Mom Convicted of Using the N-word

News:

A woman who called a Black, autistic child a racial slur last year has been found guilty of one count of disorderly conduct and not guilty on another.

The incident, which occurred at a playground in Rochester in April of last year, was caught on video by a bystander and went viral. Shiloh Hendrix, 37, called a then 8-year-old boy the n-word after he allegedly reached into her diaper bag at Roy Sutherland playground in Soldier's Field Park and took an item. She then began cussing at the bystander, who is Black — hurling the n-word at him as well.

The incident prompted Rochester City Attorney Michael Spindler-Krage to charge Hendrix with two counts of disorderly conduct, one involving her words and behavior toward the child and the other involving her words and behavior toward the man who video taped the incident.

The guilty verdict was related to her behavior toward the man who video taped the confrontation.

Hendrix was sentenced immediately following the verdict being read. She was ordered to pay a $1,000 fine, was placed on probation and ordered to complete community service. She initially faced up to 90 days in jail, but will serve no jail time unless probation is broken.

The Somalian man video recorded himself begging the mom to use the N-word, so he could record and post it. She eventually complied as she walked away.

The conviction is for her attitude towards the adult Somalian man, not the child.

That 8-year-old Somalian is already a police-registered juvenile delinquent:

In his testimony, Jimale said his son has a history of running away and taking things that don’t belong to him because he is autistic. As a result, the child wears a law enforcement issued GPS tracker that helps police find the child when he runs off.

The problem here is that lawless and uncivilized Somalians have invaded Minnesota, and this poor mom cannot even take her small child to a public park without being harassed by Somalians. Even though she was the victim, the police, prosecutors, judge, and jury have sided with the Somalians.

Elon Musk's Ambitious Project

I go on Twitter and I find:

A lot of Blacks complaining about Karmelo Anthony being convicted for murder. They say a Black jury would have acquitted him. They mention Whites who got acquitted or lesser sentences. They complain that the victim's dad used the word "watermelon", as if that justifies murder. They demand reparations for slavery centuries ago.

A lot of Democrats want to tax Elon Musk, and give his money to some welfare program. They say no one should be allowed to get billions of dollars.

The curious thing about Musk is that he is raising money to do what the consensus says cannot be done. And he has a track record of doing the impossible.

If Musk were not so rich, no one would be trying to put data centers in space. It would not happen for another century.

Musk's crime is that he has sold investors on the most ambitious, risky, and potentially rewarding plan ever carried out. I do not believe he can do it. But is it bad that he is trying? No, it is tremendously exciting. It is capitalism at its best.

It is hard for me to understand the people who want to take away his rockets, and use the money to give to the poor. We would still be living in grass huts if civilization never tried to advance.

RIP Mark Fuhrman

Mark Fuhrman has died. He was the cop famous for finding the OJ Simpson bloody glove, and then denying under oath having used the N-word in the past ten years. The trial popularized that euphemism. A recorded interviewed proved that he had used it 9.5 years earlier.

During his closing argument, defense attorney Johnnie Cochran called Fuhrman "a lying, perjuring, genocidal racist", likening him to Adolf Hitler. He argued that Fuhrman had planted the bloody glove on Simpson's estate as part of a racially motivated plot against Simpson, which could be traced back to Fuhrman's first encounter with the interracial couple in 1985.

I thought that he would be allowed to explain that use in a Hollywood role-playing interview was harmless, but he was prosecuted for perjury. Some say that his use of the N-word was the main reason OJ was acquitted.

The blood evidence against OJ was overwhelming. His blood was found at the scene of the crime, and his victims' blood was found on his possessions. Complaining about the N-word was just a way of rationalizing the acquittal. Fuhrman was the only one convicted.

A 2020 court case found:

Not only is the word "nigger" undoubtedly the most hateful and inflammatory racial slur in the contemporary American lexicon; …; but it is probably the single most offensive word in the English language. See, e.g., Ayissi-Etoh v. Fannie Mae (D.C. Cir. 2013) (Kavanaugh, J., concurring) ("[The] epithet ['nigger'] has been labeled, variously, a term that 'sums up … all the bitter years of insult and struggle in America,' [L. Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography], 'pure anathema to African-Americans,' Spriggs v. Diamond Auto Glass (4th Cir. 2001), and 'probably the most offensive word in English.' [Random House Webster's College Dictionary]. See generally [A. Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family]; [H. Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird]…. No other word in the English language so powerfully or instantly calls to mind our country's long and brutal struggle to overcome racism and discrimination against African-Americans."); R. Kennedy, The David C. Baum Lecture: 'Nigger!' as a Problem in the Law, 2001 U. Ill. L. Rev. 935 (although "[t]he American language is (and has long been) rife with terms of ethnic, racial, and national insult: kike, mick, wop, nip, gook, honkie, wetback, chink, [etc.] … 'nigger is now probably the most offensive word in English'"); Dictionary.com, available at https://www.dictionary.com/browse/nigger?s=t ("The term nigger is now probably the most offensive word in English. Its degree of offensiveness has increased markedly in recent years, although it has been used in a derogatory manner since at least the Revolutionary War.").

The word is not really a 'pure anathema to African-Americans,' as they use the word all the time. I suspect that 99% of usage today is not actually offensive.

Harvey Weinstein gets another Hung Jury

Harvey Weinstein is widely hated for being a sex criminal, but a third NY jury failed to convict him. He has dozens of accusers, including Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom's wife.

I think it is clear that Ronan Farrow and the NY Times sold us some bogus stories. Weinstein is sleazy, but there is very little evidence he committed crimes.

Weinstein Accuser Testifies

Harvey Weinstein has about a hundred accusers, so surely one can tell a convincing story to convict him. Nope. AP reports on his third trial:

Mann met Weinstein at a Los Angeles-area party around early 2013. She had done some acting work but was hoping for a big break.

Their subsequent get-togethers bounced between professional advice, invites to glitzy industry events and advances that Mann said made her uncomfortable but that she didn’t refuse, though she had an emotional “meltdown” during an episode involving Weinstein and another woman.

Still, Mann decided to have a consensual sexual liaison with the then-married producer.

She explained Tuesday that she had been taught to expect such behavior from men and thought she might feel better about it if she was in a relationship with Weinstein.

Among many consensual encounters, she said that one was not.

Mann told no one at the time. She went through with the planned breakfast, accepted Weinstein’s invitation to extend her trip, attend a movie screening and have tea with him and his daughter.

“I just wanted everyone to act like everything was normal,” she said.

She continued consensual sexual encounters and friendly email exchanges with Weinstein. He helped the financially struggling Mann get hired at a hair salon, though she declined an envelope from him that she believed contained $1,000 in cash: “It felt wrong,” she told jurors.

I am wondering how any of this would convince a jury. If he really committed a crime against her, she would not have continued the relationship.

Ricky Vaughn Election Meme Acquitted

Wikipedia reports:

After his conviction and sentencing, Mackey was interviewed by Tucker Carlson[19] and Donald Trump Jr.[20]

Carlson falsely claimed that Mackey was being jailed for "mocking Hillary Clinton on the internet", rather than for a voter suppression scheme.[21][22] In a 2021 show, Carlson had described Mackey as a victim of political persecution and did not bring up Mackey's racist tweets, stating that "we have no idea what Doug Mackey’s views are".[23] Donald Trump Jr. encouraged viewers to donate to Mackey's legal fund and said that Ricky Vaughn "may be my favorite Twitter account of all time".[20]

Claims that Mackey had been jailed for merely criticizing Hillary Clinton were spread by Dinesh D'Souza and the online magazine The Post Millennial. The claims were rated "False" by USA Today.[22]

If those claims were false, then why was he sentenced to 7 months in prison?

Yesterday, the appeals court unanimously ordered him acquitted on all counts:

On November 1 and 2, 2016, Defendant-Appellant Douglass Mackey … posted or reposted three "memes" on Twitter falsely suggesting that supporters of then-candidate Hillary Clinton could vote in the 2016 presidential election by text message. Based on these posts, a jury … convicted him of conspiring to injure citizens in the exercise of their right to vote in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 241.Mackey argues on appeal that the evidence was insufficient to prove that he knowingly agreed to join the charged conspiracy. We agree….

To begin, the government presented no evidence that Mackey participated in the conspiracy's formation.

So he was charged with conspiracy, and a jury agreed, but there was no actual evidence of conspiracy.

Here we are, in 2025, and he is just now getting vindicated for a 2016 tweet. He avoid jail, but he had to waste years of his life fighting this. I think it is fair to say that he was persecuted for the political content of his tweet.

Cassie Ventura is a Prostitute

Or so the jury concluded in Trial of Sean Combs, aka Puff Diddy.

Cassie is a very rich and successful entertainer who dated Diddy in 2007-2018. She is half Black and half Filipino. Diddy helped her promote records that made a lot of money.

The feds spent $10 million in a trial accusing Diddy of an assortment of evils including arson, but he was acquitted of the serious charges. They only found him guilty of some consensual sexual activities with adults.

Cassie was the star prosecution witness. I am wondering why she even testified. I guess she hates Diddy and wants to get revenge on him for events that happened many years ago. But she only convicted him of paying her to have sexual relations. I thought that these rich celebrities had agents and publicists to keep them out of such foolish actions.

If that is criminal, why isn't she being prosecuted? Is she happy about her image being redefined as a prostitute?

The feds were out to get Diddy. I do not know why. Even today, with him only guilty of petty charges, he is being held in jail without bail.

The other big legal case this week was Bryan Christopher Kohberger pleading guilty for the 2022 University of Idaho killings. He had no known link to the victims, no known motive, no recovered murder weapon, and no direct evidence linking him to the crime. He did not even live in the state. He was caught by a surveillance video showing the type of car, cell tower pings, and a small amount of dna on a knife case.

This the future of law enforcement. Instead of gumshoe police work, the surveillance state will provide all the evidence.

Update: The NY Times reports:

But former prosecutors and other lawyers who have followed Mr. Combs’s case said his acquittal on a federal RICO conspiracy charge, which carried a potential sentence of life in prison, was an aberration and unlikely to discourage the authorities from continuing to rely on the 1970 statute. . . .

Since the #MeToo movement, RICO has been used to prosecute high-profile men for sexual abuse. In 2019, Keith Raniere, the leader of the Nxivm sex cult, was convicted in Brooklyn federal court on charges of conspiring in a racketeering enterprise that victimized women through sex trafficking. Two years later, R. Kelly, the R&B artist, was convicted in the same court on charges that he participated in a decades-long racketeering scheme to recruit women and underage girls for sex. . . .

Elizabeth Geddes, a former Brooklyn federal prosecutor who was part of the team that won Mr. Kelly’s conviction, said she did not think the Combs verdict would dissuade the government from deploying the statute. “I think that it will be treated with the sort of one-offness — my technical term — that it is worth,” she said.

Federal and state prosecutors call RICO an essential tool against many kinds of malfeasance. Between the 2018 and 2022 fiscal years, about 98 percent of RICO cases ended in a conviction, according to Department of Justice data. About 60 percent of the RICO investigations conducted in that period were of individual people. . . .

G. Robert Blakey, a University of Notre Dame law professor who helped draft the measure, has said it was never meant to be used only against mobsters. . . .

What gives RICO its power, legal experts say, is that it allows prosecutors to pull together allegations of misconduct that may stretch back years, even beyond the statute of limitations, or to include state offenses or crimes committed in other jurisdictions. Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia Law professor and former Manhattan federal prosecutor, said the government often uses RICO to knit a sprawling case into a single narrative — “a way to provide a legal framework for putting together a sustained pattern of behavior.”

But some defense lawyers, particularly after the Combs verdict, argue that prosecutors have used the statute to prop up weak cases and give the government an unfair advantage. . . . Arthur L. Aidala, a lawyer for Mr. Raniere, said he hoped Mr. Combs’s acquittals would have a “chilling effect” on the Justice Department’s use of RICO.

“This is a good example of how the government tried to use a tool in their arsenal and they misused it,” Mr. Aidala said.

The RICO law should be repealed.

Memphis Cops Acquitted of Murder

Slate reports:

Tyre Nichols was murdered.

Not killed. Not lost. Not a life that simply “ended.” He was murdered. He was ripped from the fragile thread of existence by the deliberate choices of men who decided that his life did not matter. ...

But for Black Americans, the promise of due process is too often a mirage, a pledge written in ink that fades when touched. ...

For all the names I know — Tyre Nichols, George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, Michael Brown, Alton Sterling, Freddie Gray, Laquan McDonald, Rodney King, Atatiana Jefferson, Botham Jean, Oscar Grant, Stephon Clark, Sonya Massey — there are thousands more. Names that never became hashtags.

I did not follow this case, but the Black police defendants managed to get an all-white jury, and were acquitted of all state charges.

Some of them may have to federal time. The Constitution says no double jeopardy, but apparently there is an exception when Black want to lynch a cop.

I followed some of the above cases, and they were mostly stories of violent Black criminals who resisted arrest. If there were some systemic racism, I would think that someone would find a good example.

How SBF got 25 Years

Sam Bankman-Fried biographer Michael Lewis wrote a sympathetic essay in the Wash Post:

As Lewis Kaplan, the federal judge who presided over the case, said later: "When he wasn't outright lying, he was often evasive, hairsplitting, dodging questions and trying to get the prosecutor to reword questions in ways that he could answer in ways he thought less harmful than a truthful answer to the question that was posed would have been. I've been doing this job for close to 30 years. I've never seen a performance quite like that...." [T]he judge ordered Sam to rise so that he might address him directly. Two hours or so earlier, Sam had shuffled into the courtroom in prison khakis with his head down and his hands oddly clasped behind his back. Just before he'd entered, his guards had told him he was meant to be wearing handcuffs and asked if he could create the impression that he was doing so...

“There is a risk that this man will be in a position to do something very bad in the future, and it’s not a trivial risk, not a trivial risk at all,” said the judge. “So, in part, my sentence will be for the purpose of disabling him.” He then sentenced Sam to 25 years in prison, with no possibility of parole.

Everybody said that SBF deserved it because investors lost billions of dollars.

It seems unfair to me for the judge to blame SBF for how he handled the hostile cross-examination. Of could he tried to put his deeds in a favorable light.

The bigger issue is that inivestors ultimately got all their money back. Yes, SBF took some crazy risks, but ultimately no one was harmed. The judge did not allow the jury to learn that.

Another case of financial fraud had an odd ending:

British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch’s former co-defendant in a US fraud trial has died after being hit by a car just days before a yacht carrying the now-missing tycoon sank off the coast of Sicily.

Stephen Chamberlain, 52, a former VP of finance at Lynch’s former company Autonomy, was hit by the car while out running on Saturday, his lawyer Gary Lincenberg told CNN Monday.

The incident took place just two days before the British investor Lynch, 59, went missing along with five others after a tornado sank the luxury yacht carrying them off the coast of Sicily in the early hours of Monday.

Both Lynch and Chamberlain were acquitted of fraud by a court in San Francisco in June, following charges related to the sale of Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard (HP) for $11 billion in 2011.

Six people missing, including British tech tycoon Mike Lynch, and one dead after tornado sinks luxury yacht off Sicily Prosecutors had alleged the pair had schemed to inflate Autonomy’s revenue before selling to HP.

Lynch is dead. Seems fishy to me. Almost no one defeats a prosecution like this. I don't believe that HP or AG Garland sent out hit men, but it sure is strange.

The New York Election Law

The press sometimes describes the Trump conviction as falsifying records to cover up illegal influence on the 2016.

Here is the NY law of which Trump's records were supposedly concealing a violation:

§ 17-152. Conspiracy to promote or prevent election. Any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.

What kind of crazy law is this? And Trump did not have to violate it, but just 4 jurors thinking that he intended to. What are the elements of this crime? How is this a crime?

What did Trump do, promote an election? Prevent an election?

I say 4 jurors because Trump could have been convicted by 4 jurors thinking Trump intended to shelter Cohen from a campaign finance violation, 4 jurors thinking Trump intended to evade taxes in some unspecified way, and 4 thinking Trump intended to violate the above law.

Mindreading Jurors have not told us Trump's Crime

I jus learned that the NY Trump judge is a South American!

The judge will probably order probation conditions designed to interfere with the election as much as possible.

Whatever you think of Pres. Trump, we should not have a Colombian deciding our next President Everyone who goes along with this, from Pres. Biden on down, is an enemy of American justice.

It is funny to see the press try to descrive the conviction on one sentence. They cannot do it. The essential charge was that his office recorded transactions as legal expenses, and they were falsified to cover up at least one of 3 possible unproved crimes, campaign finance, cheating voters, and tax evasion.

The important point is that he was not convicted of paying hush money, or interfering with the election, or misleading voters, or tax evasion, or anything like that. The jury found that Trump intended to cover up a crime, but there is no finding as to what that crime was. No one knows.

Maybe some jurors will speak up and tell us, but none have so far.

The case follows the pattern where Trump-haters investigate him for years looking for wrongdoing, fail, and end up accusing him of intent to commit some nebulous crime.

That is what happened in both the first and second impeachments. No direct evidence of a crime, and not even any direct evidence of intent, but somehow the mindreading Trump-haters claim to know what he was thinking.

Maybe that should have been a jury voir dire question: Do you believe in mindreading?

I used to regularly post here the evil effects of faulty mindreading. It explains much of what is wrong with our society.

The funny think about Trump is that he is exactly what he appears to be. More so that any other politician. He says what he means and he means what he says. There is no need to apply any mindreading skills.

There is a mental illness that a lot of people have, where they cannot take anything on face value. They cannot understand straightforward language, and jump to conclusion about everything meaning something else. Some even say that such behavior is neurotypical, and they are rattled by those who are more direct.

I am not saying that Trump has autism. He does not. But I think that he is hated for some of the same reasons that people with high-functioning autism are hated.

Trump is Convicted

The Democrat attempt to destroy our political has reached a new height. The trial was a sham.

There was no evidence that Trump had anything to do with those records. The records were not falsified. His lawyer billed for legal services, and the payments were logged that way.

Michael Cohen lied for his own profit. He should not have even been allowed to testify, as it was based on him illegally recording and betraying attorney-client privilege.

There was no crime being covered up. Even the prosecutor and judge could not specify a particular crime.

Our legal system is broken. And our political system is broken, if the opposing political party can shut down the leading Presidential candidate on bogus charges.

No, I do not think we are headed for civil war. But I do t h ink that the Democrat Party is the biggest threat to our Republic in decades, and this lawfare must be shut down at all costs.

In 1920, the Democrats imprisoned Presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs for his political views. He still got close to a million votes. I thought that everyone understood that to be a mistake.

I see no solution, except to elect Trump, and hope he gets his revenge. They maybe people will learn.

Here is a law professor rant:

Thank goodness the New York prosecutors knew what they were doing, and secured a conviction against the monster child, now making him officially a convicted felon. ... The irony is that this case was not nearly as significant or as strong ...

It is incumbent on me to observe, however, that the latest report that the congenial empty suit Biden is once again risking nuclear war for Ukraine does give one pause. The only good thing about Trump is that he is not a war-monger unlike the rest of the Republican and Democratic establishment. He may be a crook, a malignant narcissist, an idiot, and an incompetent: but he doesn't want to get America involved in wars. It's not enough to justify his winning, of course, but if Biden and the feckless Democrats lead us into a nuclear conflagration over Ukraine, then I suppose this will all look rather different (should anyone be around to look). ...

The fact that Trump is still a serious candidate for the Presidency is testimony to what a sick country this is. That the alternative is a President risking nuclear war over Cold War fantasies just confirms how deep the sickness is.

This may be becoming a consensus among our intellectuals. Trump's personality is terrible, but his policies are vastly superior to Biden's. Biden is destroying the country while Trump is personally embarrassing himself.

By now I have read hundreds of essays criticizing Trump, and hardly any of them have any substantive content. They are all just name-calling.

Inside the Trump Kangaroo Court

Law professor Alan Dershowitz writes in the NY Post:

I have observed and participated in trials throughout the world. I have seen justice and injustice in China, Russia, Ukraine, England, France, Italy, Israel, as well as in nearly 40 of our 50 states.

But in my 60 years as a lawyer and law professor, I have never seen a spectacle such as the one I observed sitting in the front row of the courthouse yesterday.

The judge in Donald Trump’s trial was an absolute tyrant, though he appeared to the jury to be a benevolent despot. He seemed automatically to be ruling against the defendant at every turn.

Many experienced lawyers raised their eyebrows when the judge excluded obviously relevant evidence when offered by the defense, while including irrelevant evidence offered by the prosecution. But when the defense’s only substantive witness, the experienced attorney Robert Costello, raised his eyebrows at one of New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan’s rulings, the court went berserk. Losing his cool and showing his thin skin, the judge cleared the courtroom of everyone including the media.

I think the jury will acquit Trump.

Cohen's Anti-Trump Testimony should be Disregarded

Michael Cohen is now the Biden star witness against Pres. Trump. Cohen testified that he lied many times, and even went to prison for it, and now makes all his money badmouthing Trump.

So what did he testify that was so damaging? Here it is:

“He wasn’t thinking about Melania. This was all about the campaign,” Cohen said of the exchange — at which point Trump, seated at the defense table, turned toward him and shook his head with a sly smile on his face.

Cohen claimed Trump wanted him to delay Daniels’ story from coming out until after the election.

“I want you to just push it out as long as you can, just get past the election,” Cohen claimed Trump said. “Because if I win, it will have no relevance because I’m president. And if I lose, I don’t even care.”

First, this should have been inadmissable hearsay. Trump was not under oath.

For example, if I tell my barbar that I want a haircut to look good in a job interview, then the barber retelling the story cannot be used in court, as I was not under oath. I may have just said that to indicate what kind of a haircut I wanted.

There is an exception for admissions against interests, such as when a murder admits to killing. But there is no admission here. Next, Cohen does not know what Trump was thinking. Cohen is not a mind-reader.

Next, the whole conversation should have been attorney-client privileged. Trump is entitled to get legal advice, without his questions being used against him.

There is an exception for plotting to commit a crime. But nobody claims that this conversation was criminal. The alleged crime had to do with the later bookkeeping.

Finally, none of this implies the money was an illegal campaign expense. Trump did not say to pay the hush money do that more citizens would vote for him. It appears that Trump wanted to kill the story before the election because the upcoming election was going to make it a big story. After the election, no one will care. So if he wanted to avoid personal embarrassment, he needed to kill it before the election.

The prosecution main argument against Trump is that he is a bad person because he was unfaithful to his wife, and said crude things on the Access Hollywood. So convict him of something else, that is not even a crime.

Judge Orders Trump Gagged Again

Pres. Trump was censored again:

"But this judge, uh, said that I can't get away from the trial. You know he's rushing the trial like crazy. Nobody's ever seen a thing go like this," Trump said in the interview. "That jury was picked so fast — 95% Democrats. The area's mostly all Democrat. You think of it as a — just a purely Democrat area. It's a very unfair situation that I can tell you." ...

"Defendant violated the Order by making public statements about the jury and how it was selected," Merchan's ruling states. "In doing so, Defendant not only called into question the integrity, and therefore the legitimacy of these proceedings, but again raised the specter of fear for the safety of the jurors and of their loved ones."

Trump is right to question the legitimacy of the trial. It is a sham. No one has been prosecuted for anything like it before.

The prosecutor has to prove that Trump intended to violate, and argues that NY law does not actually require proving a violation if intent can be proved.

How could Trump have intended to violate the law, when no oen suggested that the alleged actions were criminal?

Trump is currently on trial in NY for lying in his business records. Cohen paid off a blackmailer and Trump later compensated him, booking it as a legal expense. The DA says that was a crime, because of an intent to cover up some other unspecified crime.

Harvey Weinstein Conviction Overturned

AP reports:

New York’s highest court on Thursday overturned Harvey Weinstein ’s 2020 rape conviction, finding the judge at the landmark #MeToo trial prejudiced the ex-movie mogul with “egregious” improper rulings, including a decision to let women testify about allegations that weren’t part of the case.

“We conclude that the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes,” the court’s 4-3 decision said. “The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial.”

The state Court of Appeals ruling reopens a painful chapter in America’s reckoning with sexual misconduct by powerful figures — an era that began in 2017 with a flood of allegations against Weinstein. His accusers could again be forced to retell their stories on the witness stand.

The court’s majority said “it is an abuse of judicial discretion to permit untested allegations of nothing more than bad behavior that destroys a defendant’s character but sheds no light on their credibility as related to the criminal charges lodged against them.”

This was a strange case. The news media was filled with reports of as many as 100 accusers, and yet there was no firm evidence. The main accuser in court was contradicted by a lot of evidence that the affair was consensual.

Weinstein was only convicted by convincing the jury that Weinstein had a pattern of bad behavior, as indicated by uncharged accusations.

Here is the court opinion.

I previously posted that Weinstein is innocent, and did not get a fair NY trial. I did not follow the LA trial.

Another trial disaster is the various charges against the founders of Backpage, an online service similar to Craigslist. Here is the latest:

A federal judge has acquitted Backpage co-founder Michael Lacey of dozens of counts, including a majority of those on which federal prosecutors planned to retry Lacey later this year. U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa also acquitted former Backpage executives Jed Brunst and Scott Spear on multiple counts of which they were convicted by a jury last fall.

This was a big story because of the sex trafficking charges, but they all appear bogus. Lacey was just found guilty of "international concealment of money laundering", whatever that is.

The feds were out to shut down Backpage because some prostitutes liked to advertise on it, but it was really just an ad site, and the company should not have been liable for personal ads. The feds claimed that there were underage girls on the site, but I don't think anyone proved that.

More Doubt about George Floyd's Death

I posted arguments for and against the guilt of the George Floyd cops, and now the authors have had an online debate over it. It is three Whites ganging up on one Black man.

The anti-cop threesome aggressively accused the Black guy of getting the facts wrong, but they never showed any facts were wrong.

In shprt, there was no proof that the cops caused Floyd's death, and there are plausible explanations that do not involve neck or chest compression.

It is funny how much resistance there is to anyone questioning the official narrative. Even if the cops did contribute to Floyd's death, there is no evidence that they tried to kill him, or acted out of malice or racist, or out of systemic racism.

They go on to discuss the Ferguson Effect, where faulty accusations of police misconduct have led to huge increases in Black murders, and reduced policing of Black neighborhoods.

The Black guy just wants the truth, and to undermine faulty arguments that led to a lot of Black murders and other crimes. But why do the Whites so doggedly try to uphold the narrative that cops murdered Floyd?

I think the Whites are suffering from a mental illness. They want to believe that Whites have some collective guilt for some poor Black junkie dying.

Defamation Suit for Torturing Data

A couple of opinion columnists badmouthed some climate sciente research, and 12 years later a jury found defamation.

Axos Science reports:

"Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data," wrote Simberg in reference to the former Penn State football coach who was convicted of child sexual abuse the same year the Competitive Enterprise Institute published his blog.

Steyn referred to Simberg's post in a National Review article, writing, "Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change "hockeystick" graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus."

What they found: The jury unanimously found both writers guilty of defaming Mann with "multiple false statements and awarded the scientist $1 in compensatory damages from each writer," per the New York Times.

It also determined that the writers' statements were written "maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm," and added punitive damages of $1 million against Steyn and $1,000 against Simberg, according to the NYT.

As I understand it, the technical issue was whether it was proper for Mann to combined dissimilar data into one graph. Hann used tree dinv data to infer ancient termperatures, and got the blade of the hockey stick from modern direct temperature measurements.

This case is ridiculous. Mann is a Penn State professor, but he had nothing to do with the Penn State personel who were framed for child abuse. Whether he represented tree ring data properly is a matter of opinion.

Climate science can have a big effect on public policy, and we should all be free to criticize it.

Reuters reports:

The European Union's executive has started to compile guidelines for Big Tech platforms to prevent disinformation, hate speech and counterfeits from disrupting the process of democratic elections.

Over a third of the world's population will go to the polls this year at a time when the power and influence of tech giants is under growing scrutiny.

They will allow misinformation if it favors the approved positions on global warming, vaccines, migration, etc, but not otherwise.

They will approve arguments that Trump should not be on the ballot, but not similar arguments against Biden, Harris, or Haley.

Lawfare abuses Defamation Juries

The dishonest and unfair lawfare against Donald Trump continues.

E. Jean Carroll just got a $83 million jury verdict against Trump.

Here are the facts. Carroll wrote a book claiming that Trump raped her in a high-end NYC department store in the 1990s. She did not report it at the time, and cannot say what year it happened. The whole story is preposterous, as no one ever gets raped in a high-end nyc department store.

The first jury said that she lied about the rape, but awarded her $5 million anyway. The second jury $83 million.

The lawsuits were funded by Reid Hoffman, a billionaire Biden donor.

I see regular YouTube ads from Sandy Hook parents. They already sued Alex Jones for a billion dollars, and now they are running some kind of gun scam. I did not follow the ads.

These lawsuits are all bogus, and attacks on free speech. We need laws limiting defamation judgments. Carroll was not harmed by what Trump. She probably sold more books.

Trump says he never met Carroll. No one has proved that wrong.

Jones got criticized for saying that the Sandy Hook story was a hoax, but he did raise legitimate questions about the story, and he should have a free speech right to do that.

Our legal system is broken. The judge in the Carroll case did not allow Trump to argue that he was innocent, or that he did not defame Carroll, or that Carroll is a lying lunatic, or that Hoffman bankrolled the case.

Bill Maher broadcast his weekly HBO anti-Trump rant, and this time he bragged about how Brazil elected a president with all votes cast and counted the same day.

Okay, that is exactly what Trump demands! We used to do elections that way, and it arguable that federal law requires. The excepttion was 2020, when Trump got a clear majority of votes cast and counted on election day, but was declared the loser based on unverifiable other ballots.

If you want fair elections, vote for Trump.

Ricky Vaughn Sentenced for a Joke

Evita Duffy-Alfonso writes:

Douglass Mackey, the man who posted a Hillary Clinton meme ahead of the 2016 election, was sentenced to seven months in prison Wednesday for the crime of “conspiracy against rights,” meaning, in this case, election interference. Mackey’s sentencing is unprecedented. It means America is now a place that puts citizens in prison for posting information disfavorable to the left, including satire, a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.

Mackey is going to prison for posting a fake Hillary Clinton ad prior to the 2016 election telling voters to “vote from home” by texting “‘Hillary’ to 59925.”

His tweet was a harmless joke. The DoJ could not find a witness who was fooled. I do not see how it can be a crime, if no harm was done.

He is allowed to appeal, but he must serve his sentence while the appeal is pending. Otherwise Trump might be elected in 2024 and pardon him.

The conviction was under an obscure Civil War Reconstruction law that has rarely been applied.

I am beginning to doubt the value of our jury system. Do ordinary American citizens really think that someone should go to prison for something like this?

We have federal criminal laws that are way too vague, and a federal prosecutor system that is way too powerful and political.