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"the worst first amendment case I've ever seen" just had a good ending! You can read his summary (CEO of FIRE who lead the case) or mine.
A while back, a retired police officer Larry Bushart posted a political meme on Facebook mocking conservatives over the concept of not caring about kids who get shot in schools while cancelling people for not caring about Charlie Kirk's death.
In response, Perry County officials where he lived had him arrested and held in jail for 37 days, setting his bond at 2 million dollars. He lost his job from this disruption and missed his granddaughter's birth and his wedding anniversary.
This arrest was obvious bullshit, another case where corrupt abusive officials utilize the legal system itself as punishment. No one would have seriously expected this case to go through, but the process itself is often meant as the attack.
It ends with good news though, as part of the settlement Bushart is getting almost a million dollars. Bad news, like most abuse by officials it gets paid for by the taxpayers and nothing is likely to happen to the corrupt scumbags who were in charge.
But this is a great lesson at least. In the US, you can just be a random guy, upset the most powerful government organizations and draw their ire, and win against them. America is a country where David can take down Goliath, whether it be your local officials or federal ones. Bushart refused to accept the abuse, he stood up to the bullies, and he won.
No, this shows that you can do this against government organizations that have a right-wing bias. It does not show that you can do this against government organizations in general.
It also depends on how big the institution you're fighting is and how much practice they've had doing it. If it had been the FBI instead of the county, they would have questioned him, they would have found or manufactured a felony, he would be jailed, and there would be nothing he could do.
There's been plenty of legal wins against left wing abuse. Here's a recent one involving free speech from a conservative. Her damages were obviously much lower (not flying a flag on a flagpole vs being put in jail for over a month) so she only got about 30k but yes, when government leaders illegally step on your rights you can sue and you can win/force them to settle.
Now it might take a while, especially if you aren't willing to settle after all the court system is slow and backlogged. But that's not because of unfairness, it's just a general court issue. Often the real problem that tends to happen with court is idiots. Idiots who don't realize that actually nothing illegally happened, your rights were not stepped on, and they're just stupid. The law is complex and criminals are stupid, it's why "you have to tell me if you're a cop right?" continues to be a thing. No they don't, and the court will not take you selling drugs to an undercover one as entrapment.
Now hold up, if they conducted a legal search and found a felony and proved it in court then of course he could end up jailed for it.
If they manufactured one, then he would argue for his innocence and try to provide counter evidence it isn't real. Given that isn't many cases even alleging that the FBI or other groups manufactured evidence, especially excluding anything like an obvious schizophrenic representing themselves in court filings saying it, I don't think there's much reason to believe it's actually happened often.
Yes, they would have. They would have come with an electronics search warrant based on the probable cause that he was using a computer to transmit interstate terrorist threats. They would have found an unencrypted hard drive with a terabyte of a particular type of obscene photo which the FBI is allowed to posses but which average people possessing is a serious felony in the United States. They would have dropped the threats charges and proceeded with the incidental charges. They did this to several J6ers.
If there was enough good cause to believe in a threat to get a search warrant, then there's no issue. Even in Bushart's case, the problem wasn't that they investigated him to begin with since there is decent enough cause with the meme he posted for that. The issue is that good faith officials would have accepted that this was a quote of the president and not a threat to shoot up local schools, instead of proceeding ahead with throwing him in jail.
Yes the FBI is allowed to have the data of child porn in the specific context of using it to identify other child porn. Very interesting way to word it.
Yep, that's how the law works. Things found in a legally authorized search are generally permissible evidence. This applies even if the circumstances initially permitting the search change later, like it turns out a witness had lied to the police or something. They don't have to have a valid warrant, as long as the officials executing it reasonably acted on good faith https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/probable_cause?
It requires the officials themselves to have acted in bad faith or overreached in the limits of the legal search.
That sounds like an odious context, because it doesn't really need to be identified now does it? Unless you're enforcing the extremely severe law on people who accidentally see a 17 year old on some mainstream website. Which is probably the main use case for that.
Anyway AFAIK, they're also allowed to broadly posses it, receive it, distribute it, and even cause the production of it. I have read that they entrap people by sending it to them when asked, and the by asking for photos of family members that they then use to identify the people they entrap. This implies possession by the FBI, knowing reception by the FBI, knowing distribution by the FBI, and encouraging production by the FBI. It almost looks a pedophilic enterprise operating under the thin cover of pedo hunting. The only difference is the badge. Imagine if one of those street hunter people did this. They would be arrested! Personally I think their methods should be reigned in, because makes me sick to see an FBI agent when I know he is quite likely to be someone who trades it on the darknet all day for „justice” or „the greater good” or whatever. I'm glad entrapment is illegal in my country because it must select for some disgusting people to sign up for law enforcement duties.
Yes, yes. It's all legal. That's how your law works. It's wrong, but it's how you made it work. Except for the part where the evidence might be planted. But that's impossible to prove, and defendants are forbidden from alleging it in court. Which means they are not allowed to really defend themselves. Which means it would be very easy for the government to get away with it, when you understand how it all works.
Yep the difference between law enforcement acting in an official capacity to catch criminals is different than a vigilante. The same way you can't be a "street hunter" for drugs and just do it to sell drugs to people.
The justice and greater good of catching pedophiles actively seeking out child abuse material.
Entrapment is an incredibly misunderstood legal doctrine, it is not entrapment that you get caught doing a crime you were already doing. Entrapment is not allowed in the US either.
Yes, they use the same tactics for drugs as well. Which should be illegal.
You can have that without entrapment. Many countries do, including my own.
Americans have redefined it to make it okay in their country. The common sense definition is any act which is meant to entice someone to commit a crime is entrapment. United States law enforcement at all levels commits many such acts of entrapment. If the entrapped person was already doing the crime, then they need to be prosecuted for those acts, not acts that they were pushed to do by law enforcement. If law enforcement can't find evidence, then too bad, that's the point of privacy rights. 99% of the time they can't find evidence because the act is actually not harmful, which is why victims are not lining up to testify about how they have been damaged.
What country are you in? It seems more reasonable that you, like most citizens, misunderstand your local laws than that your country never uses undercover cops at all.
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You're saying that the FBI framed several J6ers by "sprinkle some child pornography on him" ? source? would love to read up on this.
This is just what has been reported in the media.
Do people who were framed for CP usually submit a guilty plea? The only thing he’s contesting is that the search was illegal.
The other guy linked was Andrew Jackson, who apparently skipped the image step and got life in prison for actually molesting a kid.
FYI, you got your presidents mixed up. The offender was Andrew Johnson, not Andrew Jackson.
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Probably, because they aren't allowed to argue framing as a defense and the United States federal court system is well known for beating people, figuratively, into guilty pleas through intimidation via threatening cruelly long sentences if they don't plea and are found guilty. So, imagine, you are told by the judge you can't allege the government framed you in your trial. You can stage a half-defense at your trial, but if the jury doesn't buy it, since it is not the true defense, you will go to jail for 5 to 10 extra years. They plea out at this point.
And that is a federal matter how? Because the kid will at some point cross state lines in interstate commerce? How is that relevant to J6? It seems suspicious. People lie and slander each other all the time, what if the allegations were produced by the J6 investigation and are not true?
I’m talking about this guy. Not a federal charge.
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Do you have a citation on this being a real thing that happens? I know there are arguments that a judge can say that the defense can't make to the jury, but my understanding is that those are more things like "you should nullify" or "the judge has ruled this search legal, but actually it was illegal" (though you can still argue about what the evidence from that search means).
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Daniel Tocci plead guilty to possession of child pornography. Doesn't seem like the police sprinkled it on his computer.
In the United States federal system, guilty pleas are procedurally manufactured through defendant intimidation. Read my other comment on this https://www.themotte.org/post/3758/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/445398?context=8#context
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You know, I’m quite open to the possibility that the FBI is planting such material in order to get at politically disfavored people whom they cannot otherwise touch. It’s definitely doable, it would only require a few bad actors, and it would be almost impossible for the victim to defend against. But the case you linked doesn’t seem at all relevant. The defendant’s complaint is that the evidence was accidentally found during an unrelated search, not that the evidence was planted. He also doesn’t seem to be a particular ringleader, so it seems unlikely that the FBI would single him out (there haven’t been a slew of similar cases to my knowledge). Plus, there were some 1,500 January 6 defendants who were pardoned by Trump. It doesn’t seem statistically unlikely that one of those 1,500 would be into CP, especially given that some sources estimate that 1–5% of the male population are pedophiles.
So Americans will send a man to jail for 10 years because their government wrongly searched him and alleges to have found obscene photos on a private hard drive. Sounds like some uncivilized Russian monkey business to me. This is despite the initial cause for search being illegitimate enough that they could not hold him on the actual charges they were investigating. This boils down to blindly trusting a government that has already demonstrated openly, through the initial search, that they are just engaging in mere political persecution, and not the „justice” they they so hubristically don themselves in through their self-namings such as Department of „Justice,” „justice” system, supreme court „justice.” What does the United States know of justice? Is it the state that Plato envisioned when he thought of justice, or is it a democratic tyranny? Anyway, as for your statistics, maybe the special agent in charge of this specific persecution was a corrupt Democrat pedophile who was well positioned and motivated to frame this specific person for this specific crime. In the whole FBI you would expect at least one such person when it comes to a persecution as big as the J6 round-up, even if the FBI generally was not very corrupt. But we don't know because it is illegal in the United States to investigate federal agents or to question their trustworthiness at trial. I have read that judges gag the defense from presenting arguments that „place the government on trial” by alleging that evidence is forged, agents are corrupt, the prosecution is motivated, etc. Which does not seem like it is keeping up a real right to defense to me.
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