Archive for the 'Police' Category

USA Carry.

In what the Dallas Police Department is calling an expansion of alternate reporting methods, they are amending their response protocols to limit officer contact with the public for non-emergency and property-related offenses. They say that this will not affect their responses to crimes against persons and other “High Priority Calls”.

Instead of officer responses, victims are being asked to use the Dallas Online Reporting System and click on the “File a Police Report Online” tab. The Dept says that an investigation will be conducted just as if an officer had taken the report at the scene.

Among the low-level crimes affected are Burglary of a Motor Vehicle, Criminal Mischief, Reckless Damage, Shoplifting, Property Theft (Auto Accessories), and similar.

As a reminder to regular readers, and a brief primer for new readers, the police are under no legal obligation to protect anyone.

Castle Rock v. Gonzalez

Warren v. District of Columbia

DeShaney v. Winnebago County

For home invasions, I cannot offer legal advice, but it’s not a safe bet that the invaders are only there to steal property.

And just a reminder – never talk to the police.  That’s your lawyer’s job.

NY Daily News.

Wait!  You mean that cops can’t be trusted at crime scenes?

But the most interesting part is that cops know when to shut up.  ” … he refused to discuss, on the grounds he might incriminate himself.”  If you are ever accosted by police, you should claim the fifth too.

We covered the behavior of the cops in Olmos Park, Texas, and the open carry rally there.  There is development.  This video was shot soon after the rally.  Watch all of it.  The cops run like scared rabbits when the light of photography shined on them.  Cops don’t like photography.  It tells the truth, unlike them.

News from Kansas.

LEAVENWORTH, Kan. – A trailer violation lead police to enter a home leaving a Leavenworth family upset after they say the incident scared their child.

Robert Ennest wants to know how a call for an illegally parked trailer turned into Leavenworth police drawing firearms and letting themselves in a house when the owners were not there.

Ennest said his 12-year-old daughter was the only one home. They believe she was outside with neighbors when police were scoping out the property.

“It’s traumatizing that my little girl’s home and I’m not there,” Ennest said. “Now she’s scared. She called me crying.”

Police said the officers’ intentions were good. They said officers knocked on the door and the door opened.

Ring Doorbell Footage suggests a different story. In the video, you can hear a doorknob twist and the officer knock.

Earlier that morning, video footage shows the family doubled checked to make sure that door was shut tight.

After failing to get in touch with the owners, police said the officers made a judgment call and went inside the house to see if someone was hurt.

Ennest said that decision put his daughter in distress.

“It made me angry because I support the police and they’re here to help, but there’s no reason to enter into somebody’s residence with their weapons drawn for no reason,” Ennest said.

Police said it’s protocol to have their weapons out while searching a home or business.

Ennest said officers also tracked mud throughout the house — on carpets, clean laundry and bedding.

His family spent the whole night sanitizing. their home because their son, who is fighting cancer, can’t afford to get sick.

“His immune system is not up for that,” Ennest said.

Let’s see: reckless endangerment, trespassing and assault with a deadly weapon.  That should about cover it.

Well, you’re not in Kansas any more, Dorothy.  Maybe from now on you won’t be so quick to “support the police” and believe “they’re here to help.”  The .gov is never there to help you.  That isn’t their mission.

Independent journalists trying to keep the government in line are the equivalent of “Antifa” according to the Harris County Sheriff’s Department.

Hicks, losers and crybabies. I’m talking about the cops.

This awful report came to my attention, and it pertains not just to social media, but to father Google too.

The email arrived on a Tuesday afternoon in January, startling Zachary McCoy as he prepared to leave for his job at a restaurant in Gainesville, Florida.

It was from Google’s legal investigations support team, writing to let him know that local police had demanded information related to his Google account. The company said it would release the data unless he went to court and tried to block it. He had just seven days.

“I was hit with a really deep fear,” McCoy, 30, recalled, even though he couldn’t think of anything he’d done wrong. He had an Android phone, which was linked to his Google account, and, like millions of other Americans, he used an assortment of Google products, including Gmail and YouTube. Now police seemingly wanted access to all of it.

“I didn’t know what it was about, but I knew the police wanted to get something from me,” McCoy said in a recent interview. “I was afraid I was going to get charged with something, I don’t know what.”

There was one clue.

In the notice from Google was a case number. McCoy searched for it on the Gainesville Police Department’s website, and found a one-page investigation report on the burglary of an elderly woman’s home 10 months earlier. The crime had occurred less than a mile from the home that McCoy, who had recently earned an associate degree in computer programming, shared with two others.

Now McCoy was even more panicked and confused. He knew he had nothing to do with the break-in ─ he’d never even been to the victim’s house ─ and didn’t know anyone who might have. And he didn’t have much time to prove it.

McCoy worried that going straight to police would lead to his arrest. So he went to his parents’ home in St. Augustine, where, over dinner, he told them what was happening. They agreed to dip into their savings to pay for a lawyer.

The lawyer, Caleb Kenyon, dug around and learned that the notice had been prompted by a “geofence warrant,” a police surveillance tool that casts a virtual dragnet over crime scenes, sweeping up Google location data — drawn from users’ GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular connections — from everyone nearby.

The warrants, which have increased dramatically in the past two years, can help police find potential suspects when they have no leads. They also scoop up data from people who have nothing to do with the crime, often without their knowing ─ which Google itself has described as “a significant incursion on privacy.”

Still confused ─ and very worried ─ McCoy examined his phone. An avid biker, he used an exercise-tracking app, RunKeeper, to record his rides. The app relied on his phone’s location services, which fed his movements to Google. He looked up his route on the day of the March 29, 2019, burglary and saw that he had passed the victim’s house three times within an hour, part of his frequent loops through his neighborhood, he said.

“It was a nightmare scenario,” McCoy recalled. “I was using an app to see how many miles I rode my bike and now it was putting me at the scene of the crime. And I was the lead suspect.”

There is more at the link.  It actually ended up working out okay for him, but not without some trouble and expense.

Let this be a lesson.  I have used biking apps on my phone for mountain biking trail maps, as well as Waze for navigation in my truck.

I’ve rethought that after reading this article.  Google = Fedgov.  Never forget that.

Recall that one crud, vulgar, obscene Putnam County Sheriff’s Deputy violated a man’s rights guaranteed under the second and fourth amendments by an illegal and unconstitutional detention?

Also recall that we covered the violation of the fourth amendment by Putnam County Deputies about three weeks ago?

The lawyer in these cases has a new video up with more than we linked in the last video.  Watch it entirely.

His name is John H. Bryan, and he’s doing God’s work.  His web site is thecivilrightslawyer.com, and he has a new post up on the current status of the open carry case.

The judges in this case were very dismissive of the Fourth Circuit decision in Black because they just don’t care about the constitution, but I hope he carries this all the way to the Supreme Court if needed.

Further, I’ll say one more time, it never even needed to get to the point of citing Black.  West Virginia is not a “stop and identify” state, and this wasn’t a “Terry Stop.”  The state courts should have struck this all down and reprimanded the Sheriff’s department.

I’ll also say once again that Sheriff Steve Deweese should resign in shame, and remember his contact information: sdeweese@putnamwv.org.

Also remember this man.  prosecutingattorney@putnamwv.org (Mark A. Sorsaia, Office of the Prosecuting Attorney, Putnam County Judicial Building).

The deputies, crooks and thugs they are, are merely following the leadership set before them.  Followers always behave like their leaders.  To the Sheriff, you need to get up in front of your church, beg for forgiveness, ask to be placed under the discipline of the leaders of your church, resign your post, and do something you’re qualified to do, like dig ditches while serving your time in prison.

News from Ohio.

Village Council Members accepted Dorian LaCourse’s resignation in an emergency meeting Sunday.

Mayor Lisa Mear wrote in a letter to the chief when he was suspended last month that the investigation found he bought and sold guns and armor-piercing bullets without village approval or knowledge and created phony purchase orders, inflating the number of officers working in the department to do it.

LaCourse is accused of selling the weapons, which he purchased under his position as the police chief, to other entities, also without the knowledge or consent of the village council, her letter states. Records released Monday show most of the transactions were between LaCourse and Marcum Firearms and Tri-State Gun and Custom Works, both of Indiana.

It happens every day in America.  Hundreds of thousands of men are in prison for false confessions. Here’s a particularly bad example.

Two months ago, Robert Davis was getting ready to set up chairs for Bible study when he received some life-altering news: Within hours, he’d be walking out of Coffeewood Correctional Center, a free man for the first time in nearly 13 years.

Davis, 31, stepped out of prison December 21 to face television cameras, probably as surreal an experience as his last night of freedom in February 2003, when he was surrounded by police, slammed to the ground and handcuffed.

He was 18 years old then, a senior at Western Albemarle High and by his own admission, “naive.”

He didn’t know that he didn’t have to talk to police without a lawyer about a horrific double murder that had happened a few days earlier in his Crozet neighborhood. He didn’t know that police can lie to suspects to obtain a confession. And he didn’t know that after hours of a middle-of-the-night interrogation when he just wanted to sleep, if he told the officer what the cop wanted to hear, he wouldn’t be able to straighten things out in the morning.

Davis wasn’t familiar with the term “false confession” in 2003, and he didn’t realize he would become the face of the phenomenon to which juveniles and the exhausted are particularly susceptible. Nor could he have guessed that his story would be the subject of a national television show that aired on “Dateline NBC” February 14.

Robert Davis has learned a lot since 2003.

Snow was on the ground the morning of February 19, 2003, when the Crozet Volunteer Fire Department got the call of a blaze in Crozet Crossing, a subdivision of entry-level homes.

At 6047 Cling Ln., once the fire was out, responders discovered a sinister scene: The body of Nola Charles, 41, known as Ann to her family and friends, in a bunk bed upstairs, with her arms duct-taped behind her. It took Albemarle police forensics technician Larry Claytor a while to notice the charred handle of a knife in her back.

Another shock awaited in the smoldering house. In Charles’ bedroom, the body of her 3-year-old son, William Thomas Charles, was found under debris. He’d died of carbon monoxide poisoning from smoke inhalation.

Almost immediately, police focused on a couple of neighborhood teens: Rocky Fugett, 19, a senior at Western Albemarle, and his sister Jessica, 15, a freshman. During interrogation, the two started throwing out names of other students to deflect the blame, both later told a reporter. One of those names was Robert Davis.

In a 2011 interview at Sussex II State Prison, Rocky Fugett admitted that he’d picked on Davis, and said he never dreamed Davis would confess to being there the night Charles was killed.

In the world of television crime, wrongful convictions are a hot topic, as evidenced by the radio podcast “Serial” and Netflix’s “Making a Murderer.”

An expert in false confession who appeared in the “Dateline” episode as well as in “Making a Murderer,” Northwestern law school’s Laura Nirider, who is the director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, has been aware of Davis’ case for years, and sent a 64-page report supporting his petition for clemency in 2012. She has called his interrogation “one of the most coercive confessions I’ve seen.”

It was after midnight when Davis was arrested at gunpoint, and almost 2am when the interrogation by Albemarle Police Detective Randy Snead began.

Snead had been the resource officer at Ivy Creek, the special ed school Davis had attended, and Davis says he trusted him.

Davis denied he had anything to do with the Charles murders dozens of times, according to the video of his six-hour interview. He offered to take a polygraph to prove he was telling the truth multiple times. And he told police if they were going to arrest him, to go ahead and do it so he could go to sleep.

Police widely use the Reid Technique of interviewing and interrogation, which says if a suspect asks to take a lie detector test, that should be taken as a sign of innocence, according to Nirider. That alone should have been a red flag to investigators, she says, but there were other details that made Davis’ interrogation a textbook case of false confession.

She points out how police fed him the details of the crime. Snead lied and told Davis police had evidence he was at the crime scene. He threatened Davis with the “ultimate punishment,” and said Davis’ mother could go to jail if he didn’t tell the truth. Finally, at nearly 7am, Davis said, “What can I say I did to get me out of this?”

“The young and those with mental limitations are most vulnerable to making false confessions,” says Nirider.

She notes a recent study that shows the sleep-deprived are way more likely to falsely confess to a crime. Exhaustion “absolutely plays a role,” she says. “There is a correlation.”

UVA law professor Brandon Garrett has examined many cases of false confession, and points out the interviews in those cases lasted over three hours. If someone is exhausted, he says, he thinks if he just goes along with the interrogation, he can clear it up later.

Today, Davis says the overriding emotion during that interview was fear. “I was scared shitless,” he says.

With Davis’ confession and the testimony of the Fugetts putting him at the crime scene, his attorney, Steve Rosenfield, says it was a “grave risk” to go to trial. He feared a jury would ask the question most people ask—why would you confess to a crime you didn’t commit?—and give Davis a life sentence.

When the commonwealth offered a deal, Rosenfield advised Davis to enter an Alford plea, in which he maintains his innocence but acknowledges the prosecution has enough evidence to convict him, and take a 23-year prison sentence.

Davis says it’s hard to recall a lot about entering that plea because he was on medication for anxiety and depression. Mainly, he thought, “At least I get to go home eventually.”

“I told Robert one day the Fugett kids might tell the truth,” says Rosenfield. “It took a long time—with Jessica especially.” She recanted her allegations about Davis in 2012.

Two years after Davis was convicted in 2004, Rosenfield received a letter from Rocky Fugett that said he had some information that would be helpful to Davis. Fugett signed an affidavit saying Davis had nothing to do with the slayings, and in 2012, Rosenfield sent a petition for clemency to then-governor Bob McDonnell.

There it lingered until McDonnell’s last day in office, when he denied the petition. According to Rosenfield, McDonnell’s administration conducted no investigation of the petition’s claims.

That was a particularly bleak time for Davis. “It was crushing having to wait so long and even more crushing when Bob McDonnell denied it without doing any investigation,” he says.

When Davis walked out of Coffeewood the day Governor Terry McAuliffe signed a conditional pardon, he pointed to Rosenfield and said, “If it weren’t for that man there fighting for me, I wouldn’t be out right now.”

He’s probably right. Rosenfield submitted six volumes of documents supporting the clemency petition. “There wouldn’t be a realistic mechanism if a prisoner tried to do that,” he says.

Rosenfield was Davis’ court-appointed lawyer in 2003, but since Davis took the Alford plea in 2004, he’s been Davis’ pro bono lawyer. He estimates he’s spent between 1,500 and 2,000 hours working on the case, legal expertise worth about $600,000. And that doesn’t include the couple of thousand dollars he’s spent out of pocket.

“I’m glad he’s out,” says the attorney. “It’s a lot less work.”

Years in prison, more than half a million dollars in legal time, the innocent get punished, the guilty go free, and the cops and attorneys couldn’t care less because they got their conviction.

By feeding him details, threatening his mother, lying about other things, all to a sleep deprived adolescent. This is why the Scriptures require the testimony of two or more witnesses to convict a man of a crime, and self incrimination isn’t allowed by the Bible.  Because our judicial system no longer recognizes the Scriptures as God’s Holy law, they make up their own system of “righteousness,” a false righteousness in God’s eyes.  A damning righteousness in God’s eyes.  For more, see Rousas J. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law.

Torture could become the norm without Biblical law, and while they didn’t inflict physical pain on the boy, it was a form of torture.  Torture is simply not allowed by the Scriptures, and only wicked men do it, some in the name of local security, and some in the name of national security.

Teach your children, wife, and even relatives well.  Do not talk to the police.  Explain to them why.  The Scriptures do not allow self incrimination.  Do not be naive, and do not be trusting.  Do not cooperate with your own false imprisonment.

The traitor responsible for the continued violations of the constitution of the U.S. and of Texas law is none other than a sworn defender of the same, Olmos police chief Rene Valenciano.  He is an awful person who cares not the least about lying and abandoning his oath.

So the claims on their web site are all lies.  He and his traitor officers have no intention of obeying Texas law, in which open carry is legal.  This also raises yet another question: where the hell is the Texas attorney general?  A police chief is violating Texas law and infringing on constitutionally protected rights.  Where is the Texas attorney general on this?  Missing in action?

Police chief Rene Valenciano’s email address is: policechief@olmospark.org.  Feel free to tell him he’s a traitor.  The city manager is Celia DeLeon, and her email address is: citymanager@olmospark.org.  Is she a coward?  Just why hasn’t she shut down Valenciano’s traitorous henchmen yet?  Is she waiting for a massive lawsuit that bankrupts the city?

By the way, police chief.  That fat boy officer in the video, yea, him.  Tell him to go on a diet, put on a backpack, and hit the trails.

And as for my readers in Texas (I know I have a lot of them), you know what to do next.