Non-Withholding Employer Simkanin Trial Ends: Mistrial (fwd)

[Tim May]

On Nov 26, 2003, at 8:39 PM, J.A. Terranson wrote:

> Note the line: "the Court denied Simkanin the opportunity present any 
> expert
> defense witnesses or legal evidence".
>
> This is what our country has come to.  Secret courts; incarceration 
> with no
> lawyers, trials, or even charges; "trials" where the defendants are
> prohibited from presenting any evidence; "Sneak & Peek" secret 
> searches...
>
> "The Terrorists" have indeed won: they are running this asylum.
>

This has been the norm in American jurisprudence for many decades. 
Judges routinely decide which "theories of the case" may be presented 
and which may not. They dictate the language used, the witnesses 
called, even the legal precedents cited.

For this list, we need look no further than a list contributor and 
meeting attendee from the mid-90s: Keith Henson.

Google on Keith's case with the Church of Scientology and read about 
his conviction in a Riverside, California courtroom. Keith and his 
lawyers were prevented by order of the judge from presenting their 
defense. Basically, he was muzzled. And not because he was acting up in 
court or screaming obscenities. Rather, the Court decided he could 
neither bring up past behavior by the COS nor could he argue to the 
jury that saying he had a "Tom Cruise missile" aimed at the Gold Base  
facility was obviously a joke and that he did not in fact have any way 
to possess a cruise missile, Tom Cruise or otherwise.

Welcome to the Beknighted States of America, where the "free press" is 
muzzled (or arrested, as in the New American Republic in Baghdad), 
where judges lay down a narrow track of allowable arguments in a court 
room, and where the police and government are no longer bound by the 
precise document which was created to bind them, the Bill of Rights.



--Tim May