George Gascon fights his own prosecutors over three strikes

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot of DAs have been in the news lately, haven’t they?

Here’s what George Gascon of Los Angeles has been up to while he prepares to face a recall vote:

Gascón’s prosecutors sued him so they could “charge repeat offenders to the fullest extent of the law.” The DA wants to appeal in front of the California Supreme Court:

“In June, the Second Appellate District Court upheld portions of a lower court’s injunction that said Gascón cannot refuse to charge three-strike cases, which can dramatically increase prison sentences for some of the most serious repeat offenders.

“Gascón is hoping to have the court’s order overturned, arguing that it is ‘draconian,’ creates ‘a dangerous precedent’ and amounts to ‘taking the charging decision out of a prosecutor’s hands.’

“‘The district attorney overstates his authority,’ the Second Appellate District ruling reads. ‘He is an elected official who must comply with the law, not a sovereign with absolute, unreviewable discretion.'”

But for Gascon, l’état, c’est moi.

The article also mentions that Gascon hired a very high-priced lawyer for the appeal, and of course the Los Angeles taxpayers will be footing the bill.

And remember Mike Schmidt, the Portland, Oregon DA we talked about just yesterday? Here’s more about how some of the policies he supports on drug addiction have affected that city and the state of Oregon:

Criminal-justice reformers garnered support for the bill [ballot Measue 110] by claiming that it would reduce both addiction and alleged racial disparities in the criminal-justice system. A solitary dissenter, Paul Coelho, a physician with Salem Health Hospitals and Clinics, said, “The framers of ballot Measure 110 portray individuals with active addictions as rational actors who will naturally seek out and accept treatment for their condition. But I can assure you as a front-line provider this is simply not true. . . . Unfortunately, removing the threat of incarceration and abandoning the collaboration between law enforcement, the judiciary, probation, and the drug court system will result in a revolving door of drug abuse, treatment refusal, crime, homelessness, and ongoing costly health related expenditures for hospitalizations due to overdose, infections, and drug-induced psychosis.”

Oregon should have listened. On the issue of reducing addiction and overdoses, Oregon’s decriminalization of drug use has been a tragic failure. Overdose deaths rose by over 33 percent in Oregon in 2021, the year after the law was passed, compared with a rise of 15 percent in the rest of the United States. As for the claim that the law would provide a pathway to treatment for addicts, less than 1 percent of the people eligible for treatment under Measure 110—a paltry 136 people—ended up getting help. In fact, out of the 2,576 tickets written by police for drug possession, only 116 people called the help hotline to get the ticket waived, with the vast majority of the others choosing to pay the minimal fine instead. As Coelho warned, without the threat of incarceration and the mandatory court programs that come with an arrest, addicts seldom have any interest in getting treatment.

The impact of decriminalizing drugs did not stop with addiction and overdoses. Police in Portland report that all categories of crime jumped in reaction to Measure 110.

It is extraordinary that people would think the effects would be otherwise. Do they know nothing about drug addiction? It’s as though the song “Imagine” is their manual.

The racial aspect seems to be part of the motivation for these approaches – the idea that, if you stop defining an activity as a crime, then the disparity among the races in incarceration rates will go away. This was Schmidt’s attitude:

Portland district attorney Michael Schmidt gleefully announced that his office would immediately stop prosecuting drug possession even before the law went into effect, saying, “Past punitive drug policies and laws resulted in over-policing of diverse communities, heavy reliance on correctional facilities and a failure to promote public safety and health.”

And getting rid of those policies has made the situation worse. That’s a common approach by the left – get rid of something that didn’t work very well before you have a clue what to replace it with that would be more effective. Perhaps they even want the ensuing chaos.

Trying to assassinate NY gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin? No biggee

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, at least Zeldin gets to say “I told you so”:

The man who allegedly tried to stab Republican candidate for New York governor Lee Zeldin with a bladed weapon during a campaign stop on Thursday was released from jail within hours of his arrest on a felony charge — just as Zeldin had predicted.

David Jakubonis, 43, from Fairport, New York, was arraigned overnight in Perinton Town Court on a count of second-degree attempted assault stemming from the attack on Rep. Zeldin but was quickly released on his own recognizance.

In a tweet after the violent incident in Monroe County, Zeldin, who is running as a tough-on-crime candidate against incumbent Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, said he expected his alleged assailant to be back on the streets in no time.

It is fitting, I suppose, the the attack attempt occurred while Zeldin was giving a stump speech about the need for bail reform.

The would-be attacker was freed without bail, by the way:

…New York law bars judges from setting bail for nonviolent felonies, even when that nonviolent felony can fairly be described as the threatened and attempted assassination of a member of Congress and candidate for governor.

How is this considered a nonviolent felony? I assume it was because the perp was blocked and then tackled to the ground while trying to stab Zeldin in the neck. Because he didn’t succeed, it seems it becomes non-violent by definition.

In a sane state, this entire incident would be just another indication that Zeldin ought to be elected. But New York is no longer a sane state, so I expect Hochul to win. By the way, Hochul had been labeling her opponent Zeldin as a far-right extremist who is “dangerous” to New York, as well as informing supporters where and when Zeldin was speaking. After the attack attempt, she of course condemned it and added, “this violent behavior…has no place in New York.”

I find the construction of that phrase interesting. What does it mean that violent attacks “have no place” in New York? Obviously, they occur with some frequency. Just as obviously, the current policies on bail come under the heading of “things that encourage violent behavior or at least don’t discourage it.” Words such as Hochul’s are meaningless blather without the policies to back them up.

I imagine Hochul may have been sad that the attempt was made with a sort of knuckle-knife (hard to describe; photo at the link) rather than a gun, since that means she can’t use it to condemn guns.

NOTE: Zeldin is young and fit, as well as an Iraq vet, and he was able to grab his attacker’s arm until others tackled the man. But why was the attacker able to get so close without any intervention to stop him? It’s frightening, and reminds me that I asked the same question – how did the attacker get so close? – about the assassin in the killing of former Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

Google: “Don’t be evil”

The New Neo Posted on by

Google started out with the mantra “Don’t be evil”:

When Google went public in 2004, it epitomised technological and entrepreneurial genius. Two engineers had developed a remarkably powerful, easy-to-use search engine, opening the doors to vast amounts of knowledge.

The founders proclaimed their motto as ‘Don’t be evil’, which was typical of Silicon Valley’s decades-old techno-optimism. Stewart Brand, writing in Rolling Stone in 1972, claimed that once access to information became universal, it would turn us all into ‘computer bums, all more empowered as individuals and as cooperators’. It would be a new era, Brand continued, of enhanced ‘spontaneous creation and of human interaction’. The ‘early digital idealists’, noted computer scientist and writer Jaron Lanier in 2014, envisioned a ‘sharing’ web that functioned ‘free from the constraints of the commercial order’.

That’s a rather high and extremely unrealistic level of idealism.

We all know what Google has become by now. Interestingly, the “don’t be evil” admonition was removed in 2018:

“Don’t be evil” has been part of the company’s corporate code of conduct since 2000. When Google was reorganized under a new parent company, Alphabet, in 2015, Alphabet assumed a slightly adjusted version of the motto, “do the right thing.” However, Google retained its original “don’t be evil” language until the past several weeks. The phrase has been deeply incorporated into Google’s company culture—so much so that a version of the phrase has served as the wifi password on the shuttles that Google uses to ferry its employees to its Mountain View headquarters, sources told Gizmodo.

My personal opinion is that the founders, despite what I believe actually was a certain amount of idealism, adopted the motto in the first place because they were well aware that, as the company grew, becoming “evil” would be a greater and greater temptation and possibility, perhaps even a probability. And so it came to pass, and at a certain point Google yielded. All in the name of righteousness – of course.

That two-tiered system of justice again: DA Mike Schmidt of Portland

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m referring to this:

…Joey Gibson, the leader of Patriot Prayer was hit with a charge of rioting for the May Day brawl in August of 2019 [in Portland, Oregon]…

Today, Gibson’s case was finally dismissed. He threatened to sue the prosecutor for what he claimed was discriminatory prosecution…

“Judge Benjamin Souede said the decision [to dismiss] was made because there was not sufficient evidence in the case for jurors to find that Gibson and Schultz participated in the act of ‘riot’ as defined by the state.

“’These defendants are not charged with inciting anything, or with encouraging anything, or provoking anything. In each of these cases, the district attorney presented to the Grand Jury for its consideration the charge of riot,’ Judge Benjamin Souede said…

“Gibson now tells KATU News he plans to take legal action aginst the county, accusing District Attorney Mike Schmidt of discriminatory prosecution.

“‘The judge was highly confused why the DA fought so hard for three years to go after people who weren’t even violent,’ Gibson told KATU News.”

The judge may have been confused, but he shouldn’t have been. The DA is Mike Schmidt, a name that might ring a bell.

Here’s a previous mention of Mike Schmidt in one of my 2020 posts:

The city of Portland voted for this catastrophe when they elected a DA such as Schmidt, and they got it.

I wrote more about Schmidt about a year later (and a year ago) in this post. He had dropped a lot of prosecutions of Antifa-type rioters, but I guess prosecuting someone like Gibson suited him more. Schmidt is a prosecutor of the now-familiar “progressive” variety, and although I was unable to uncover any indication that Soros had backed him, he’s very much in the mold of the other prosecutors who fit that description.

Is it possible that Schmidt can be recalled, and meet the same fate as Chesa Boudin of San Francisco (and, hopefully, George Gascon of LA)? Perhaps:

[Schmidt] dropped 600+ riot charges, over 80% during the violent Portland protests.

Under District Attorney Mike Schmidt, Portland homicides jumped 83% — the nation’s highest!

Mike Schmidt has also been investigated by a special prosecutor for biased enforcement.

This makes Multnomah County District Attorney at risk of a citizen recall or at least a much needed course correction.

During the May Primary two tough-on-crime District Attorneys (Washington County, Marion County) defeated liberal challengers in their races. Another sign Oregonians don’t want Leftist soft-on-crime politicians.

Well, if they really don’t want them, they’re going to have to do more than talk about it, they’re going to have to get a viable recall drive going.

And by the way, that investigation of Schmidt for “biased enforcement” was about the Gibson case. This was written a little over a year ago, in March of 2021:

Yamhill County D.A. Brad Berry has been assigned as special prosecutor to oversee an investigation into political and religious bias in the prosecution of Joey Gibson and Russell Schultz for violation of the Oregon anti-riot statute, ORS 166.015 during a political protest held outside the former Antifa hangout known as Cider Riot in Portland.

While a state court judge has found Mr. Gibson’s conduct to be within the protections of the First Amendment, and a federal judge recently declared that both “[Gibson and Schultz] make compelling arguments that their conduct does not rise to the level of ‘tumultuous and violent’ conduct under ORS 166.015,”[1] District Attorney Schmidt has insisted on the continued prosecution of Gibson and Schultz despite turning hundreds of Antifa rioters loose for actual violent conduct…

The policy specifically prohibits selective or bias enforcement against a person based on their religion or political affiliation. Under District Attorney Schmidt’s infamous non-prosecution policy issued last August, charges sought by police against left wing rioters have been repeatedly dismissed by his office even where there is evidence of direct physical attacks on police and others. A federal judge recently noted that the District Attorney “failed to provide any justification for the non-prosecution policy or explain why it was not evidence of [MCDA]’s bias against [Gibson and Schultz].”

And yet the trial apparently got to the beginning stages before the judge dismissed the charges. Now Gibson is suing the county regarding Schmidt’s behavior. I wish Gibson luck.

Biden tests positive for COVID

The New Neo Posted on by

Supposedly he is experiencing only mild symptoms. I actually believe that’s most likely the case, because in general COVID has become more and more mild over time – in the manner of most infectious viral diseases. That didn’t stop the government and the press from trying to scare people into thinking it would be otherwise.

Nevertheless, COVID can still be serious or even deadly in the vulnerable. Biden appears outwardly frail, but his problems may be more mental than immunological and he may sail through.

But it does bring to mind the question of what the Democrats are going to do about Joe, both between now and 2024 and during the 2024 campaign and election. Many people believed that the Democrats were going to remove him and replace him long before now, but that hasn’t happened.

I was never one of those who thought it would happen early, for several reasons. The first was that it serves them to have someone relatively malleable in there, and that’s Joe. The second is that although his cognitive decline is obvious, he still continues to function in a sort of doddering way and isn’t completely and utterly lost. The third is that I don’t think he’s cooperative about leaving; they’re going to have to forcefully kick him out. And the fourth and I believe the most important is that if they were initially relying on Kamala to fill in, they have long been reconsidering that option and finding it wanting.

When they callously and cynically nominated, promoted, and hid the truth about Biden during the 2020 campaign, they were calculating that enough American voters would buy the fiction of his moderation and competence long enough to elect him (or they were calculating on being able to make up the difference with vote manufacturing; take your choice). They already knew he was very cognitively challenged but they didn’t think it would matter because hey, it’s not that hard to run the country, right? And they would be the ones controlling him, and they’re very very smart, right? (Turns out it’s quite hard.) And Kamala was ready and waiting in the wings – except that, although they knew Joe was very marginal, I don’t think they understood how awful and unpopular Harris would be.

That’s the conundrum they face, and it’s one of their own making. Biden wasn’t supposed to make so many Americans turn on the Democrats, and Harris was supposed to be able to replace him. But until they figure out a better solution than Harris, they need Joe to hang in there.

On the Greenwood Mall “Good Samaritan”

The New Neo Posted on by

This was one fast-acting and accurate “good guy with gun”:

According to Greenwood Police Chief James Ison, Dicken was shopping at the mall with his girlfriend…

“The time lapse between the moment that Jonathan Sapirman exited the restroom and began shooting, and when he was shot by the civilian (Elisjsha Dicken) was only fifteen seconds, not two minutes…

“I will say his actions were nothing short of heroic. He engaged the gunman from quite a distance with a handgun,” Ison said. “(He) was very tactically sound as he moved to close in on the suspect, he was also motioning for people to exit behind him. He has no police training and no military background.”

Ison explained to WRTV, Dicken’s first shot at the gunman was from 40-50 yards away and it appeared the very first shot hit the gunman.

Dicken was able to hit the gunman with additional rounds.

On Tuesday, Johnson County Coroner Mike Pruitt said an autopsy found the suspect had eight gunshot wounds and none were self-inflicted.

People who are for very strict gun control laws aren’t keen on stories such as this one, for obvious reasons. In addition, Dicken was carrying legally but the mall was a gun-free zone. The mall seems pretty grateful that Dicken and his gun were there, however.

But not everyone is grateful. Some offer comments such as, “What you have is two gunmen — one of whom obeyed the law for a little longer than the mass shooter.”

Kyle Rittenhouse was considered by the left to be a cold-blooded killer for defending himself. Now Dicken, who wasn’t defending just himself but many many other people, and who acted with decisive speed and extremely impressive skill as well as courage, is considered merely a potential criminal by some people because he had a weapon and was willing to use it to protect others. This is one of the consequences of guns being labeled unequivocally bad.

[NOTE: A lot of people are comparing the actions of Dicken to those of the police in Uvalde. I find the two situations quite different, although they do share one important element: a perp murdering innocent people with a gun. In the mall, however, the Good Samaritan was right there when the killing began, and it happened out in the open. Dicken could see the shooter clearly, and had already seen what he was doing. The opportunity was there, and Dicken took it (as I said, with decisive speed and impressive skill as well as courage). In Uvalde, the police arrived to the classrooms at a point when it is almost certain the perp had already shot the victims and killed almost all of them, but the police hadn’t witnessed any of that. The police didn’t actually know whether there were any people other than the perp in those two classrooms, and although it would certainly seem logical to assume so, the evidence of their phone calls and recorded conversation shows (and I plan to discuss this in a future post; there are a lot of details involved) that they thought the shooter might have been alone in there and was shooting through walls now and then. This was a grave error on their part, but it was made possible by the fact that they could not see into the classrooms through the narrow windows (one in each door) because the lights were off, the shades were drawn, and the gunfire had added some haze as well, and a nearby classroom was empty (that’s information from the recent Texas House report). They also did not want to kill children themselves, if living children were in there. Over time their perceptions changed and they started to think there were injured and possibly dead in there, which is another story I hope to tell in a subsequent post.

A better analogy to the mall shooting, although hardly a perfect one, would be the situation in the Robb Elementary schoolyard before the shooter had entered the school but after he had done some shooting outside – that is, if initial reports that a Uvalde officer had hesitated when he had a chance to pick off the shooter there had been accurate. However, those reports were inaccurate. They left out one all-important fact, which is that the officer did not have a bead on the perp. Actually, if that officer had fired and taken his target down, he would have shot Robb Elementary coach Abraham Gonzalez (see this).

What would one of those Uvalde officers have done if faced with the situation Dicken encountered? It is sheer speculation, and your conclusions may differ from mine, but I believe an officer would have acted to shoot the perp – although perhaps not as well as Dicken did.

That is not to excuse the decisions made by the Uvalde police at Robb Elementary. I have said before that many of their decisions were poor and that there was basically no command structure established; communication was also abominable.]

[NOTE II: I don’t have time to locate the source again right now, but I read that although Dicken has no military or police background, he practices shooting very regularly at a range and has done so for several years. His accuracy certainly reflects that.]

Our two-tiered system of justice: the release of the Colbert Nine

The New Neo Posted on by

They were enlisted in a worthy cause – the cause of the left – and so their case has been dismissed:

Nine members of far-left TV host Stephen Colbert’s production team were arrested on June 16th after refusing to leave the premises. They had previously been told they must have an escort and that their entry wasn’t permitted. In its decision to not prosecute, the DOJ presented the situation as one big misunderstanding, noting that the Colbert team members had been invited by congressional members, including Rep. Adam Schiff.

Ah, but the DOJ is leaving out just a few facts, which the Capitol Police, of all groups, has decided to mention. Here are a few:

They were informed multiple times over multiple days via multiple incidents that they could not be in any of the Capitol buildings without a credentialed escort. Earlier on June 16th, they had been escorted out of the Capitol Rotunda and told the rules. Their intent to ignore the law in order to harass GOP members isn’t in doubt.

It’s also untrue that they were invited into the building on June 16th, which is the primary excuse given by the DOJ for not pressing charges. Their scheduled meetings were on June 15th. Further, contrary to the idea of them being unwitting, the group was specifically denied the credentials they requested for that next day and chose to illegally enter anyway. Ironically, it was a Democrat staffer who called the police on Colbert’s team because he was terrified by all the screaming and yelling going on.

I’m pretty sure I don’t have to point out some obvious contrasts with other trespassers, many of whom thought they were allowed into the Capitol because the police opened the doors for them and seemed welcoming at first.

None of this differential treatment by the DOJ is a surprise any more. It hasn’t been a surprise for quite some time.

Talk about political theater

The New Neo Posted on by

Starring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar:

As we reported earlier, socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) made even more of a fool of herself than she normally does after trying to make an “arrest” video from the steps of the Supreme Court Tuesday look more dramatic than it actually was, holding her hands behind her as she was being escorted away, making it appear at first that she was handcuffed even though she wasn’t.

AOC’s arrest was one of 16 arrests made on Democratic members of Congress including fellow radicals Cori Bush (Mo.) and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) by the Capitol Police in front of our nation’s highest court as they “protested” the June ruling from the SCOTUS that overturned Roe v. Wade.

Another member of the so-called Squad, Ilhan Omar (Minn.), was also arrested. In initial reports, WCCO (Minneapolis) anchor Esme Murphy said that a Facebook video showed “a woman who appears to be Rep Omar in handcuffs”…

Murphy later proclaimed that Omar’s staff “confirmed” it was indeed video of Omar “under arrest and in handcuffs.”

“Staff confirms this is video of Rep @ilhanmn under arrest and in handcuffs, she and other female Members were arrested in a protest supporting abortion rights in front of the Supreme Court today,” she tweeted.

Except if you check the very end of the video, you see that Omar raised one of her hands high in the air in solidarity with the crowd.

Just call her Ilhan Houdini.

Bragg drops the charges against Alba – finally

The New Neo Posted on by

It took an awful lot of pressure, but this finally happened:

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg finally did the right thing by dropping murder charges against bodega worker Jose Alba, but he hasn’t remotely admitted he was wrong from the start.

Nor abandoned his reflexive support for thugs over crime victims.

Moving to dismiss the case, Bragg conceded only that his office couldn’t prove the “defendant was not justified in his use of deadly physical force.” How did it take him two weeks to accept the obvious?

Again: Video showed from the start that younger, bigger Austin Simon cornered Alba behind the counter and attacked him; the clerk’s stabbing of his attacker was clear self-defense.

Remember that the process is the punishment, and the charges against Alba served notice to everyone that this could happen to you if you have the temerity to defend yourself. I had previously written the following about Bragg:

So, why weren’t the charges against Alba dropped the minute prosecutors saw the video, especially with the audio? (Rhetorical question.) Bragg says oh well, I’m thinking about it. But IMHO he can afford to drop the charges now because he’s already gotten his message across, which is don’t defend yourself or you could be charged with murder. And you better hope there’s video to document things, or it will be even worse for you.

That is the goal here, and it was met.

On the other hand, I’m glad that Alba’s ordeal is over. He’ll never be the same, though, and not just because of what Bragg put him through. He is no murderer, and killing Simon, even if justified, is something he’ll have to live with for the rest of his life.