Tar and feathers
Because, you know, at a fair trial details like the .gov, at best, acting irresponsibly or, at worst, breaking the law isn’t something people should know about. Or that it, you know, kinda helped facilitate a murder.
Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.
Uncle Pays the Bills
 |
|
Find Local
|
Categories
- ATF (769)
- Death Match (10)
- Eminent Domain (225)
- In the bag (9)
- Notes to Junior (546)
- Poker (74)
- Recipes (142)
- Shotgun Noob (11)
- The Airing of Grievances (19)
- uncategorized (47,725)
September 20th, 2015 at 8:31 pm
I’m not too bothered by this. Nothing said at trial regarding the provenance of the murder weapons will bring the ATF bureaucrats responsible to justice. On the other hand, blaming the government might make it easier for the murderers beat the charges.
As a matter of principle, it would be great to see our courts make more of an effort toward transparency. As a matter of practicality, I’ll settle for seeing the murderers get put away.
September 21st, 2015 at 12:35 am
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if Cook County, who is bringing this prosecution for murder against my client, had reasonable gun control, he never would have been able to get his hands on the gun which killed Officer Smith. Put the responsibility where it lies. On the peddlers of death, their NRA lobbyists, and their bought and paid for politicians, who put guns in the hands of our innocent children.”
The judge’s ruling is correct. How these scags got the guns is irrelevant as to their guilt or innocence. The scags who gave them the guns are a separate case.
September 21st, 2015 at 7:44 am
I share your outrage about the Fast and Furious coverup, but the judge’s ruling is probably correct.
The issue at trial is, “Did the defendants unlawfully kill Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry?” Where they got their guns is irrelevant, just as it would be if they got them by burglarizing your car.
This is a trial, not a debate. The only reason for the defense to bring up Fast and Furious would be to try to create reasonable doubt. If they can convince one or more jurors that the government either conspired with the defendants to murder BPA Terry, or conspired to frame the defendants for it, the result will be either a mistrial or an outright acquittal.
September 21st, 2015 at 10:30 am
What others have said. How they got the murder weapons would only be relevant if there was some issue with proving possession, or if they were trying to prove it was a “murder for hire” by the ATF. Otherwise, whether the guns came from the ATF or a private sale at a gun show is entirely irrelevant to whether or not they actually killed him.
September 21st, 2015 at 10:41 am
Are the defendants charged only with murder? Are there not associated charges of illegally obtaining a firearm?
Oh, wait, there was no tracking of the firearms past the US border by the ATF, and the Mexican government was not informed of the project, so they didn’t track the firearms either. So there is no way to prove in a court of law that anything illegal happened with those guns before they were used to kill someone.
The judge’s ruling is indeed correct. But for all the wrong political reasons.
September 21st, 2015 at 1:15 pm
Illegal possession, possibly. But the actual obtaining probably occurred on the other side of the border, and subject to Mexican law instead of US law.
Of course, with no way to figure out where the guns went after ATF “lost” them, it would be nearly impossible to prosecute even if it happened here.
September 21st, 2015 at 3:41 pm
However, I am surprised that a judge would deny the defense of the opportunity to use it in defending their clients. (From the link).
Well, how is it helping their defense?
It doesn’t seem like it actually, well, justifies their actions in any possible way, under the law.
As Jake and the other say, “where the guns came from” or “what the ATF was doing moving guns” is irrelevant to this murder trial.
Letting it be brought up might actually make for a mistrial, or a successful appeal if someone decides later that the irrelevant information swayed a jury to convict.
September 21st, 2015 at 4:39 pm
>As Jake and the other say, “where the guns came from” or “what the ATF was doing moving guns” is irrelevant to this murder trial.
I’ll actually agree with that.
The part that bothers me is that this makes the trial much, much less of an “inquiry into the truth” of what happens and much more like finding 15 or so completely ignorant people, and stuffing them in to a courtroom and feeding a carefully crafted story guided by a narrow set of rules, in order to get a verdict that the prosecution desires.
We don’t have a justice system, and allowing government people to be cross examined about fast and furious is not in the governments interest.
September 22nd, 2015 at 8:33 am
Mr. or Ms. Mischief:
A criminal trial has a very narrow issue: Did the defendant(s) do what the prosecution says he/they did?
The jury is not being “fed” a “carefully crafted story.” The defense can still raise any relevant defense; it just can’t raise completely irrelevant issues with the goal of causing a mistrial or a reversible error.
“Inquir[ies] into the truth” are done by grand juries, not trial juries. I’d like to see a grand jury investigation of Fast and Furious, but a murder trial is not the place for it.
September 25th, 2015 at 3:07 pm
” Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means—to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal—would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this Court should resolutely set its face.” –Louis Brandeis, SCOTUS Justice, Olmstead v.United States, 1928, dissenting opinion