I’m sorry this isn’t quite what you wanted us to focus and comment upon, but I did want to express my appreciation for you bringing up the Chauvin/Floyd theater (whether it happened or not, it was theatrical).
I remember the first time I saw the video, I thought “I can’t see anything definitively” and withheld judgement, and looked around in wonder at how people who previously seemed so smart, or loving, were suddenly so...stupid, blind, or unfathomably hateful. The 20th time I was forced to watch it if I were online at all (I don’t own a TV), I remember wondering if there were ever a Chauvin family who’d had a son named Derek, who’d been a bar bouncer and then a cop...and if Floyd were even dead, or even had ever been real, or if they created his name and his character, complete with a violent rap-sheet, just to troll America as idiots who defended a man who destroyed more than he contributed--defended a destroyer with additional destruction.
Sometimes when I consider all the details and nuances of any given situation, especially headlines, which often include what feels like intentional allusions to red-pilled realities, I feel more trolled than anything else, by TPTB. They’re having fun at the expense of the blue-pilled more than the red-pilled. I wonder if they almost have some respect for red-pilled people, who work to defend what is good, pure, or at least truth (even as they seek to kill them), but consider the blue-pilled fair game for a different kind of sport--as a type of fodder.
The CPS initially chose not to prosecute the officer, and the director of the CPS who took this decision was none other than the current Labour leader, Keir Starmer. Didn't exactly cover himself with glory on this one...
My main takeaway is not whether Chavin was technically murdered or not, just that can we expect law enforcement to use a reasonable degree of common sense at all times? I don't agree with defunding the police but their training surely should be improved and maybe cultivate a sense of empathy?
But how can anyone be reasonable always? If you look at the full sequence of events, what is really happening is that Chauvin chooses a stance - 'ignore this mentally disturbed MMA fighter or kickboxer or whatever who is wrongly asserting that I am choking anyone' - that is reasonable for a short period, at a moment when he expected an ambulance to only be a minute or two away. So when the ambulance doesn't come he's in sunk cost and "would look silly to back down now" mode. And by the time Floyd is perceived as being in distress, again this is minutes after the ambulance should have already arrived, I would say he's probably already in CYA mode. So you have this highly improbable and convoluted situation, the stuff of on-stage-with-no-pants-nightmares, is more training going to fix that, maybe / maybe not. How do you train officers for totally unforeseen ridiculous scenarios where they now have an antagonistic relationship to the state and have to decide how to appear to have not understood that something wrong had happened. Additionally, deescalation is intrinsically subjective. You can build an algorithm (matrix of force) for escalation and train that, but you can't just tell officers "and as soon as you have someone in cuffs, take them out of the cuffs to make sure they are safe," so it's all really just CYA on the state's part that deescalation is part of the training at all.
Aug 29, 2023·edited Aug 29, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
I'm aware that the entire video tells a bit of a different story, but what seems to happen in these situations is the ego of the law enforcer gets too involved, the 'red mist' descends and it gets personal, then de-escalation is completely forgotten in the effort to defend ego (and eg old man gets pushed over as in video above).
Difficult to really assess in a training classroom but if it's a consistent problem in service then maybe the law enforcer isn't well suited to front line duty without more intensive training.
Maybe a way round it is to ask another law enforcer to take over _if possible_; if after a couple of minutes Chauvin asked a collegue to take over, perhaps he would be a free man right now?
RE delegating, probably. 50 seconds after the crowd becomes noticeably aggressive either Kueng or Lane propose rolling Floyd over, also this is 10 seconds before last vocalization by Floyd, so he would be alive maybe. Chauvin's reply, "It's fine we got an ambulance coming." Again, unknowingly entering into the "weird to back down" phase.
When the ambulance loads Floyd, it doesn't go to the hospital. It also doesn't stay in place. It literally drives a few blocks away and stops to begin CPR etc. Just to get away from that crowd. Chauvin doesn't have a way to do "just get away from the crowd" -- or rather, in fact waiting for the ambulance and looking awkward is doing that.
Aug 29, 2023·edited Aug 29, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
I've learnt that letting other people take over sometimes means you can then learn something new from their approach. Its tempting to want to prove yourself in a difficult situation, and to do things the particular way you want them to, but that can reflect ego involvement, again.
On the other hand in some group situations it's harder to do the right thing if that means being the odd one out, and over time this can lead to institutionalisation. I don't think it was such an issue in the George Floyd death but was definitely a factor in that video of the elderly protestor getting pushed over. It was pretty incredible that none of the riot police stopped to help him, but if an elderly man fell over in the street while they were off duty, would they react the same way?
I agree with you Brian that prisons are a cancer. I lean more towards the 'thief loses a hand', 'killer loses his life' system of justice. I can roughly understand the theory of incarceration as denying access to society to someone who misuses his liberty but the idea of essentially taking time, having them pay in lifeyears seems very indirect and poorly thought out.
My big philosophical problem with any of these ideas is that it views the injustice exclusively as an injustice against society and restricts the right of redress to the state, essentially endorsing the idea that we are all serfs or property of some kind. It might be fair to say that those who have the right to take vengeance for you are the ones who have a legitimate interest in your life. I don't know what the argument that excludes family and friends from taking vengeance is, save that personal vengeance is scary and we would be better to trust our friends in the government.
This is a very important fundamental sort of issue as the sort of minimum duty of any government is to provide justice and it is the absolute failure of our current government to provide justice that makes them utterly illegitimate and the 'social contract' broken.
As in a comment below I will bring up Rabbinical Courts as a good alternate model, so people aren't involving the state for every dispute, or in some cases they do both, or go to multiple courts (as I understand it), essentially shopping around different spheres of justice until things are as worked out as they are going to be. Another interesting model is Southeastern Indian annual renewals coinciding with the late summer (Green Corn Dance) as described by James Wilson in "Earth Shall Weep" (p140). Four-eight days of cleaning, bathing in rivers, purging old junk, and then declaring that individual rifts and transgressions except murder were all pardoned. Of course you wouldn't want that if you have millions of people in prisons, instead it might make sense with a transition to pre-industrial justice, stocks and flogging etc. People could be pariahs for their crimes until a ritual party gives everyone a fresh start.
That's a neat idea. Or the Old Testament 'cities of refuge' model, essentially an appeals court that if they are convinced enough of your innocence to let you live among them you can't be pursued.(and any vengeance becomes invalid when the current High Priest died IIRC)
The state's 'monopoly on violence' coincides fairly well with the rise of modern warfare and genocide. The concentration of violence is sort of Phase 2 of the concentration of capital. I would guess from the way things are going now that the concentration of knowledge is Phase 3. I doubt that we will be on this road long enough to find out what Phase 4 would be. The Defund the Police crowd almost seem like a deliberate distraction to get thinking people to defend some of the state's most egregious abuses, a parody of the people's legitimate cry for the justice that we have all been denied.
I suppose monopoly on violence and "the state" (as opposed to church or crown) becomes more visible after feudal system is replaced by capitalist one, but it's also visible in Rome. Perhaps necessary feature of cities, later suburbs. I would pin modern warfare / genocide more to advent of cartridges, which for whatever reason isn't treated as an important distinction between the musket and rifle era, but it is what allowed people to essentially "manufacture potential death" in the factory to any scale they wanted, which could then be taken anywhere a small calvary. So modern states have this new available machinery that makes it seem like they can exert their state-ness over foreign rural areas, it only works so-so. And then you scale manufacturing up enough and now the state can't do anything because the guerrillas all have AKs.
Was Defund the Police meant to rouse a backlash, I dunno. It certainly hasn't resulted in much male recruitment for police departments. Personally living in California, where essentially the police are already relatively defunded (officer per capita here is like if you fired 90+% of the NYPD) has totally rewired my attitude about policing. So if someone really wanted a backlash "they" would probably have let the defund thing be more successful.
Earlier governments simply didn't subscribe to the 'monopoly on violence'. Augustus signed bills encouraging honor killings for instance in a world where justice was generally executed by family members and the government only intervened if it sort of got out of hand. Even the monopoly on warfare is a recent and very unevenly applied innovation. Most of the world still functions on militias with often very loose ties to the state.
Certainly urban areas have always seemed to require more government intervention but even there regular policing doesn't seem to appear before the 1800's. There is a genuine need for policing in our society, but I would argue that that is because modern society is so poorly run and designed. 'Defund the police' would actually be the response of a traditionalist but I would say that as long as our heads remain up our asses about so many other things they are probably necessary.
Centralized justice is a modern experiment and seems to be a failure from where I am standing. Modernity comes with some costs and some benefits, but the balance no longer seems nearly as clear as it once did. The state has made a lot of promises that it can't keep and their 'justice deficit' is far more serious than their budget deficit.
Hm... but the magistrates and lictors with their fasces must have found something to do with their time... This is still a nice example of a pre-industrial mode of justice, because everything was resolved instantaneously. But yes I think that in practice it could not have truly been a monopoly on violence/justice especially when you take slave justice into account. There were all sorts of funny rules for that, slave testimony was only considered valid if obtained via torture etc., haha.
I think to a certain extent the problem stems from everyone being plugged into highly productive, complex but stationary economic systems. Any basic economic activity today besides homesteading is as elaborate and infrastructure-dependent as running rail post used to be. Retail has a footprint that both reflects this extreme productivity and makes it tangible for crime. There's no information asymmetry, the wealth of society resides in clearly labeled stores and anywhere people are gathered (i.e. wallets and phones). There isn't really a free pass out of this problem besides police, just like you can't put flame to dry grass without a fire.
What If: A system develops where a person or legally defined person (corp) can purchase/earn criminal footprint credits the same way you can purchase carbon credits. In this manner, a person/corporation could offset their crimes economically. It’s reminiscent of our already flawed version of capitalism. And in a sense, it’s similar to a criminal justice system that operates more like FTC/SEC regulations and penalties.
Best I can do at 4:33am. But thank you, Brian, for such a thought-provoking piece!
I wouldn't call it dystopic. It would essentially be the same as what prevails now. Rich people just pay lawyers to overcome the fact that jury ignorance voids the intended cautious design of our justice system - the burden of proof is always trivially easy for the state to make juries incorrectly believe it has met. "Here's a person in suit that says this guy bad." Guilty.
This all goes back to epistemic helplessness, everyone outsourcing their understanding of the world to experts, so it's been a problem in the justice system from the beginning of forensics as a state technology. Jefferson wrote, "with us, the people (by which is meant the mass of individuals composing the society) being competent to judge of the facts occurring in ordinary life, they have retained the functions of judges of facts, under the name of jurors" - but forensics and pathology are used in trials today and obviously jurors can't appraise this kind of evidence. It's totally different. Interestingly the 1641 Body of Liberties of Massachusetts had specific provisions for when evidence is beyond lay understanding. If a jury felt unsure and then their proposed verdict didn't match bench's proposed verdict then trial instantly went to higher court.
Wow, thank you for taking the time for such thoughtful feedback!
I said to a teammate at dinner tonight that I’m starting to think that the Constitution is the Law, and lawyers often behave as though their job is to circumvent the Constitution. (Obviously not a hardline rule.)
"I simply cannot take the idea that Derek Chauvin murdered anyone seriously"
Derek Chauvin's actions towards George Floyd were felonious. There is no doubt on this point.
Derek Chauvin's kneeling on George Floyd's neck was an inherently dangerous move. No, it does not necessarily obstruct the airway, but it does have the potential to disrupt blood flow to the brain.
Derek Chauvin had George Floyd manacled with his hands behind his back and on his stomach, in blatant contradiction of protocols promulgated in 1995 for law enforcement when handling manacled suspects--Chauvin ignored a quarter century of police protocol in his handling of George Floyd.
During this, George Floyd died. Within Minnesota law, that makes Derek Chauvin culpable for George Floyd's death. Yes, there was a lethal concoction of drugs in George Floyd's system and arguably he would have died anyway, but that is beside the point. If Chauvin's actions shortened George Floyd's death by as much as a nanosecond, legally he carries some culpability for that death.
Chauvin was initially charged with 3rd degree murder. Minnesota is one of the few states with a 3rd degree murder charge (the norm is 1st degree, which involves premeditation, and 2nd degree, which requires only intent, and all other homicides become classified as "manslaughter"), for which the burden of proof is limited to showing that Chauvin's actions played a role in George Floyd's death and that they showed a reckless disregard (also known as depraved indifference) to that death. Chauvin ultimately was convicted of second degree murder.
While is is plausible to debate the justice of charging Chauvin with 2nd degree murder over 3rd degree murder, the video footage alone is ample evidence to convict for 3rd degree murder under Minnesota law.
Beyond the propriety of the 2nd degree vs the 3rd degree murder charge itself, the facts even at the time established beyond a reasonable doubt that, according to the facts and the law, Derek Chauvin did indeed "murder" George Floyd.
Pressure to the back of the neck is not going to restrict blood-flow to the brain, and Kueng and Lane's body cam footage make it apparent that the knee was on the trapezius anyway. It was established by the MPD's own use of force witnesses, Yang (crisis intervention training designer) and Mercil (defensive tactics instructor) that Floyd was not in a chokehold and nothing was off-training about the use of a prone restraint with "knee to shoulder and base of neck," nor using body weight restraints "after cuffing." Chauvin was established as on-policy and on-training in placing the restraint, and the state's experts gave six different opinions about when maintaining the hold became "unreasonable," demonstrating that deescalation is a totally subjective question with no policy-definable answer, not fit for passing any reasonable doubt standard.
I've watched the entire video and a video shot from another angle. In the first video, Floyd sat down on the ground and started complaining that he couldn't breathe some thirty minutes before the cops rolled him over on his stomach and restrained him. In the second video, it appears that Chauvin was kneeling on his shoulder and not his neck. I also read the autopsy report. There were no injuries to his neck, spine or shoulder. There was, however, enough fentanyl in his system to kill him.
I wouldn't bring up the knee location except that I don't buy that it's that high up. At best it's unclear, and Mercil (MPD defensive tactics instructor) opined on cross that it is on shoulder blade, with shin also contacting shoulder which suggests knee isn't pressing down much https://www.youtube.com/live/RNBjkQ5x_p8?si=w9nxhXfj9SpNjO3D&t=8296
And, trapezius, neck, none of it is going to arrest blood-flow from just one side. Humans have some unfortunate evolutionary flaws but this isn't one of them.
*eta: Let's be clear, the state did not even claim that Floyd died because of blood-flow restriction. They brought in a quack to invent a totally imaginary theory of how someone can be asphyxiated from this type of one-sided pressure to the neck. Then they accidentally asked the same expert if there were actually any studies that supported this claim. Any reader can see for themselves what the conviction was actually based on https://www.youtube.com/live/S0GVL8omNB8?si=ikp5udJUJLdWcFO2&t=5328
Again. I have seen the video. Knee was not on the shoulder blade. It was not on the trapezius. It was right below the ear, which puts it in the general vicinity of the carotid artery, with some lateral pressure potentially being exerted on the jugular.
Press the carotid artery, which Derek Chauvin did do (the video footage leaves no real doubt on this point), and blood flow to the brain does get disrupted.
Which makes Floyd's death third degree murder at the very least, under Minnesota law.
The technical term would be positional asphyxia, and can occur when a combination of compressive pressure on the chest and torso as well as compression of the neck combine to restrict oxygen flow to the brain.
Pressure on the carotid/neck while being manacled face down in the prone position with hands behind the back would produce all the necessary compressive forces to produce positional asphyxia.
Chauvin spent 9 minutes with his knee on a guy's neck and then, coincidentally, the guy died. 2 autopsies and an autopsy review found that Floyd's cause of death was homicide.
Floyd was a total piece of shit, but you don't get murder people just because they're garbage people. You have to arrest them and they get a trial.
The second graph is irrelevant to the question of cause of death, as well as murder/manslaughter distinction in the case that cause of death were really a magic knee (murder requires intent, which is impossible to support since EMT should have arrived when Floyd was still vocal, therefore the officers called EMT and escalated to Code 3 too early (before the bystander video even begins) if they "intended" to kill). But even if true, doesn't explain why police should be imprisoned for such an act of "misconduct" (as deemed by media, politicians, hired experts who say whatever the state wants them to, and uninformed citizens) in light of incentive problems, theoretical justice problems, etc.
Chauvin's knee was not on Floyd's neck, and his weight usually doesn't seem to be on his knee, both are clear from body-cam footage of Kueng and Lane, the weight thing is also evident from the bystander video. To press down on one knee would have upset the other knee and since that was over the back and upper arm, Floyd wouldn't have been restrained very well. It is not possible to restrict air or blood-flow from putting even full body weight on the back of the neck or trapezius, otherwise the five shoulder stands I just did would have knocked me out. Autopsies are not able to accurately diagnose asphyxiation in the absence of bruising, and there was none, so the result of the autopsies were medical fantasy. There simply isn't any actual possible basis for the conclusion. This is why after it was established by the state's own witnesses that Chauvin et al. applied a prone restraint, not a chokehold, Tobin was brought in to narrate a complete biological fabrication, literally a brand new theory of how breathing works in which a position that allows you to yell loudly for minutes on end somehow is depleting you of air, it just takes all those extra minutes to build up the invisible "airlessness" that isn't stopping the yelling. This was never plausible because Floyd could vocalize, which meant he could breathe. Everything that happened after he stopped vocalizing was in response to the crowd and not relevant to the cause of death except in failure to provide medical attention (again, because of the crowd).
I barely concerned myself with this case so you could easily be right but to be clear, are you saying he died from an OD, the timing of having a cop on his neck for 9 minutes during his OD was coincidence, the autopsies we're all faked, and Chauvin pled guilty because... Why? If everything you're saying is not only accurate but obvious and incontrovertible then why did he go to prison? I know the court system is corrupt, the government is corrupt, and the media is corrupt but if the facts of the case are really as clear as you present them then all of that should have come out in court and he shouldn't be in prison
Fentanyl is an anesthetic. You cannot take anesthetics and then pass out with your head turned to the side. You will die. Think of all the clinicians that are present when you have surgery. They are not there because anesthetics are safe. So this is why Floyd died, it was apnea, relaxation of airway muscles. For whatever reason this is barely (realllllly barely) acknowledged in medical and media discussion of why fentanyl is so deadly.
I must repeat myself on the autopsies. It is not a question of elusively-defined fraud. Either there is bruising or there is no evidence for strangulation and homicide. Human bodies all stop breathing when they die, there *is no way* besides bruising to infer strangulation/homicide physically from "here's a dead body, look it's not breathing." It was fabrication.
Pleading guilty to a Federal 18 U.S. Code § 242 doesn't mean pleading guilty to murder. In fact 18 U.S. Code § 242 is a total kangaroo court generator script. It just means the Federal government can imprison or kill state agents for wrongthink. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/242
Why did he go down in the state murder case -- there is no apt word here except evil, and the principle agent of the evil was judge Cahill, same one who just chided officer Thao for citing religion instead of groveling. He whiffed over and over again on valid motions to dismiss. The worst was when it was revealed that the state withheld blood saturation readings from the defense, leading their expert witness to commit an unnecessary error that the state then paraded in front of the jury. This was all in public. The whole thing streamed.
Second degree murder can require intent, although in Minnesota law there are exceptions where intent is not a necessary element of the crime (Minnesota Statutes §609.19)
Third degree murder (Minnesota statutes §609.195) only requires depraved indifference:
"(a) Whoever, without intent to effect the death of any person, causes the death of another by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life, is guilty of murder in the third degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 25 years."
Kneeling on a person's neck is an act eminently dangerous to others, and doing so for nine minutes makes a pretty good case for "evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life."
Basically, Derek Chauvin didn't give a damn, and by not giving a damn, he committed third degree murder at the very least.
There is room to debate the propriety of the 2nd degree murder charge of which Chauvin was convicted. Certainly the video footage itself does not establish intent to kill George Floyd.
The timely call for emergency medical services is the entire proof of the absence of indifference to human life. It is possible to argue that he exercised bad judgment or poor technique but taking action to save Floyd's life is incontestable proof that he was not indifferent to that life.
What I find mystifying is why he crashes into my comments with this obviously and insultingly lawyerly, inauthentic argument for why a given person deserves to be imprisoned for Magic Knee Strangulation, and then gets affronted when I refuse to oil his balls and pat him on the back.
Intent is still absolutely required for second degree. Chauvin would have to have intended great bodily harm, this is impossible since he is executing training that was never labeled "cause great bodily harm pose."
Third degree, same thing, Chauvin would have to have had knowledge that restraint would likely kill Floyd. This is impossible because you can't kill physically sound adult men with that restraint (obviously you can kill weak and obese people with any restraint, though it isn't ever "likely"). *eta: I'll rephrase here. There is nothing about interpreting staying in a restraint too long as Murder 3 that wouldn't also define all police activity that leads to death as Murder 3, because you are using "eminently dangerous" as the standard.
Whoever does either of the following is guilty of unintentional murder in the second degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 40 years:
(1) causes the death of a human being, without intent to effect the death of any person, while committing or attempting to commit a felony offense other than criminal sexual conduct in the first or second degree with force or violence or a drive-by shooting; or
(2) causes the death of a human being without intent to effect the death of any person, while intentionally inflicting or attempting to inflict bodily harm upon the victim, when the perpetrator is restrained under an order for protection and the victim is a person designated to receive protection under the order. As used in this clause, "order for protection" includes an order for protection issued under chapter 518B; a harassment restraining order issued under section 609.748; a court order setting conditions of pretrial release or conditions of a criminal sentence or juvenile court disposition; a restraining order issued in a marriage dissolution action; and any order issued by a court of another state or of the United States that is similar to any of these orders."
Intent is not a requirement at all for third degree murder under Minnesota law. I've already quoted the relevant text of the statute. In Minnesota, depraved indifference is the threshold for third degree murder. Says so explicitly in the statute.
In every criminal proceeding, the statutes are the definition of the crime and describe the requisite elements of the crime. Insofar as the courts are concerned, the statute is the only definition of the crime that matters.
Is your claim that Chauvin restrained Floyd in furtherance of some other felony or that Floyd had a protective under against Chauvin? None of this is relevant.
The key word in the 3rd degree statute is depraved. There is no evidence of depravity even if you were to argue that there is evidence of indifference. He executed a maneuver which he had been trained on and instructed that this was a legitimate non-lethal restraint. He had no reason to believe that this restraint would cause death hence there is no depravity.
Fine, I mixed it up from my notes of the interpretations explained in the trial.
All of the charges fall apart for the reason I have explained, prone restraint can not arguably be *expected* to be harmful. You just disagree with that fact. But it's a fact. Being a risk of harm isn't the same as being expectably harmful. And it *wasn't* harmful, it didn't restrict air, it didn't restrict blood, it was just a knee. The biology and medical knowledge are not unclear here.
The DOJ has been telling law enforcement agencies since 1995 that prone restraint IS harmful. The expectation of harm is therefore a given, not a point of contention.
It may be profoundly interesting that things went the way of defund the police rather than prison abolition or punitive reform... I mean as far as my extended family goes it's been from parent's generation growing up on the farm and then going to work at the ford plant to their children working at a prison, so the transition from the manufacturing industry to the carceral industry may be factor. But if american prison wasn't insane and didn't actually reinforce and escalate violent patterns and commerce... then the police might end up defunding themselves. As it is we basically do live in a kind of Australia.
It's a basic human right, perhaps even the most basic right offered by the state, to have your murderer prosecuted; this is supposed to provide some deterrent. It is indeed somewhat of a side-splitter to imagine a murderer, being deterred by the idea that the state would refuse to prosecute their killer.
It makes more sense conceptionally in a classical context when you can actually banish people physically. And this is another obvious alternative to prisons, but logistically difficult, which is to just designate some part of a nation's geography to being Australia, a land for outcast criminals and the Irish.
Aug 28, 2023·edited Aug 28, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
Hey, that’s not fair. 😀
Australia only became the next best penal colony due to the American Revolution. The Brits had nowhere else suitable to transport their “undesirables” after you guys ruined their business model so they had to find somewhere else to send them. Incarnation of undesirables looks to have always been “good business”.
An interesting problem I have been mulling is how England and America both became more tame after they ran out of colonies and frontiers for hardy men and women to adventure in. Of course this wasn't instant, you had the Bonnie and Clyde era of lawlessness. But it still seems like losing the escape valve had the long term effect of taming the Anglo race, making them totally docile to the state.
Aug 27, 2023·edited Aug 27, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
There probably isn't a solution which isn't fraught and dehumanizing. You could go Clockwork Orange, but that kind of conditioning is itself a dangerous insertion of the state into the human mind, as we'll see when it is applied to purely political prisoners. Or criminal shock technology, which detects the biometrics of violence and sends drones to interfere. Great idea, until it is used for more general population control.
Doing nothing at all might be a better idea. How many murders are to cover up another murder? How many are to cover some other crime?
Does the prospect of punishment even often factor into the decision to violate the most fundamental dictate of human society?
The question of prison-incentivized (or justice-incentivized) murders is probably most relevant for mafias and gangs, where so much killing or threat of killing is designed to compensate for the fact that 99% of the community knows you are a criminal.
But really, I don't want to sound like a sociopath, but rather just able to use antisocial thinking, if there were no punishment for murder, I don't see why any reasonable person shouldn't just kill strangers and take stuff they want all the time. That way they will have the stuff, and still feel satisfaction at having worked to acquire it, just not in the extremely complicated and rigged ways offered by society. Stuff is nice. So in the Wild West the problem wasn't "too much justice," people just responded rationally to shortage of stuff and law.
9/11: two "planes", yet the third tower (WTC7) imploded like in a controlled demolition. It was out of reach and all 7 World Trade Center towers destroyed, not the closer towers not belonging to World Trade Center... and the owner, with his 2 grown up siblings, failed to show up for work (never skipped work before)… by the way, he first took an insurance policy for the WTC against terrorism, just months before, when no one was taking them. The inside information about the FUTURE 9/11 event helped masons make trillions by shorting the stock exchange: the records were deleted by the SEC so they wouldn't be prosecuted !!!:
Why is 9/11 called a Pearl Harbor event? Both Churchill and Roosevelt were masons and plotted to get the reluctant USA into the war by provoking the Japs and letting Pearl Harbor (left the whole fleet defenseless and concentrated there as an easy candy to be taken from a kid, no radar warning from outer islands, etc.) and MUCH MORE:
Please read and watch all of this! Your life depends on it, because there's a plan to murder 95% of the global population by 2050… written on the masonic Georgia guide-stones: “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 … ”
- J6: The fake riot was mason-planned, incited and guided by FBI agents, who broke into the Capitol !!! The same mason-plot was copy-pasted to disband the insurrection against the stolen elections in Brazil! All intel agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA) were founded by masons and are run by them for their own nefarious goals.
- At least since the 90s, vaccines are weaponized to reduce the population, for example:
1. Adding hCG to infertilize women: lab detected in 30 countries
2. Overpassing the FDA 10 ng limit to human DNA “contamination” by 2000%, thus causing neuro-damage (autism, asperger, tics, dyslexia in 29% of kids, etc.) and childhood cancer epidemic (n.b. leukemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas)
- It’s the masons, who create counterfeited currencies (trillions of dollars and EUROS) and bought the listed corporations, media, healthcare, universities, parties and political careers:
Pllllleeeeease, on my knees, don’t believe me, just do your own homework by searching the following in yandex.com, mojeek.com (includes crawl date filter and substack search), gigablast.com, startpage.com, duckduckgo.com (not Google, Bing, Yahoo censors). The key terms to test them? Child Satanic Ritual Abuse, Child Satanic Ritual Murder.
If you are a mason or know a mason, ask him to ask his 33° master to put in writing and sign it, who is "the great architect" and that he is not Lucifer. If he refuses, then he’ll know who he is really serving, Satan: tell him to get out of masonry NOW. Sooner or later he’ll be required to trample on a cross to get to a higher degree.
President John Quincy Adams: “Masonry ought forever to be abolished. It is wrong - essentially wrong - a seed of evil, which can never produce any good.”
Confessions of a former mason (Serge Abad-Gallardo):
The best way to have a real dialogue about vaccines being weaponized to handicap, infertilize and murder the “over-population” is to start with vaccine contamination: nobody could be in favor of contaminated pharmaceuticals.
1. Carcinogen SV40 in Oral Polio Vaccine: they knew it since the 60s but kept distributing it even until 2016 !!!
2. hCG in vaccines to infertilize women detected since the 90s: still going on
3. Thimerosal, aluminum, Mono-sodium Glutamate (MSG) and other NEUROTOXINS
4. Heavy metals
5. Human DNA 2000% in excess of FDA 10 ng limit (main driver towards brain damage like autism/asperger/ticks, leukemia and non-Hodgkin cancer), probably related to point 7 below.
6. Graphene oxide in Flu and COVID shots but now with anything injectable (even dentist anesthesia, hospital IV, etc.).
7. Carcinogenic SV40 genomic sequences and double-stranded DNA in mRNA COVID shots: the hacked DNA in the cell doesn’t stop producing the poison when the cell dies, but its descent continue the poisoning until the haccinated casualty dies.
8. Bluetooth nano-routers injected with COVID vaccines and inserted with swabs (which explains why they rejected the cheaper non-invasive saliva test).
Proof of criminal intent:
Points 7 and 8
Censoring and blocking 30+ COVID cures
Labeling the most lethal batches with a lethal code (howbad.info)
Blocking the real knowledge of effectiveness v. "adverse event" rate
That proves:
A. There's zero Government control
B. There's zero Manufacturer liability
C. There's zero Media coverage
D. All that, during decades and still going on, not only with vaccines but also with medicines, food&beverage additives, etc. Everything, even institutions have been weaponized!
E. There's zero political action to stop that (except RFK2 in the USA)
A school buddy told me "I know you make sense but if I recognize it's true, I won't be able to enjoy life anymore".
Change goes in hand with the number of awakened! Thank you for sharing this to save lives!
PS I'm sorry I'm linking to my own substack. It’s not self-promotion: I couldn’t find better links but if you find anything better, I'd be glad to replace.
How would that work for homeless, and does that mean other people who live in the designated home of particular criminals are being forced by the state to live with them? Are landlords forced to keep renting to anyone serving time as long as they pay, or even if they don't? It would probably be messy, like turning all criminal law into civil/family law. If so, it would probably be better handled by informal courts that serve as optional alternates to the formal system, similar to rabbinical courts.
I’m sorry this isn’t quite what you wanted us to focus and comment upon, but I did want to express my appreciation for you bringing up the Chauvin/Floyd theater (whether it happened or not, it was theatrical).
I remember the first time I saw the video, I thought “I can’t see anything definitively” and withheld judgement, and looked around in wonder at how people who previously seemed so smart, or loving, were suddenly so...stupid, blind, or unfathomably hateful. The 20th time I was forced to watch it if I were online at all (I don’t own a TV), I remember wondering if there were ever a Chauvin family who’d had a son named Derek, who’d been a bar bouncer and then a cop...and if Floyd were even dead, or even had ever been real, or if they created his name and his character, complete with a violent rap-sheet, just to troll America as idiots who defended a man who destroyed more than he contributed--defended a destroyer with additional destruction.
Sometimes when I consider all the details and nuances of any given situation, especially headlines, which often include what feels like intentional allusions to red-pilled realities, I feel more trolled than anything else, by TPTB. They’re having fun at the expense of the blue-pilled more than the red-pilled. I wonder if they almost have some respect for red-pilled people, who work to defend what is good, pure, or at least truth (even as they seek to kill them), but consider the blue-pilled fair game for a different kind of sport--as a type of fodder.
Reminds me of the death of Ian Tomlinson in the 2009 G20 riots after being violently hit and pushed over in an unprovoked attack by a police officer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Ian_Tomlinson
The CPS initially chose not to prosecute the officer, and the director of the CPS who took this decision was none other than the current Labour leader, Keir Starmer. Didn't exactly cover himself with glory on this one...
My main takeaway is not whether Chavin was technically murdered or not, just that can we expect law enforcement to use a reasonable degree of common sense at all times? I don't agree with defunding the police but their training surely should be improved and maybe cultivate a sense of empathy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoFFUlAWr50
But how can anyone be reasonable always? If you look at the full sequence of events, what is really happening is that Chauvin chooses a stance - 'ignore this mentally disturbed MMA fighter or kickboxer or whatever who is wrongly asserting that I am choking anyone' - that is reasonable for a short period, at a moment when he expected an ambulance to only be a minute or two away. So when the ambulance doesn't come he's in sunk cost and "would look silly to back down now" mode. And by the time Floyd is perceived as being in distress, again this is minutes after the ambulance should have already arrived, I would say he's probably already in CYA mode. So you have this highly improbable and convoluted situation, the stuff of on-stage-with-no-pants-nightmares, is more training going to fix that, maybe / maybe not. How do you train officers for totally unforeseen ridiculous scenarios where they now have an antagonistic relationship to the state and have to decide how to appear to have not understood that something wrong had happened. Additionally, deescalation is intrinsically subjective. You can build an algorithm (matrix of force) for escalation and train that, but you can't just tell officers "and as soon as you have someone in cuffs, take them out of the cuffs to make sure they are safe," so it's all really just CYA on the state's part that deescalation is part of the training at all.
I'm aware that the entire video tells a bit of a different story, but what seems to happen in these situations is the ego of the law enforcer gets too involved, the 'red mist' descends and it gets personal, then de-escalation is completely forgotten in the effort to defend ego (and eg old man gets pushed over as in video above).
Difficult to really assess in a training classroom but if it's a consistent problem in service then maybe the law enforcer isn't well suited to front line duty without more intensive training.
Maybe a way round it is to ask another law enforcer to take over _if possible_; if after a couple of minutes Chauvin asked a collegue to take over, perhaps he would be a free man right now?
RE delegating, probably. 50 seconds after the crowd becomes noticeably aggressive either Kueng or Lane propose rolling Floyd over, also this is 10 seconds before last vocalization by Floyd, so he would be alive maybe. Chauvin's reply, "It's fine we got an ambulance coming." Again, unknowingly entering into the "weird to back down" phase.
When the ambulance loads Floyd, it doesn't go to the hospital. It also doesn't stay in place. It literally drives a few blocks away and stops to begin CPR etc. Just to get away from that crowd. Chauvin doesn't have a way to do "just get away from the crowd" -- or rather, in fact waiting for the ambulance and looking awkward is doing that.
I've learnt that letting other people take over sometimes means you can then learn something new from their approach. Its tempting to want to prove yourself in a difficult situation, and to do things the particular way you want them to, but that can reflect ego involvement, again.
On the other hand in some group situations it's harder to do the right thing if that means being the odd one out, and over time this can lead to institutionalisation. I don't think it was such an issue in the George Floyd death but was definitely a factor in that video of the elderly protestor getting pushed over. It was pretty incredible that none of the riot police stopped to help him, but if an elderly man fell over in the street while they were off duty, would they react the same way?
I agree with you Brian that prisons are a cancer. I lean more towards the 'thief loses a hand', 'killer loses his life' system of justice. I can roughly understand the theory of incarceration as denying access to society to someone who misuses his liberty but the idea of essentially taking time, having them pay in lifeyears seems very indirect and poorly thought out.
My big philosophical problem with any of these ideas is that it views the injustice exclusively as an injustice against society and restricts the right of redress to the state, essentially endorsing the idea that we are all serfs or property of some kind. It might be fair to say that those who have the right to take vengeance for you are the ones who have a legitimate interest in your life. I don't know what the argument that excludes family and friends from taking vengeance is, save that personal vengeance is scary and we would be better to trust our friends in the government.
This is a very important fundamental sort of issue as the sort of minimum duty of any government is to provide justice and it is the absolute failure of our current government to provide justice that makes them utterly illegitimate and the 'social contract' broken.
As in a comment below I will bring up Rabbinical Courts as a good alternate model, so people aren't involving the state for every dispute, or in some cases they do both, or go to multiple courts (as I understand it), essentially shopping around different spheres of justice until things are as worked out as they are going to be. Another interesting model is Southeastern Indian annual renewals coinciding with the late summer (Green Corn Dance) as described by James Wilson in "Earth Shall Weep" (p140). Four-eight days of cleaning, bathing in rivers, purging old junk, and then declaring that individual rifts and transgressions except murder were all pardoned. Of course you wouldn't want that if you have millions of people in prisons, instead it might make sense with a transition to pre-industrial justice, stocks and flogging etc. People could be pariahs for their crimes until a ritual party gives everyone a fresh start.
That's a neat idea. Or the Old Testament 'cities of refuge' model, essentially an appeals court that if they are convinced enough of your innocence to let you live among them you can't be pursued.(and any vengeance becomes invalid when the current High Priest died IIRC)
The state's 'monopoly on violence' coincides fairly well with the rise of modern warfare and genocide. The concentration of violence is sort of Phase 2 of the concentration of capital. I would guess from the way things are going now that the concentration of knowledge is Phase 3. I doubt that we will be on this road long enough to find out what Phase 4 would be. The Defund the Police crowd almost seem like a deliberate distraction to get thinking people to defend some of the state's most egregious abuses, a parody of the people's legitimate cry for the justice that we have all been denied.
I suppose monopoly on violence and "the state" (as opposed to church or crown) becomes more visible after feudal system is replaced by capitalist one, but it's also visible in Rome. Perhaps necessary feature of cities, later suburbs. I would pin modern warfare / genocide more to advent of cartridges, which for whatever reason isn't treated as an important distinction between the musket and rifle era, but it is what allowed people to essentially "manufacture potential death" in the factory to any scale they wanted, which could then be taken anywhere a small calvary. So modern states have this new available machinery that makes it seem like they can exert their state-ness over foreign rural areas, it only works so-so. And then you scale manufacturing up enough and now the state can't do anything because the guerrillas all have AKs.
Was Defund the Police meant to rouse a backlash, I dunno. It certainly hasn't resulted in much male recruitment for police departments. Personally living in California, where essentially the police are already relatively defunded (officer per capita here is like if you fired 90+% of the NYPD) has totally rewired my attitude about policing. So if someone really wanted a backlash "they" would probably have let the defund thing be more successful.
Earlier governments simply didn't subscribe to the 'monopoly on violence'. Augustus signed bills encouraging honor killings for instance in a world where justice was generally executed by family members and the government only intervened if it sort of got out of hand. Even the monopoly on warfare is a recent and very unevenly applied innovation. Most of the world still functions on militias with often very loose ties to the state.
Certainly urban areas have always seemed to require more government intervention but even there regular policing doesn't seem to appear before the 1800's. There is a genuine need for policing in our society, but I would argue that that is because modern society is so poorly run and designed. 'Defund the police' would actually be the response of a traditionalist but I would say that as long as our heads remain up our asses about so many other things they are probably necessary.
Centralized justice is a modern experiment and seems to be a failure from where I am standing. Modernity comes with some costs and some benefits, but the balance no longer seems nearly as clear as it once did. The state has made a lot of promises that it can't keep and their 'justice deficit' is far more serious than their budget deficit.
Hm... but the magistrates and lictors with their fasces must have found something to do with their time... This is still a nice example of a pre-industrial mode of justice, because everything was resolved instantaneously. But yes I think that in practice it could not have truly been a monopoly on violence/justice especially when you take slave justice into account. There were all sorts of funny rules for that, slave testimony was only considered valid if obtained via torture etc., haha.
I think to a certain extent the problem stems from everyone being plugged into highly productive, complex but stationary economic systems. Any basic economic activity today besides homesteading is as elaborate and infrastructure-dependent as running rail post used to be. Retail has a footprint that both reflects this extreme productivity and makes it tangible for crime. There's no information asymmetry, the wealth of society resides in clearly labeled stores and anywhere people are gathered (i.e. wallets and phones). There isn't really a free pass out of this problem besides police, just like you can't put flame to dry grass without a fire.
By no means am I championing this...
What If: A system develops where a person or legally defined person (corp) can purchase/earn criminal footprint credits the same way you can purchase carbon credits. In this manner, a person/corporation could offset their crimes economically. It’s reminiscent of our already flawed version of capitalism. And in a sense, it’s similar to a criminal justice system that operates more like FTC/SEC regulations and penalties.
Best I can do at 4:33am. But thank you, Brian, for such a thought-provoking piece!
I wouldn't call it dystopic. It would essentially be the same as what prevails now. Rich people just pay lawyers to overcome the fact that jury ignorance voids the intended cautious design of our justice system - the burden of proof is always trivially easy for the state to make juries incorrectly believe it has met. "Here's a person in suit that says this guy bad." Guilty.
This all goes back to epistemic helplessness, everyone outsourcing their understanding of the world to experts, so it's been a problem in the justice system from the beginning of forensics as a state technology. Jefferson wrote, "with us, the people (by which is meant the mass of individuals composing the society) being competent to judge of the facts occurring in ordinary life, they have retained the functions of judges of facts, under the name of jurors" - but forensics and pathology are used in trials today and obviously jurors can't appraise this kind of evidence. It's totally different. Interestingly the 1641 Body of Liberties of Massachusetts had specific provisions for when evidence is beyond lay understanding. If a jury felt unsure and then their proposed verdict didn't match bench's proposed verdict then trial instantly went to higher court.
Wow, thank you for taking the time for such thoughtful feedback!
I said to a teammate at dinner tonight that I’m starting to think that the Constitution is the Law, and lawyers often behave as though their job is to circumvent the Constitution. (Obviously not a hardline rule.)
"I simply cannot take the idea that Derek Chauvin murdered anyone seriously"
Derek Chauvin's actions towards George Floyd were felonious. There is no doubt on this point.
Derek Chauvin's kneeling on George Floyd's neck was an inherently dangerous move. No, it does not necessarily obstruct the airway, but it does have the potential to disrupt blood flow to the brain.
Derek Chauvin had George Floyd manacled with his hands behind his back and on his stomach, in blatant contradiction of protocols promulgated in 1995 for law enforcement when handling manacled suspects--Chauvin ignored a quarter century of police protocol in his handling of George Floyd.
During this, George Floyd died. Within Minnesota law, that makes Derek Chauvin culpable for George Floyd's death. Yes, there was a lethal concoction of drugs in George Floyd's system and arguably he would have died anyway, but that is beside the point. If Chauvin's actions shortened George Floyd's death by as much as a nanosecond, legally he carries some culpability for that death.
Chauvin was initially charged with 3rd degree murder. Minnesota is one of the few states with a 3rd degree murder charge (the norm is 1st degree, which involves premeditation, and 2nd degree, which requires only intent, and all other homicides become classified as "manslaughter"), for which the burden of proof is limited to showing that Chauvin's actions played a role in George Floyd's death and that they showed a reckless disregard (also known as depraved indifference) to that death. Chauvin ultimately was convicted of second degree murder.
While is is plausible to debate the justice of charging Chauvin with 2nd degree murder over 3rd degree murder, the video footage alone is ample evidence to convict for 3rd degree murder under Minnesota law.
Beyond the propriety of the 2nd degree vs the 3rd degree murder charge itself, the facts even at the time established beyond a reasonable doubt that, according to the facts and the law, Derek Chauvin did indeed "murder" George Floyd.
Pressure to the back of the neck is not going to restrict blood-flow to the brain, and Kueng and Lane's body cam footage make it apparent that the knee was on the trapezius anyway. It was established by the MPD's own use of force witnesses, Yang (crisis intervention training designer) and Mercil (defensive tactics instructor) that Floyd was not in a chokehold and nothing was off-training about the use of a prone restraint with "knee to shoulder and base of neck," nor using body weight restraints "after cuffing." Chauvin was established as on-policy and on-training in placing the restraint, and the state's experts gave six different opinions about when maintaining the hold became "unreasonable," demonstrating that deescalation is a totally subjective question with no policy-definable answer, not fit for passing any reasonable doubt standard.
I've seen the video footage. Chauvin's knee was right below Floyd's ear. Not on the trapezius.
I've watched the entire video and a video shot from another angle. In the first video, Floyd sat down on the ground and started complaining that he couldn't breathe some thirty minutes before the cops rolled him over on his stomach and restrained him. In the second video, it appears that Chauvin was kneeling on his shoulder and not his neck. I also read the autopsy report. There were no injuries to his neck, spine or shoulder. There was, however, enough fentanyl in his system to kill him.
I wouldn't bring up the knee location except that I don't buy that it's that high up. At best it's unclear, and Mercil (MPD defensive tactics instructor) opined on cross that it is on shoulder blade, with shin also contacting shoulder which suggests knee isn't pressing down much https://www.youtube.com/live/RNBjkQ5x_p8?si=w9nxhXfj9SpNjO3D&t=8296
And, trapezius, neck, none of it is going to arrest blood-flow from just one side. Humans have some unfortunate evolutionary flaws but this isn't one of them.
*eta: Let's be clear, the state did not even claim that Floyd died because of blood-flow restriction. They brought in a quack to invent a totally imaginary theory of how someone can be asphyxiated from this type of one-sided pressure to the neck. Then they accidentally asked the same expert if there were actually any studies that supported this claim. Any reader can see for themselves what the conviction was actually based on https://www.youtube.com/live/S0GVL8omNB8?si=ikp5udJUJLdWcFO2&t=5328
Again. I have seen the video. Knee was not on the shoulder blade. It was not on the trapezius. It was right below the ear, which puts it in the general vicinity of the carotid artery, with some lateral pressure potentially being exerted on the jugular.
Press the carotid artery, which Derek Chauvin did do (the video footage leaves no real doubt on this point), and blood flow to the brain does get disrupted.
Which makes Floyd's death third degree murder at the very least, under Minnesota law.
Answered in my edit regarding blood-flow not even being claimed as cause of death by state
The autopsy finding was death by asphyxia.
The technical term would be positional asphyxia, and can occur when a combination of compressive pressure on the chest and torso as well as compression of the neck combine to restrict oxygen flow to the brain.
Pressure on the carotid/neck while being manacled face down in the prone position with hands behind the back would produce all the necessary compressive forces to produce positional asphyxia.
Chauvin spent 9 minutes with his knee on a guy's neck and then, coincidentally, the guy died. 2 autopsies and an autopsy review found that Floyd's cause of death was homicide.
Floyd was a total piece of shit, but you don't get murder people just because they're garbage people. You have to arrest them and they get a trial.
The second graph is irrelevant to the question of cause of death, as well as murder/manslaughter distinction in the case that cause of death were really a magic knee (murder requires intent, which is impossible to support since EMT should have arrived when Floyd was still vocal, therefore the officers called EMT and escalated to Code 3 too early (before the bystander video even begins) if they "intended" to kill). But even if true, doesn't explain why police should be imprisoned for such an act of "misconduct" (as deemed by media, politicians, hired experts who say whatever the state wants them to, and uninformed citizens) in light of incentive problems, theoretical justice problems, etc.
Chauvin's knee was not on Floyd's neck, and his weight usually doesn't seem to be on his knee, both are clear from body-cam footage of Kueng and Lane, the weight thing is also evident from the bystander video. To press down on one knee would have upset the other knee and since that was over the back and upper arm, Floyd wouldn't have been restrained very well. It is not possible to restrict air or blood-flow from putting even full body weight on the back of the neck or trapezius, otherwise the five shoulder stands I just did would have knocked me out. Autopsies are not able to accurately diagnose asphyxiation in the absence of bruising, and there was none, so the result of the autopsies were medical fantasy. There simply isn't any actual possible basis for the conclusion. This is why after it was established by the state's own witnesses that Chauvin et al. applied a prone restraint, not a chokehold, Tobin was brought in to narrate a complete biological fabrication, literally a brand new theory of how breathing works in which a position that allows you to yell loudly for minutes on end somehow is depleting you of air, it just takes all those extra minutes to build up the invisible "airlessness" that isn't stopping the yelling. This was never plausible because Floyd could vocalize, which meant he could breathe. Everything that happened after he stopped vocalizing was in response to the crowd and not relevant to the cause of death except in failure to provide medical attention (again, because of the crowd).
I barely concerned myself with this case so you could easily be right but to be clear, are you saying he died from an OD, the timing of having a cop on his neck for 9 minutes during his OD was coincidence, the autopsies we're all faked, and Chauvin pled guilty because... Why? If everything you're saying is not only accurate but obvious and incontrovertible then why did he go to prison? I know the court system is corrupt, the government is corrupt, and the media is corrupt but if the facts of the case are really as clear as you present them then all of that should have come out in court and he shouldn't be in prison
Fentanyl is an anesthetic. You cannot take anesthetics and then pass out with your head turned to the side. You will die. Think of all the clinicians that are present when you have surgery. They are not there because anesthetics are safe. So this is why Floyd died, it was apnea, relaxation of airway muscles. For whatever reason this is barely (realllllly barely) acknowledged in medical and media discussion of why fentanyl is so deadly.
I must repeat myself on the autopsies. It is not a question of elusively-defined fraud. Either there is bruising or there is no evidence for strangulation and homicide. Human bodies all stop breathing when they die, there *is no way* besides bruising to infer strangulation/homicide physically from "here's a dead body, look it's not breathing." It was fabrication.
Pleading guilty to a Federal 18 U.S. Code § 242 doesn't mean pleading guilty to murder. In fact 18 U.S. Code § 242 is a total kangaroo court generator script. It just means the Federal government can imprison or kill state agents for wrongthink. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/242
Why did he go down in the state murder case -- there is no apt word here except evil, and the principle agent of the evil was judge Cahill, same one who just chided officer Thao for citing religion instead of groveling. He whiffed over and over again on valid motions to dismiss. The worst was when it was revealed that the state withheld blood saturation readings from the defense, leading their expert witness to commit an unnecessary error that the state then paraded in front of the jury. This was all in public. The whole thing streamed.
"murder requires intent"
Second degree murder can require intent, although in Minnesota law there are exceptions where intent is not a necessary element of the crime (Minnesota Statutes §609.19)
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/609.19
Third degree murder (Minnesota statutes §609.195) only requires depraved indifference:
"(a) Whoever, without intent to effect the death of any person, causes the death of another by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life, is guilty of murder in the third degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 25 years."
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/609.195
Kneeling on a person's neck is an act eminently dangerous to others, and doing so for nine minutes makes a pretty good case for "evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life."
Basically, Derek Chauvin didn't give a damn, and by not giving a damn, he committed third degree murder at the very least.
There is room to debate the propriety of the 2nd degree murder charge of which Chauvin was convicted. Certainly the video footage itself does not establish intent to kill George Floyd.
The timely call for emergency medical services is the entire proof of the absence of indifference to human life. It is possible to argue that he exercised bad judgment or poor technique but taking action to save Floyd's life is incontestable proof that he was not indifferent to that life.
What I find mystifying is why he crashes into my comments with this obviously and insultingly lawyerly, inauthentic argument for why a given person deserves to be imprisoned for Magic Knee Strangulation, and then gets affronted when I refuse to oil his balls and pat him on the back.
Intent is still absolutely required for second degree. Chauvin would have to have intended great bodily harm, this is impossible since he is executing training that was never labeled "cause great bodily harm pose."
Third degree, same thing, Chauvin would have to have had knowledge that restraint would likely kill Floyd. This is impossible because you can't kill physically sound adult men with that restraint (obviously you can kill weak and obese people with any restraint, though it isn't ever "likely"). *eta: I'll rephrase here. There is nothing about interpreting staying in a restraint too long as Murder 3 that wouldn't also define all police activity that leads to death as Murder 3, because you are using "eminently dangerous" as the standard.
Intent is NOT an absolute requirement for second degree murder under Minnesota law.
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/609.19
" Subd. 2.Unintentional murders.
Whoever does either of the following is guilty of unintentional murder in the second degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 40 years:
(1) causes the death of a human being, without intent to effect the death of any person, while committing or attempting to commit a felony offense other than criminal sexual conduct in the first or second degree with force or violence or a drive-by shooting; or
(2) causes the death of a human being without intent to effect the death of any person, while intentionally inflicting or attempting to inflict bodily harm upon the victim, when the perpetrator is restrained under an order for protection and the victim is a person designated to receive protection under the order. As used in this clause, "order for protection" includes an order for protection issued under chapter 518B; a harassment restraining order issued under section 609.748; a court order setting conditions of pretrial release or conditions of a criminal sentence or juvenile court disposition; a restraining order issued in a marriage dissolution action; and any order issued by a court of another state or of the United States that is similar to any of these orders."
Intent is not a requirement at all for third degree murder under Minnesota law. I've already quoted the relevant text of the statute. In Minnesota, depraved indifference is the threshold for third degree murder. Says so explicitly in the statute.
In every criminal proceeding, the statutes are the definition of the crime and describe the requisite elements of the crime. Insofar as the courts are concerned, the statute is the only definition of the crime that matters.
Is your claim that Chauvin restrained Floyd in furtherance of some other felony or that Floyd had a protective under against Chauvin? None of this is relevant.
The key word in the 3rd degree statute is depraved. There is no evidence of depravity even if you were to argue that there is evidence of indifference. He executed a maneuver which he had been trained on and instructed that this was a legitimate non-lethal restraint. He had no reason to believe that this restraint would cause death hence there is no depravity.
Fine, I mixed it up from my notes of the interpretations explained in the trial.
All of the charges fall apart for the reason I have explained, prone restraint can not arguably be *expected* to be harmful. You just disagree with that fact. But it's a fact. Being a risk of harm isn't the same as being expectably harmful. And it *wasn't* harmful, it didn't restrict air, it didn't restrict blood, it was just a knee. The biology and medical knowledge are not unclear here.
The DOJ has been telling law enforcement agencies since 1995 that prone restraint IS harmful. The expectation of harm is therefore a given, not a point of contention.
It may be profoundly interesting that things went the way of defund the police rather than prison abolition or punitive reform... I mean as far as my extended family goes it's been from parent's generation growing up on the farm and then going to work at the ford plant to their children working at a prison, so the transition from the manufacturing industry to the carceral industry may be factor. But if american prison wasn't insane and didn't actually reinforce and escalate violent patterns and commerce... then the police might end up defunding themselves. As it is we basically do live in a kind of Australia.
It's a basic human right, perhaps even the most basic right offered by the state, to have your murderer prosecuted; this is supposed to provide some deterrent. It is indeed somewhat of a side-splitter to imagine a murderer, being deterred by the idea that the state would refuse to prosecute their killer.
It makes more sense conceptionally in a classical context when you can actually banish people physically. And this is another obvious alternative to prisons, but logistically difficult, which is to just designate some part of a nation's geography to being Australia, a land for outcast criminals and the Irish.
We could call ours... Florida. /s
Hey, that’s not fair. 😀
Australia only became the next best penal colony due to the American Revolution. The Brits had nowhere else suitable to transport their “undesirables” after you guys ruined their business model so they had to find somewhere else to send them. Incarnation of undesirables looks to have always been “good business”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_transportation
An interesting problem I have been mulling is how England and America both became more tame after they ran out of colonies and frontiers for hardy men and women to adventure in. Of course this wasn't instant, you had the Bonnie and Clyde era of lawlessness. But it still seems like losing the escape valve had the long term effect of taming the Anglo race, making them totally docile to the state.
There probably isn't a solution which isn't fraught and dehumanizing. You could go Clockwork Orange, but that kind of conditioning is itself a dangerous insertion of the state into the human mind, as we'll see when it is applied to purely political prisoners. Or criminal shock technology, which detects the biometrics of violence and sends drones to interfere. Great idea, until it is used for more general population control.
Doing nothing at all might be a better idea. How many murders are to cover up another murder? How many are to cover some other crime?
Does the prospect of punishment even often factor into the decision to violate the most fundamental dictate of human society?
The question of prison-incentivized (or justice-incentivized) murders is probably most relevant for mafias and gangs, where so much killing or threat of killing is designed to compensate for the fact that 99% of the community knows you are a criminal.
But really, I don't want to sound like a sociopath, but rather just able to use antisocial thinking, if there were no punishment for murder, I don't see why any reasonable person shouldn't just kill strangers and take stuff they want all the time. That way they will have the stuff, and still feel satisfaction at having worked to acquire it, just not in the extremely complicated and rigged ways offered by society. Stuff is nice. So in the Wild West the problem wasn't "too much justice," people just responded rationally to shortage of stuff and law.
The way to go is "home imprisonment", with a geofence: if broken, back to prison.
You might like:
A Republic or a Democracy? Are we crazy to accept demo-crazy?
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/democracy-democrazy
How about REAL democracy: townhall republican democracy?
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/reinventing-democracy
16 laws we need to exit Prison Planet
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/laws-to-exit-planet-prison
If we fail with that, then prep for this until 2040:
The full PLAN exposed:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-plan-revealed
What’s your best way to wake-up those who don’t want to open their eyes?
Please share your most effective wake-up strategies.
The more the awakened, the sooner this nightmare will be over!
For example, I start with this video (2 minutes):
https://odysee.com/@ImpossiblyWackedOutWorld:f/WTC-7-Free-Falling:8
(caveat: pot destroys your brain…)
9/11: two "planes", yet the third tower (WTC7) imploded like in a controlled demolition. It was out of reach and all 7 World Trade Center towers destroyed, not the closer towers not belonging to World Trade Center... and the owner, with his 2 grown up siblings, failed to show up for work (never skipped work before)… by the way, he first took an insurance policy for the WTC against terrorism, just months before, when no one was taking them. The inside information about the FUTURE 9/11 event helped masons make trillions by shorting the stock exchange: the records were deleted by the SEC so they wouldn't be prosecuted !!!:
4 min. (0.75 speed):
https://rumble.com/v1jpdwl-a-911-conspiracy-theory-explained-in-5-minutes-by-james-corbett-classic.html
Where’s the plane for the 2nd Tower (WTC1)?
https://odysee.com/@N%C3%A9mesis2030:8/11WTC:3
Controlled demolition?
https://odysee.com/@covid2020:d/9-11-World-Trade-Center-..-Demolition-Control%C3%A9e-1:2
Why is 9/11 called a Pearl Harbor event? Both Churchill and Roosevelt were masons and plotted to get the reluctant USA into the war by provoking the Japs and letting Pearl Harbor (left the whole fleet defenseless and concentrated there as an easy candy to be taken from a kid, no radar warning from outer islands, etc.) and MUCH MORE:
Please read and watch all of this! Your life depends on it, because there's a plan to murder 95% of the global population by 2050… written on the masonic Georgia guide-stones: “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 … ”
- J6: The fake riot was mason-planned, incited and guided by FBI agents, who broke into the Capitol !!! The same mason-plot was copy-pasted to disband the insurrection against the stolen elections in Brazil! All intel agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA) were founded by masons and are run by them for their own nefarious goals.
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/j6-what-you-need-to-know
It's such a mason manual that they organized the same J6 play in Brazil when it was proven that the voting machines owned by mason Soros, were rigged:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-2020-american-coup
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/dominion-over-us
- At least since the 90s, vaccines are weaponized to reduce the population, for example:
1. Adding hCG to infertilize women: lab detected in 30 countries
2. Overpassing the FDA 10 ng limit to human DNA “contamination” by 2000%, thus causing neuro-damage (autism, asperger, tics, dyslexia in 29% of kids, etc.) and childhood cancer epidemic (n.b. leukemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas)
Check soundchoice.org or videos at bottom after this page:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/wake-up-videos
- COVID was designed as a primer for even more lethal COVID haccines:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-real-covid-timeline
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/not-vaccine-not-gene-therapy-just
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/what-do-bioweapons-have-to-do-with
- Wake up videos:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/wake-up-videos
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/2050-youll-go-nowhere-and-youll-be
- It's genocide for depopulation:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/depop-vaccines-no-myth
- It’s the masons, who create counterfeited currencies (trillions of dollars and EUROS) and bought the listed corporations, media, healthcare, universities, parties and political careers:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/david-rockefeller-illuminati
Confessions of ex-illuminati Ronald Bernard (all lodges obey the same master, Satan):
http://youtu.be/JAhnCdXqPww
Now, are you really ready for this?:
The full PLAN exposed:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-plan-revealed
16 laws we need to exit Prison Planet
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/laws-to-exit-planet-prison
Pllllleeeeease, on my knees, don’t believe me, just do your own homework by searching the following in yandex.com, mojeek.com (includes crawl date filter and substack search), gigablast.com, startpage.com, duckduckgo.com (not Google, Bing, Yahoo censors). The key terms to test them? Child Satanic Ritual Abuse, Child Satanic Ritual Murder.
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/rpn5aj/i_have_found_the_perfect_uncensored_search_engines/
https://www.deepwebsiteslinks.com/uncensored-search-engines-for-anonymous-searching/
If you are a mason or know a mason, ask him to ask his 33° master to put in writing and sign it, who is "the great architect" and that he is not Lucifer. If he refuses, then he’ll know who he is really serving, Satan: tell him to get out of masonry NOW. Sooner or later he’ll be required to trample on a cross to get to a higher degree.
President John Quincy Adams: “Masonry ought forever to be abolished. It is wrong - essentially wrong - a seed of evil, which can never produce any good.”
Confessions of a former mason (Serge Abad-Gallardo):
https://www.ncregister.com/interview/confessions-of-a-former-freemason-officer-converted-to-catholicism
Confessions of ex-illuminati Ronald Bernard (all lodges obey the same master, Satan):
http://youtu.be/JAhnCdXqPww
Confession of 33rd degree master mason - Masons worship deities/demons
https://rumble.com/v294ksc-words-from-33rd-degree-master-mason-rare-video-masons-worship-all-sorts-of-.html
Masonry's Satanic Connection
https://odysee.com/@HiddenTruths:c/Masonry's-Satanic-Connection:4
Masonry's Satanic Doctrine | From Their Own Books
https://rumble.com/v2wg24a-masonrys-satanic-doctrine-from-their-own-books.html
Do Freemasons Worship Lucifer？ Evidence They Don't Want You To See
https://odysee.com/@John_4-14:a/Do-Freemasons-Worship-Lucifer%EF%BC%9F-Evidence-They-Don't-Want-You-To-See-%EF%BD%9C-Hidden-Agendas---Walter-Veith:0
Satanic Ritual Abuse and Secret Societies [1995] [VHS]
https://odysee.com/@thisworldworks:1/satanic-ritual-abuse-and-secret-societies-1995:3
Satanic Pedophilia Torture and Blood - Dark Satanic Secrets Revealed
https://odysee.com/@Gmail.com:52/822821884_Satanic-Pedophilia-Torture-and-Blood---Dark-Satanic-Secrets-Revealed:4
UNITED NATIONS LUCIFER AND THE LUCIFER TRUST
https://odysee.com/@dynosarus:c/UNITED-NATIONS-LUCIFER-AND-THE-LUCIFER-TRUST:4
The best way to have a real dialogue about vaccines being weaponized to handicap, infertilize and murder the “over-population” is to start with vaccine contamination: nobody could be in favor of contaminated pharmaceuticals.
1. Carcinogen SV40 in Oral Polio Vaccine: they knew it since the 60s but kept distributing it even until 2016 !!!
2. hCG in vaccines to infertilize women detected since the 90s: still going on
3. Thimerosal, aluminum, Mono-sodium Glutamate (MSG) and other NEUROTOXINS
4. Heavy metals
5. Human DNA 2000% in excess of FDA 10 ng limit (main driver towards brain damage like autism/asperger/ticks, leukemia and non-Hodgkin cancer), probably related to point 7 below.
6. Graphene oxide in Flu and COVID shots but now with anything injectable (even dentist anesthesia, hospital IV, etc.).
7. Carcinogenic SV40 genomic sequences and double-stranded DNA in mRNA COVID shots: the hacked DNA in the cell doesn’t stop producing the poison when the cell dies, but its descent continue the poisoning until the haccinated casualty dies.
8. Bluetooth nano-routers injected with COVID vaccines and inserted with swabs (which explains why they rejected the cheaper non-invasive saliva test).
Proof of criminal intent:
Points 7 and 8
Censoring and blocking 30+ COVID cures
Labeling the most lethal batches with a lethal code (howbad.info)
Blocking the real knowledge of effectiveness v. "adverse event" rate
That proves:
A. There's zero Government control
B. There's zero Manufacturer liability
C. There's zero Media coverage
D. All that, during decades and still going on, not only with vaccines but also with medicines, food&beverage additives, etc. Everything, even institutions have been weaponized!
E. There's zero political action to stop that (except RFK2 in the USA)
A school buddy told me "I know you make sense but if I recognize it's true, I won't be able to enjoy life anymore".
16 laws we need to exit Prison Planet
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/laws-to-exit-planet-prison
If we don’t succeed, they’ll succeed with their 6-sword lethal plan fully exposed here:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-plan-revealed
Change goes in hand with the number of awakened! Thank you for sharing this to save lives!
PS I'm sorry I'm linking to my own substack. It’s not self-promotion: I couldn’t find better links but if you find anything better, I'd be glad to replace.
How would that work for homeless, and does that mean other people who live in the designated home of particular criminals are being forced by the state to live with them? Are landlords forced to keep renting to anyone serving time as long as they pay, or even if they don't? It would probably be messy, like turning all criminal law into civil/family law. If so, it would probably be better handled by informal courts that serve as optional alternates to the formal system, similar to rabbinical courts.