People v. State

fairly undermining public confidence in the administration of justice
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Archive for the ‘Freedom of Speech’

“Are you indignant that the plain text of the First Amendment has been so thoroughly obviated?”

October 26, 2011 By: John Kindley Category: Freedom of Speech, Ioz

“Well, of course it has been.  There is no contract between the state and its subjects; the contract is with itself; the First Amendment isn’t a constraint on the power of government to fuck your shit up; it is a mere New Year’s Resolution; having used up that January membership at the gym, fatty is going to take a day off . . . two days off . . . well I’ll go back next week . . . mmmm are those double-stuff oreos? . . . nom nom nom crunch crunch crunch.” — Monsieur IOZ

My Opinion of the Indiana Supreme Court’s Opinion of Tyrus Coleman

May 20, 2011 By: John Kindley Category: Castle Doctrine, Freedom of Speech, Judges, Religion, Tyrus Coleman

I borrow the words of a commenter on a local story about the Indiana Supreme Court’s reversal of the Indiana Court of Appeals’ reversal of an innocent man’s attempted murder conviction and 45 year sentence, who writes:

First and foremost I know none of the individuals nor any of their family members involved in this. Having only followed coverage of this trial by this media. This is one of those traits of our court system that continues to perplex me. The Indiana Court of Appeals after careful consideration appeared to side with argument presented on behalf of Tyrus Coleman. The Indiana Supreme Court upon review of essentially the same evidence in turn rendered decision in total opposition to the lower court findings. Keep in mind, aside from the local trials these findings were not rendered by empaneled novice jurors. We as society are to then believe justice has truly been served in spite of the contradictions presented by our own court system.

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I’m as American as apple pie.

April 29, 2011 By: John Kindley Category: Admission & Discipline of Attorneys, Freedom of Speech, Jamison Koehler, Judges

In the blog post by Jamison Koehler that I wrote about here, Jamison remarked:

Six or so months ago I wrote about the malleability of truth at trial.  While I have since taken down this blog entry on the advice of Virginia bar counsel, I continue to believe that the objective truth is rarely, if ever, introduced at trial.

I commented:

If Virginia bar counsel advised you to take down a blog entry “about the malleability of truth at trial,” and you acted on such advice, I’m probably not long for this profession based on many of my own blog entries. Yet, believe it or not, I believe everything I’ve written is protected by the First Amendment, and don’t go out of my way to court trouble, and do give some thought to whatever uncertain and slippery line might be out there in the ether. It seems the real danger area is appearing to call into question the “integrity” of a specific judge, which I try to steer clear of. The rules of professional conduct, at least in my state, forbid making a “statement that the lawyer knows to be false or with reckless disregard as to its truth or falsity concerning the qualifications or integrity of a judge.” Supposedly, though, we’re still allowed to criticize judicial decisions. But doesn’t any such criticism — to the degree it asserts the decision is contrary to the law and/or the facts — implicitly concern either the qualifications or the integrity of the judge(s) making the decision?

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Sometimes judges, to their credit, do slam their own, sort of.

February 20, 2011 By: John Kindley Category: Admission & Discipline of Attorneys, Alan Dershowitz, Freedom of Speech, Judges

A few days ago the Indiana Supreme Court unanimously granted transfer and adopted a court of appeals’ unanimous opinion reversing a St. Joseph County trial judge’s granting of an adoption of a minor child by the child’s stepmother over the child’s mother’s objection. The court of appeals’ opinion had concluded:

Under the circumstances before us, there is not a single shred of evidence indicating that this adoption could even remotely be considered to be in N.W.’s best interest.

As if that wasn’t already strong enough, the Supreme Court in its order adopting the court of appeals’ opinion went even further, going out of its way to observe:

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Playing By The Rules

January 30, 2011 By: John Kindley Category: Freedom of Speech, Honor, Judges

Recently I’ve found myself engaging in an endeavor that might strike a casual reader of this blog as hypocritical. Essentially, I’ve been urging a recently charged criminal defendant (who is not a client and who is currently unrepresented by counsel) to follow the rules of the court in which he’s been charged, to increase his chances of beating those charges. The defendant, however, believes the courts and the judges that rule them are lawless, and so his stated strategy is not to play by their rules but to try to force them to play by his.

I’ve been forced to ask myself: how does my advocacy of what might sound to him and others like meek submission to authority cohere with the radical philosophical anarchism I espouse on virtually every post of this blog? After all, haven’t I said, and meant, that the State is of No Authority? Why submit to its arbitrary rules, when we have better rules of our own?

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Calling all New York criminal defense attorneys

January 19, 2011 By: John Kindley Category: Freedom of Speech, Jury Nullification

Or even just one really good one. (And yes, for this post only, Scott Greenfield is not banned from commenting.) Julian Heicklen needs your help. Here is the indictment. If a criminal case can be a thing of beauty, this one is. The good professor is charged with jury tampering for “distribut[ing] pamphlets urging jury nullification, immediately in front of an entrance to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.” Here is one of the pamphlets Heicklen is in the habit of distributing, entitled “A Primer for Prospective Jurors” and produced by the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA). As a commenter on this post by Garry Reed observes: “What is funny is that the evidence against him will be FIJA pamphlets.”

What Mark Draughn at Windypundit said re: “vitriolic” political rhetoric

January 16, 2011 By: John Kindley Category: Freedom of Speech

In a post aptly titled To Hell With Toning It Down, Mark nails what I’ve been trying to say in my last two posts about the causal relationship between ideas and consequences and what if anything we should do about it. The whole post speaks to my condition, but I’ll highlight these paragraphs:

Third, anybody who’s ever given a speech or written a blog knows that it’s hard to make people understand what you want to say. Some people will misunderstand your point because they lack the background, or because they’ve had different life experiences, or just because they have a different way of thinking about the world. It’s hard work telling a story or making a point in a way that communicates clearly with most of your audience.            (more…)

Ideas Have Consequences

January 12, 2011 By: John Kindley Category: Freedom of Speech, Norm Pattis

Norm Pattis in his most recent post provides an important qualification to what I took him to say in his previous post (“When politicians seek to mobilize supporters with martial and military metaphors and symbols, they are now accused of inciting violence. This is utter silliness.”) about the shootings in Arizona:

In the case of Jared Loughner we will never know to a certainty what caused his actions. But denying that hate speech and a low-brow, knuckle-dragging political culture had anything to do with his actions seems a lot like calling cigarettes health food. Denying the relation of speech and acts is a sign of something far worse than cancer, however: The denial is a form of declaring meaningless the very concept of culture or political society.     (more…)

What Rick Horowitz at Probable Cause said about Jared Loughner, with a big caveat

January 09, 2011 By: John Kindley Category: Brad Spangler, Freedom of Speech, Lysander Spooner, Norm Pattis, Revolution, Rick Horowitz

This is great stuff:

When I say that I am not alone in thinking sometimes violence is a necessary response to our own government, I am referring to the Founders of the United States of America. We may not like to think about it, but if they had not violently responded to what was then “our government,” the United States of America would not exist today; would never have existed.

But the words and actions of the Founders are instructive for us today not because they violently overthrew the government in place at the time. Or maybe not “just because.”     (more…)

  • "[T]here is just nothing wrong with telling the American people the truth." - Allen v. United States

  • Lysander Spooner

    Henry George

    Harriet Tubman

    Sitting Bull

    Angelus Silesius

    Smedley Butler

    Rose Wilder Lane

    Albert Jay Nock

    Dora Marsden

    Leo Tolstoy

    Henry David Thoreau

    John Brown

    Karl Hess

    Levi Coffin

    Max Stirner

    Dorothy Day

    Ernst Jünger

    Thomas Paine