Alabama Municipal Judge Carlton Teel is packing more than legal principles under his robe. When a defendant Brian (Bryant) Keith Ford reacted badly to a sentence and started swinging his crutches at the judge, Teel whipped out a gun and then a deputy shot Ford in the side.
Accounts differ on how much danger the man posed — with some witnesses saying that he was not attacking the judge when he was shot. Others say he tried to grab the gun.
Ford was in the courtroom on a harassment charge from a neighbor who said Ford had cursed at her in December after accusing her of talking about him to police.
Teel reportedly fined him $800 — a rather modest sum when one considers he now faces serious criminal charges and remains in critical condition.
The most disturbing account was:
Sara Williams said she was sitting in the front row when the man, whom she knew, got agitated after the judge fined him $800. He waved one of his crutches in the air.
“The police were hollering for him to get down” when an officer opened fire, she said.
Williams said she yelled “Don’t shoot him no more!” right before the officer fired again.
If that is true, it is hard to see why potentially lethal force was used. However, others describe Ford as attacking the judge.
Do you believe judges should be allowed to pack heat in a courtroom?
Source: ABA Journal
Dear Michelle
Are you available for hire to do law library research? I need research on evidence.
Wow Buddha is Laughing, that was a slam-dunk, punched-out knock-out you just wrote. Outstanding. It resulted in recognition of you being correct as stipulated by JBH’s shortest reply of the century. Congratulations for demonstrating the facts always win over speculations.
–.- / .-. / – // –… …– // .-.-. 🙂
Through, with, whatever. Your idea of perfection is based on irrational belief. That is the realm of religion. The law, to be effective, is the realm of empirical fact and reason. The fact is that humans are not perfectible. As non-divine mortals, they are imperfect in myriad ways. You cannot win your argument against legalism in part because it is built on a foundation of irrational sand.
The only deception being perpetrated here is by you, on you and upon others.
And fuck your “research”, troll boy.
Your congratulations tell me only one thing: you are defeated again.
And you will be in perpetuity.
You argue an untenable position.
You keep giving a map of the fraudulent propagandist id, however.
Squirm some more.
It’s funny.
BiL,
You just cannot stop helping my research work.
Thanks again.
And it don’t say in print, “through God,” it do say in print, “with God.”
Why is the only tyranny I have ever encountered adversarial?
Aha! Found the key word in your comment.
I needed it to do a dozens farce, for which I seek all of African ancestry to forgive me…
Yo momma musta done held you upsidey-down when she done breast feeded you. Wit yo, everathin done gone went the wrong way. That done gotta be why that stinky stuff done come outta yo foul mouth insteada at whea it do belongs. Great grannie slave? Someone gonna needa stand up to the uppity man…
And I am no good at dozens, as now made clear. My first, worst, and last try, I dozen know no bettah.
You lawyas don’t make no impossible rules for me that I cannot understand because one rule contradicts another and the only way I can learn what the law was is by unknowingly violating it and learning, ex-post-facto what the judge will concoct for the law without telling me so I can avoid violating it and I find myself atrociously violated, atrociously and hellishly violated and I am not ever going to retaliate in kind or unkind, yet as long as there are words, I will tell whoever is willing to listen of my experiences with the absolutely hellish atrocity of having a son and daughter in law murdered by a defectively welded car, and, as punishment for being a really decent, caring, and loving adoptive dad, my reward is being squashed like a deadly bug by the adversarial due process system.
I forgive without limit and I remember without limit, and, after how the adversarial system punished my family merely for being decent and caring, the adversarial system showed to me its true nature so well that I can fully understand how it would have captured you with deception compounded by deception until your beliefs are plausibly just as you describe.
And yet, it is to me as though Nirvana is a terrifying notion to you…
You keep giving the map of your “hateful Freudian Id.” Thanks.
“The recipe is one in a language you cannot, as best I can discern, understand.”
Oh, I understand just fine. You’re delusional. And religiously delusional at that.
“It is as though you believe you can teach me to believe as you do; perhaps that gives your life a hint of worth.”
Believe I can teach you? I’d have more success trying to teach a stone to be water. When I address you? You mistake being the object of address for being the object of message.
“More than anything else I have yet encountered, you have proven remarkably that the notion of free will and concomitant accountability is none but absolutely evil in nature and effect.”
Really. Too bad free will is a reality and accountability is the keystone of legal systems. That you disapprove is irrelevant other than it affirms how delusional your belief based circular logic is in reality.
“The central tragic enigma of Buddhism is the proclivity of people suffering from abuse to become addicted to suffering and never beginning to bother walking the eightfold path.”
This shows your ignorance of the Eight Fold Path. Proclivity does not equate to lack of potential. All sleepers either wait to be awakened or wake upon their own. But feel free to insult Buddhism all you like. I am not a religious Buddhist but rather a philosophical Buddhist. Adhere to a religion? I don’t operate off of irrational beliefs – like human beings are perfectible.
“I have meant to only mention adversarial process, for I am unaware that due process is due anything.”
Adversarial and process and due process are distinct terms of art and language. Adversarial comes into play simply because disputes exist and by the very nature of their existence are adversarial. Process is simply a method of achieving an end. Due process is government must respect all of the legal rights that are owed to a person according to the law. Due process holds the government subservient to the law of the land protecting individuals from the possibility of state sponsored tyranny like that commonly seen in pre-Magna Carta English courts (subservient to the whim of the monarch) or in the governments of dictators. When a government harms a person, without following the exact course of the law including built in protections like those found in the Bill of Rights, then that is a due process violation. Due process violations offends the rule of law because due process violations promote tyranny. Due process in the adversarial system acts as a check on tyranny – both state sponsored and from the strong who would abuse the weak – and works to create an equitable and just solution to conflicts.
If your concern is tyranny, due process is due your respect as it is a bulwark against tyranny.
And thus, your bullshit is once again exposed for what it is: anti-legalist nonsense that seeks to promote tyranny in the guise of seeking to prevent tyranny.
And you still haven’t proven or provided a recipe to make humans perfect other than defaulting to theocratic belief that “through God” people are perfectible – which is utter nonsense.
Evade and twist all you like.
I’ll just pin your nonsense down again.
The recipe is one in a language you cannot, as best I can discern, understand.
It is necessary to read and read and read again the whole book until all of it makes fully intelligible sense (which I have done) before one can have access to the absolutely necessary context for the recipe, so it will be fully intelligible, but the recipe is very simple:
From Matthew 19:26, “…with God all things are possible.”
Now you have the recipe.
The rest of the Bible, read and studied until it all makes fully intelligible sense within the totality of science are the necessary ingredients, and there is not a jot not necessary in the whole of the Bible, else the recipe will fall.
I was never taught anything so meaninglessly supercilious as to argue logic. Logic is not arguable. Neither are facts. Nor is valid law. Opinions and only opinions are arguable.
Because I actually understand logic is why I have been able to design very, very complex electronic logic circuits which invariably work in full accord with design intent.
No competent engineer would ever dream of doing anything so absolutely, catastrophically, cataclysmically, dastardly horrifically, abusively, idiotically insanely abusive as to argue logic. So, you are trained to do, as I read your words, quite precisely just that which engineers are trained to avoid doing at all costs. No wonder we live in worlds which have no connection with each other.
Now, you, and all of your ilk, keep your abusive, destructive, ruinous, lethal, murderous adversarial system of jurisprudence to yourselves and stop terrorizing the rest of humanity with your time-corrupted brain-damage trauma-generated distortions of the physical-biophysical world and people like me will stop asking you to stop imposing your ultra-superstitious religion on the rest of us, who believe in actual reality because we live really live in it and not in a world where what is helpful is wrong and what is hurtful is right, as you repeatedly appear to me to describe your destructively fantastic world.
I read, and read carefully, what you write, because I find there are many people who operate as you do. Thorsten Veblen wrote about such folks as have many scholars since Veblen.
You never critique what I write in an authentically scholarly way, at least as I can best guess from what you write, you merely dismiss some very carefully done science and science research and its findings with the prejudice of summary judgment without caring a whit about what you are judging and who your sort of judgments will next murder.
And I find no fault with you, for you do as your life gives you to do.
Perhaps while you were learning the law profession and practicing law, my choice of working at Cook County Children’s Hospital, with the only purpose of helping children in need without ever doing anything abusive to any child is what more than everything else, separates us. I have striven all my life to learn better and better how to help children without abusing them in any way. Because I so deeply abhor abuse, it is impossible for me to be adversarial about anyone or anything.
It is as though you believe you can teach me to believe as you do; perhaps that gives your life a hint of worth. It would never occur to me to teach anyone anything in the manner I experience you seemingly doing.
More than anything else I have yet encountered, you have proven remarkably that the notion of free will and concomitant accountability is none but absolutely evil in nature and effect.
There is an alternative, promised some 2000 years ago, and, after that, in the teachings of Islam, and since.
The central tragic enigma of Buddhism is the proclivity of people suffering from abuse to become addicted to suffering and never beginning to bother walking the eightfold path.
Comparable central enigmas are to be found in every established religion. All such enigmas are forms of the adversarial principle.
And, except as a typo, I never once in recent threads, mentioned adversarial due process. I have meant to only mention adversarial process, for I am unaware that due process is due anything.
Come on.
Tell us how to make any sapient being that is entirely without fault or defect.
I want to hear the recipe for a God.
“Perfect human beings being a possibility, there is a substitute for adversarial process.”
That is a perfectly delusional belief.
Argument based on delusion is inherently faulty.
Changing definitions to suit your faulty premises will not change that.
It may be unwise to play logic games with someone trained to argue logic.
Engineers are not trained to argue logic.
You are out of your league, windbag.
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, February 12, 2011 at 12:54 pm
And you’re still wrong, Brian.
There is no substitute for adversarial process except perfect human beings – an impossibility.
.
.
Ending adversarial due process is not going to help you.
###############################
It is not tyrannical, authoritarian, impossible-to-actually-demonstrate, despotic assertions that will show me my error, it is only an actual demonstration, in the scientifically-reproducible sense that will ever work in revealing errors in my work that will work, and such actual demonstration, I observe that you have never yet proffered.
In an adversarial procedure, the one who is most effectively adverse, by piling up the most evidence, to the truth of which the lady of the scales is blind, gives the one with the most weight of evidence (be it false evidence or true evidence not being material?) is declared the winner. That reinforces cheating like nothing else I find imaginable.
The difficulty to which it appears to me that you apparently become blind and deaf is the contrast between declarative and procedural brain functions with regard to the ordinary course of daily life for people whose lives are not constrained to the dance of points alone.
While your view is, and has always been, since long before I wandered onto the Turley blawg, terribly, vividly, tragically clear to me, and I can and have given very concise accounts of the adversarial system, and having checked from time to time, not yet found effective, scientifically valid rebuttal, I am slowly garnering a sense that the world in which I actually, really live is utterly incomprehensible to you.
From your cited post, for ease of associations:
################################
You, BiL, wrote:
There is no substitute for adversarial process except perfect human beings – an impossibility.
################################
I find you posed a testable hypothesis, to wit, “a perfect human being is an impossibility.”
There is funny little property of real scientists. Real scientists, when presented with a testable hypothesis and piqued by sufficient curiosity, set about the testing of testable hypotheses.
Using as the null hypothesis, “A perfect human being is impossible,”
AND
Using as the alternate hypothesis, “A perfect human being is possible,”
It is logically manifestly evident that the null hypothesis perfectly excludes the alternate hypothesis, just as does the alternate hypothesis exclude the null hypothesis.
A hyothesis dichotomy is thus shown and is to next be demonstrably tested.
The demonstration of a single perfect human being invalidates the null hypothesis and validates the alternate hypothesis, due to the hypotheses being of a dichotomy.
A claim made:
“I, Rev. J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E., am a perfect human being.”
That, being also a testable hypothesis, generates another null-alternate hypothesis pair, for which:
The null hypothesis is that I am not a perfect human being, and the alternate hypothesis is that I am a perfect human being.
This is where accuracy of brain function becomes significant, and is where brain damage may reveal itself in terms of imperfect brain function…
This being a law blawg, I have perused my available law dictionary collection, Black’s Sixth through Ninth,
Black’s seventh through ninth do not define “perfect” as a free-standing adjective and do not define “perfect human being, thus those dictionaries are not useful in making sense of only word whose definition is critical to accurate hypothesis testing.
My name being correctly given and my being a human being sort-of self-evident, what is needed for determining whether or not I am a perfect human being obviously is a perfect definition of perfect. That might seem to be another of those circular reference traps, and if it is a circular reference trap, there is no way to determine what perfect is except by itself and that makes perfect impossible to define, by definition.
If you are sufficiently awake, you may soon find yourself being given a glimpse into the profoundly savant aspect of brain-neurological-biological-optimal autism. This aspect is of the practical ability to parse experience into minutia.
It first needs to be made clear by demonstration that there is no such thing as the plain meaning of a word, and that, without context, words are actually without meaning. Example:
Bear.
Another poundal of load on the column will take it beyond the load it can safely bear without risk of brittle fracture.
My wife was given to bear a child.
At the next turn, bear to the right.
It was a bear market.
The grizzly bear was hungry after hibernating.
Exit, words have plain meaning… Never to return…
How to define “perfect” perfectly? Without a perfect definition of perfect, it is perfectly impossible to demonstrate that a perfect human being is impossible.
Have we encountered an impassible impass?
Come, Savant. Nice Savant. Purrr. Purrrrrrr Meow Meooooooowww Purrr Purrrrr Good Savant! Meow….. Purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Savant purrs, “remember Carleton? Physics? Symmetry??
Return to beginning of hypothesis testing, while remembering this seeming blind alley…
Reframe null hypothesis and alternate hypothesis.
Null hypothesis: A perfect human being is impossible
Alternate hypothesis: A perfect human being is possible
Again the null hypothesis and alternate hypothesis comprise a dichotomy, so disproof of the null hypothesis is proof of the alternate hypothesis.
To reiterate, disproof of the null hypothesi that a perfect human being is impossible is proof that a perfect human being is possible and that proof disproves the hypothesis posed by BiL…
Jingle bells, jingle bells.. to grandmother’s house?.
Remember that little observation: “Without a perfect definition of perfect, it is perfectly impossible to demonstrate that a perfect human being is impossible.”?
The null hypothesis, “a perfect human being is impossible” is itself impossible to prove, and the null hypothesis thereupon fails.
Thus the alternate hypothesis, “a perfect human being is possible” is affirmed.
And therefore, the logical proposition of BiL, to wit:
“There is no substitute for adversarial process except perfect human beings – an impossibility.” is shown to be false.
BiL’s proposition may be restated without changing its logical structure so as to clarify the proposition:
Perfect human beings being an impossibility implies that there is no substitute for adversarial process.
It has been shown that perfect humans being an impossibility is false.
Now we need the logical contrapositive of the original proposition, to wit:
Perfect human beings being a possibility, there is a substitute for adversarial process.
It having been shown that perfect human beings are possible there is a substitute for adversarial process.
It may be unwise to play logic fallacy games with a competent professional engineer (who is a Life Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) whose design work with logic circuits goes back well before the earliest of the RTL days.
Buddha Is Laughing 1, February 11, 2011 at 3:10 pm
W=c,
“Attack is a cry for love.” To quote my personal physician, Dr. Hubert Farnsworth, “Whaaaa?” To paraphrase that famous coke-head Freud, “Sometimes a cigar an attack is just a cigar an attack.”
Freud was a lunatic, but he occasionally had a point.
————————-
I loved that episode of Groucho….
Yes, sometimes attack is a cry for love….not necessarily from the person being attacked….
It’s just laying there dormant and unchallenged. New York never bothered to outlaw it.
Per Trump’s head, I think a general hunting license would cover it.
Bob,
Trial by combat? How so? That must be some loophole!
If it’s viable?
I want to challenge that thing living on Trump’s head to a battle.
Wager of battel may have been outlawed in England but it’s technically still viable in New York.
And you’re still wrong, Brian.
There is no substitute for adversarial process except perfect human beings – an impossibility.
To do away with adversarial process?
AGAIN!!!!!
. . . is simply inviting the tyranny of the strong over the weak.
If ending tyranny is your goal?
Ending adversarial due process is not going to help you.
Ending adversarial due process is an open invitation for tyranny.
If ending tyranny is your goal, your “suggestion” is counterproductive.
Keep spouting that bullshit, Brian.
I’ll gladly continue to point out the massive error of your reasoning.
RE:J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E., February 12, 2011 at 12:29 pm
What if I am continuing the life work of learning, and have the foolish will to try THIS?
###############
That “THIS” did not work, I suspected it would not work, and checked what would happen.
And I unwittingly typed:
I find the adversarial principle to the ultimate essence of all forms of tyranny.
When my brain intended that I have, instead, typed:
I find the adversarial principle to be the ultimate essence of all forms of tyranny.
Yet another unavoidable mistake made by me. How do I know it was unavoidable? Just because it was not avoided.
Some “things” really are simple. So simple as to go un-noticed for hundreds of thousands of years?
RE: Woosty’s still a Cat, February 12, 2011 at 8:23 am
Dr. Harris,
I enjoy your postings though I must say, I don’t agree with everything you have said. You have as much right to be here as anyone else, it is not a private club (for weenies).
#############################
Were I to expect people to agree with what I write, I would be of the authoritatian (passive-aggressive) ilk. Which I am not.
Truthful disagreement is the essential essence of the way of truthfulness itself.
Assassinating a messenger bringing a clarion warning of impending danger before hearing the message, which, were the message heard would allow averting the danger, may be among the most effective ways to guarantee the danger becoming realized.
Those who most disagree with what I write help me the most to identify and rectify overlooked errors within what I write, and it is also helpful to me for people to “hammer away” with misunderstandings of my work with blatant, repetitious sincerity, for that only gives me more evidence that disproof of some aspects of the work may be eternally elusive for want of actually possible existence.
I put one of my written “dittys” on the “New Jersey Judge…” thread of February 11, 2011, including what I observe to be marvelously informative model of my sense of the adversarial system in a video clip.
I use care in how and what I post, having used square brackets instead of html tags so as not to seem all that “bright.” Strategy is useful.
Today, I have dropped a few html tags in my postings, including just then.
I do have a sense of humor, which is partly why I have been posting comments with some ludicrous ludicrosities.
Such as:
[bold on]
bold is on
{bold off}
Without making the intervening text actually bold…
What if I actually am intelligent enough to truly know and understand, as fact, not mere opinion, how stupid I truly am?
What if I am continuing the life work of learning, and have the foolish will to try THIS?
Methinks, in one way, I perchance am just as is everyone else, infinitely stupid because there is an infinity of what I have not yet learned.
At the same time, my knowledge must exceed absolute zero, else, how has this comment been written and posted?
I wonder how many who read this blawg have read and studied sociologist G. William Domhoff, “The Powers That Be: Processes of Ruling Class Domination in America,” (originally copyright 1978, I have in hand the January, 1979, Vintage Books Edition).
From the preface of “The Powers That Be…,” page xii (italics here signifying quoted text):
The book begins with a general overview of the ruling class and the study of power in America. This provides a framework for considering the specific processes through which the ruling class dominates the government and underlying population within the territory or “state” known as the United States.
I find Domhoff’s writing as cogent as ever, if not more cogent in terms of the social turmoil of today than ever before.
Perhaps more significant yet is Thorsten Veblen’s “The Theory of the Leisure Class” (originally published in 1899)…
I have sometimes wondered whether “the ruling class” has not made Veblen their ultimate idol for having shown them how to better enjoy the fruits of the labors of the non-leisure class?
And a Marxist, I am not. I started my electronics business in 1950, and am therefore a diehard capitalist. I simply am not an exploitative capitalist. Capital is merely the means of production, such that, to me, the Soviet Union was not communist, but merely had a tyrannical government with an eventually ruinous form of tyrannical-state-capitalist economic system.
I find the adversarial principle to the ultimate essence of all forms of tyranny.
Tony,
No system is going to be perfect as long as humans are agents of that system. Could they be more perfect than they are now? Most assuredly. Perfect justice is a goal that will forever remain slightly beyond our grasp. That does not negate the duty to humanity to work toward that end though. In fact, it mandates that we be ever vigilant in making sure progress toward that end is forward and not retrograde.
@Buddha: I agree there is some tactical necessity; it takes experience (which a grand jury may not have) to know whether to try for murder or manslaughter (assuming the prosecutor is certain it wasn’t manslaughter, but can’t prove that).
So I think discretion is a necessity, but I also think that anytime discretion is an option, it gets endlessly abused! We can even see that in something like traffic tickets; independent studies show blacks do not speed any more than Caucasians do are any more severely, but they get stopped for speeding a few times more often than Caucasians do, because traffic cops have discretion and (apparently) abuse it.
So I don’t have any solution for that, or enough experience in the the legal system to propose one, I am just pointing out what I see as a tough problem with law enforcement discretion at any level; it opens a door for exercising prejudices or favoritism and practice shows a lot of traffic through those doors.
MFM/Tony,
There should indeed be restrictions on refusal to prosecute. Expanding the role of grand juries would be one way to do this in an equitable manner. If there were mechanisms like this in place, people like that toady Holder would have no choice but to arrest and prosecute the traitors Bush and Cheney and all those Wall St. types who are getting a pass on their assorted crimes at the moment. But on the quality of charges to bring? That would impair the tactical ability of prosecutors to do their job as a practical manner. They have to have that leeway.