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Notes -
Update to the Juan De Oñate Statue shooting (as requested by @FCfromSSC):
I've not been able to find any copies of the plea deal document itself, but the case lookup site points to 30-3-5, 30-3-4, and 30-7-2 & 31-19-1. The max estimated jail sentence looks like it's produced by throwing together all of the normal max sentences together, which isn't likely since the man's previous offenses seem limited to some minor traffic stuff, but that’s media coverage. Some of the plea may not be factually possible -- in particular, where New Mexico draws the line from concealed to open carry leaves 30-7-2 as less a slam dunk that it might seem at first glance -- but it's unlikely anyone's going to try to argue the matter.
Separately, the "New Mexico Civil Guard" group has had interesting legal battle charging them as impersonating peace officers](https://law.justia.com/codes/new-mexico/2018/chapter-30/article-27/section-30-27-2.1/), filled with increasingly harebrained legal tactics and having been targeted by an early injunction prohibiting the group from being a civil guard. Some of this has been reported as ‘disbanding’ the group, though the final consent decrees and judgements are hard to access to find out how literal that was. On the other hand, in case the behavior seemed particularly doomed or quixotic, six members (somehow!) were awarded a collective 300k payout from the state to settle likely public records request delays, which doesn't necessarily indicate specifically bad behavior or hilariously explosive text messages being covered up (or even if the money actually got to them; the org was severely sanctioned over the deposition misconduct), but must have been a very interesting meeting when deciding if dealing with these guys were worth 300k of other people's money. Baca is largely described as 'not apparently a member'.
I've not been able to find any assault or battery charges placed against any of the protestors opposed to the De Oñate statue, though the records are a bit of a pain to search.
The Albuquerque Oñate statue was removed in June 2020; the last mainstream reporting I've been able to find was limbo in 2021, shortly followed by an op-ed proposed splitting the baby by putting the statute in a museum and establishing a Truth and Reconciliation committee, which afaict has gone nowhere.
It's nice to see things tied up at last, but it seems to me the general pattern was well-established more or less at the time and we've just watched it play out. Every high-profile incident where people tried to defend themselves from rioters resulted in significant effort being made by the state to punish them as harshly as possible. These prosecutions clearly had nothing at all to do with the facts at hand, and everything to do with the demands of the mob.
Rittenhouse was subjected to a malicious murder prosecution in the face of multiple-angle video evidence showing his attempts to retreat from his attackers. His attackers were not charged in any way, despite solid evidence that they had broken the law.
The McCloskeys were charged with felonies for defending their home from a criminal mob, but managed to mostly defend themselves from the worst consequences.
Gardner was hounded to suicide with the able assistance of his local and state governments.
Bacca pleads guilty and will go to prison.
Daniel Perry has been sentenced to 25 years, but might get a pardon.
On the other side:
The CHAZ gunmen were allowed to slip away unmolested after one murder and an unknown number of attempted murders, with the implicit cooperation of local government.
Reinoehl committed cold-blooded murder, on camera, which was then publicly celebrated by his allies, again on camera. He died shortly after in a shootout with federal law enforcement, which the press spent some time spinning conspiracy theories about.
Dolloff shot a man to death for, at most, punching and pepper-spraying him, and witnesses were uncertain even of that much. The authorities declined to prosecute him, instead punishing his employers while he walked free.
...There's more, but I have better things to do this morning.
Some takeaways:
Masks work. Anonymity works. Not just for the basic reasons of making a positive ID harder, but because it makes every effort to cover for you by your allies downstream in the press, the activist scene and in government easier as well. It widens every subsequent zone of plausible deniability, lends credibility to every argument about why there's just nothing to be done about your exercise of coordinated political violence.
Institutional support is crucial for control of the streets, and thus the public. What these people did can't be done without a cooperative press and local government, and especially a firm handle on the police. Again, plausible deniability is key.
Manipulation of procedural outcomes is the name of the game, surfing that line between clearly communicating that you are above the law, and exposing yourself to real backlash and severe consequences. Making it clear that your side will tend to walk even when you murder, while the other side will be prosecuted even for defending themselves from you is an integral part of the strategy. Remember, even if it takes a while, even if the hit-rate is not 100%, your opponents are risk-averse and have a whole lot to lose, so it doesn't take much to shift the calculus. You or your allies need to control interpretation and implementation of the procedures. All else flows from that point.
For Reds specifically:
Don't live among Blues. Armed self-defense, in the lawful sense, assumes an impartial legal structure. That is not a supportable assumption anywhere Blues control. It doesn't matter what the laws say; they will interpret, ignore and adjudicate as necessary to secure their desired outcomes. If you cross them, they will find a way to fuck you. Not every time, but often enough that it's not worth the risk.
Stop pretending that the outcomes of orderly systems can be trusted. Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process. Findings and verdicts and rulings do not settle a matter if the outcome is not just. Demand Just outcomes, and never, ever let an unjust outcome rest.
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Neat.
Even after reading about the incident, it’s hard to tell what anyone involved wanted to accomplish.
Do you think Baca had any chance of winning if he went to trial?
Right before the confrontation and shooting, it's pretty clear the anti-Juan De Oñate protestors wanted to topple the statue and very likely destroy it; they literally had a chain wrapped around the thing and people trying to pull it over, a complete idiot who didn't know how to use a pickaxe, a guy waving around a "We don't ask permission" sign, so on. There's a lot to be written on the exact tactics, here, and watching the video closely shows a lot of roles spread across this group -- actors, observers, blockers -- but ultimately the point is to achieve a public and, if symbolic, concrete goal, usually as part of an approach to freezing and making the villain a target.
But ultimately the point is that there's a procedure and politics involved in doing this sort of thing above-board, and not everyone wants to wait for that when they've got a bunch of strongarms sitting around. Either because the government doesn't actually own the piece in question, or because it's politically complex to actually hold a vote, sometimes because there isn't as much public support to take down a statue as to just not put one back up, and probably at some points to make clear that they can. Sometimes this connection to local politicians is pretty overt, and you have State Senators telling protestors to vandalize statues and telling police they can't arrest the vandals mere hours before someone gets squished by falling rocks (the police chief to file charges was placed on administrative leave immediately after, and the charges dismissed by the state). But unless someone gets hit in the head with a rock fist, most of the time they're just an undistinguished mass of manpower; not only do these groups not face serious investigation, in some cases the state or city won't even bother listing it as a crime on open data sources.
The Civil Guard morons thought this was their time to shine! The police were demonstrably not actually upholding the law or protecting people or property, and they stopped Baca and provided first aid to the man Baca shot. They probably thought they'd be thanked -- not, you know, by the protestors, but the whole general 'silent majority' who don't like deaths at protests -- right up until the guys in full-body camo slapped them straight onto the ground.
Baca thought he'd stop people from doing something he didn't want them to do, and didn't think hard enough about what each specific escalation meant, objectively, til long after he'd either grabbed someone's shoulder out of nowhere or shoved someone who shoved him. Not much fancy going on there.
The state... I don't know. The Civil Guard wants to draw the anti-Onate protestors as the state gov's brownshirts and the police's shitty response to obviously criminal behavior at protests as an attempt to produce a scenario to legally destroy the NMCG directly, but while the public records request settlement raises some eyebrows, it's still a pretty complex conspiracy theory. Hanlon's Razor has the state leaving the protestors a free leash to avoid expensive lawsuits and bad publicity from lot of concentrated political alliances, and then trying to hammer everybody not in the group after things go tango uniform, but that doesn't exactly look great either.
Dunno. It's not the best set of facts for a self-defense case and far from the most sympathetic defendant -- the point of blockers as a role is to have people counter-protestors or even police can't touch without touching the (often photogenic and sympathetic-sounding) blameless -- but New Mexico's self-defense law doesn't actually rely on "first aggressor" like the prosecutor wished, and there's a lot of reporting suggesting that the prosecution was having a hell of a time getting witness statements. But I can definitely see why he wouldn't want to roll the dice.
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