Every student of the First Amendment knows about the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts, the Palmer Raids of World War I, the persecution of the Chicago 7, crackdowns on anti-war movements, and the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO abuses and surveillance of Martin Luther King and the Black Panthers.
This from Roger Roots on gatewaypundit.com.
The single greatest mass infringement on fundamental First Amendment freedoms, however, is happening right now.
And the civil liberties establishment, which rakes in millions annually parroting the civil rights talking points of the 1970s, has turned its back on the greatest mass political persecution in American legal history: the railroading of January 6 defendants.
As these words are written, the US District Court for DC is approaching a grim milestone. Soon, a total of a thousand years of prison time will have been handed out to J6ers. January 6 injustices are eclipsing all other American legal disgraces of the past.
After three years of litigation, the conviction rate for J6ers is 100 percent before juries; and 99.5 percent-plus before judges.
– The average prison sentences for J6ers are by far the longest in American history associated with rioting or demonstrating.
– None of the Civil War’s Confederate leadership served as much prison time as an average J6er who simply pushed against a police riot shield outside the Capitol on January 6. (Jefferson Davis himself served only two years.)– The longest prison term stemming from the infamous Alien and Sedition Act prosecutions of the 1790s—which every law student learns were the most tyrannical abuses of speech and political expression in early America—was 18 months. The longest term served by Black Panthers who chased out the California legislature from the State Capitol with assault weapons in 1967 was one year in jail.
– Compare Eugene V. Debs’ ten-year prison sentence handed down in 1918 for sedition, to the 22-year prison sentence of Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio for seditious conspiracy stemming from January 6. Debs’ sedition conviction involved claims that Debs’ anti-war speeches undermined America’s military preparedness during World War I. (Note that President Harding commuted Debs’ sentence in 1921.)
– Nothing—literally nothing—in the evidence linked the Proud Boys to any definitive or detailed planning behind the chaotic breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6.
– The same is true with Stewart Rhodes and the Oath Keepers. Rhodes is serving an 18-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy despite never going in the Capitol and urging followers not to go inside.
– These long prison sentences for J6ers are derived by applying math tricks to the sentencing guidelines. Judges stack enhancement upon enhancement to arrive at stratospheric sentences, even for first-time offenders. For example, judges applied ridiculous ‘terrorism enhancements’ to the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers by pointing to instances of property damage—such as the breaking of a window or the bending of a decorative fence—and then attributing such property damage to ‘intimidation or coercion.’
Journalist Steve Baker has documented that prosecutors and government witnesses committed blatant perjury at Rhodes’ trial, and even presented false evidence that Oath Keepers terrorized a black officer inside the Capitol. But rather than investigate such perjury, the Department of Justice chose to charge Baker, the investigative journalist, with crimes.
Mainstream news media dutifully reports these exorbitant prison sentences as if the judges are being lenient to J6 defendants for issuing sentences below prosecutors’ recommendations or “the Guidelines.” And many judges punish J6 defendants with “obstruction of justice” enhancements if the defendants dare to testify in their own defense but are later (almost inevitably, given the venue) convicted.
Almost everyone who even touched a cop or pushed against a police shield on Jan. 6 is charged with assaulting a federal officer. After their near-certain convictions, these J6ers find their sentences are enhanced or designated as aggravated assault for sentencing purposes, upon a theory that they selected their “victim” due to his “official status” or committed the crime with the “intent to commit another felony.”
The cruelty of prosecutorial vindictiveness against J6ers has totally evaded the attention of America’s civil liberties establishment. Neither ACLU nor any other organization purportedly fighting injustice has bothered to notice.
To wit:
– The DC jury pool is the most extreme pro-government jury pool in the United States, if not anywhere outside North Korea.—– DC residents vote for Democrats more than 90 percent of the time.—– Recent polling shows that almost half of DC residents think ‘life imprisonment or death’ would be ‘a fair punishment’ for J6ers.—– Almost 70 percent of DC residents believe ‘anyone who participated in the events’ should serve hard time in prison.
Normally, this lopsided imbalance would provoke judges to step up to protect the rights of defendants. But in the cases of January 6 defendants, the judges have generally joined forces with prosecutors to maximize convictions and sentences.
Some of the most important instigators of the Capitol breach on Jan. 6 have never been apprehended, despite their features being plainly visible to millions on widely circulated videos. The fact that Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris was at DNC Headquarters near the “pipe bombs,” instead of the Capitol, at the most crucial moments of January 6, was kept top secret for almost a year after the event. Hundreds of indictments—which falsely said Harris was in the Capitol—had to be rewritten. The public still has not been provided any explanation.
By now it is obvious even to members of Congress that the “pipe bombs” were actually some type of blown sting operation or undercover FBI or Secret Service false-flag operation. But every question about the episode goes unanswered.
NOTE: Mentioning the First Amendment is Prohibited.
– Prosecutors file motions to forbid mentioning the First Amendment prior to every trial. Judges grant the motions almost summarily. Prosecutors then use the judges’ orders as an offensive weapon.
– Similarly, federal prosecutors are able to introduce any of a J6 defendant’s social media posts about ‘stopping the steal’ as evidence of the defendant’s corrupt intent to “overturn” an election; but defendants are prohibited from introducing other social media posts showing their good faith basis for their beliefs.
– January 6 prosecutors and judges assert that J6 defendants forfeited all their First Amendment rights by breaking petty rules relating to trespassing or disrupting sacred government proceedings.
– Long-settled First Amendment decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court have been cast aside. For example, in Adderley v. State of Fla. (1966), the Supreme Court upheld trespassing convictions of protestors at a Florida jail but said the defendants would be protected by the First Amendment if the facility had been a legislative capitol.
UPDATE:
A federal appeals court has ruled judges across the Washington, D.C., judiciary, largely leftists in the leftist enclave, blundered when they sentenced possibly hundreds of January 6 defendants using a special procedure to enhance their sentences that was improper.
A report from the Washington Examiner explained:
[T]here are potentially hundreds of defendants who will have to be resentenced.
Final comment: Apologies for posting such a long article but I could not cut any more. Check out the original article for the full details. Also, go to “federal appeals court” link directly above.
