Breaking 1-06-21: MAGA terrorist attack on Capitol

they have it easy as compared to Wen Ho Lee

they were not shackled in chain like Wen Ho Lee was.

they know what the charges are, Wen Ho Lee didn't

 

the trump insurrection happened 14 months ago. how have they been sitting in jail for two years?

and im going to keep pointing out that you and many others are more upset about how the insurrectionists are being treated than you are about the fact that the president incited an insurrection against his own government.

 

The issue is he ruled specifically to block this very information from going to the Jan 6th committee. He didn't even write up his reasoning in his dissent.

I get that Ginni Thomas is a nut, and like we see with Kellyanne and George Conway, it's possible for households to be split drastically on basically everything. We know that Thomas is a bias judge yes with a horrible record, but we don't know if he's a nutcase like his wife who openly is trying to overturn democracy at the highest levels even in contact and influencing the White House chief of staff.

The issue really at hand though is Judge Thomas' rulings on matters potentially pertaining to his own wife. IMO he should have recused himself, and should do so moving forward on Jan 6th matters. Even though George Conway and Kellyanne Conway are night and day politically, it still doesn't mean that if Kellyanne was charged with murder, that George Conway could sit as a jury in her case, or could be a judge if he was a sitting Justice.

All of this is kind of moot though because the Republican Party would NEVER let Thomas be impeached. He could be caught on camera as the pipe bomber on January 6th and theres no way in hell they'd vote to impeach him if the president is a Democrat, and had the votes in the Senate to get a Justice on the Supreme Court in his place. The only way the Republicans would ever allow a judge like Thomas to be replaced is if they had the presidency, and control of the Senate. So like it or not, Clarence Thomas is going nowhere regardless of what he does. He has absolute immunity which in principle is sort of scary that our judicial system has that level of power at the top.

 

Is it?

Wrong skin color to be terrorist?

 

Gitmo was an unjust and unconstitutional way to handle foreign, Islamist terrorists. Invoking that idea for US citizens is a little over the top. Besides which, I don't see why you wouldn't get bail for treason (not that they are charged with treason), so long as the court was reasonably assured you wouldn't be a flight risk or a danger to the public. If 80 Jan 6 rioters are being held without bail, it's probably because they've said things to make a judge think releasing them was dangerous. I don't know about every case, but the last specific one that I recall being brought up was precisely about threats of future violence.

 

They should have been sent to gitmo.

Definitely no bail for treason, that's completely within the court's right to deny it in special cases like this and murder. You attack the capital you should be in prison.

 

I think it's obvious that @Commodore see them as heroes vs traitors.

 

our attorney general, ken paxton, has been sitting on multiple felony indictments since 2015.

i hope those who think our justice system moves too slow for insurrectionist traitors is also outraged that its taking 7 years to bring paxton to trial.

 

This!!!!!

 

Not hard to see this, his voting record is pretty clearly in favor of overturning democracy at all levels. Voting rights, apportionment, election law - every single decision he's on the authoritarian/disenfranchisement side.

 

Hard to believe an accused felon is our Attorney General. That's disgusting.

 

u know u fcked up when u end up deciding to just leave the country

as for the others, let them sit in jail eating months old mystery meatloaf as they await trial…should’ve been at work or minding your own business, but u wanted to overthrow democracy instead and then self-snitch on social media making it even easier to make a case against u

 

Police Departments should make “social media detective” a job opening for retired people who want something to do

just sit at home and browse these idiot’s social media during commercial breaks collecting evidence

the urge to self-snitch is an epidemic…What good is robbing a bank or trying to overthrow Democracy if u don’t let everybody know what u did?

 

Tell it to your girl Ginny Thomas, Juan

Not as reckless as this type of lazy framing ("private citizens, making a petition, to murder the vice president and steal teh election!"). If you think that the only thing Ginny is on the hook for is sending a few cringey text messages you're not paying attention - she's in pretty deep in the whole plot with Rudy, Eastman and the rest.



And then:



LOL, the funny thing about judicial recusal/ethics is that you're supposed to avoid even the slightest appearance of impropriety - lololol, there's literally no way to bothsides this one.

 

I've heard many in LE say that while social media has caused a lot of problems it's been great for solving crimes. Many just can't resist bragging or even recording their crimes on social media.

 

This Op-Ed lays out the problems regarding Clarence Thomas and Ginni Thomas regarding his role as USSC Justice. Bolded for emphasis some key parts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/opinion/ginni-clarence-thomas-trump.html
Ginni and Clarence Thomas Have Done Enough Damage

What did Justice Clarence Thomas know, and when did he know it?

The question usually gets directed at politicians, not judges, but it’s a fair one in light of the revelation on Thursday that Justice Thomas’s wife, Ginni, was working feverishly behind the scenes — and to a far greater degree than she previously admitted — in a high-level effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

As The Washington Post and CBS News first reported, Ms. Thomas, a supremely well-connected right-wing agitator, was in constant communication with the White House in the weeks following the election, strategizing over how to keep Donald Trump in office despite his incontrovertible loss. “Do not concede,” she texted to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, on Nov. 6, the day before the major news networks called the election for Joe Biden. “It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.” (To date, Mr. Trump has not conceded.)

In dozens of messages with Mr. Meadows over several weeks, Ms. Thomas raged over baseless allegations of voter fraud and shared unhinged conspiracy theories, including one that the “Biden crime family” was in the process of being arrested and sent to Guantánamo Bay for “ballot fraud.”

“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” Ms. Thomas wrote at one point. “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”

Ms. Thomas had already acknowledged some involvement in the fight over the 2020 election count, recently confirming that she attended the Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally in Washington, but she said she went home before Mr. Trump spoke to the crowd and before a mob of hundreds stormed the Capitol in a violent attempt to block the certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory. The texts reveal that her efforts to subvert the election were far more serious than we knew.

Now recall that in January, the Supreme Court rejected Mr. Trump’s request to block the release of White House records relating to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. Mr. Meadows had submitted a brief in the case supporting Mr. Trump. The court’s ruling came as an unsigned order, with only one noted dissent: from Justice Thomas.

Perhaps Justice Thomas was not aware of his wife’s text-message campaign to Mr. Meadows at the time. But it sure makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

And that’s precisely the problem: We shouldn’t have to wonder. The Supreme Court is the most powerful judicial body in the country, and yet, as Alexander Hamilton reminded us, it has neither the sword nor the purse as a means to enforce its rulings. It depends instead on the American people’s acceptance of its legitimacy, which is why the justices must make every possible effort to appear fair, unbiased and beyond reproach.

That may seem naïve, particularly in the face of the crippling assaults on the court that Mitch McConnell and his Senate Republicans have carried out over the past six years in order to secure a right-wing supermajority that often resembles a judicial policy arm of the Republican Party — starting with their theft of a vacancy that was President Barack Obama’s to fill and continuing through the last-second confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett while millions of voters were already in the process of casting Mr. Trump out of office.

And yet the public’s demand for basic fairness and judicial neutrality is not only proper but critical to the court’s integrity, as the justices, whoever nominated them, are well aware. Partly in response to the court’s tanking public-approval ratings, several of them have grown increasingly outspoken in defense of their independence. (Though not all of them.)

The most obvious way for justices to demonstrate that independence in practice, of course, is to recuse themselves from any case in which their impartiality might reasonably be questioned. It does not matter whether there is, in fact, a conflict of interest; the mere appearance of bias or conflict should be enough to compel Justice Thomas or any other member of the court to step aside.

Many of them have over the years, out of respect for the court as an institution and for the public’s faith in their probity. Just this week, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson vowed that if confirmed she would recuse herself from an upcoming case challenging Harvard’s affirmative-action policies, because of her multiple personal and professional connections to the university. Legal-ethics experts are not even in agreement that her recusal would be necessary, but Judge Jackson is right to err on the side of caution.

Justice Thomas has paid lip service to this ideal. “I think the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference,” he said in a speech last year. “That’s a problem. You’re going to jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions.”

Bench memo to the justice: You know what jeopardizes public faith in legal institutions? Refusing to recuse yourself from numerous high-profile cases in which your wife has been personally and sometimes financially entangled, as The New Yorker reported in January. Especially when you have emphasized that you and she are melded “into one being.” Or when you have, as The Times Magazine reported last month, appeared together with her for years “at highly political events hosted by advocates hoping to sway the court.”

Ms. Thomas’s efforts, and her husband’s refusal to respond appropriately, have been haunting the court for years, but this latest conflagration shouldn’t be a close call. “The texts are the narrowest way of looking at this,” Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor and one of the nation’s foremost legal-ethics experts, told me. “She signed up for Stop the Steal. She was part of the team, and that team had an interest in how the court would rule. That’s all I need to know.” He said he has over the years resisted calling for Justice Thomas’s recusal based on his wife’s actions, “but they’ve really abused that tolerance.”
Cont.

 

Cont.

Yes, married people can lead independent professional lives, and it is not a justice’s responsibility to police the actions of his or her spouse. But the brazenness with which the Thomases have flouted the most reasonable expectations of judicial rectitude is without precedent. From the Affordable Care Act to the Trump administration’s Muslim ban to the 2020 election challenges, Ms. Thomas has repeatedly embroiled herself in big-ticket legal issues and with litigants who have wound up before her husband’s court. All the while, he has looked the other way, refusing to recuse himself from any of these cases. For someone whose job is about judging, Justice Thomas has, in this context at least, demonstrated abominably poor judgment.

If Justice Thomas were sitting on any other federal court in the country, he would likely have been required by the code of judicial ethics to recuse himself many times over. But the code does not apply to Supreme Court justices, creating a situation in which the highest court in the land is also the most unaccountable.

This is not tolerable. For years, Congress has tried in vain to extend the ethics code to the Supreme Court. For the sake of fundamental fairness and consistency, the code must apply to all federal judges; it would at the very least force the hand of those like Justice Thomas who seem unmoved by any higher sense of duty to the institution or to the American people who have agreed to abide by its rulings.

The court is in deep trouble these days, pervaded by what Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently called the “stench” of partisanship — a stench arising in no small part from the Thomases’ behavior. It is hard to imagine that the other justices, regardless of their personal politics, aren’t bothered.

No one should have to choose between their devotion to their spouse and their duty to the nation. But Justice Thomas has shown himself unwilling or unable to protect what remains of the court’s reputation from the appearance of extreme bias he and his wife have created. He would do the country a service by stepping down and making room for someone who won’t have that problem.

 

Wrong thread.

 

Aren't clearance rates for most felonies either about the same or even lower than in the pre-Internet era?

Seems like cops spend more money on armored vehicles and automatic weapons than gumshoes these days.

 

I don't know how other prosecutors do it, but I release people when they have been in jail long enough to cover what I am offering them in a plea bargain. They have already served the jail time I was asking of them. If they choose to continue fighting their case, they are welcome to do so and they may prevail or the court may impose additional punishment if they are found guilty.