Another police officer in the Chauvin case sentenced
Former Minneapolis police officer Tou Thao was sentenced to almost five years in jail on Monday for his role in the death of George Floyd. Thao was at the scene that day doing crowd control and is essentially being charged for not doing anything to stop it.
Tou Thao, the officer who held back bystanders during Floyd’s fatal arrest in May 2020, was handed a 4.75-year sentence, or four years and nine months, on Monday by Hennepin County Judge Peter A. Cahill. It comes over a year after his conviction on Minnesota state charges.
Thao was convicted last year on federal charges and is serving a 42-month prison sentence. Monday’s jail sentence will run concurrently, instead of consecutively, with the federal sentence, so he already received credit for 340 days.
I guess the feds didn’t consider 42 months to be enough of a sentence for the likes of Thao. This was his terrible crime:
Cahill found wrote in his 177-page ruling in May that Thao’s actions separated Chauvin and two other former officers from the crowd, including an emergency medical technician. The judge said this allowed the officers to continue restraining Floyd and prevented bystanders from rendering medical aid.
“There is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Thao’s actions were objectively unreasonable from the perspective of a reasonable police officer, when viewed under the totality of the circumstances,” Cahill wrote.
“Thao’s actions were even more unreasonable in light of the fact that he was under a duty to intervene to stop the other officers’ excessive use of force and was trained to render medical aid,” he added.
So was Thao supposed to let the crowd surge forward and engulf the officers and Floyd? When is a mob not a mob, and how on earth is Thao supposed to know what that group would do if uncontrolled? And while Thao is keeping his eye on all of that, he’s also supposed to know that Floyd has stopped breathing, and he’s supposed to do something about that, too?
I guess Minneapolis police officers are supposed to be Superman. But at this point it may be moot, because Minneapolis has lost so many of its police officers – and it’s not hard to figure out why.
Robert Barnes on the Jack Smith indictment of Trump
I’ve said before that I think Robert Barnes is very good on legal issues pertaining to politics in the US, although there are other topics on which I’m in disagreement with him. But he’s up to his usual high standards on the subject of Jack Smith’s Trump indictment and the ways in which Barnes thinks it should be fought by Trump’s lawyers.
The problem is, of course, that in the particular DC court in which it’s being tried, legal issues that might go in Trump’s favor will be only small obstacles to be gotten around one way or the other. It’s on appeal – and I mean appeal all the way to SCOTUS – that Trump might prevail.
The left knows that, and is proceeding anyway for propaganda and revenge purposes. Both of those goals are important to the left. The revenge element is obvious: make him suffer and make his supporters suffer as well. The propaganda is with the idea of elevating him in supporters’ eyes so that he wins the primary, and yet making him ever more toxic in the eyes of those in the middle so that they will not vote for him in the general. This is playing with fire – but then again, the whole thing is playing with fire in the sense that it escalates the divisions in America and causes ever more bitterness and anger.
The left may feel so secure right now because they assume they can put down any rebellions or protests and “J6” the protesters by using Draconian measures to either shoot them a la Ashli Babbitt or incarcerate them a la the J6 defendants. They also may feel secure about the 2024 election because they either can cheat and no Republican will have the courage to call them on it because of fear of the legal repercussions (now that such accusations by the right have become supposed crimes), or that the left will win the election even without cheating and with just the usual “rigging.”
But what if a lot – and I mean a lot – of people in the middle are turned off by the left’s show trial of Trump and recognize it for what it is, and vote for him or Republicans in general as a result? What are the chances of that happening? I don’t know, but I don’t think the chances are zero. It would be “interesting” to see how the left would handle that.
So, here’s Barnes:
By the way, Trump’s lawyers are trying to get the Jack Smith case moved out of DC. But of course the judge who will decide if the request to move the case has any merit is the very same judge who is already hopelessly biased against Trump
:
Trump’s arguments center on two claims: that Washington D.C.’s liberal politics would deprive him of an impartial jury, and that the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol stirs an emotional response in Washington, D.C. residents that is unique to the region. His lawyer, John Lauro, said Sunday he intends to survey D.C. residents to back up these claims and present findings to the judge.
Trump’s biggest obstacle: Chutkan — along with nearly every federal judge on the bench in Washington, D.C. — has already rejected versions of these arguments in the hundreds of criminal cases stemming from the Jan. 6 attack. A review of Chutkan’s rulings on these motions suggests Trump is unlikely to fare any better.
At the heart of Chutkan’s analysis — like most of her colleagues’ as well — is a rejection of Trump’s premise. Just because a juror is affiliated with one political party — and even opposes the political views of someone facing charges — does not mean they are incapable of setting aside those views to judge a case based on evidence and facts.
No, it doesn’t mean it for sure – but it means it’s highly likely that the person is incapable of it if that person hates the defendant. And in a venue such as DC, the likelihood is that everyone on the jury will meet that description. But hey, let’s pretend otherwise, because that’s part of the plan.
Open thread 8/8/23
The Trump indictment by Jack Smith is a watershed event
We’ve known for quite some time that it was coming. And yet – I don’t know about you, but for me the fact that the shoe finally dropped has nevertheless been profoundly shocking and disturbing. That’s why I’ve written so much about it, and plan to write a great deal more about it.
Regular readers here know my history with Trump. During the 2016 campaign I very much distrusted him and did not want him to become the nominee, in part because I thought he would lose against a candidate – Hillary Clinton – who seemed very beatable. But then he won, I paid attention to his actual presidency, and I was mostly pleased with what he did as president and made that quite clear. At the same time, I was outraged at the unrelenting assault mounted by the left on his presidency, his legitimacy as a president, and on anyone who would work with him or support him. Trump’s enemies wrapped themselves in the mantle of righteousness, with a form of stolen valor from WWII by calling themselves the Resistance. And of course, by inference, Trump was the Nazi.
Now they continue to wrap themselves in that mantle as they use the tactics of tyrannical regimes around the world to indict Trump in a venue where the deck is stacked against him, in the continued aim to destroy by lawfare what they could not destroy in 2016. That destruction is not just of Trump as a person, of the lawyers who advised him (the as-yet-unindicted co-conspirators), but of his supporters and anyone who might work for him in the future. The left goes after Trump this way, realizing that half of America wants him back in office and agrees with him for the most part, and huge numbers of Americans think the 2020 was either outright fraudulent or at least unfairly rigged. It is a big F-you to those Americans. And worse, it’s a big warning, as was the prosecution/persecution of the J6 defendants: cross us, and we’ll destroy you, too.
The media has prepared the way, and continues to do their bidding, so that many people are truly unaware of what this means for America. The left counts on the ignorance of those people, their indoctrination, and most of all their lack of knowledge about how the safeguards in the American legal system are meant to work.
Sorry to be such a downer.
A bit more upbeat is this interview with one of Trump’s lawyers. Also, see this from Alan Dershowitz and this from Jonathan Turley.
I believe the problem is that all these niceties of law will mean nothing to the DC judge and jury trying Trump, just as they mean nothing to most of Trump’s enemies. They use them when they see they might benefit from them, and discard them when they don’t.
The left are experts at holding two contradictory thoughts in mind without being perturbed by the contradictions
The irony should not be lost on anyone that liberals will be angry at Navalny being sentenced to jail while at the same time cheer on Biden's DOJ stretching out criminal statutes to try and jail Donald Trump.
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 4, 2023
Open thread 8/7/23
I don’t know about you, but I got frightened watching this:
Seals and selkies and silkies
I was going to use this video for one of my open threads:
But after I watched it, I suddenly felt a strong urge to find some clips from the 1994 movie The Secret of Roan Inish. I hadn’t thought of that film in many many years, but I remember it as unique and full of mystery. Here are two short segments that convey that sense. John Lynch is just marvelous here; he’s the guy telling the story to the little girl:
I learned an interesting fact by looking up Lynch’s Wiki page. It turns out that his sister Susan Lynch played the selkie in Roan Inish.
And lastly, to continue my train of thought, there’s this:
More reflections on the Trump J6 indictment and what it signifies about our legal system
Andrew C. McCarthy talks to Megyn Kelly about Smith’s charges against Trump:
And Julie Kelly – who is a leading expert on the J6 trials so far – talks to Megyn Kelly about the Trump indictment:
I find these clips very depressing. Not just about Trump, although there’s that; but about the utter corruption of the DOJ and so much of the legal system in America. The left must feel quite sure that they not only will win the 2024 election, but that any rebellion that might come as a result of Trump’s conviction will be put down very effectively. They certainly showed their capacity for that in their prosecution/persecution of anyone connected with J6, even those who merely entered the Capitol thinking they were allowed to do so and who were not violent.
What is happening now to Trump in terms of Lawfare against him is also the result of thirty years of the undermining of the legal education system as it used to be. I went to law school prior to those years, and although some of my professors were liberals and Democrats, they had a certain respect for the law. That basic respect would not have allowed them to do something like this to a former president, even one of the opposing party. But starting in the 1980s and gaining momentum during the 1990s, legal education was transformed by critical legal studies, which maintained that laws were merely power by another name. Law became, not a thing to be respected as a process that despite its imperfections is nevertheless the best way we have developed to protect us all from an overbearing and tyrannical governmental enforcement system, but a tool by which to dismantle those aspects of society that the left doesn’t like. After all, if it’s all about power and hierarchy, the left needs to be on top of that hierarchy, and there’s no need to protect the rights of the opposition along the way.
Donald Trump is their number one enemy, and the people who support him are to be destroyed as well. That’s what the J6 prosecutions have been about.
One of the comments at YouTube to one of the above videos:
I feel sick about this. It feels like our country as we know it is over.
NOTE: The unindicted co-conspirators are mostly Trump’s former lawyers. The object of this, of course, is to have a further chilling effect on legal representation for him. It has become a minefield for anyone who might work for him (note that Carlos De Oliveira, the Mar-al-Lago property manager, has been charged in connection with the documents case, which also sends the same message to those who might want to work for Trump). Charging Trump’s lawyers for giving him legal advice is another way in which the left isn’t just undermining Trump and the right, they’re undermining the entire legal system, which works on respect for the adversary system and the idea that lawyers can give their clients legal advice, even if it includes “novel theories” with which the other side doesn’t agree.
A new type of pain medication?
And a supposedly non-addictive one.
Of course, many painkillers that ended up being addictive were originally touted as non-addictive, so I would be cautious. On the other hand, this drug works through a different mechanism:
The pill, known for now as VX-548, targets a particular sodium channel that is active only in the body’s peripheral sensory nerves, where it helps transmit pain signals to the brain. The idea is that inhibiting the channel might ease pain without serious systemic side effects — including the risk of addiction and abuse associated with opioids.
In an early trial, researchers found some promising evidence that the drug can take the edge off of post-surgery pain.
That would be great, but what would be even greater would be a new drug for chronic pain, in particular neuropathic pain. I have quite a bit of personal experience with neuropathic pain – unfortunately. I’ve written about it on this blog. One of those posts is this one from 2014, which also touts a possible new drug for pain, in that case neuropathic pain. I’m not sure whatever happened to that drug …
At any rate, this latest medication might also be used some day for neuropathic pain, its developers are saying:
A Vertex spokesperson said the company has started an early trial of VX-548 for neuropathic pain. That’s pain caused by nerve damage, such as diabetic neuropathy.
Waxman said the need for new neuropathic pain therapies is “great,” and peripheral sodium channels should be studied as targets for treatment. But any such therapy would be down the road.
The rest of this post is an excerpt from what I’d previously written about neuropathic pain:
We all know what pain from an injury feels like. But if you’re fortunate, you don’t know – and will never have to learn from personal experience – what neuropathic pain is like.
Nerves ordinarily conduct pain impulses when tissues are damaged, but that sort of pain corresponds to the degree of injury and is time-limited. Once healing occurs, the pain (or almost all of it) goes away. Neuropathic pain is different; it arises from injury to the nerves themselves. They become disordered in a host of ways, and the quality of the pain impulses is quite different from that of the more familiar types of pain, and has a marked tendency to become chronic…
Not that much is known about nerve pain today, and it remains exceedingly difficult to treat. But about twenty years ago, when I began to deal with it myself, it was the relative Dark Ages of pain control.
When I hurt my arms it was terrifying; the pain felt like nothing I’d ever had before, and it was with me 24/7. The best I can do to describe it is to say that among its many horrific qualities was the feeling of having sustained a severe sunburn on the entire surface of both arms. But with a real sunburn, there are salves and ointments to apply, you know why you’re hurting, and you know that in a few days the pain will go away.
This pain was different. It waxed and waned in odd and erratic fashion, although it tended to be at its worst at night, which made sleep nearly impossible and the nights a long drawn-out torment. It wasn’t just the burning, either. There was also tingling and stabbing pain and severe achiness and exquisite sensitivity and weakness and pressure and all sorts of odd sensations that gave me the feeling that my body had become a sadistic trickster bent on driving me mad …
What’s more, although most pain is a warning sign that something is being damaged (stove, hot, get away!), neuropathic pain appears to have no reasonable purpose at all. No tissue is being harmed, and yet the pain goes on and on and on. You can see why a successful treatment for neuropathic pain would be a boon to humankind.
Open thread 8/5/23
Is this Jack Smith’s endgame?
I was planning to write a piece advancing a certain thesis about one of Jack Smith’s goals in the Trump J6 case, but this person beat me to it.
So I’ll just quote the gist of it:
…[W]hat jumps out to me is that Smith is pushing for an early trial date not to provide a quick resolution and to “do justice”; rather, Smith wants a partisan DC jury to quickly convict Trump, thus setting up Smith’s next level of political gamesmanship. Smith wants Trump’s conviction to be heard and decided by the Supreme Court, knowing full well that a Trump conviction has no chance of affirmation at SCOTUS. Smith is counting on it. Smith wants the Supreme Court to vacate his almost certain conviction in order to enflame the Democratic base. He wants to hand Joe Biden another “the Supreme Court is illegitimate” gift …
Smith isn’t dumb. He expects his conviction to be vacated. In fact, he’s counting on it.
I would add that it’s win/win for Smith. In other words, if SCOTUS happens to uphold a Trump conviction, that’s good too. But if it doesn’t, that’s fodder for the “Illegitimate Court” shrieks.
NOTE: And by the way, although I write as though Smith is acting alone, he most definitely is not. This is a group effort, and I mean the Democrat Party and its leaders, and of course Garland. Smith wouldn’t be acting without their help and approval.