Every driver who was issued a red light camera ticket in New Miami, Ohio will be refunded after an appeals court ruled the fines to be unconstitutional.
The post VICTORY! Court Finds Red Light Camera Fines ‘Unconstitutional’—Forces City to Refund ALL Tickets appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Massachusetts may soon hold the record for the most massive single dismissal of wrongful convictions in United States history, as state prosecutors announced a breathtaking 21,587 criminal drug convictions will be thrown out.
Tens of thousands had been arrested based on testimony and evidence provided by Annie Dookhan — a former state chemist arrested in 2013 for obstruction of justice, evidence tampering, and perjury, pertaining to misconduct over the course of her nine-year tenure at a state crime lab in Boston.
Investigators remain uncertain as to Dookhan’s motivation, though colleagues believed her apparent obsession with overachieving may have meant cutting corners or even faking results. As the state’s most prolific analyst, the chemist — who pled guilty in a plea deal and served three years in prison — garnered praise from supervisors, but doubts from coworkers.
“Today is a major victory for justice and fairness, and for thousands of people in the Commonwealth who were unfairly convicted of drug offenses,” declared Matthew Segal, who assisted litigating for the Massachusetts ACLU. “Unfortunately, the victims of this crisis waited far too long for justice. It shouldn’t have taken years of litigation by the ACLU, public defenders, and pro bono lawyers to address this stain on the Commonwealth’s justice system.”
UPI reports, “The seven district attorney offices with cases affected by Dookhan’s crimes brought their lists to the state Supreme Judicial Court clerk’s office in Boston on Tuesday. The court is expected to issue an order of dismissal this week.”
Both the Massachusetts state public defender and American Civil Liberties Union explained re-trying some 24,000 individual cases pertaining to 20,000 individuals would paralyze the state’s defense bar — and, more to the point, would be inconsequential in light of the ineffectual War on Drugs.
Rather than cope with such a superfluous backlog, the Supreme Judicial Court, highest in the state, ruled Dookhan’s callous ineptitude, “government misconduct that has cast a shadow over the entire criminal justice system,” according to the Washington Post.
In the court’s opinion, Chief Justice Ralph D. Gants noted the ‘ongoing impact’ of the false convictions on the individuals’ lives — including added burdens in seeking jobs, housing, or financial aid.
District attorneys in the eight counties affected by Dookhan’s egregious mishandling received orders from the highest court in January to review pertinent reports within 90 days, in order to determine which could be feasibly retried and those which should be dropped.
Prosecutors delivered those lists to the court Tuesday.
According to UPI, the “counties involved are Bristol, Essex, Cape and Islands, Middlesex, Norfolk, Plymouth, and Suffolk. Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel Conley said in a statement that 117 of 15,570 cases will be pursued and the rest dropped; Bristol Count District Attorney Thomas Quinn III said that 112 of more than 1,500 cases involving Dookhan’s analysis would go forward; Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe said his office would prosecute one case and drop 1,067.”
In a statement, O’Keefe explained, “We are dealing with drug defendants, the overwhelming majority of whom pleaded guilty, went through an exhaustive plea colloquy with a judge and testified under oath that they were ‘pleading guilty because they were guilty and for no other reason.”
Convictions must be tossed, he added, “because we believe that the integrity of our system of justice is more important than their convictions.”
Astonishingly, Dookhan lied about her chemistry degree, forged supervisors’ initials, and admitted to performing the most perfunctory of visual tests. Investigators noted her colleagues expressed doubts about the workaholic’s performance — but those concerns were never addressed by supervisors.
“The dismissal of thousands of tainted drug lab cases rightly puts justice over results,” asserted Massachusetts Bar Association Chief Legal Counsel Martin Healey. “It is a necessary and long-overdue outcome, given our criminal justice system’s responsibility to ensure a level playing field for all, regardless of the offense.”
Attorney Daniel Marx, who represented some of those wrongfully convicted, explained a number of the ‘Dookhan defendants’ had served time in prison and experienced unnecessarily harsh repercussions in daily living thanks to the chemist’s quest to achieve.
“Now,” Marx said, “a majority of these wrongfully convicted individuals will have the opportunity to clear their records and move on with their lives.”
From zombie at zomblog
Western society is super-saturated with leftist propaganda. Politically astute non-leftists see it everywhere and complain about it incessantly — because it is ubiquitous. In fact, most of our waking hours are spent noticing, commenting upon, getting outraged by and then futilely combatting the endless, relentless leftist slant to everything in modern culture.
Every news broadcast. Every movie. Every lesson in every classroom. Every social signifier in public. Every poll. Every TV show. Every tribal shibboleth. In ways large and small, overt and covert, subtle and blatant, the society around us is infused with progressive ideals and agendas, whether you realize it or not.
And it’s not just the entire preschool-through-PhD educational system, the entire media/entertainment complex, and most interpersonal environments; increasingly, under Obama especially, the federal government itself has become an inescapable agent of coercive progressive propaganda imposed on us with the full force of the state.
But what is the purpose of all this propaganda?
The culture-wide brainwash we witness with chagrin every day is not designed to ignite a violent overthrow of the American political structure — long experience has proven that violent revolutions simply don’t happen in middle-class first-world countries. We’re too comfortable as a nation for that strategy to ever work. Instead, the ultimate goal of all this brainwashing and social intimidation is to make the general population VOTE as the Left wants us to vote.
Many of the progressives fighting (and seemingly winning) the “culture wars” may not even realize the ultimate purpose of their activism — most naively think that the goal of altering America’s social mores is merely to alter America’s social mores, and nothing beyond that. What other objective could there be?
The answer, of course, is obvious: Political change. While it is possible, I suppose, for a thoroughly left-wing society to accept being forever ruled by a conservative government, such a state of affairs never endures for long in the real world. Indeed, one of the core values at the heart of leftism (aside from the touchy-feely cultural stuff) is that the machinery of the state exists for the very purpose of imposing by force progressive ideology on the populace. So the “culture wars” can never be fully won until leftists have a firm grip on political power.
And how do you get political power in America? You don’t have a bloody revolution. Violent revolutions can only ever succeed in what were called “peasant societies” — czarist Russia, impoverished rural China, etc., where there were large populations of oppressed peasants — but never in industrialized countries, as Marx had incorrectly assumed.
Instead, in the United States of America, you gain power incrementally by winning elections. And the way you win elections is by changing the hearts and minds (and thus the voting patterns) of the hoi polloi.
The term for this process, in Marxist theory, is cultural hegemony, a phrase that was coined by communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci to describe how the political power-structure of a society is always determined by the cultural norms of that society. A conservative-minded populace will always vote for conservative-minded leaders, so the way to achieve communism in advanced nations, he argued, would be to first change the culture so that progressive ideals become dominant, and then people will simply vote themselves into communism without the need for a revolution.
And the way to change the culture, according to the theory, is to slowly infiltrate and then surreptitiously seize control of the “institutions” which shape cultural awareness — most importantly the mass media and the educational system. This process was strongly advocated by the influential leftist philosophers at the Frankfurt School, and was eventually given the catchy name “the long march through the institutions” by ’60s radical Rudi Dutschke.
So, it’s no accident, nor did it simply happen naturally, that everything in society since the 1950s seems to have shifted wildly leftward toward political correctness; it is in fact a decades-long strategic plan to change the underlying nature of society to pave the way for an eventual socialist utopia. And while part of that plan is to deny it even exists, in reality modern academia spends most of its time these days openly discussing and debating how to best implement it.
The point behind Gramscianism and “stealth communism” (as I call it) is that the revolution in the United States should not and can not be a violent revolution, but instead a quiet revolution in which the populace imposes communism on itself willingly — what Bernie Sanders correctly dubs “democratic socialism” — that is to say, by electing socialist leaders democratically.
Which brings us to the main point: The entire purpose of 60 years of slanted media and slanted news and slanted education and social pressure and brainwashing and deception and indoctrination — all of it, everything we complain about every day, all day, for years and years and years — the purpose of all this is to get people to vote for the most left-wing candidate in each presidential election. The goal is to bring about a self-imposed silent revolution in America, a democratically elected socialist government voted in by low-information rubes unaware of what they’re doing.
And it has looked ever since Obama’s ascendancy in 2008 that this long-term strategy had reached a tipping point of success from which there was no return — no conservative could ever win another presidential election. With each passing year, the population was getting younger, more radical, more brainwashed, etc. (Midterm/off-year elections are a somewhat different story, as regional conservative outposts could still elect local representatives — but on a national scale, they were greatly outnumbered by burgeoning young generations of leftists.)
The results of these decades of indoctrination was plainly visible in the college students of today, who are all so left-wing by default that they consider standard Marxism too old-fashioned and conservative. Taking this into consideration, and remembering that the adults of today were the radical students of the recent past, it had seemed that these decades of indoctrination had been resoundingly successful, and that the U.S. electorate had swung wildly to the left, never to swing back, just as the Gramscian brainwashers had been planning and implementing for the last 50 or more years.
And then November 8, 2016 happened, and BOOM: It was all revealed to be a lie. Not only did the indoctrination fail, but the general impression that the relentless indoctrination had always been successful was itself a gigantic meta-deception.
All the chatter and statistics and talk show “experts” proclaiming that America had forever swung Democratic? ALL LIES.
All the slanted polls, which were intended to convince everyone that Hillary was inevitable? ALL LIES.
The derision of Trump as a ludicrous fringe candidate and his supporters as wild-eyed extremists? ALL LIES.
And it’s not just that they were all lies — they were lies that had no effect. Somehow, without anyone noticing, a majority of the American populace had evolved a new immunity to progressive disinformation.
It doesn’t even matter what Trump’s actual political beliefs are or what his policies will be. All that matters is that he was the media’s Designated Enemy and yet he won.
This election didn’t merely expose the failure of six months of campaigning by the Democratic Party. This election exposed the failure of SIX DECADES of leftist propaganda to have any cumulative effect at all.
Read more here: zombietime.com
(The comments on this website are good as well.)
After what appeared to be a refusal to concede late last night (via John Podesta), followed by Trump’s victory speech, in which he referred to a concession call by his opponent, Hillary Clinton finally issued her concession speech at around 11:30 AM Eastern time.
The tone was clearly bitter, though it was cloaked in the hopeful language of continued efforts.
After questions about whether or not Donald Trump would have the wherewithal to admit defeat and accept election results, it turned out to be Hillary who had apparent difficulty in giving up.
But reality set in, and she went on stage, albeit more than an hour after she was scheduled to do so, to admit her loss.
She played to what might have been her largest and most enthusiastic crowd to date on the 2016 campaign trail.
Partial transcript:
Thank you so very much for being here. I love you all, too. Last night I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country.
I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans. This is not the outcome we wanted or we worked so hard for, and I’m sorry we did not win this election for the values we share and the vision we hold for our country.
But I feel pride and gratitude for this wonderful campaign that we built together. This vast diverse creative unruly energized campaign. You represent the best of America and being your candidate has been one of the greatest honors of my life.
I know how disappointed you feel because I feel it, too. And so do tens of millions of Americans who invested their hopes and dreams in this effort. This is painful, and it will be for a long time. But I want you to remember this.
Our campaign was never about one person, or even one election. It was about the country we love and building an America that is hopeful, inclusive, and big-hearted. We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America, and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power.
[…]
To anyone that sent contributions, even as small as $5, that kept us going, thank you. To all of us, and to the young people in particular, I hope you will hear this — I have, as Tim said, I have spent my entire life fighting for what I believe in.
I’ve had successes and setbacks and sometimes painful ones. Many of you are at the beginning of your professional, public, and political careers — you will have successes and setbacks too.
This loss hurts, but please never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it.
[…]
And so we need — we need you to keep up these fights now and for the rest of your lives. And to all the women, and especially the young women, who put their faith in this campaign and in me: I want you to know that nothing has made me prouder than to be your champion.
Now, I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but someday someone will — and hopefully sooner than we might think right now. [Cheers and applause]
And to all of the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams. [Cheers and applause]
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Author: Mac Slavo
Views: Read by 900 people
Date: November 9th, 2016
Website: www.SHTFplan.com
Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.
