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by Lawrence A. Hunter
Social Security Institute
Recently by Lawrence A. Hunter: From the Fascist Welfare State of America
Mr. Jefferson must be turning in his grave.
On August 16 last, a combined militarized strike force of local, state and federal “law enforcement” personnel (including local and state Virginia police, Homeland Security, FBI and Secret Service agents) kidnapped, assaulted, unlawfully detained and gratuitously committed former marine Brandon J. Raub of Chesterfield Virginia to a psychiatric ward for Facebook postings he had made that were critical of the government. Mr. Raub was not charged with any crime or wrongdoing beyond a bogus accusation by local police to the press and Raub’s family after his kidnapping that he “assaulted an officer of the law and resisted arrest” although even these spurious charges never were formally filed against Mr. Raub.
Soon after Raub’s kidnapping, a local Virginia magistrate (a government bureaucrat, not a real judge) refused to release him but still did not charge him with any crime nor did he in anyway justify continuing to hold Raub in custody. Instead, the magistrate unlawfully ordered Raub to be held in custody over the weekend at a local mental institution for so-called “preliminary evaluation.” After a hearing on Monday, August 20, a Virginia “special justice” (also a bureaucrat lawyer, not a real judge) further ordered Raub detained for an additional month, again without charging him with any crime or wrongdoing, and additionally ordered the Virginia captive to be transferred to a Salem Virginia hospital where he was involuntarily committed to another psych ward.
According to Raub’s lawyer, John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, which courageously stepped up to defend Raub:
“. . .the August 20 detention order was ‘rubber-stamped’ and represents the corrupt system in Virginia…This is the so-called judge – he’s a lawyer, not a real judge – it’s like what you would see in a bad movie.”
Except, in the best “bad movie” depicting yahoo justice in America, My Cousin Vinny, there was justice of a sort even in backwater, Podunk Alabama, and most importantly, there was complete transparency in the legal proceedings. Despite his heavy-handed, sometimes tyrannical courtroom presence in the movie, Judge Chamberlain Haller allows the defense complete and unrestricted access to the state’s case files against the defendant. As Vinny’s girlfriend, Mona Lisa Vito explains:
“You wanna know why [DA] Trotter gave you his files? He has to, by law, you’re entitled. It’s called disclosure…He has to show you everything, otherwise it could be a mistrial. He has to give you a list of all his witnesses, you can talk to all his witnesses, he’s not allowed any surprises.”
Not so in Virginia. Disclosure in Virginia is a bad joke, and Commonwealth Attorneys lusting to climb the political ladder to AG and then into the governor’s mansion routinely play the surprise-and-gottcha game on defendants by stonewalling, withholding information and refusing to reveal all the evidence they possess, even such basic evidence (or lack thereof) that a crime has actually been committed. This corrupting process leads to constant over-charging of defendants in Virginia so that devious prosecutors can blackmail them into pleading guilty to lesser charges on which prosecutors may not even have sufficient evidence to convict.
And now, evidently, in Virginia you don’t even have to commit a crime to be “arrested,” really kidnapped, and manhandled by “officers of the law” and unlawfully locked up without charge. Virginia’s Attorney General, Kenneth Cuccinelli (who is running for governor in 2013), seems to believe his Commonwealth Attorneys don’t even have to charge a person with a crime before Virginia disappears him into its mental-health gulag, what the old Soviet Union used to call the Psihuska. So this is The Virginia Way: GITMO on the Potomac?
Whitehead further exposed how the incestuous old-boys’ club rules in the Old Dominion:
“I’m friends with the local police; I could call them right now and probably get you committed if you were in Virginia…They can arrive at your door based on somebody’s testimony or your Facebook page and take you away to a mental hospital… There’s a system here that is corrupt.”
But the Virginia Yahoos, egged on and manipulated by the Feds, over reached in the Raub case, and when there was a national outcry to free Brandon Raub, Virginia officials realized on August 23 that they has screwed the pooch. They panicked, and another Virginia judge released Raub toot sweet on the narrow technical grounds that the state’s “petition is so devoid of any factual allegations that it could not be reasonably expected to give rise to a case or controversy.” I’m wondering if his pun was intended? Now, one awaits the cover up and the official denials of wrongdoing to begin.
Mr. Jefferson would be appalled and outraged to know his beloved Commonwealth of Virginia has become a weapon of mass tyranny in the hands of unprincipled politicians and bureaucrats; Virginia, a wholly owned subsidiary of the tyrannical national-security state in Washington, DC. So this is “federalism” in 21st-century America.