Like many, I am still waiting for the evidence used as the basis to charge the six officers in Baltimore for the death of Freddie Gray. This morning, however, I was disturbed to read that an effort to create a fundraising site for the defense of the officers was taken down on GoFundMe. It appears that the site has a very questionable standard for funding that does not afford accused parties a presumption of innocence in asking for support to fund their defense.
The Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police created a GoFundMe page for the six officers after they were charged Friday. However, less than an hour later, it was taken down.
After 41 minutes, it has only raised $1,135 — considerably short of the $600,000 goal.
There is no confirmation on who is responsible. However, the site states the following : “‘Campaigns in defense of formal charges of heinous crimes’ are prohibited by our terms . . . GoFundMe cannot be used to benefit those who are charged with serious violations of the law.” Really? Why? I was under the impression that people were given a presumption of innocence in this country. Why shouldn’t this site be used to help guarantee a fair trial for anyone facing prosecution? Moreover, how do you define a serious violation? Clearly, this case would qualify but where is the line drawn?
This is a site that is designed to help people organize in making donations to support different causes. Giving such charity is a positive act, including giving money to guarantee a fully funded defense. Our criminal justice system is a foundational part of our society. It reflects our commitment to the rule of law. Central to that institution is the presumption of innocence. I find this policy of GoFundMe to be inexplicable and distasteful. Many people want to support the criminal justice system as much as environmental or other causes. The policy makes, in my view, an arbitrary and biased decision in barring those who are accused of serious offenses by the government. It should equally presumably bar those who are viewed as victims of government abuse like journalists or whistleblowers.
I also was a bit concerned to read Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby comments telling protesters: “I heard your calls for, ‘No Justice, No peace.’ Your peace is sincerely needed as I work to deliver justice on behalf of this young man.” I generally think it is a bad idea for prosecutors to directly respond to public protests demanding criminal charges. Such protests should not have an influence on the decision to prosecute and it is always a concern, as with Mike Nifong in the Duke case, where prosecutors are seen as too responsive to public demands for criminal charges. This is not meant to suggest that a criminal case cannot be made but these press conferences can undermine the integrity of a prosecution if the chief prosecutor is viewed as too influenced by external events or demands.
Squeaky
Because an agent of the state laughs at you for calling a policy totalitarian does not mean the assertion is any less true.
Stalin would have laughed at people for calling his policies totalitarian too. For whatever reason… Doesn’t change the truth.
And under current law, looking and fleeing is reasonable suspicion uncertain neighborhoods. That doesn’t mean it’s not totalitarian.
You’d rather give the fourth branch sprawling powers that individuals great liberty.
Dust Bunny’s link to legal insurrection (a right wing blogger) is not operative in the thirty minutes that I have been trying
Get a better internet connection or a better computer…..and possibly some better internet skills. It works for me when I click on the link.
In your address bar on your browser type in……legalinsurrection.com or google for the website. Scroll down to the article Freddy Gray’s Knife.
Geez you guys are helpless.
😀
needed, not need
Frontpage Mag
May 1, 2015
Daniel Greenfield
Anymore info need I. Annie?
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Stand Up for Baltimore’s Real Victims
May 1, 2015 by Daniel Greenfield 98 Comments
The real victim in Baltimore is not Freddie Gray, a repeat loser who eventually died as he had lived: Being arrested by the police. The real victims are not the thugs smashing and looting stores. It isn’t the young black men disproportionately stopped by the racist majority-black police force in Baltimore under a racist black police commissioner for doing nothing wrong except the usual drug and weapons charges.
It’s not even the “majority of law-abiding Baltimore families” referenced by politicians.
85% of Baltimore voters came out for Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who gave the muggers and looters “space to destroy,” and then apologized for calling them thugs, defending them instead as “misguided young people” who “need support.”
Rawlings-Blake was a former City Council speaker who got a promotion when Sheila Dixon, the first black female mayor of Baltimore, was convicted of stealing gift cards intended for the poor. During her time in the City Council, Dixon had become notorious for waving her shoe at white colleagues and shouting, “You’ve been running things for the last 20 years. Now the shoe is on the other foot!”
It was indeed. At least some of the stolen gift cards were used to buy clothes. And the shoe is still on the other foot. Just ask the criminals who smashed and grabbed while the police did nothing.
Dixon had won 87% of the vote. And she wants to get back into politics. After the riots, she popped up to complain that white people were going about with business as usual while black anger grew.
“We have some major inequities in the city,” she said. “We have to put more focus in those areas.”
There are probably no inequities in Baltimore that can’t be solved by giving Dixon some more gift cards intended for the poor.
What is the difference between Sheila Dixon stealing gift cards to buy an Xbox and thugs smashing up stores to grab saxophones, candy and liquor? Baltimore’s former mayor had climbed high enough to be able to steal without breaking the glass.
While Dixon and Rawlings-Blake didn’t do much for the inner city youth whose plight we never stop hearing about, they did dismantle the tougher policing put in place by Martin O’Malley. Now Baltimore has become one of the few cities whose murder rate keeps rising.
Today it has the fifth highest murder rate in the country. And since Dixon and Rawlings-Blake, the city also has 20,000 fewer people. Baltimore has been bleeding population almost as badly as Detroit. The city has gone from having 900,000 residents in the 70s to the low 600,000s today.
Dixon and Rawlings-Blake made Baltimore a haven for criminals. They switched out crimefighting for community policing. Now we have to listen to sanctimonious speeches about how we need to make Baltimore even more criminal friendly as if the city were a police state, instead of a thug playground whose mayor calls muggers and looters “misguided young people” and gives them space to destroy.
Baltimore does not have a policing crisis. It has a crisis of criminals. And those criminals aren’t just the ones who smash stores. They also run the city.
When asked about Baltimore, Obama mentioned that, “There’s some bad politicians who are corrupt.” He ought to know. Sheila Dixon was an early endorser and a Valerie Jarrett pal. Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is the secretary of the Democratic National Committee. At Obama’s second inauguration, she said, “My hope is that we can carry forward the momentum of the Obama administration and that we can continue to grow the Democratic Party.” But Rawlings-Blake can’t even grow Baltimore. The only momentum that Obama’s administration is carrying forward is that of the racist mobs who voted for it.
There are real victims in Baltimore. They are the hundreds of thousands of people who have been forced out by riots, crime and misery.
You can see some of the real victims still hanging on, trying to run stores on thin margins, sweeping up broken glass and talking about how they called the police and no one answered.
They, and not Freddie Gray and his fellow criminals, are the real victims.
They’re not just the victims of the thugs threatening their lives and destroying their livelihood. They’re also the victims of wealthy and powerful politicians like Sheila Dixon, Rawlings-Blake and Barack Obama.
The tattered remnants of Baltimore’s middle class are trying to hang on despite a national consensus by Democrats and even some Republicans that instead of fighting crime, we ought to be going easier on criminals, that instead of prisons we need more social workers, and that the real victims are not bleeding baseball fans or hospitalized cops, but mobs of thugs who wanted to act out a movie they saw.
The last thing that Baltimore, or any other place on earth, needs is more community policing, sentencing reform and political pandering to violent mobs. But pro-criminal politicians like Obama want to make Baltimore worse while turning the rest of the country into Baltimore.
What would that look like?
If the country had Baltimore’s murder rate, around 120,000 Americans would be murdered every year. Not to mention 2.3 million assaults, 1.8 million robberies and 160,000 rapes by “misguided youth.”
And we can have that country. All we have to do is listen to the voices clamoring for criminal justice reform and America can look like Rawlings-Blake’s “space to destroy” Baltimore.
All we have to do is ignore the fact that the real victims in Baltimore are not the thugs in the streets, they are the people being assaulted by them.
The worst of the Baltimore violence didn’t begin with Freddie Gray’s death. It began with a meme about “The Purge”, a reference to an Anti-American movie which depicts a society where crime has been temporarily legalized, “allowing citizens to roam the streets and vent their rage for a 12-hour stretch, to rob, rape and kill with impunity.”
That should sound familiar. It’s what happened in Baltimore with Rawlings-Blake’s “space to destroy.” It’s what happened in Ferguson. It’s what has been happening around the country as Obama and his associates have targeted police departments on behalf of criminals.
The Obama Purge legalizes crime. It legalizes theft, vandalism and assault. Baltimore, like Ferguson, shows us what that looks like.
The solution to crime isn’t less law enforcement, it’s more law enforcement. You don’t make society better by empathizing with criminals. All you do is create more criminals and more crime.
You fill morgues, hospitals and cemeteries. You create a nation under siege by violent criminals.
The Democrats and Republicans championing “criminal justice reform” have chosen to ignore the lessons of the sixties and seventies. They have decided that sympathizing with criminals will fix everything. Meanwhile the real victims, the people who work hard, especially the working poor, are disdained because they aren’t rioting in the streets.
The muggers and looters, the thugs and criminals, are not disenfranchised or forgotten, no matter how often the media tells you that. We see their smirks and hear their voices all the time. It’s their victims who are brushed aside and forgotten. We are told to sympathize with criminals and forget their victims.
A moral society doesn’t sympathize with criminals. It sympathizes with their victims. It doesn’t license criminality because it cares about the people who suffer when criminals run wild.
Dust Bunny’s link to legal insurrection (a right wing blogger) is not operative in the thirty minutes that I have been trying.
Be that as it may – I guess we’ll just have to wait for the knife to show up as evidence as to whether it is a switchblade or not.
I’m open as to what may prove to be the case – but if pressed my money is on the DA’s facts as opposed to ‘Andrew’s’ blog which is just LOADED with supposition.
@Tjustice
You said, “You claim eye contact and running (in a particular neighborhood) is reasonable suspicion. That’s totalitarian.”
Excuse me, law student, but that’s called Illinois v. Wardlow , according to Greenfield.
Try calling it “totalitarian” in court some day. Go ahead, and make the prosecutor’s day for them! Go ahead, the judge probably needs a good laugh.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
@fiver
Your link was to some sort of histrionic twit. He admits the cops had the right to stop Freddie, and cites SCOTUS:
Then, he goes on to quibble about the knife, and while admitting that Freddie had a spring-assisted knife,
all while ignoring City of Baltimore statutes which make such knives unlawful. Funny, since Branca clearly discussed the city statutes in his article.
But, I guess this guy Greenfield knows his audience, and plays to their confirmation bias. And general inability to think for themselves.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Bam bam
The rule of law in this case: mr gray can be arrested with probable cause and can only be frisked with reasonable suspicion.
You claim eye contact and running (in a particular neighborhood) is reasonable suspicion. That’s totalitarian.
The knife would be the basis for arrest, if it is illegal that is.
Under the fourth amendment if the initial stop is bad then most likely any evidence obtained is out.
You are going to such great lengths to defend these officers that you fail to recognize the questions of grays civil liberties being violated.
How have the officers had their civil liberties violated???? People get charged with crimes every single day.
The person who started the gofund me site has legit claims.
Otherwise the biases on here are manifested under the guise of the rule of law.
Thanks again for that link Fiver, that article sounded like gibberish to me too, glad someone else thought so.
Ah, Andrew Branca, a political author with a law degree. What do actual, practicing attorneys think of his analysis? Scott Greenfield certainly wasn’t impressed.
How can someone claim to a “foremost expert” and not be able to handle even the basics of Terry v. Ohio?
http://blog.simplejustice.us/2015/05/02/freddie-grays-bad-arrest-and-still-dead/
Hysterical and hilarious if it weren’t so pathetic to hear the outrage that cops are being held accountable and will have their day in court. Ah it’s so outrageous to expect due process.
@DBQ
Some people here don’t even read their own links, sooo it is no surprise they can’t read yours. What I find fascinating is how some people jump on the “Freddie’s Surgery” issue like a pack of hyenas to question the validity, while they seem to swallow whole hog the suppositions behind charging the Baltimore Six.
Personally, I prefer to stay in hyena mode regardless of the particular carrion.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
DBQ must have inside info, no one KNOWS if he was on parole
Some people evidently just lack the ability to read and comprehend. It is very sad. I hope that isn’t an indication of some sort of brain damage or hardening of the arteries the feed the brain. Please get help.
Note….suggests it highly likely. But the author is asking for confirmation.
Note…the word IF Gray was on probation. IF means that they don’t know for sure.
English must be very hard for some people.
BamBam, how are they being “hung”? They will have their day in court.
DBQ must have inside info, no one KNOWS if he was on parole. He may NOT have been on parole and the knife was legal as the State’s attorney said. So many assumptions.
Again, for all of you who mistakenly believe that I do not want justice, whatever that may be in this situation, to prevail, let me repeat my take on this whole episode.
The scarcity of any confirmed facts, and I do mean ANY CONFIRMED FACTS, relating to this entire saga, is troubling. Those of you who want to hang these individuals from the highest tree, as a result of the mass looting and mayhem, should be troubled that you are basing your beliefs on few, if any, confirmed facts. You are simply responding to the criminal destruction of a city. Nothing more. The same way that you were ready and willing to convict and sentence Officer Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown. Charges against police officers, or against any individuals, should not be based upon mob rule.
If that discredits me, then consider me discredited, Wadewilliams. Considering the source, I take it as a compliment.
on 1, May 2, 2015 at 2:52 pmGeorge
“Allegedly, the “victim” had spinal injuries from a previous accident for which he sought no treatment. His spinal cord was 80% severed for a week before the arrest. The slightest incidental application of force or a minor impact would have completed the severance of the spine causing paralysis.”
**********************
LOL!
Since Inga is still unable to master the ability to read and unable to follow the hyperlink to the article that I have posted THREE times…..here is the relevant part
Third, it raises questions about whether the knife was illegal per se, or whether it was the possession of the knife by Freddie Gray that was illegal. Gray was a convicted felon, and an examination of his criminal record suggests it highly likely that he was on probation when he was arrested and found with the concealed knife. (Anybody with definitive information on Gray’s probation status, please contact me directly.)
In my experience, it is an invariable condition of probation that possession of a concealed weapon of any type is prohibited.
Note that the explicit language in the Statement of Charges reads that Freddie Gray
did unlawfully carry, possess and sell a knife commonly known as a switch blade knife, with an automatic spring or other device for opening and/or closing the blade within the limits of Baltimore City. (emphasis added)
Thus if Gray was on probation, and his probation prohibited his possession of a concealed weapon, this unlawful possession would provide adequate probable cause for Gray’s arrest.
I have bolded the areas that she seems unable to read.
Note….suggests it highly likely. But the author is asking for confirmation.
Note…the word IF Gray was on probation. IF means that they don’t know for sure.
English must be very hard for some people.
“Affirmative action State’s attorney”? She was voted into office.
Allegedly, the “victim” had spinal injuries from a previous accident for which he sought no treatment. His spinal cord was 80% severed for a week before the arrest. The slightest incidental application of force or a minor impact would have completed the severance of the spine causing paralysis.