Some Animals…

This was Keith Ellison, the other night in Brooklyn Center:

So we have:

  • Minnesota’s top “law enforcement officer”
  • Out after the curfew his political class imposed
  • Telling (the right) people to go ahead and flout the curfew

I’m going to need to find all these examples of Ellison’s perfidy and collect ’em all in one place for 2022. This stuff needs to get dragged out of the memory hole…

…for whatever good it’ll do.

44 thoughts on “Some Animals…

  1. The people of MN elected Ellison as an exercise in moral vanity (he ran on a platform of opposing Trump policy, even the Trump policies tht did not exist).
    Now the people of Minnesota are going to get it good and hard.

  2. Has Ellison been in the courtroom? I haven’t seen him actively participating in the trial. Maybe a small point, but he’s having the hired guns—sorry, pro bono prosecution counsel—do the heavy lifting. As well he should, given his modest litigation experience. Anyone ever heard of the State needing pro bono help in a prosecution? Right now it’s David vs Goliath. Which may factor into an appeal given the fact that the prosecution is dropping new evidence as the trial progresses, impossible for a solo defense attorney to evaluate while conducting courtroom tactics.

  3. Golfdoc
    Ellison was in the courtroom for much of voir dire but since the trial started the camera rarely shows the prosecution team, which seems to be limited to only 4 at a time, so I can’t say how much Ellison has been in court. The judge at one point during voir dire mentioned that the prosecution team numbered 12-15 lawyers.

  4. Appeal?  The opinion of the MENSA members here at SiTD has uniformly been that Chauvin is going to be acquitted because “ELLISON IS TEH INCOMPETENT AND OVERCHARGED THE CASE.”

    I’ve got money riding on this, which is why I checked back.

  5. You’ve got a bad take, JK. It’s like you are repeating talking points rather than looking for the truth.
    I don’t know what the jury will decide, but I know that Ellison has never prosecuted a criminal case, and the people of MN elected him anyway.
    I think that if Floyd had been white, and had behaved the same way, he’d be just as dead under the knee of Chauvin, and Chauvin would still have his career on track. Howabout you?

  6. Minnesota seems to have compeltely abandoned the ideal of the rule of law in the last year. You have one-man rule, your politicians refuse to enforce what laws that remain, and pronounce people guilty without due process.
    Place tht do not have rule of law at their center are not republics & are pretty miserable places to live.

  7. I don’t actually repeat “talking points” here MO. I’m sure you process what I say as “talking points”.

    It’s true Ellison has never prosecuted a case. That doesn’t mean the details of the Chauvin prosecution didn’t make for an easy prediction of conviction.

    Uh, no, I don’t agree. If Chauvin kneeled on the neck of a white guy for 9 minutes on cam and killed him, I think he’s in the same place, fired and charged. The whole thing wouldn’t have nearly the same racial edge, but he’d be in the same place.

  8. I say “Talking points” because I can’t recall any commenter on SITD saying that Chauvin would be acquitted. There are a lof outcomes possible. Who knows how the appeal of a harsh sentence would go if it was moved out of Minneapolis? Chauvin seems to me to be a rough, mean cop.
    The people who have acted badly are not the commenters on SITD, who are basically spitballin’, but the politicians who rushed to appease the mob and have now painted themselves into a corner: they have made a saint out of a despicable criminal (George Floyd), and are in the process of doing so with Duante Wright. They insist the the evidence from a cellphone video is so damning that they pronounced Chauvin guilty before the autopsy was complete. Then they believed that their case is so weak they dare not move it out of Minneapolis, and they assigned a “dream team” of corporate lawyers to prosecute it. Several of the seated jurors have already said that they fear the consequences of an unpopular verdict. Does this look like Justice to you?
    Once you head down the path of appeasing the mob, or leading it in the case of Ellison, you’ve already lost. There can be no good outcome other than for those who receive direct pay offs from the government.
    If the police pull out of parts or all of Minneapolis, who will take their place? It won’t be “social activists,” except insofar as “social activism” intersects withe drug trafficikng.

  9. That quote is over a year old, JK. Do I stand by it? No. Common sense told me that Chauvin had been over charged (he was charged before Ellison even began an investigation) and was obviously meant to appease the mob, not defy it.

  10. SmithStCrx on March 16, 2021 at 10:58 am said: The Mpls City Council is afraid of the riots that will happen after Chauvin isn’t convicted (personal prediction is a hung jury and mistrial).

    bikebubba on August 4, 2020 at 5:57 pm said: Take #2; since the hyoid or whatever bone wasn’t broken, that’s a limited amount of force that doesn’t appear to have actually killed Floyd. So murder 2 is a huge overcharge, and in a just world, the court will slap Ellison’s minions into next week. 

    bikebubba on July 14, 2020 at 11:57 am said: Agreed both that murder 2 is probably an overcharge that will almost certainly backfire, 

    golfdoc50 on July 15, 2020 at 9:44 am said: I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but if I were, Keith X Ellison’s attempt to call this a felony homicide could be construed as deliberate incompetence, sure to garner an acquittal and make Round Two even more of a shitstorm than forecast.

    Here’s Mitch saying murder 2 was a politically motivated overcharge and that he wasn’t likely to be convicted of murder 2.  http://www.shotinthedark.info/wp/?p=74331&cpage=1#comments

    FWIW – I, John Kraephammer, predict he will be convicted of Murder 2.

  11. bikebubba on August 20, 2020 at 1:20 pm said: And like it or not, that’s not evidence to support a 2nd degree murder charge, and hence it’s strongly likely that the accused will walk

    Night Writer on August 20, 2020 at 1:38 pm said: It will be interesting to see if the celebrity Dream Team of pro bono prosecutors start bailing due to “other commitments”. If they think the verdict is a hard-wired cinch, they’ll stick. If they see weaknesses in the case they’ll bail so as not to be tainted by the verdict (especially since working for “free”).

    Mitch, main body http://www.shotinthedark.info/wp/?p=75030#comments
    Any bets on whether the “Unintentional 2nd Degree Murder” charge gets dismissed before trial?

  12. I’m not ‘sure’ MO. I just have a better, reasoned, tethered to reality guess than as I say, you MENSA members and William Mitchell grads here at SiTD.

  13. We’ll see, won’t we JK?
    Seems to me you are going by popular wisdom. That is often the path to failure.

  14. better, reasoned, tethered to reality guess than as I say, you MENSA members and William Mitchell grads here at SiTD.

    Hey, JK,

    I’m pretty sure I know how you snuck back on.

    As I’m always loath to ban people, sure – I’ll give this another shot.

    Dial back the “creepy” and we can maybe make this work.

    But the tether will be short indeed.

    And suffice to say the cracks about MENSA and Law School are funny, but only in an ironic way.

  15. From the Democrats’ viewpoint, as a political matter, the best overall outcome might be to intimidate the jury members into returning a conviction to placate the lynch mob, then have the conviction overturned on appeal so the Democrats in the judicial system can maintain the fiction that the courts aren’t politically motivated but still do actual justice, by which time the mob will have moved on to burning and looting over the next outrage (possibly a police shooting, maybe a garage door loop, or possibily a misused gender pronoun, hard to guess what will set them off).

    A straight-up lynching after a year of riots, coupled with on-going promises to defund police and enact more gun control, leaves them open to Republican fear-mongering in the next election (or truth-telling, depending on how you look at it).
    A frightened populace is a law-and-order populace, which is the last thing Democrats need.

  16. https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/609.19

    IANAL, but I’m not seeing how any of the 4 conditions listed in that statute apply to Chauvin.

    Subdivision 1.Intentional murder; drive-by shootings. Whoever does either of the following is guilty of murder in the second degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 40 years:
    (1) causes the death of a human being with intent to effect the death of that person or another, but without premeditation; or

    (2) causes the death of a human being while committing or attempting to commit a drive-by shooting in violation of section 609.66, subdivision 1e, under circumstances other than those described in section 609.185, paragraph (a), clause (3).

    We can pretty much count out the first two since he probably didn’t INTEND to kill Floyd, and he didn’t commit a drive by against Floyd.

    Subd. 2.Unintentional murders. Whoever does either of the following is guilty of unintentional murder in the second degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 40 years:
    (1) causes the death of a human being, without intent to effect the death of any person, while committing or attempting to commit a felony offense other than criminal sexual conduct in the first or second degree with force or violence or a drive-by shooting; or

    He was not committing a felony offense against Floyd by restraining him. Shortly after the incident, I remember reading that at the time, that neck/shoulder hold was approved in the MPD policy manual, including a screenshot of the page on which it was listed. Chief Arrodondo testified that it was not. I don’t know which way to believe. If I am misremembering what I read (always a possibility that far back) and it was in fact not an approved hold on the day it happened, is breaking from approved police procedure a felony crime? He obviously wasnt committing CSC or a drive-by shooting.

    (2) causes the death of a human being without intent to effect the death of any person, while intentionally inflicting or attempting to inflict bodily harm upon the victim, when the perpetrator is restrained under an order for protection and the victim is a person designated to receive protection under the order. As used in this clause, “order for protection” includes an order for protection issued under chapter 518B; a harassment restraining order issued under section 609.748; a court order setting conditions of pretrial release or conditions of a criminal sentence or juvenile court disposition; a restraining order issued in a marriage dissolution action; and any order issued by a court of another state or of the United States that is similar to any of these orders.

    Irrelevant. Floyd had no sort of restraining order nor order for protection against Chauvin.

    I’m sorry, but if he is convicted of Murder 2, there is no way I can believe the jury had honest intent. It will be an invalid conviction due to the jurors either to evoke street justice in the courtroom, or they are afraid of the mob coming after them if they voted to acquit.

    JD, can you see any fault in my reasoning?

  17. I never said “hack”.

    I cut you off for a reason. That reason is still valid.

    Dial back the bullshit.

  18. That was my entire point before, Bill – there appeared, to me, to be a poor match between the elements of the charges and the apparent facts of the episode.

    Perhaps our resident non-lawyer who still feels qualified and/or compelled to sniff about others’ lack of law school education could sound off with, radical as this might sound, factual assertions toward convincing people?

    Hah. I slay me.

  19. Joe Doakes on April 15, 2021 at 10:52 am said:
    From the Democrats’ viewpoint, as a political matter, the best overall outcome might be to intimidate the jury members into returning a conviction to placate the lynch mob, then have the conviction overturned on appeal so the Democrats in the judicial system can maintain the fiction that the courts aren’t politically motivated but still do actual justice . . .

    One of Powerline guys, forget which, ruminated on the subject of why there was no change of venue. The judge, apparently, denied a change of venue on the grounds that the publicity about Floyd’s death & the ritos was state-wide. The Powerline guy suggested another, less legitimate motive, was that if the trial was held anywhere outside of the metro, the jury would be overwhelmingly white.
    If true, you can look at it ina good way or a bad way. The good way is that the court wanted the jury’s verdict, what ever it was, to be seen as more legitimate. The bad way is that the court wants Chauvin to hang to please the mob.

  20. I guess well know how well Ellison’s decision to charge Floyd with 2nd degree murder holds up when we hear the prosecution’s closing statement.
    It still makes no sense to me to charge 2nd degree murder when the coroner hadn’t returned a cause of death yet.

  21. You must not have received the update, MO. Waiting for facts before charging the defendant is as quaint as waiting for a verdict before imposing sentence.

    ‘Let the jury consider their verdict,’ the Judge said, for about the twentieth time that day.

    `No, no!’ said the Attorney General. `Sentence first–verdict afterwards.’

    `Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. `The idea of having the sentence first!’

    `Hold your tongue!’ said the Attorney General, turning purple.

    `I won’t!’ said Alice.

    `Off with her head!’ the Attorney General shouted at the top of his voice.

    — formerly a children’s story, now criminal trial procedure in the People’s Democratc Republic of Minnesota. Try to keep up.

  22. Kraphammer has time to sift back through 12 months of comments which prove, definitely, that predictions were made.

    For what purpose, exactly? There’s nothing resembling justice going on in Minneapolis, or any other leftist shit hole.

    This faggot is more scatterbrained than 2 Jab Tater.

  23. I’m going to stand by my comments from 2020, and add “Kraephammer has way too much time on his hands.”

    The route to conviction here is more or less a combination of “the jury was scared to exonerate because of violence by BLM and Antifa mobs” and “expert testimony painted black and white pictures of Floyd’s condition that obscured the roles of heart disease, drug use, and stress.” Both of these are reasonable routes for appeal, IMO.

    One side note–with both this and the Democrats’ desire to pack the Supreme Court–is that blacks have been at the business end of mob rule in the past, and one would have hoped that they would remember why they might want to avoid this in the future. Apparently BLM has forgotten this little bit of our nation’s history, or thinks they’ll always be on the winning end, so they don’t care.

  24. Somebody get Kraphammer back in here…I’m not half finished with that dimwit.

  25. Let’s try this, JK. Do you think that Chauvin is guilty of 2nd degree murder? Can you point to the relevent law and explain how the evidence in admitted in court proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Chauvin is guilty of 2nd degree murder?
    Cuz I can’t.

  26. Pretty sure “Tom’s” wife is a woman…Pretty far outside your wheelhouse, Kraphammer.

    Does that kids parents know what you’re doing?

  27. Let’s try this, Kraphammer, one of your leaders, an obese slob named Nadler, who famously shit-his-pants during a press conference, says he thinks Pedo Joe should be able to nominate 4 more sideshow acts to the Supreme Court.

    It’s not gonna happen, but if pigs fly, do you think Joe would nominate trannies, faggots, child molesters, 68 IQ refugees from 3rd world shitholes, abortion ghouls or poverty pimps?

    The lefty bench is deep, tia

  28. The defense’s argument switched from drugs, to heart disease to CO level.
    What’s next?

    Floyd was outside and in the sun so it could have been skin cancer? Perhaps it was a very aggressive form of skin cancer — cultivated in an Antifa lab.

  29. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 04.16.21 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain

  30. In America, the defense doesn’t have to prove anything. The prosection does have to prove the defendent guilty of a specfic crime. Isn’t that right, Emery?

  31. Woolly wrote: “The people of MN elected Ellison as an exercise in moral vanity (he ran on a platform of opposing Trump policy, even the Trump policies tht did not exist).”

    Keith Ellison has been a good, hardworking Attorney General for Minnesotans.The GOP candidate — Doug Wardlow is the pillow guy’s attorney. Mr Wardlow helped advise Mr Lindell to call for martial law and supported Trump’s Big Lie with other insurrectionists.

    This is what we don’t need in America nor the office of the MN Attorney General.

  32. Woolly also wrote: “In America, the defense doesn’t have to prove anything. The prosection does have to prove the defendent guilty of a specfic crime.”

    The defense will be looking to find at least one juror who has enough doubt about Chauvin’s guilt to fight the prevailing view.

    I would think that if the defense successfully raises enough doubt — this may cause the jurors to coalesce around the lesser charges of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

    I would think it’s best to to put yourself in the jury box and view the trial from their perspective — with an open mind to both sides of the argument and then process the information presented in court.

  33. I haven’t practiced criminal law for t2o decades but I’ve followed the trial commentary and viewed video of testimony on Legal Insurrection (and I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express one time).

    It seems to me there are two main points in dispute, both of which the State must prove beyond a reasonable doubt to obtain a conviction : whether kneeling on Floyd killed him, and if it did, whether Chauvin’s actions were unreasonable considering the totality of the circumstances known – and this is important – known to the office at the time. People who have spent a year viewing video frame by frame aren’t acting as the cop on the scene was acting and that distinction is incorporated in Supreme Court precedent.

    Put the other way: if kneeling didn’t kill Flohy; or if Chauvin’s actions were reasonable even though they did kill Floyd; then Chauvin is not guilty.

    The body camera footage and testimony show Chauvin did not kneel on Floyd’s neck but on his shoulder blade, he did not compress Floyd’s airway, he did not compress Floyd’s artery, Floyd had taken a lethal dose of drugs, and the Medical Examiner admitted that if Floyd had been found dead in any other circumstances, he would have ruled the death a drug overdose.

    The Power Point evidence shows me Chauvin followed the official department “excited delirium” restraint procedure according to his training, did everything he was supposed to do, when he was supposed to do it, and the verbal and video evidence shows me he was acting reasonably in light of all the circumstances including Floyd’s violent behavior and on-camera admission that he ate too many drugs; his girlfriend’s testimony that he passed out from his overdose in the car so she couldn’t rouse him until the police came to put him in the squad; the testimony that drugs found in the back of the squad care had Floyd’s DNA on them; the mob that was so threatening even the ambulance crew was afraid to render first at the scene but instead loaded Floyd and drove several blocks away before beginning; and testimony from the prosecution’s own Use of Force expert who agreed everything Chauvin did was reasonable under those circumstances.

    My conclusion is Floyd died in police custody but the police didn’t kill him. Floyd died of a combination of his own drug use and the crowd’s threatening behavior delaying timely medical attention. Under existing Supreme Court precedent, that’s not enough to convict the officer.

    If I were on the jury, I would want to find the cop not guilt of any charge except I don’t want my house burned down by a mob incited by Keith Ellison. My first duty is to my own family. Sacrificing them to stand up for principles that will change nothing in Minneapolis would be a breach of that duty, a violation of my marriage vow, an abdication of my responsibility as a husband and father.

    Therefore, I would vote to protect my family by sending Officer Chauvin to prison for life and would lie about it when later asked if that was my true vote or if I was intimidated by the threat of mob violence.

    I expect the jury to do the same.

  34. Both sides have presented their case as expected: the prosecution underlined the details of Floyd’s death by repeatedly playing video footage of him suffocating under Chauvin’s knee. The defense has called into question whether Floyd’s past — drug use, heart issues — were the cause of his death rather than Chauvin.

    I make no predictions—the result of previous trials would suggest that Chauvin walks. The question is whether this jury will give us a different ending.

  35. JD
    I think the defense dropped the ball on the roll Dispatch and Fire played. According to the testimony of the firefighter wench the nearest Fire/EMT Firestation was only 3 minutes away. According to the Dispatch wench Fire/EMT should have been dispatched with the first call for EMTs. The ambulance with paramedics was dispatched from HCMC and took >6 minutes to get there. By that scenario the Fire/EMT people should have arrived, if the Firefighter wench is to be believed, before St Floyd stopped breathing. As it was the Fire/EMTs didn’t arrive until after the ambulance had been and gone. If the Firefighter wench is correct it is possible to make a good case that Dispatch is responsible for the death of the Sainted One.

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