DENVER, COLORADO- Prosecuting attorneys for the City of Denver were granted their own motion to have their case against Patrick Jay dismissed for lack of evidence! Prominent civil rights lawyer David Lane was informed this weekend that all charges against Patrick have been dropped.
Patrick was arrested last December while returning to his car after a ?#?BlackLivesMatter? protest. He was seized by SWAT officers while VIDEOTAPING the snatch and grab arrest of fellow activist Max Mendieta. Patrick was charged with obstructing traffic while marchers staged die-ins at prominent Denver intersections. *
According to police, HALO cameras recorded Patrick and others blocking vehicles. The cameras might also have confirmed that their actions prevented cars from running over the marchers laying prone on the pavement. We’ll never know because the DPD now says the footage is gone. After defendants declined to take plea deals, Patrick’s defense attorney David Lane learned the HALO footage would not be available for discovery because the surveillance files had been accidentally overwritten! In view of this, David Lane motioned for a dismissal, but city attorneys assured the judge that there were DPD officers enough to bear witness against Patrick Jay. Lane vowed to compel those officers to first have to pick Patrick from out of a line up. Patrick’s jury trial was set for April, but last week city attorneys tendered their own motion for a dismissal and that motion was granted.
Patrick Jay’s charges were dropped and his First Amendment rights were vindicated, but of course the Denver Police achieved their goal of intimidating activists who have to brace themselves for arbitrary arrest even though they know their rights. Over the course of many months of marches, participation has suffered attrition not just because people are frightened, don’t want to or can’t subject themselves to arrest, but some activists who had no alternative but to take plea deals now cannot risk violating the terms of probation which forbid their participation in protests.
Only a few days after Patrick’s arrest, he and I were leaving another anti-police-brutality march when multiple DPD cruisers swooped up to us on the sidewalk. This time instead of jumping off and unto us, an officer in the lead vehicle shouted from his rolled-down window: “Scared you?!”
Yes, officer, you did. **
Arrests and harassment have helped the DPD reduce protest numbers. Because of favorable plea deals or inadequate legal representation, no one has yet had the chance to challenge the veracity of their charges, until now. Several cases, including Max Mendieta’s, are still pending. Max is also represented by David Lane. Hopefully the recognition of Patrick’s arrest being unwarranted will turn the tide.
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NOTES:
* PATRICK’S ARREST WAS SURREAL. Everyone was returning to their cars, putting signs into trunks etc, when the police SUV carrying riot cops on its sideboards made a slow pass. This was a development we began to notice at earlier events. Even though the officers in riot gear might not have had to show themselves during a march, they would emerge afterward on their SUVs to cruise by our vehicles, almost to a stop as if scanning our cars looking for suspicious occupants. We didn’t think much of it except this time they stopped and the entire gang lept off to seize one of our group, Max Mendieta, as he walked the few solitary steps to his car. Patrick started to film the whole incident, from when police forced Max to the ground until they hauled him into custody. We’d reconstituted into a small group of less than a dozen, activists eager to dissuade further arressts, but the riot cops elbowed past us to seize another, which Patrick filmed, and then they grabbed Patrick. Patrick asked what they were arresting him for, but the officers wouldn’t say, only that it would be listed on his arrest warrant.
Ironically their irreverant answer turned out to be incorrect. But first I want to tell you what happened when the police drove off. They left an officer behind. The SUV loaded with riot cops, minus one, stopped several car lengths away when someone noticed the error. Their sargeant had been left on the street, in his cumbersome riot gear, unable to fit in the ordinary cruisers, and barely able to catch up with the waiting SUV. I guess the SUV driver didn’t want to risk backing over his sargeant, so the fat man lumbered slowly back to his perch, his riot gear clinking with every plodding step, like a minuscule robocop, the crowd barely able to sustain its “nah-nah-nah-nah” chant for laughing so hard.
Perhaps as payback, the arrestees that night -there were four total- had to wait sixteen hours “for their fingerprints to clear.”
Back to Patrick’s undeclared charges. Due to what we could only construe to be a typo, Patrick’s citation read “database-error” where the offense was supposed to be. Patrick had to sit in jail for 16 hours, post bail, await arraignment, and seek a lawyer, knowing only that he was charged with database-error. When the magistrate asked if he pled guilty, Patrick said “To what? Database error?” “No.”
** YES THERE’S MORE TO THIS STORY TOO. After the DPD pulled their gag, the officers watched as we walked to the building under which we’d parked our vehicle. The hour having become late, we discovered the stairwell doors locked. We imagined the officers laughing as they saw us circle the office building testing every door. We soon realized that our only recourse was to descend the car ramp to the parking area, but we were afraid that the police would follow and corner us there, out of view of other late night passersby. Security cameras or no, we feared what two dozen or so cops could do to two pedestrians; what we know often happens to homeless indigents in back alleys and poorly lit spaces; what happens to African Americans in broad daylight while they scream “I Can’t Breathe!” So we waited until the police cars lost interest before we ventured down the ramp.
Not being able to count on even our own police to obey the law, knowing the brutality of which police are capable, and witnessing the capriciousness of police abuse of authority, is the terror that defines living in a police state.
national budget goes to the Defense Department, so our federal resources are mostly soldiers! When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. In this case, coffin nails, to contain the stricken people of West Africa. They need epidemiologists, we give them boots on the ground.
A Pennsylvania 14-year-old is facing two years in juvenile detention for mounting a statue of a Christian mortal-diety and simulating receiving oral sex. The teen is charged with defacing public property, if merely symbolically. Critics assert authorities are punishing an act of blasphemy, not vandalism, which is probably correct, but I see a teaching moment here beyond a so-called religious offense. I ask: was the teen GAY? I would have chosen to urinate on the prophet-creature if I was going to desecrate it but since this teen invoked an unsolicited blowjob, I’d be more comfortable if I could infer that both participants were homosexual. Involuntary or not, the pose of two males of equal weight suggests they are probably engaged in something consentual. As a scene of heterosexual sex however, I think the posture smacks of male-dominant rape-culture, and doesn’t win any points for humor. For me, the longer this macho emulator can be detained from opportunities to clasp real heads into forced acts with his groin, the better. Especially with his predeliction for casual sidewalk encounters, however long he may have had his eyes on this particular object of his lust. The aspiring blasphemer rapist can be thankful he wasn’t African American or he’d be tried as an adult.
Western interest are desperate to create public consent for airstrike interventions in Africa, having failed with their KONY 2012 campaign, the Rwanda remembrance handwringing, ad infinitum. Now Nigerian insurgents have thwarted a military “rescue” of two hundred schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram by announcing that the girls will be put up for sale. The western media is spinning a horror story of sexual bondage while trying to ignore the obvious solution: purchase the girls. It’s even cheaper than euthanizing them with drone strikes. The US kills dark-skinned children by the thousands without a care. I have yet to hear anyone consider the circumstance of these Nigerian schoolgirls before they were abducted? Can we know the Chibok girls weren’t repossessed by dissident factions of their own communities? The White House hashtag campaign #bringbackourgirls seems dreadfully Freudian. The kidnapped girls were liberated from our clutches and we want them back. BOKO HARAM is an Islamic movement which opposes Western indoctrination. While it’s labeled “terrorist” outside of Africa, certainly its methods are no worse than those of the Western-imposed dictators ravaging Africa for corporate extraction interests. Western schools in Africa are entry points for providing the labor pools for Capitalism. Are African children better off in our recruiting mechanisms or out of them?
George Zimmerman’s MO has nothing on the US justice system. High school freshman Philip Chism is accused of murdering Boston teacher Colleen Ritzer. Though he’s only 14, Chism is being arraigned as an adult. The media is playing it down but Philip Chism is black. You’d think somewhere in America, district attorneys want to prosecute an African American juvenile AS A juvenile because, you know, Obama and shit. Neatly bookending this story today, white felon and Kennedy kin Michael Skakel, has been granted a retrial. Skakel was 39 when the law finally caught up with him, but Skakel was TRIED AS A JUVENILE (AT 39) because he was 15 when the murder was committed. In a further flaunting of priviledge, the judge granted Skakel a retrail because the judge decided his original defense must have been inadequate. That should set quite a precedent for anyone who’s been failed by a public defender, which would be EVERYBODY! But probably this precedent will only apply to everybody who’s white, and a Kennedy.
By now you’ve read elsewhere that many of the wounded soldiers being medivac’d to the US surgery hub in Germany are coming from parts unknown more specifically not-known to be US-declared war zones. Their flight origin is only revealed as “Horn of Africa”, but it’s telling isn’t it? US disrespect for foreign sovereignty means not even uttering the nation states involved. USG spokesmen know, for the geographically challenged, calling it the Horn can obfuscate the spheres of disputed influence stretching from Somalia, for you Blackhawk Downers, to Mali, where three US special ops were recently killed with their prostitute attaches, while the corporate media breathed a collective “huh?” Thankfully US adversaries in Mali had the better sense not to string the American bodies from bridges like pre-Falluja’d Fallujah, or did they? NATO’s media cameras weren’t there to exploit it in any case. Basically the Horn is where US AFRICOM has yet to beat back the continent’s last Islamic protectors as the Western serial rape of Africa drops its pretense that strangulation isn’t the final act.