Borders of the Gulag - Democratic Underground

teryang

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Wed Mar-30-05 11:48 PM
Original message

Borders of the Gulag

Edited on Wed Mar-30-05 11:53 PM by teryang

I have had an insiders view into the police state in the last year or so working in the criminal courts. I always tried to keep my professional distance from the players. I viewed my experiences from the perspective of detachedly observing a cross section of what must have been going on in the courts for decades if not longer.

Then a funny thing happened. Somebody called the police on me. They claimed my dogs were barking continuously and were a neighborhood nuisance. The report was false and a mistake. However, I found out what it was like to be treated like a criminal by a small town cop, currently unqualified for higher career aspirations.

The purpose of his inquiry was not so much as to shut up the neighborhood dogs as to gain access to a middle class home. When I refused to open the door to this maniac pounding on my door at 1030 pm waking up everyone in my home, he went ballistic. I thought he was going to break the door down. To my surprise, to avoid a greater confrontation and against my professional judgement concerning my rights I opened the door.

It was then I realized that this shit cop didn't give a god dam about the local nuisance. His conversation with me was rude, totally incoherent and meaningless. What he wanted was to smell the air from my home for burnt cannibis and look inside through the doorway for "paraphernalia" in plain view. To his chagrin, he had nothing to work with, and quickly lost interest.

In fact, this is what is done to tens of thousands of Americans at their places of residence, every single day. It usually happens at cheap motels, run down apartments, and poor neighborhoods. At these locations the police just walk right in and lie in their reports saying they were invited in and given consent to search. As I recognize the addresses and neighborhoods of my arrested and jailed clients every day, I no longer see a cross section of the criminal justice system at work. What I perceive is entire neighborhoods and towns transitioned to open air gulags, where everyone's home and person are subject to search upon one flimsy pretext or lie or another on a daily basis. To my chagrin, my middle of the road ungated working class neighborhood has slipped within the borders of this invisible gulag.

The realm of arbitrary and unchecked police action is not limited to my own subjective perception. As I meet and gain the personal confidence of other legal professionals working in criminal law, I realize that virtually all of them have experiences in which they personally observed or experienced arbitrary police actions with no justification in law or fact, that went unchallenged out of plain simple FEAR of the reality of unchecked police power. Most judges don't or won't sit through suppression hearings or trials if they can discourage it with every means at their disposal. Through dismal funding of the courts and greater "efficiency" it is becoming prohibitively expensive to challenge the system.

The emerging police state was the subject of the keynote speech by a top lawyer in the state at a recent professional seminar when he described in detail the brutal arrest and beating of an assistant public defender in front of his workplace, the courthouse, and took place FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER and went unsanctioned, unpunished and also, unmentioned, in the press. He linked this episode and many others of which he had personal knowledge to the absurd reaction of the American people to 911, which was to conclude that giving up their hard earned liberty would somehow save them from loss of security. In fact, the exact opposite is true. It is as if the arbitrary round up and imprisonment of thousands of persons of Islamic heritage would somehow not have any effect on our own rights. Or that the tolerance of the violations of human rights in Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraid doesn't make us the less as human beings.

Welcome to the Gulag.