The End Of Law

On January 24, 2021 Deputy Robert A. Weil of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office typed lies into a computer, and then swore them before a judge. The next day I was arrested. From that day to this one there is not a person on Earth other than me – no member of The Bar, no legislator, no journalist, no activist – who cares that Deputy Weil used perjury to usurp the power of the courts and legislature, and body snatch an unpopular person.

It is not unique in human history that people would prefer mob rule or “direct democracy” over courts and law. That is the human instinct left over from when men lived in competing tribes dependent on land resources. That is the essence of communism, the impulse to control the means of production for some collective tribal will. What makes it unique today is the absence of anyone in the United States – not college professors, not idealists, not 1% of people, not 0.0001% of people – who objects to what is going on.

The abandonment of a system of laws is plainly visible, because it is popular. A recent article on DailyBeast.com lists candidates for Attorney General in different states, who promise not to enforce laws against abortion, and to interfere with local prosecutors who try to. This is an appeal directly from a strongman to a tribe, with no consideration for the role of courts or a legislature. In other campaigns boasted on Breitbart.com, sheriffs promise not to enforce gun laws, or to at least enforce them in an uneven way, where only poor people, unconnected people, and people the sheriff doesn’t like will be subjected to the law.

In San Francisco and Los Angeles voters seek to replace leftist prosecutors who ignore the law, with right-wing prosecutors who ignore different sets of laws, refusing to prosecute police who break the law to victimize undesirables and members of the opposition faction. In no case do voters on any side see prosecutors who evade the intent of the legislature as a problem. Local voters want to preserve the power of local prosecutors to ignore laws campaigned and passed at the state level, to instead use state power to enforce what they wish the law was, the way they want it enforced.

There is a facebook group of likeminded people who claim to address “18th Judicial Circuit Court Corruption”. Their central mission is to use the plain perjury of two cops Sergeant Diane Clarke and Deputy Mark Rixey, to free a murderer Crosley Green and torture his rape victim Kim Hallock as being a lying slut. At its core is a human impulse no different from what you might find in Iran. They claim Crosley Green was convicted based on the self-interested lies of his own sister. But not one of them wants to see the statute against such perjury, Florida Statute 837.02, enforced to punish such lies.

One day a member of this “Corruption” group said if the appeals court upholds Crosley’s conviction, the prosecutor better ignore it, the prosecutor better not seek to keep the convicted murderer in prison. I pointed out that asking a prosecutor to ignore the law and decisions of the courts, and instead let a murderer go based on pressure from influential locals, is a form of corruption. I was blocked from this facebook group soon after, seemingly by a lawyer in Seminole County, for documenting the lies of some Seminole County cops in the Mandi May Jackson case.

Preference for convenience over the law, does not just occur in large numbers, the 51,000 who elect a sheriff, mayor, or prosecutor. It occurs in courtrooms where only a handful of people are present. In such a setting, overlooking the lies of a cop, or coercing one defendant to lie about another, enables defense lawyers to pay off their student debt, enables prosecutors to put on a facade of solving crime, and gives judges a plausible facade of a legal justification to close cases and clear out the docket. An appeals court looking at what is in the record, will see a legally correct decision while remaining blind to the lies it is based on.

There is no mystery as to what the pattern is. In all cases the rights of the few are seen as an obstacle to what the majority wants. The same local discretion which can be used to allow a woman to kill her unborn child, can be used to allow cops to lie about black people at trial, and to generally evade the power of the courts and juries and instead serve the impulses of the mob. In Florida nobody has jurisdiction to investigate cops who break the law, except their own employer put in place by the local 51% majority. Allowing locals to make their own law like Boss Hogg, and looking the other way on it, wins the necessary support of those locals when governors run for election.

These types of local discretion, and insulation from state and federal level checks and balances, was originally used to attack black people outside the reach of the law and the Constitution. But it has since been used to also look the other way on local VIP’s and government officials committing crimes against children, often sex crimes against mentally incompetent teenage girls. Even people who lie to themselves that they are for law and order, academics like Heather McDonald and Thomas Sowell, imagine that we live in some kind of wartime where police must be allowed to break the law, to protect the concept of law itself from the barbarians.

There is no chance to change the present course of events, but only to watch the abandonment of law as watching the tide go out from standing on the beach. People who have never lived without law have no particular fondness for it. The ideals of the United States were a particular high water mark in human history, but only made possible by people who had experienced something different and were running away from it. So now we are running in the opposite direction, where law is seen as an obstacle, an inconvenience. That this will not lead to utopia for any faction in the long run, but to the standard human condition of war and misery, is easily visible to anyone who studies human history.