Which. You know. It's a protest. Everybody agrees to meet at the marching location.
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Then, in the most spectacular legal wipeout I have ever had the pleasure of seeing, Kerkhoff, having had the utter incompetence of her investigators on display for the court, fucking TONE TROLLED THE DEFENCE.
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Kerkhoff said she was worried about bringing Veritas people in court because ~the defence~ has an accusatory tone. The bloody defence isn't the one trying to imprison people for 61 years for walking past a broken fucking window!
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That was literally it. All she could offer for not having the producers of her doctored evidence in court to be cross-examined is that the defence are a bunch of meanies for asking questions. :( :( :(
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Just to add some context to how monumentally bad this mistake is: I'm not a legal professional, and I'm expected to do this when reporting for the news. I have ~less~ authority than the police and even I have to be more rigorous than this.https://twitter.com/SiobhanFTB/status/999998051539304448 …
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Day 9: Turns out the Veritas employee ("Matt" is all anyone is given of his name) was subpoenaed for court last Friday. Defence counsel had the opportunity to establish the chain of custody of the video evidence that the government couldn't be arsed to do itself.
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The investigator who was responsible for sifting through the video was cross-examined at length, and probably will be for the rest of the day, about the video. "Matt" says InfoWars was also at the planning meeting, which must be news to them.
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Take that statement with a few pounds of salt. The investigating officer admitted there was more video submitted to him than was given to the defence. This is a much bigger error (if I'm being charitable) if there is something in the omitted videos that's exculpatory.
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But I'm not sure we know that yet. We also learned during cross that Veritas did in fact attempt to bribe people to be provocateurs on inauguration day. I'm going to take a moment to talk about the significance of that.
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So the big deal about
#DefendJ20 is that the precedent it can set depending on how the verdict shakes out is "everyone in a protest can be charged for the actions of anyone in a protest."Show this thread -
Now combine that precedent with a provocateur who has been paid under the table to misbehave at a protest. Bam, you just dragged 100s of people into court, with a legal mechanism already secured to imprison them. For potentially years, no less.
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It's a bit of a buried lede but I can't emphasize the Reichstag Fire thing America's alt right are trying to construct here. None of the defendants are accused of accepting such a bribe to my knowledge, so the impact of this news for the 05/14 defendants isn't clear.
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But organizers elsewhere might want to be paying attention now, if they weren't before. The alt right are watching this trial.
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Okay, so back to the 05/14 investigating officer's testimony: The only cross-checking he did was with the officer that infiltrated the planning meeting. Recall that the infiltrator doesn't remember what one defendant said or when they said it.
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In other words the closest thing to relevance in terms of cross-checking is a witness who can't actually accuse the defendants specifically of saying anything incriminating at the planning meetings.
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Defence counsel brought up the earlier Brady violation ruling and talked about the exculpatory statements that were edited out. The investigating officer admitted he made the choice to cut the video before those statements were spoken.
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He can likely wriggle out of any consequences by saying he didn't watch the video after that point, and therefore didn't "deliberately" exclude exculpatory evidence. You don't have to buy that, but it's indicative of the
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Also, like, yeah: We are really learning that we got all the way to a trial and the prosecution doesn't seem to have even done their bloody job.https://twitter.com/dropj20/status/1001492976290467841 …
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I'm almost wondering if Kerkhoff is so used to strong-arming people with plea bargains that she's forgotten how to litigate.
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Prosecution has rested her case. It seems the closest she can get to tying defendants to any specific act of property destruction are grainy, low quality images of a black blur, compared to the footage of the defendant's arrests.
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No DNA, no property logs, no cell phone data, that's it. Until I can get court transcripts I'm not going to have a reference for *exactly* who is accused of what, so if any convictions are returned it will take me a little while to determine >
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whether it was returned based on their participation in the protest (in which case we witness the death of American assembly rights) or whether the jury was convinced the images positively ID'd a defendant actually breaking something.
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The latter is bad news for the defendants themselves but doesn't have the civil rights implications outside of that courtroom.
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The second half of the morning was spent establishing, again, the myriad of standard operating procedures the police are supposed to follow at demonstrations. These were written in response to previous 1A lawsuits D.C. has lost bc of mass arrests in I think '99 and '08
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Abso-fucking-lutely stunning testimony during the defence's summoning of one of the arresting officers.https://twitter.com/UR_Ninja/status/1001521105398624256 …
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So remember upthread when I said the precedent that might be set by these trials could be easily exploited by bad faith actors to manufacture an American Reichstag Fire? I was slow on the uptake: J20 *is* the Reichstag Fire. Veritas was in the marching column itself.
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We learned more about "Matt" from Project Veritas on the latter half of Day 9.
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After infiltrating J20 planning meetings and taking multiple recordings (only one of which was provided to defence counsel, another potential Brady violation), Project Veritas sent its infiltrators to participate in the black bloc marching column to act as provocateurs.
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