The Jan. 6 persecutions
I have been reading with horror Julie Kelley’s day-to-day description of the treatment afforded some 850 people arrested in D.C. for conduct on January 6 and the awful legal representation and judicial treatment they have received. Many have been held in horrible prison conditions for over a year, denied bail and an opportunity to have their cases heard outside this venue where the jurors will never grant them a fair trial.
None of the big law firms in town which puff up their public service donating time -- for example, to defend Guantanamo Bay detainees -- have to my knowledge volunteered to help these people. So it was a welcome surprise to see one young public defender do her job. The woman is Natasha Taylor-Smith, and for once I am proud of the legal profession in this ginned-up partisan Stalinist prosecution of mostly ordinary citizens most of whom did little more than walk through the open doors of the Capitol and leave. (Six more were just convicted of this -- ordinarily a minor trespass with no charges brought -- and will now face a potential six months in jail.)
Most of the defendants have had to rely on public defenders and most of those caved utterly in defending them. Not Natasha. Here’s her opening statement to the trial court....
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She then proceeded on cross-examination to destroy the government's (and the Jan 6 Committee's) law enforcement witness.
It’s not just that having refused to act on the widespread Antifa and BLM rampages which burned cities, businesses, courthouses, and police cruisers, it’s not just that the sentences being handed down after inept legal representation that is so infuriating. It is that Nancy Pelosi refuses to release the full video record of what actually happened in the Capitol that day. When snippets previously kept from the public and defense are dribbled out, the picture is often far different from the prosecution’s fairy tales. For example, there’s Capitol Police Lieutenant Tarik Johnson who put on a MAGA hat and urged the Oath Keepers, whom the government has changed with stirring up violence, to help him escort out of the building police officers. Which they did.
Nor, in fact, has any action at all been taken against the Capitol police officer who shot a woman in cold blood or the other law enforcement officers who bludgeoned to death a woman who had fallen in the crush of a peaceful crowd.
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This is yet another example of the duel justice system that has developed in the US where Democrat riots are ignored and excused and a mostly peaceful GOP gathering in Washington sees participants harshly mistreated.
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