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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.
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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