The news last weekend was enough to make your teeth vibrate with rage.
New York bodega owner Jose Alba – a Dominican immigrant, a citizen, and by all rational accounts the good guy – got stabbed by a woman who was irate over her EBT card getting rejected.
Then, her boyfriend – Austin Simon, an ex-con with a violent record – took over.
It went downhill for both men after that. Alba faces murder charges. Simon, for his part, now knows what a pin cushion feels like:
This is yet another case of a Soros-funded district attorney – Alvin Bragg, Manhattan County’s DA, and a man who makes Keith Ellison look like Barry Goldwater – taking the side of the criminal. Bragg initially got $500,000 cash bail – eventually reduced to a $50K bond, even though Alba had a spotless record
Even New Yorkers – well, the ones who go to bodegas – aren’t amused:
The handling of the case has prompted local New York City Council members from both sides of the aisle to demand that the embattled Manhattan DA dismiss the charge. Prominent criminal defense lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman has offered to represent Alba for free.
Now, in carry permit you’re told that if you use lethal force in self-defense, even if the case is utterly justified, you should expect an arrest, and very likely charges; the bluer the district, the more likely you’re up against a prosecutor who wants in principle to make an example of the law-abiding schnook. Examples to the contrary are often astoundingly unpredictable.
But if you look at the criteria for self-defense – in New York as well as Minnesota – to me the five criteria for self-defense break down like this:
- Reasonable Fear of Death: Seeing what I saw? Absolutely.
- Immediacy: Simon didn’t look like he was waiting for anything.
- Appropriate Force: He used lethal force until the threat ended.
- Innocence: He certainly wasn’t the aggressor.
- Duty to Retreat: I suspect this may be the weasel Bragg’s theory; you have to make every reasonable effort to get away. You see the video – there is no reasonable escape. But using a knife requires one to attack; it’s a much more active act than shooting. It’s an academic distinction when you’ve got someone behind the counter with you – but to a weasel like Bragg, it’s a hook.
I don’t think should have been arrested, much less charged. Hopefully a Manhattan jury agrees.
So – what to do about metastatic legal tumors like Bragg?
A National Review editorial hopes for an electoral solution to the problem of Alvin Bragg:
Bragg is a disgrace, the biggest threat to law and order in Manhattan in decades. The unjust prosecution of Alba is merely the latest example of how recentering the justice system around “equity” amounts to coddling career criminals at the expense of upstanding citizens such as Alba. In a one-party city, Bragg effectively won his office when he secured the Democratic Party’s nomination last June with just 85,000 votes, a margin of only 9,000 over his nearest challenger. Unless Zeldin this fall upsets the liberal Democratic governor Kathy Hochul, who is unlikely to do anything about Bragg except make a few concerned noises, New Yorkers are going to suffer for at least three and a half more years from the disastrous consequences of not bothering to stop Bragg in that low-turnout primary election last summer.
If there isn’t – and the dumping of Chesa Boudin in San Francisco shows that people in progressive cities can be pushed too far – then the alternative is people will start handling self-defense off the books.
And thats going to get ugly.
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Bragg received 83% of the vote over his opponent. Look at his campaign material. People knew what they were getting.
UMMP, get out of my head!
It may be that Bragg, in the twisted logic required of his ilk, believes he is sending a strong message for citizens to NOT handle self-defense off the books. He likely thinks this is important in an era where showing up to intimidate judges and elected officials in their homes is considered “democracy”.
That’s right, NW. Leave the policing to pigs (not all cops are pigs, but ones that ran away from the action and let 19 kids to die while doing nothing, and worse yet PREVENTED anyone from doing something, anything, are the worst pigs… ever…) because only cops are allowed to engage. Oh.. wait… they are not REQUIRED by law to protect. So why do we have them, exactly? To support the donut industry and to act as tax collectors?
showing up to intimidate judges and elected officials in their homes is considered “democracy”.
Which is against the law and is a federal crime. But hey, we live in two Amerikas where Clause 4 in 14th Amendment does not exist. Hell, Constitution does not exist!
jpa – the Nazis of WWII knew that the way to rule a large geographical area with a minimal number of troops was to demonstrate total brutality and devastating reprisals for anyone defying their authority. (Hence, kill all the men and all but a handful of the children in the village of Lidice and then burn and bulldoze the town after the assassination of Heydrich in Prague, even though the village had nothing to do with it.) I’m sure today’s Nazis are keeping the playbook handy.
I’m guessing that if Bragg goes forward with this, he is going to learn the hard way about self-defense law, or at least jury nullification.
This is one of those times where it seems we need some remedy for prosecutorial misconduct. There should be some line where we tell prosecutors that if they bring a BS case to court and put someone needlessly through H***, they can lose their job, their bar license, and even their liberty.
bikebubba, that’s a great thought, but until any legislature is no longer contaminated by former lawyers, that will never ever happen. They’ll protect their own just as completely as any thin blue line.
Bragg needs to be Nifonged.
“Nifonged” is a verb appearing in both Wiktionary and the Urban Dictionary. Wikipedia’s first paragraph on former DA Mike Nifong covers the bases (emphasis mine):
Michael Byron Nifong (born September 14, 1950) is an American former attorney and convicted criminal.[2] He served as the district attorney for Durham County, North Carolina until he was removed, disbarred, and jailed following court findings concerning his conduct in the Duke lacrosse case, primarily his conspiring with the DNA lab director to withhold exculpatory DNA evidence that could have acquitted the defendants.[3]
Speaking of pigs (not all cops are pigs, but I dare ANYONE defend these motherfucking wastes of oxygen):
The footage from a hallway camera inside the school shows in grim detail how heavily armed officers—some carrying rifles and ballistic shields—waited more than an hour before going inside and confronting the gunman.
NW, bodega owners do not have the scratch nor political clout to go after Bragg.
More pig action (not all cops are pigs, especially not officer Ruiz, the subject of the viral Punisher photo from the video, but the motherfuckers who held him back are absolute filthbags!):
That man’s name is officer Ruiz, and his wife, a schoolteacher at the school, died that day.
But before she died, she was sending him text messages, letting him know what was happening inside, and telling him she was shot and was dying.
That’s why he was looking at his phone.
The image was likely taken shortly before he was disarmed and removed from the building while attempting to enter the classroom.
Why is it that every… time… more details come out of Uvalde, it looks worse and worse? There is a place in hell reserved for these pigs (not all cops are pigs and I dearly hope these are the exception, but what an exceptional exception!)
Sci Fi writer Frank Herbert posited a Bureau of Sabotage, which used dirty tricks in lieu of red tape to slow down and regulate the imperial bureaucracy, to liberate the citizenry.
Sci Fi writer Robert Heinlein posited an emperor who watched his bureaucrats carefully and when he found an efficient one, eliminated that person’s job and everyone under him, the better to slow down and hinder government, to liberate the citizenry.
Too bad the only Sci Fi read by this administration is Handmaiden’s Tale.
Hard to go after Bragg, even with resources, if you don’t have evidence that the prosecutor has willfully failed to do his job, and generally if you don’t have evidence that the prosecutor has withheld exonerating evidence from defendants, as did Nifong.
It is also worth noting that the grand jury system is supposed to protect us here as well. Maybe it’s time to have a requirement that exonerating evidence be included in grand jury investigations, and penalize prosecutors/DAs that fail to do this?
How to get it past legislatures with lots of lawyers? Point out what Frederick Douglass noted; the four boxes of liberty are the soap box, the jury box, the ballot box, and the cartridge box, and those denied recourse via the first three sometimes go to the fourth.
bike – and then there’s the fifth box, the one you kick out from under someone’s feet when he’s got a noose around his neck.
Don’t ya need the fourth box to use the fifth, NW?
Bragg was chosen by 83% of his electorate because he promised to go after cops and capitalists, not street criminals.
I have a friend (I know, hard to believe) who is a business guy in Brooklyn Center. He is a Democrat. He thought he would run for mayor as a law and order guy.
Got his butt burned and is now selling his business & moving to the SW exurbs.
I don’t think that he is moving far enough.
“I don’t think that he is moving far enough.”
I think that’s plenty far enough, UMMP. We don’t need any more “law and order” leftists from shithole states moving South. Y’all let them “stop crime” up there.