absolutely anything Bill Clinton told them to swallow.
and
(B) were so dominated by the political lesbians and minorities in their ranks that they really did not care if heterosexual white women were subjected to anything from rape to harassment on a public street — heterosexual white women have long been no more than the feminist movement’s whipping boys. [And yes, to the Judith Butlerites out there, I know on the one hand that I shouldn’t use the term “boys” to describe women, but you (or “u” or “it” or “shoe” or whatever you call yourselves now) must admit that I’m at least disrupting cissexual gender normativity by doing so.]
Back in the nineties, Clinton and Holder swore that white victims of racial violence and abuse would “be counted” alongside other victims (it’s all about the counting). They swore that these laws wouldn’t diminish other victims of crime. They promised a lot of things that never happened, but these things were never really intended to happen in the first place. White people were never intended to be protected against anti-white hate. Women were never intended to be “counted” as victims of hate. “Gender bias” was always intended for only non-biologically-born females, not hatred against females, because there’s just too much of it.
As a consequence of these lies, we’re now at a place where randomly killing a heterosexual woman is not as important to our justice system as killing certain other types of people, and mugging a white man is not as important as using a slur word against a minority, and mugging a black man, if the mugger is also a black man, is not as important as a slur word uttered by a white. Neither types of muggings is likely to be investigated much, if at all, while the right kind of slur word uttered by the right kind of person actually brings out federal troops to investigate and denounce the crime.
It is important to remember that all of this is by design.
The best example of the selective dehumanization of victims created by the hate crime regime was, for a long time, for me, the beating murder of a transgender prostitute in Cordele, Georgia in 1999. Tracy Thompson managed to seek help before dying from terrible injuries. Before she died, she said “her boyfriend” had committed the crime, but it was uncertain whether she meant a John or someone she knew. It was thus also uncertain whether the killer knew that she was biologically a man dressed as a woman and if that knowledge factored at all into the crime.
And so, the real intentions of hate crime laws were horrifically laid out: if Thompson’s killer was angry at her for being transgender — if he had picked her up with the intent of buying sex and “discovered” male genitalia under her skirt then beat her to death because of it, that was a hate crime. But if her killer just decided to kill a female prostitute, that wasn’t hate. It wasn’t a crime that would bring federal intervention; it wasn’t as serious a state crime, sentencing-wise; the GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation) would not get involved; the activists would not march in the streets; the exploiter organizations, from the SPLC to the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal (the source of the church burning deceptions) to the ADL to the NAACP to the HRC to the NOW (special shame on their heads) would not given a damn; the crime wouldn’t be recounted in the pricey “teaching tolerance” manuals sold by the SPLC and shoved down childrens’ throats at school; it wouldn’t be solemnly memorialized at civil rights events by Eric Holder and Bill Clinton or by Eric Holder and Barack Obama some dozen years later.
If the male genitalia under the skirt didn’t matter to the killer, then it wasn’t an important injustice like killing Matthew Shepard: it was just your run-of-the-mill kidnapping and brutally beating to death of a woman in a lonely field.
At that moment, hate crime laws made “biologically-born” women officially less human than transgendered women and a whole slew of other specially designated people, and this inequality in the courts has only grown stronger since that time.
Nowadays, nobody even expects hate crime laws to be enforced with a facade of even-handedness. Nobody expects equality before the law anymore, and that lack of expectation is horrifying in its normalcy. We gave away a lot in 1999.
And so we come to just the latest ethical and practical mess the hate crimes industry has made of our entire justice system. From the moment Shaima Alwadi was found murdered in her home in California, with a note denouncing the soon-to-be divorced housewife as a “terrorist” nearby, it was well understood that the note was likely a hoax. But the hate crimes industry cannot let pass any opportunity to accuse Americans of being racist because that is their primary purpose, and so the candles in the cups appeared, and the vigils, and the marchers, and teach-ins on college campuses and elementary schools: the entire apparatus of the for-profit non-profit hate crimes industry struck up the band. As the media reported: “The case reverberated across the nation because at first, it was thought to be a hate crime.” So we have trained people to react and also to not react when the victim is just the usual: black-on-black, or black-on-white, or male-on-random female, or, frankly, male-on-male victim when it’s a sex crime. The latter never gets counted as gender bias, because that’s not what gender bias laws are for.
From the beginning, there was ample evidence that Alwadi’s murder was some type of domestic violence, including her own recent warning to her sister that she would be killed by her husband. But we have primed a generation of young people to believe above all else that an easily dismissible note with a racial slur is more important than a woman’s beaten and murdered body. And so the mob assembled, and when the killer’s laughable ploy was revealed, the mob did not retreat: they simply claimed, as they always claim, that it was a “teachable moment” about white racism nonetheless.
The hate crime activists simultaneously demeaned the real victim and created a fake one. Alwadi simply wasn’t politically useful if she had just been killed by her husband.
Shaima Alwadi’s husband was convicted for murdering his wife in San Diego this week. Her killing was not prosecuted as a gender-bias hate crime because it was just an angry man killing a woman because she tried to leave him. Of course, the question of whether his anger arose from his Muslim beliefs in women’s submissiveness would never be “counted” as potential grounds for hate crime charges — not only because feeling such things about women doesn’t officially count as hate, but also because Muslims are among the groups who are systematically designated only as victims of hate crimes, not as perpetrators of them.
If we enforced hate crime laws in ways designed to actually fight hate, even this domestic murder might be investigated as a form of gender bias. But if we enforced hate crime laws equally, the Muslim terrorists of 9/11 would count as the most prolific hate criminals in our country’s history (3,000 dead thanks to anti-American nationality hatred); Major Hasan would be one of the worst individual hate criminals in history (13 dead thanks to anti-infidel hatred), and female victims of serial, stranger rapists would be by far the largest category of hate crime victims (gender bias hate) and male victims of serial, stranger rapists who targeted men exclusively would be a significant cohort of gender bias hate crime victims as well. If anti-white slurs and targeting of random whites were counted as hate, as it should be, minority males (and increasingly females) would rank the highest among hate crime offenders for crimes ranging from robbery to gang assault.
The vast majority of hate crime victims would be white, and the vast majority of hate crime offenders would be from several of the minority populations whose advocates control the deceptive enforcement machinery of these laws today. These activists could not, of course, allow the truth to be told this way. To maintain their hate-filled, false vision of America, they must make sure that these laws are never enforced equitably. Until conservative elected officials find the backbone to address this terrible injustice, we should cease pretending that equality before the law is an ideal or practical matter in our courts.
Or maybe we should say: It Takes a Village to Get Away With Raping a Child.
This is Hillary Clinton in 1975. She was on her way to becoming a “feminist icon,” so of course she stepped up to defend a 41-year old man who admitted to raping a child — a twelve-year old child. There were two witnesses to the crime — another man and a teen boy who were in the car with the rape victim. The offender plied the child with alcohol and then raped her.
As reported in The Washington Free Beacon in a well-researched article by Alana Goodman, Clinton, in 1975, by her own giggly admission, knowingly orchestrated a fraudulent test of the evidence from the crime in order to try to deceive the jury about her client’s guilt: she sent a part of the rapist’s underpants that had no fluids on it to a lab in New York and then threatened to use the negative lab result to disprove the prosecutor’s other evidence. She also made false claims about the victim’s mental state, calling her an unstable liar. Ultimately, despite powerful evidence condemning the rapist, the prosecution let Clinton’s client plead down to little more than time served.
There are lessons for everyone in this story.
Academic Feminists (a category that includes many feminist journalists) are now piling on anyone who deigns to criticize Clinton for using dirty tricks forty years ago to help a child rapist get off with a slap on the wrist. This may sound odd, but Academic Feminists have never been interested in putting real rapists into real prisons.
In fact (a fact you won’t learn in women’s studies classes), from the very beginning of the modern feminist movement, Academic Feminists have been far more interested in playing identity politics than in punishing rape. At the first meetings of the N.O.W., violence against women wasn’t even going to be included as a platform of the group, out of fear that condemning violence against women would result in some minority men getting convicted for the rapes they committed.
Couldn’t have that.
Better to throw all rape victims under a bus than hold black rapists responsible for their rapes — of mostly black women and children. From the beginning of modern feminism, racial and ethnic sensitivity — who committed a crime — was more important than the victim or the crime itself, let alone the ethic of justice for all.
[It should be noted that this attitude disgusted a critical mass of other feminist women who started working with police to protect women and children anyway — regardless of the color of their offender. These service provider types generally like to stay away from politics, and they shouldn’t be confused with Academic Feminists and other political bottom feeders]
Fast-forward to today: the Academic Feminists have spent the last several years perfecting their March Towards Universal Guilt But No Prison Time Only Re-Education For All Men But Especially White Fraternity Brothers.
Academic Feminists have always just been leftists who care more about emptying the prisons than about real victims of crime. They would rather exploit rape cases for political ends than imprison rapists.
For example, Amanda Marcotte at Slate is wagging around her frayed invisible Code of Defense Lawyer Ethics to explain why Clinton wasn’t merely right to use deceit and character assassination of a 12-year old rape victim to get her rapist client off: according to Marcotte, Clinton was super-right to use deceit and character assassination of a 12-year old rape victim to get her rapist client off because she’s Hillary Clinton:
Defense attorneys have an unpleasant but necessary job, and Clinton did what she was obligated to do, which was to give her client a constitutionally mandated adequate defense. … As long as juries keep acquitting based on this myth that women routinely make up rape accusations for the hell of it, defense attorneys will continue to use it. The problem here is a larger culture that promotes rape myths, not defense attorneys who exploit these myths in last-ditch attempts to get acquittals for rapists who have overwhelming evidence against them.
According to Marcotte, everyone else uses rape myths, so the legal standard is to use rape myths, so Clinton was just giving her client the benefit of a really good defense by using rape myths and she should be praised for doing this because it had to be super hard for her to shed her principles that way, but, by the way, if a frat brother uses a rape myth, even if there’s no rape involved, even if he’s just making a bad joke, he deserves to be destroyed, preferably by Amanda Marcotte, Hillary Clinton, and millions of other women.
Yes, this is the way the Academic Feminists think. I think it has something to do with all that mascara intersecting ink from bad tattoos and shards of bad prose by Judith Butler in the dark little place where your heart’s supposed to be. Other people just call it identity politics.
Amanda Marcotte, Defense Ethics Specialist, With Cat ...
Alex Jones (the politically elastic InfoWars host) and Attorney General Eric Holder (no introduction needed) both routinely rally their troops by crying wolf about police brutality. Jones encourages his libertarian followers to harass police and to view them as stormtroopers; Holder uses the power of the Executive Branch to warp criminal justice via the race card, imposing punitive oversight over state and local police on the grounds of “racial discrimination,” and encouraging minority populations to view police as racist persecutors.
So when police get assassinated by violent black power thugs or drug-addled white power wannabes, as happened to Officers Beck and Soldo in Las Vegas this week, Eric Holder and Alex Jones both deserve censure. Did they put the guns in the assassins’ hands? No. But they encourage such events, and then they exploit them for cheap political gain while police attend their colleagues’ funerals then put themselves on the line of fire again. ...
I urge you to take a few more strolls down memory lane. Let’s take the older post first. Note the date:
September, 2011: Gaming The System: DragonCon Founder Edward Kramer Caught With Another Boy
“Are we actually supposed to believe that Bob Barr and his partner, Edwin Marger, knew nothing about Ed Kramer’s real physical condition when they claimed he was too sick to attend court in 2009, or that he had basically fled what little court-ordered control they had managed to wrangle for him under extremely questionable circumstances? Well, here’s some clues:
Ed Kramer sporting a Barr ’08 button
Here’s Ed Kramer in either 2007 or 2008. He claimed he was too sick to stand trial for molestation, but he looks like he was having a really good time campaigning for his lawyer, Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr. If anyone knows more about this photo, please contact me.
Ed Kramer at the 2008 DragonCon ...
As Georgia prepares to follow in Florida’s footsteps in privatizing child protection services, there has been a lot of politicking but little talk about the real issues that lead to failures to protect children “in the system.” Privatization in Florida has been a very mixed bag, with some counties improving their performance and other counties mired in scandals involving the private non-profit agencies hired to protect children. It’s reasonable to expect that Georgia will fare a little better, but don’t expect the failure rate to drop — or rise — significantly.
The failures lie in policies enforced by the courts, and nobody is talking about reforming those policies.
Like Florida, Georgia plans to eventually privatize the services that come after an investigation has determined a child is in danger, namely: foster care, family “reunification” interventions, and adoption. State workers will continue to be responsible for investigating abuse, and courts will still be responsible for deciding if a child should be removed from a home, returned to a home, or adopted.
Private agencies do a great job with adoption, and some of them do a better job than the state in supervising foster care. Much of this care is already done through public-private partnerships in Georgia. But in all the politicized talk about private versus public, little has been said about the real problem with our child protection services.
The problem is the mandate to keep families together or achieve “reunification” as soon as possible.
Approximately a decade ago, many states began to move towards a model of keeping families together, no matter the cost. Florida went further than Georgia, though it wasn’t an issue tied to privatization because that part of child protection is still performed by state agencies.
And now Florida is counting the bodies.
In an extraordinary report, the Miami Herald investigated the deaths of 477 children who had prior contacts with child protection services. 477 — since just 2008. The Herald makes a strong case for blaming the mandate for “family preservation” for many of those deaths:
They tumbled into canals and drowned, baked in furnace-like cars, were soaked in corrosive chemicals, incinerated, beaten mercilessly, and bounced off walls and concrete pavement. One was jammed into a cooler posthumously; others were wrapped like a mummy to silence their cries, flattened by a truck, overdosed and starved. An infant boy was flung from a moving car on an interstate. A 2-year-old girl was killed by her mom’s pet python.
The children were not just casualties of bad parenting, but of a deliberate shift in Florida child welfare policy. DCF leaders made a decision, nearly 10 years ago, to reduce by as much as half the number of children taken into state care, adopting a philosophy known as family preservation. They also, simultaneously, slashed services, monitoring and protections for the increased number of children left with their violent, neglectful, mentally ill or drug-addicted parents.
Public or private, the child protection system is dealing with multigenerational problems that are far more severe than most people realize. It’s easy to criticize government social workers, or to lash out at efforts by private agencies. The hard part is acknowledging that “family preservation” may be the wrong goal:
Rather than go to court to force parents to get treatment or counseling, the state often relied on “safety plans” — written promises by parents to sin no more. Many of the pledges carried no meaningful oversight. Children died — more than 80 of them — after their parents signed one or, in some cases, multiple safety plans.
• Parents were given repeated chances to shape up, and failed, and failed and failed again, and still kept their children. In at least 34 cases, children died after DCF had logged 10 or more reports to the agency’s abuse and neglect hotline. Six families had been the subject of at least 20 reports.
The decision to prioritize family unification was made by bureaucrats and politicians from across the political spectrum. Liberals defend state agencies and argue that biological parents should receive as many resources as possible to keep their children; conservatives argue for the primacy of family and against state involvement. Failure is bipartisan:
“It’s the system that’s broken. When numbers take over instead of outcomes for people, you are doomed to failure,” said James Harn, a 30-year law enforcement officer who spent his last nine years as a commander supervising child abuse investigators at the Broward Sheriff’s Office before leaving a year ago. “They want to keep families together, but at what cost?”
Prioritizing family preservation is just one policy error. Others involve the increasingly hands-off attitude towards the family arrangements of women living on public services and the leniency granted to serial offenders in the courts.
Social workers have had little power since the 1960’s to insist that women on welfare live alone with their children, rather than inviting a boyfriend, or a series of men into their state-subsidized homes. These unattached men frequently abuse the children they are living with:
The night before Aaden Batista died, his killer played a baseball game on his Xbox, smoked marijuana and gave the toddler a bath.
As Aaden’s mother, Whitney Flower, worked as a medical assistant at a nearby hospital, Jason Padgett Sr. prepared the toddler for bed, putting on his diaper before, ultimately, viciously shaking him and slamming his head on the floor. . .
Aaden became part of the yearly count of children killed at the hands of paramours — child welfare’s oddly genteel term to describe boyfriends or girlfriends of custodial parents. Protecting children from abusive paramours is one of the great challenges facing the Department of Children & Families.
“Paramours are a huge red flag,” said Richard Gelles, dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as chairman of child welfare at the school. “They are enormously over-represented as the slayers of young children.”
Under-prosecution and under-incarceration, especially for domestic violence, presents another problem. Expect this problem to grow worse as “Right on Crime” Republicans, left and right-wing libertarians, leftists, and liberals join forces to shrink our criminal justice system and empty the prisons. Their political kumbaya moment is going to mean more violence, more crime, and more murders. You need only peruse the Miami child death report to find evidence of hundreds of people who have been granted serial leniency in our allegedly-harsh justice system:
In the pre-dawn hours of May 5, 2009, Jasmine Bedwell had to make a decision: Take more blows or more chokes — but try to rescue her son from the clutches of her enraged boyfriend — or go find help. She left and borrowed a cellphone to call 911.
...
“Senate rejects Obama appointment of Debo Adegbile to top civil rights post”
We need to thank Democrats and Republicans who voted against this nomination: ...
There is a Change.org petition drive you need to act on TODAY!
Vote “No” to the Confirmation of Debo Adegbile to the Department of Justice
Petition by Maureen Faulkner
Los Angeles, CA
PLEASE SHARE THIS PETITION WITH FAMILY, FRIENDS, AND COLLEAGUES!
As early as Tuesday [UPDATE: THE VOTE HAS BEEN DELAYED UNTIL WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5], the Senate will vote to confirm Debo Adegbile as the next Assistant Attorney General to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. This confirmation must be stopped.
Thirty years ago, Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner was violently murdered by Mumia Abu-Jamal, a member of a racist group that advocated violence against police. A jury convicted him and sentenced him to death for the brutal crime.
In the three decades that followed, Abu-Jamal filed appeal after appeal – each rooted in lies, distortions and allegations of civil rights violations. Today, as Officer Faulkner lies in his grave, Abu-Jamal has become a wealthy celebrity and continues to spew his vitriol from prison.
Old wounds were ripped open again, and additional insult was brought upon our law enforcement community when President Obama nominated Mr. Adegbile for the Department of Justice post. Mr. Adegbile previously led the Legal Defense Fund at the NAACP. In that position, Mr. Adegbile chose to throw the weight and resources of his organization behind Abu-Jamal. Attorneys working under Mr. Adegbile’s supervision have stood before rallies of Abu-Jamal supporters and openly professed that it was “an extreme honor” to represent the man who put a hollow based bullet into Officer Faulkner’s brain as he lay on the ground wounded, unarmed, and defenseless.
While Mr. Adegbile may be a well-qualified and competent litigator, through his words, his decisions, and his actions he has clearly and repeatedly demonstrated that he is not the best person to fill this position. Clearly there are others with similar qualifications that would be better choices.
The thought that Mr. Adegbile would be rewarded, in part, for the work he did for Officer Faulkner’s killer is revolting. Please set aside any partisan feelings you have and do the right thing when you vote on Mr. Adegbile’s confirmation. Please vote “no.”
………………………………………………….
Previous TINATRENT.COM Posts On Officer Faulkner and the Pro-Mumia Movement: ...
Wrongful conviction settlements are big business, but they are not always sensible. Chicago settles millions of dollars in cases where convicted offenders claim they were wrongfully convicted.
For a number of law firms, suing the city over wrongful convictions has become a kind of cottage industry. Inmates claim they were tortured and coerced into confessing. The offenders are freed from prison. Attorneys quickly initiate civil lawsuits against the city. Many people assume that a settlement signifies the police were culpable and had something to hide.
But this is not the truth in several key wrongful conviction cases, none more so than the Anthony Porter case, a double murder in 1982 in Washington Park on the South Side.
Preib shows how students and professors at Northwestern University and post-conviction lawyers didn’t even bother to interview the detectives involved in the conviction of Anthony Porter when they tried to exonerate Porter years later:
One common theme permeates the entire wrongful conviction movement: the police are crooked, willing to coerce confessions from the wrong man, willing to frame the wrong man, torture him, even. Police are often accused of racism in wrongful conviction cases, that they don’t care about African-American suspects or their communities. Many of these accusations were lobbed against the detectives in the Porter case, one of the most crucial wrongful conviction cases in the state’s history.
That Martin Preib could singlehandedly, with no resources, uncover more evidence than armies of well-connected, well-funded professors, students, and lawyers speaks volumes about the dynamics of post-conviction criminal justice activism.
The media repeats the claims of the Innocence Industry uncritically and dumbly parrots their nonsensical “statistics” about so-called “causes of wrongful conviction” — statistics and causes that are a pure fabrication. If the Innocence Project were actually trying to create real wrongful conviction statistics, they would have to do several things they don’t do now — first and foremost contextualize their cases within the numerical universe of rightful convictions.
They would also have to stop inventing “causes of wrongful conviction” that highlight only one aspect of a case, often something minor or irrelevant to the conviction but that serves their ideological interests.
They would have to acknowledge that the most common “cause” of wrongful conviction is being a criminal and running with other criminals. Lying for a criminal friend, being a non-DNA depositing co-conspirator in a murder that leaves no witness, dealing in stolen items from the crime, and letting your own brother go to prison in your place are all causes of wrongful conviction that you won’t find anywhere in the Innocence Project’s highly touted “statistics.”
Several of the Innocence Project’s most high-profile clients are serial rapists popped for the wrong crime BECAUSE they were committing similar crimes in the area or had done so elsewhere. The media avoids mentioning this part of the story because they want to act out their own Atticus Finch drama. Fabulist journalists go looking only for the story they want to hear, as Prieb demonstrates:
One wonders when journalism professors started teaching students to get only one side of a story. It turned out that, during the Innocence Project investigation, the detectives say that neither Protess [head of the Innocence Project at Northwestern] nor his journalism students ever attempted to sit down with the detectives and listen to their account.
Finally, many Innocence Project clients were not actually innocent at all.
See here and here for examples of the misbehavior of activists wanting to spring guilty men to gratify their own self-regard.
I have repeatedly urged Innocence Project activists to use some of their vast resources and manpower to try to identify offenders who got away with murder and rape. Merely saying this is a great way to get laughed at — or accused of racism, the movement’s eternal fallback pose.
The Martin Preibs of this world toil on their own in the shadows to correct grotesque injustices, as the defense bar and their media lackeys labor to spring anyone and everyone from prison, regardless of their crimes.
Imagine if someone made that into a movie.
Crossing Lines: What’s Wrong with the Wrongful Conviction Movement by Martin Preib
Martin Preib’s Amazon Page