Verdicts of GUILTY in the Arbery case

The New Neo Posted on by

The verdicts are as follows: Travis McMichael (who actually shot Arbery) guilty on all counts, including malice murder, and the rest are guilty of various types of felony murder. You can read the details at the link.

As I’ve written before, I’ve not followed this case closely enough to have a truly informed opinion about most aspects of it. My sense – mostly from reading two or three long articles – is that this was a situation in which the defendants were trying to make a citizen’s arrest under a law that has now been repealed as a consequence of this incident, and they were arguably violating a number of the requirements of a citizen’s arrest. For example, they had not personally witnessed Arbery committing the crime of which they believed him guilty. They were armed with a long gun, which he ultimately tried to grab from them, but he may indeed have had plenty of reason to think they were the ones threatening his life.

That said, apparently the judge’s instructions to the jury on the required elements of a citizen’s arrest under the statute were extremely restrictive and essentially meant that as a matter of law the defendants were not complying. Once that was established as the law per the judge’s instructions, the jury had almost no recourse but to decide that the defendants were in the act of committing a felony against Arbery, and therefore the felony murder convictions would almost certainly follow.

At least, that’s my understanding at this point, subject to revision. As I’ve said, I’m not at all up to speed on this case and therefore anything I say about it is very provisional. I will add, however, that many decades ago when I was in law school and first heard of felony murder, it was a law that troubled me. I’m still troubled by it. I know the reason behind it, but it still seems to me to be a mechanism by which it’s easy to put someone away for very lengthy periods of time who is not guilty of anything a layperson would usually call “murder.” This may be the case with the third defendant here, William “Ryan” Bryan, who was nowhere near as involved as the others.

Another description of the case and the verdicts can be found here.

I’ve left out the racial aspects of the case, which were certainly operating for the public because Arbery was black and the defendants are all white. This definitely mattered in the court of public opinion – and certainly for the MSM, who portrayed Arbery as a recreational jogger, which he was not. But whether race mattered in the actual court in terms of the jury’s deliberations, I don’t know. It seems to me that the judge’s instructions on citizen’s arrest are what effectively determined the outcome.

I also have no opinion as to whether this was the correct verdict or not, although as I said before I have my doubts about Bryan’s guilt of the most serious charges of which he was convicted, which rests on the application of the felony murder doctrine (you can read up on felony murder here and here).

Happy day-before-Thanksgiving to you!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited reprint of a previous post.]

I happen to like Thanksgiving. Always have. It’s a holiday for anyone and everyone in this country—except, of course, people who hate turkey. There are quite a few of those curmudgeonly folks, but I’m happy to report I’m not one of them. Even if the turkey ends up dry and overcooked, it’s nothing that a little gravy and cranberry sauce can’t fix. And although the turkey is the centerpiece, it’s the accompaniments that make the meal.

My theory on turkeys is that they’re like children: you coax them along and just do the best you can, but as long as you don’t utterly ruin or abuse them, they have their own innate characteristics that will manifest in the end. A dry and tough bird will be a dry and tough bird despite all that draping in fat-soaked cheesecloth, a tender and tasty one can withstand a certain amount of cooking incompetence.

One year long ago my brother and I were cooking at my parents’ house and somehow we set the oven on “broil,” an error that was only discovered an hour before the turkey was due to be finished cooking. But it was one of the best turkeys ever. Another time the turkey had turned deep bluish-purple on defrosting and was so hideous and dangerous-looking that it had to be abandoned. Another terrible time, one that has lived in infamy ever since, my mother decided turkey was passe and that we’d have steak on Thanksgiving.

Since I like to eat, I am drawn to the fact that Thanksgiving is a food-oriented holiday with a basic obligatory theme (turkey plus seasonal autumnal food) and almost infinite variations on that theme. Sweet potatoes? Absolutely—but oh, the myriad ways to make them, some revolting, some sublime. Pie? Of course, but what kind? And what to put on it, ice cream, whipped cream, or both?

For me, there are three traditional requirements—besides the turkey, of course. There has to be at least one pecan pie, although eating it in all its sickening sweetness can put an already-sated person right over the top. The cranberry sauce has to be made from fresh cranberries (it’s easy: cranberries, water, and sugar to taste, simmered on top of the stove till mushy and a bright deep red), and lots of it (it’s good on turkey sandwiches the next day, too). The traditional stuffing in my family is non-traditional: a large quantity of cut-up Granny Smith apples cooked in fair amount of sherry as well as a ton of butter till a bit soft; and then mixed with prunes, almonds, and one Sara Lee poundcake reduced to small pieces by crushing with the hands. It’s very rich and I think it may have originally been a stuffing for duck or goose.

Thanksgiving is one of the few holidays that has a theme that is vaguely religious—giving thanks—but has no specific religious affiliation. So it’s a holiday that unites – although good luck this year on that. It’s one of the least commercial holidays as well, because it involves no presents. It’s a home-based holiday, which is good, too, except for those who don’t have relatives or friends to be with. One drawback is the terribly compressed travel time; I solve that by not usually traveling very far if I can possibly help it – although this year I happen to be far from home.

The main advantage to hosting the day is having leftovers left over. The main disadvantage to hosting the day is having leftovers left over.

I wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving Day, filled with friends and/or family of your choice, and just the right amount of leftovers!

Open thread 11/24/21

The New Neo Posted on by

Is the dog really “thinking through” the problem, as the title says, or is it discovering a solution through a series of random efforts until one finally works? I think more likely the latter.

Closing arguments in the Arbery case, and now the jury is deliberating

The New Neo Posted on by

I previously knew only the bare bones of the Arbery case and hadn’t followed it at all closely. But here’s what Andrew Branca has to say at Legal Insurrection about the closing arguments (also please read this from Branca). In sum, he thinks the McMichaels and the third defendant will be found not guilty.

I have no idea what will happen. But I do know – as Branca points out – that these highly politicized cases have certain similarities although the fact situations, and most importantly the defendants, are very different.

They each rest on mendacious pretrial publicity in the MSM. For Zimmerman, it was primarily (among many other things) the idea that he had targeted Martin due merely to racism. For Darren Wilson, it was the famous “hands up, don’t shoot.” For Derek Chauvin, it was the idea that Floyd only complained of being unable to breathe when Chauvin had his knee on his neck (and that the hold Chauvin used was not approved by the Minneapolis police department when it actually was), for Kyle Rittenhouse it was the fictitious “crossing state lines with an illegal gun in order to kill demonstrators,” and for the McMichaels (the white killers of the black Arbery) it was the idea that they were racists pursuing an innocent jogger because he was black when in fact there is zero evidence that he was a jogger and a lot indicating he was a burglar.

These are the hooks whereby the public becomes inflamed and juries tainted, and also the reason that even an acquittal doesn’t dissuade a lot of people from thinking the defendants really were guilty.

In this case, apparently there also was the now-familiar pattern of a prosecutor lying about the law in closing arguments. For example:

Specifically, Dunikoski was talking to the jury about the concept of beyond a reasonable doubt, clearly attempting to minimize the threshold of that burden in the minds of the jury, stating:

“It’s just beyond a reasonable doubt. In other words, do you think they committed the crime? If you go, OK, yeah, I think they committed the crimes, you’re good. That’s all you need.”

As you might expect, this led to a fair-sized eruption on the part of the defense teams.

What Dunikoski was describing in plain English to the jury was not the concept of beyond a reasonable doubt, but rather the threshold of a mere preponderance (majority) of the evidence.

Preponderance of the evidence is the standard applied in civil court—is it more likely than not that someone has been proven liable for some harm. It is utterly different and enormously lower legal standard than beyond a reasonable doubt—guilt had been proven to such a degree that it has removed any reasonable doubt on the question…

This conduct was not a mistake—it was a deliberate attempt to convince the jurors to convict on a lower threshold than what the US Constitution demands—and she knew so when she did it.

Andrew Branca thinks this smacks of desperation on the part of the prosecution. I guess we’ll see.

Another parallel:

[ADA] Dunikoski also made the “harmless, unarmed victim” argument with respect to Arbery that ADA Binger had made with respect to Joseph Rosenbaum in the Rittenhouse trial—he was unarmed, he had no weapons, can’t have been a deadly force threat.

Just as with Rosenbaum, however, Arbery was not unarmed. Arbery was armed with fists, and he was seeking to arm himself with a shotgun—Travis McMichael’s shotgun. Just as Joseph Rosenbaum had been doing with respect to Kyle Rittenhouse’s rifle.

The very same grotesque and fatal injuries that Arbery ended up suffering while fighting for control of that shotgun are what Travis had every reason to believe would be inflicted on himself and his father if Arbery seized control of that weapon. That’s an imminent deadly force threat every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

As I said, I don’t know enough about the case and the law to have an informed opinion about what will happen or even about what should happen. But relying on Branca, I’d say that it doesn’t appear that the state has made its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Waukesha killer Darrell Brooks’ enablers

The New Neo Posted on by

Darrell Brooks is the career felon who killed five people and injured over 40 by purposely barreling through a barricade and driving through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin on Sunday. Not only does Brooks have the proverbial rap sheet a mile long, but he’s apparently a BLM supporter general hater of white people.

Not the perpetrator for which the left was hoping. Despite the MSM’s accomplished and accustomed lying, Brooks is a tough customer for them to make into a saint. If they can’t do that, they’ll try to make sure he is forgotten as quickly as possible, much like James Hodgkinson, the left-wing activist would-be killer of Steve Scalise and other Republican Congress members.

After all, Brooks is a black mass murderer (I thought they didn’t exist?) and quite the racist, as well. They’re also attacking the messenger:

For the past 15 months, our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the press have screamed that Kyle Rittenhouse is a “white supremacist” for shooting three white men who were attacking him. Now those same journos are trying to suppress information about a black supremacist who ran over dozens of people at a Christmas parade in Wisconsin. The journos and other libs can’t use this mass murder for their own political purposes, so they’re blaming Andy Ngo for revealing facts about the killer’s past that they’d rather you didn’t know.

Facts such as these:

More at this link.The post about running people over in the street is actually a quote from some Facebook posts by a person who turned out to be a St. Paul, Minnesota policeman, concerning the demonstrations there in which leftist activists walked on the highway and put themselves at risk. You can find a story about that here; suffice to say that the officer was correctly relieved of his duties as a result of posts that seemed to be encouraging people to run them over.

So you have someone like Darrell Brooks, a criminal and drug abuser for most of his adult life, getting the idea – fanned by media and leftist rhetoric, and by people like that officer – that white people are out to get black people. Not only that, but the current rhetoric even implicates white children as irredeemably tainted with the original sin of racism against blacks, in a society saturated with such hatred.

Add to that mix an image that clearly fired up Brooks’ imagination – that of mowing people down with a car. What power! And no need even for something like a firearm. Even felons can legally possess cars, and they make excellent weapons. Three weeks ago Brooks had tried out the method on his girlfriend or ex-girlfriend (identified here as the mother of his child), and apparently he enjoyed the experience enough to repeat it on a large crowd.

Of course there’s also the question of why this man was not already in prison for a long, long time. The answer lies in policies put in place by enablers such as leftist DA John Chisholm of Milwaukee (Waukesha is basically a Milwaukee suburb):

“When we pay too little attention to the underlying causes and characteristics of individuals in the criminal justice system, we make significant errors, which can lead to greater problems,” Milwaukee County district attorney John Chisholm wrote in a 2019 paper about criminal justice reform.

That was before Chisholm conceded Monday that he had set an “inappropriately low” bail amount earlier this month when Darrell Edward Brooks Jr., the lead suspect in Sunday’s deadly car rampage in Waukesha, Wis., was arrested for domestic abuse and eluding police. Chisholm has been a leading figure among “progressive prosecutors,” leftwing lawmen who favor diversionary programs and community-building to locking up criminal defendants. His handling of the Brooks case is already sparking blowback to their growing influence over the justice system, much of which has been boosted by financial contributions from the leftwing billionaire George Soros.

Chisholm, who was elected in 2007, supports deferrals for some misdemeanors and “low-level” felonies in order to cut down on incarcerations. And he’s taken credit for inspiring a new wave of prosecutors in cities like San Francisco, St. Louis, and Philadelphia who have enacted similar reforms. Chisholm congratulated San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin following his election in 2019, and the pair spoke at a forum earlier this year on the status of the progressive prosecutor movement.

So this guy Chisholm is one of the earliest of the “reformers” in this movement. He apparently also knew and accepted that some people would get killed as a result of his policies:

“Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into [a] treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody?” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2007. “You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen. It does not invalidate the overall approach.”

Collateral damage, he seems to be saying.

It would not have been rocket science to have predicted that Darrell Brooks might be a good candidate for being one of those individuals who would “go out and kill somebody.” He seems to have tried his best with his ex, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy his rage.

Chisholm said Monday he is reviewing the bail decision for the earlier case, saying it was not high enough for a violent crime.

Brooks’s release this month is not the first time he has been freed after prosecutors lowered his bail. ..

Court records show that Brooks has two open felony cases in Milwaukee County, both of which involve violent crimes. One is the domestic abuse incident, which occurred Nov. 2. The other dates to July 2020, when Brooks had a fist fight with his nephew over an old cell phone at his grandmother’s house. Brooks fired a 9mm Beretta at his nephew’s car as he drove away from the house. He was arrested with the gun and a small amount of meth.

It’s a perfect storm of leftist rhetoric and policy that led to an obviously violent and angry man being let out time and time again to commit acts of violence against family and then ultimately against strangers who were probably targeted because of his racial animus.

Brooks may finally end up paying a significant price for a crime. But will the press and Chisholm ever pay a price for their enabling?

Rittenhouse revealed: the Tucker Carlson interview

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot of people thought Kyle Rittenhouse shouldn’t give an interview at all at this point, and especially not to Tucker Carlson. After all, Carlson has gotten a lot of flak for his supposed extremism and in particular for his recent January 6th documentary “Patriot Purge.” Kyle doesn’t owe anybody anything, the argument against the interview goes, and he should just relax and enjoy himself.

But for whatever reason, Rittenhouse decided to do the interview, and I think the reason is similar to the reason he testified in his own defense at his trial: he wants to dispel the lies about him, and he thinks the best way to do this is to show people who he really is rather than the portrait of a hateful and hating killer that the MSM has been presenting and continues to present even today, when it is clear to anyone who paid attention to the evidence and the trial that he is nothing of the sort.

I watched the interview last night. (I can’t find the whole thing on video or I would post it, but here’s a link to the first segment.) I’ve been a Rittenhouse defender since last August 2020 when the videos came out and it became glaringly obvious that he was being attacked by a mob and acted in self defense. And I was already mightily impressed by his intelligence and integrity on the witness stand.

I was almost equally impressed by Rittenhouse’s TV interview, which demonstrated not only his essential goodness, but also his intelligence and remarkable ability (especially in one so young, or really in anyone) to sum a matter up succinctly and clearly.

It also showed his likabilty, at least to my mind. Just to take one example, here Kyle describes part of his experience while in jail (he was there for 87 days):

That’s an example of the fact that actually getting to know the real Rittenhouse can change people’s perceptions from negative to positive.

So why is the left still lying about Rittenhouse and painting him as a vicious ogre? One reason is that they can’t really afford to turn back now and declare how wrong they were. Not only would that expose their previous game, but it would encourage their listeners to generally doubt them in the future. It might even lead to a certain amount of red-pilling among their listeners, and they can’t risk that.

So they keep doubling down in hope that their listeners don’t listen to other news sources that might correct the record, including the trial itself and what was revealed during its course. The MSM mostly showed the portion of the trial featuring the mendacious prosecution, in order to buttress their preferred perspective.

From the start, the MSM used Kyle’s photo with the rifle as support for that message. The photo fit the stereotype – young white punk who loves guns and is out to kill blacks (whether or not he killed black people is irrelevant – after all, it was a BLM “protest,” right?). Armed (as it were) with the photo, the media created a fictional persona to go with it. They love the uses to which this creation can be put, and so they will not relinquish it.

Roundup time again!

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m going to do another roundup, which sometimes seems to be the best way to handle a whole bunch of news stories at once. I may return in the evening with another post.

(1) A person who wrote a story for the NY Times on all the destruction from the August 2020 Kenosha riots says that her story was held by the paper till after the 2020 election. Most likely it was for political reasons; I’d expect no less of them.

[Reporter] Bowles admitted earlier this month that when she started at the paper in 2017 that she was a raging liberal with an agenda to push, but said somewhere along the way she woke up and started pushing back, which was not appreciated by her colleagues.

A changer is usually persona non grata among his or her former circle, having stepped outside the circle dance.

Here’s the story as it finally ran, shortly after the election.

(2) The FBI continues to do the administration’s dirty work. The latest:

…[T]he FBI on Tuesday raided the homes of a Republican election official and several of her associates in Mesa County, Colo., in connection with a dispute about efforts to preserve 2020 election files.

In collaboration with state and county law enforcement, the FBI raided the homes of Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters, Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert’s former campaign manager Sherronna Bishop, and two others.

The FBI operations targeting skeptics of the 2020 election results follow the bureau’s raids earlier this month on the homes of conservative guerrilla journalist James O’Keefe and several of his associates with Project Veritas.

(3) In Waukesha, more news has come out about the car attack on the Christmas parade. Now it’s said that five people have been killed and over 40 injured.

The suspect is a 39-year-old black man who has a long rap sheet and had been released two days earlier on $1000 bail. Compare and contrast to Kyle Rittenhouse, whose bail was set at two million dollars.

There is a rumor – and I have no idea whether it’s true – that the suspect was fleeing a knife fight when he plowed into the crowd.

(4) The NY Times tries to deal with the fallout from the Durham indictments, and what they mean regarding its past reporting on Russiagate, which was a pack of lies.

The media are also stung because of not only adhering to this source for years of coverage, but they were behind entrenching it as a valid document. Many of the largest newsgroups confirmed that Millinian was the name behind the dossier, and now they have been shown to be either willfully corrupt or painfully inept during this coverage. The Post has significantly altered two primary articles on the matter to the extent it has made the rarely-seen decision to republish them. Along with that, at least twelve other articles from its coverage have been changed.

The Times appears less forthcoming. In one piece taking on this new development, Bill Grueskin looks into how the media managed to play this entire story in so wrong of a fashion, but the level of introspection is lacking. The Times had been at the forefront of the reporting, and two of the reporters from that piece — Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo — were part of the team of journalists from the Times and the Post who were granted the Pulitzer Prize for coverage on the dossier and the ensuing fabricated scandal.

They should publish a banner headline mea culpa on the front page, but of course they never will do anything even remotely appropriate to make up for their malfeasance, because they have every intention of continuing along the same lines in the future on any topic of opportunity that might present itself.

Two highly recommended Barnes videos on the Rittenhouse case

The New Neo Posted on by

For quite a while I’ve been featuring videos with attorney Robert Barnes, and especially the ones about the Rittenhouse case. He’s not only thorough, he’s also lively and interesting. In addition, it turns out that he’s been about 97% correct in describing the case and in making predictions. I find that truly impressive.

The trial is over and Rittenhouse has been found not guilty of all charges, but the discussions continue. Even though I know a lot about the case already, when I listen to Barnes I find I still have things to learn.

So here are two videos. I’ve cued up the parts I think are the heart of the matter.

The first video was made shortly before the verdict came down. It’s useful if you want to get a good summary of the entire case, both the facts of what happened the night of the shootings and also what occurred in the courtroom. It might be useful to send it to someone who doesn’t understand what the whole thing was about (which would probably include a majority of the population, and everyone who uses the MSM as his or her main source of news):

The second is a post-verdict wrap-up. It sheds a lot of light on the jury deliberations and why they took so long:

BREAKING: Person of interest is in custody in Waukesha, WI

The New Neo Posted on by

A person of interest is in custody in connection with a red SUV that plowed through the crowd at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, causing many casualties:

Calling what happened “a tragic incident,” Chief Thompson went on to say that a Waukesha police officer “did discharge his weapon to try to stop the vehicle” as it went through the barriers. No bystanders were injured from the shooting…

“It is unknown if the incident has any nexus to terrorism,” said Thompson

Fire Chief Steven Howard reported, “11 adults and 12 pediatric patients were transported from the scene to six area hospitals.” Some of those injured were fatalities…

I have my theories about the motives of the perpetrator, but I’ll keep them to myself for now.

I don’t know whether this has any significance or not, but Waukesha appears to be a suburb of Milwaukee that’s about an hour north of Kenosha.

UPDATE:

Previous pending criminal charges here.

Dave Brubeck, fake it till you make it

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the things I’ve discovered through my recent delving into popular (and unpopular) music has been how many musicians have quirky, interesting life stories. In particular, so many came from a musical parent or parents, and so many were highly gifted even as children.

And quite a few couldn’t read music. The Beatles of course, as well as the Bee Gees, and Irving Berlin, just to name a few who were well-known (note also the prevalence of “B” names among pop musicians). They just had music in their heads, and that was that; they didn’t need to learn to read it in the conventional way.

Another highly successful musician (and another “B” name) who couldn’t really read music was Dave Brubeck, jazz great. Quite a few people mentioned him on the blog in the recent jazz thread. Unlike so many of the other music greats who couldn’t read music who were self-taught, Brubeck took lessons. From his mother. But he faked the ability to read music, and that deficiency continued with him in some form or another (such as failure to learn how to sight read) for quite some time [emphasis mine]:

Brubeck did not intend to become a musician (his two older brothers, Henry and Howard, were already on that track), but he did take lessons from his mother. He could not read music during these early lessons, attributing the difficulty to poor eyesight, but “faked” his way through well enough that his deficiency went mostly unnoticed.

Planning to work with his father on their ranch, Brubeck entered the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California to study veterinary science. He switched his major to music at the urging of the head of zoology, Dr. Arnold, who told him “Brubeck, your mind’s not here. It’s across the lawn in the conservatory. Please go there. Stop wasting my time and yours.” Later, Brubeck was nearly expelled when one of his professors discovered that he could not read music on sight. Several others came forward, arguing that his ability to write counterpoint and harmony more than compensated, and demonstrated his skill with music notation. The college was still concerned, and agreed to allow Brubeck to graduate only after he promised never to teach piano.

Is that not a great story?

His older brother Howard, by the way, apparently could read music, because he taught music at the college level as well as being the person who “transcribed, edited, and arranged much of his brother’s music for publication.” It’s also possible that Dave Brubeck learned how to read music somewhere along the line, although I’m not sure why he would need to bother.

Speaking of musical families, Brubeck had six children and four of them became professional musicians: one pianist, one cellist, one percussionist, one multi-instrumentalist, and several are composers as well. His wife Iola wasn’t a musician; she was a writer and she wrote lyrics to some of his compositions (and those of some other jazz musicians, as well). The story of Brubeck’s 70-year-long marriage is wonderful, too; You can read about it here, but this is an excerpt:

In college, Iola studied drama and radio production. She co-directed a weekly campus radio program called “The Friday Frolics”, on which Dave and a small band contributed the music. At the time, Dave frequently pounded his foot to the beat. Iola asked him to remove his shoes, because the pounding upset the audio balance. The only thing Dave could think to say in response was, “I’ve been thrown out of better places than this.”

Despite the rocky beginning, Dave asked Iola out to a dance. They danced just once, sat and talked in Dave’s car for three hours and decided to become engaged that night.

So they became engaged on their first date and had a 70-year-long marriage. When it’s really right, I guess it’s really right.