COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO.- Local municipal court judge Matthew Ramirez was presented with evidence today that the city is operating an UNJUSTIFIED SPEED LIMIT TRAP in the construction zone at the intersection of Highway-24 and Interstate-25. Though drivers are regularly cited for exceeding a 30mph speed limit, the posted speed does not meet the 85% compliance rule, nor the "pedal test" for enforceable speed reductions. Both are characteristics of improper and legally unenforceable "speed traps". Plus, it turns out, 30pmh is not even the minimum speed required to cross under I-25 before the traffic light turns red. At 30pmh it takes a motorist 8.75 seconds to cross the intersection from West to East. But the traffic light allows only 2.75 seconds! No wonder drivers don't want to slow down. Upon seeing the video, instead of calling traffic engineers to set appropriate speed restrictions and adjust the timings, Judge Ramirez instead put his stamp of approval on CSPD's very lucrative speed trap. YES, I got a speeding ticket. Haha. And yes, today I was found guilty. I'm not upset so much as disappointed that the judge made himself complicit with the city's scheme. I know that "speed trap" has come to designate anywhere that police monitor traffic speeds, sometimes in hiding, and issue tickets. But I'm not using the term in the general sense. "Speed trap" has a legal definition which describes a scenario where police are ticketing motorists who have been forced, by circumstances under the control of the police, to violate the law and thus become eligible to be asked to contribute to the local administration's fee based tax. "Speed traps" are abuses by law enforcement to maximize citation revenues without having to come across and apprehend offenders operating autonomously to local fundraising schemes. On August 31 of this year, I was clocked going 43mph in a 30mph construction zone. Except for a vague feeling that I had not been "speeding", I had no intention of fighting the ticket. I support the enforcement of speed limits and I accept that being pulled over is more or less a random hazard of going with the flow. No objection. But my recent attendance at municipal cases brought against activists has meant a lot of time spent in courtrooms where I couldn't help but notice that many, many drivers were being cited for the same ticket as me, crossing the same intersection, their fines doubled because it's a construction zone, almost all of them taking a plea. My decision to plead not guilty led to a fruitful survey of legal abuses perpetrated by our traffic courts; on the part of the city attorneys, on the part of the police officers, and on the part of the judges. It was worth the fight and I assure you it's not over. Hundreds, if possibly thousands, of motorists have been ticketed, and are still being ticketed, like I was. Unless they're riding the brake as they approach the intersection, they are considered speeding. Often, hitting the brake at that approach
Tag: Injustice
Obama regime to claim God says it’s A- OK to murder US citizens without trial!
...Well OK- the title of this commentary is close enough to the real truth of the matter... Report: US government to offer legal backing for 'targeted killings' of Americans overseas. Lord, Please bring back Dubya now!
Lemony Snicket on Occupy Wall Street
"Someone feeling wronged is like someone feeling thirsty. Don’t tell them they aren’t. Sit with them and have a drink." --Lemony Snicket on Occupy Wall Street protests Reprinted from Occupy Writers: Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance Lemony Snicket is the author of A Series of Unfortunate Events (which are NOT about the economic collapse) which includes The Vile Village (which is neither about Wall Street nor Washington, DC). 1. If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald. 2. “Fortune” is a word for having a lot of money and for having a lot of luck, but that does not mean the word has two definitions. 3. Money is like a child—rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there. 4. People who say money doesn’t matter are like people who say cake doesn’t matter—it’s probably because they’ve already had a few slices. 5. There may not be a reason to share your cake. It is, after all, yours. You probably baked it yourself, in an oven of your own construction with ingredients you harvested yourself. It may be possible to keep your entire cake while explaining to any nearby hungry people just how reasonable you are. 6. Nobody wants to fall into a safety net, because it means the structure in which they’ve been living is in a state of collapse and they have no choice but to tumble downwards. However, it beats the alternative. 7. Someone feeling wronged is like someone feeling thirsty. Don’t tell them they aren’t. Sit with them and have a drink. 8. Don’t ask yourself if something is fair. Ask someone else—a stranger in the street, for example. 9. People gathering in the streets feeling wronged tend to be loud, as it is difficult to make oneself heard on the other side of an impressive edifice. 10. It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view. 11. Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending. 12. If you have a large crowd shouting outside your building, there might not be room for a safety net if you’re the one tumbling down when it collapses. 13. 99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1
Nominate Julian Assange for a Nobel? Time Person of the Year? No, jail him.
I Am Just Sick. Julian Assange arrested, denied bail, confined to a UK jail cell deemed unsuitable for Bush, Blair or their murderous peers. Britain even assured Israel that its war criminals could visit England without fear of politically motivated arrest warrants. So much for the Assange-is-Mossad rumor. Arrested for what? Publishing evidence of governments conspiring against their peoples' interests, in their own words? Really, what's next for our pretense of Democracy? No, it was accusations of sexual impropriety, technically. Rape and molestation being the corporate media's chosen translation of how Swedes might describe a consensual sexual encounter gone off, according to post-coital television interviewees, turned insufficiently feminist-sensitive. Do I sound flippant? Two women in Sweden, described as groupies, of activist pedigree it's alleged, one elder cementing the resolve of the younger, shall we call them Lewinsky and Tripp, accusing Assange of disrespecting their gender. They play right into the stereotype I have of single-issue advocates who can't get past affronts to their own personal agendas. Whatever Assange's transgressions, is not the fate of the western world, the awakening of its public participants in the balance? Though Swedish authorities originally dismissed the accusations, the pair is determined to interrupt Wikileaks' Cablegate to school Assange in his bedside manner? Whether instigated by intelligence operatives or not, the charges made by the two women have been the only hooks which authorities have been able to get into Assange. Will extradition to Sweden to answer police inquiries lead to US rendition to a secret facility? Should we hope that at the very least the Brits resist US pressure to interrogate Assange, or affect the operation of Wikileaks by coercion and duress? We must hope the Assange's colleagues can secure Wikileaks before their sysadmin is tortured for his access codes. Hearing the New York Times assail the character of Julian Assange as having delusions of grandeur, I'm reminded of how a centuries earlier ruling class rid themselves of the populist scourge Napoleon. Defeated once, Napoleon was able to escape banishment and had but to set foot on French soil and with only the force of his personality he was able to reconstitute his campaign to free the European citizenry of their despotic monarchs. Defeated again, Napoleon was too popular to execute and so was banished again. This time, it's alleged, a heroic loyalist submitted to be contaminated with syphilis and thence to infect and ground the upstart Napoleon for good. The remaining Wikileaks crew is at greater risk than Julian Assange, lacking his media visibility, they could be disappeared without fanfare. But that's evidently a fading misconception of mine. Assange's high profile hasn't helped him.
Police poster offering from CrimethInc
Per the Blatant murder of Oscar Grant and the Pig who forced him to lay down face down on the concrete before shooting him in the back, and the Reverse Kangaroo Court giving him the lightest possible charge one can obtain after Killing Another Human Being... For those who haven't the wit to understand, CrimethInc is a deliberate play on the ThoughtCrime word made up for the novel "1984" by Eric Blair. The link for the .pdf file in color -the link for the .pdf in black and white... If you've got an older form feed printer that costs less than a tenth of a penny per copy, this is a REALLY good one. Time to stir things up. A few hundred of these posters in places round town, bring the "Back the Badge" sucks out of the woodworks, get them to PUBLICLY scream their support for cold blooded racist murder. The text of the poster... THE POLICE The ones who beat Rodney King, who gunned down Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo and Oscar Grant, who murdered Fred Hampton in his bed. The ones who broke Víctor Jara’s hands and Steve Biko’s skull, who disappeared dissidents from Argentina to Zaire, who served Josef Stalin. The ones who enforced Apartheid in South Africa and segregation in the United States. The ones who interrogated Black Panthers and Catholic Workers, who maintained records on 16 million people in East Germany, who track us through surveillance cameras and phone taps. The ones firing tear gas and rubber bullets whenever a demonstration gets out of hand, who back the bosses in every strike. The ones who stand between every hungry person and the grocery shelves stocked with food, between every homeless person and the buildings standing empty, between every immigrant and her family. In every nation, in every age, you tell us you’re indispensable, that without you we’d all be killing each other. But we know well enough who the killers are. You won’t fuck with us much longer. Some of our regular readers will no doubt object to the "gratuitous profanity" in the poster text, without once objecting to the gratuitous Police State Violence depicted, the Pigs standing ready to beat down any opposition to their arbitrary rule, might makes right, the Gratuitous Violence of forcing a REAL man to lay face down then shooting him in the back, the Gratuitous Violence inherent in a system of so-called "Justice" that allows the Murdering Pigs to get away with claiming it was somehow an accident... Here's how that would sound if You or I entered the same kind of defense in an Aggravated Assault case "Well, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, the defendant was standing around with a weapon in his hand, but of course not intending to use it, in this case a 5 inch "Buck" brand fixed blade hunting knife. The alleged "victim" attempted to force the Defendant to kill him by presenting his open belly and deliberately falling toward the knife blade, the Defendant managed to break the fall of
Would you sell your kid for 253 dollars?
That's what the people of Bhopal India were told to do when the "compensation" was announced 24 years ago. That's after 2 years of LawyerFights over Limited Liability and "Tort Reform". The Reaganites including Ron Paul, the Dad-part of the Paul and Paul Father-son Hate Team, rather than celebrate the judgment of 12,400 rupees per each dead Indian, bitched and whined that it was Too Much. The BAIL for the Guilty Parties, or at least the lower level Guilty parties, nine in all, one deceased and one "hiding" in a Country Club gated community on Long Island, was 25,000 rupees apiece. $502. For 25,000 counts of Murder. That's three times the "official" count. The official count was 8000 initially and another 9000 since. If Union Carbide wants to call that libel or slander, it would be up to them to prove it. The Union Carbide Corporation, the truly guilty party, is not required to meet the responsibilities of a Real Human Citizen even though they have more "rights" than a real human citizen. Ron and Rand Paul and all the other Reaganite Corporate Sucks say Amen. I was charged with possession of a knife that doesn't fold up in Texas once, the bail for that was $800. The actual BOND for it was $2000. You know, that makes me feel especially hard core when my bond for merely carrying a knife was 4 times that for 25,000 counts of Capital Murder. Incidentally, the BBC report only counts the initially killed, not those who have died subsequently. The clinic that Union Carbide opened to "treat the injured" closed about 12 years ago. The residues of that explosion and all the accumulated Union Carbide waste chemicals over the decades are still killing people. Sans the $253 payout per dead kid. Maybe the criminals at British Petroleum will receive a stiffer payment. It would be next to impossible for the punishment to be lighter than that. No, Really. Look up "impossible" in the dictionary and right next to it will be a picture of somebody getting a lighter slap on the wrist for a heinous crime. But, after all, the economic victims of BP are (for now) mostly American citizens, a large part of them White and there's even the damage to some of the Playground Beaches where the richest like to go, when their Very Important Jobs holding down their office chairs, keeping them from drifting off into space, become too wearisome and they need a break. I figure one oil stained beach on a Private Island will fetch more in damages than 25,000 dead Indians.
Judicial delinquents
In a country where the politicians appoint judge- ships, this story stands out about how totally corrupted our US Legal System actually is. Pennsylvania judges accused of jailing kids for cash. An aberration, or par for The System? I think PAR myself.
More strange American ‘law’
What would happen if the police had the evidence on any other Tony, Eric, Dick, or Peter, that any one of us three had paid for a prostitute? I ask this, since I once was almost a victim of police entrapment by a female cop decoy that I innocently enough offered a ride from inside a convenience store. She kept begging me to pay her for sex! Luckily when I didn't bite, she finally got out of the car, and the next day I read about her policing activities in the daily paper. Close call. In New York, the police are not as uncorrupted as the Texas cops are though. No Charges for Spitzer in Prostitution Case They get all the dope on a guy, and then let him go! Isn't that just incredible? This man could possibly corrupt the morals of some other young call girl because of this inexplicable police behavior. That's not right! I chalk it up to being just another strange American 'law'. Some go to jail, and others don't. Equal protection under the law? Perhaps not. The law is not blind, though now the current governor of New York is just that, ever since Spitzer has got spitzed back out into the general population. Who needs these prostitution laws anyway? The police? I feel sorry for Eliot's wife, since she might not be able to buy at Neiman Marcus this Christmas? And imagine if I had used New York State Police logic back if I had taken the bait with the police decoy bird down in Texas? I had offered her say, $100 for a 'light massage'? As they would then have converged on me in mass, handcuffed me, and I would have shouted out.... 'You can't arrest me! This $100 is not from public funds!' Here is that imaginary answer from the cops... 'Sorry, Guv, we will have to let you go. You harmed nobody.'
The Whites win this one against the great Orange Juice Simpson
The media is so muted this time around. Racism in America is so volatile that a concrete channel for it must always be built by the ruling class and the damns only opened up to the common (religious) folk under the most controlled circumstances. Arab racism is now allowed to flow at a heavy rate along with anti-Latino/ anti-immigrant worker racism, but anti-Black racism can only be opened to a trickle at this time. So how to handle the OJ Simpson verdict to keep the levees intact? The Verdict 'In' is for 'The Revenge of Injured Whites' where 2 wrongs can certainly seemingly be used to make a seeming Right. What the Criminal Injustice System had working for it this time is that Orange Juice Simpleton continued to carry on in a vain, self centered manner, all to snatch justice away from injustice (or is it the other way around?), never mind all that money spent by the Football Guy the first time around. The criminal got beat by the con it seems! The Black criminal and the White Con, with the Smiling Police Officers, the prim and serious Judge Nancy Nice presiding. Oh Well, Oj. The prison system really is not that much worse than the typical American nursing home, and you'll get used to it in the short run. I know that at 62 you wanted to wait a few more years before going to the Shady Manor , but many of the people you'll meet will even seem already quite familiar to you. You'll be a star to them! So have fun! It's all such poetic injustice! We'll miss you...