Daniel Penny and Alvin Bragg

Well, one month ago, I predicted that the Manhattan DA’s Office would read the statute to the Grand Jury thereby deliberately throwing the case, and that the charges against Daniel Penny would be dismissed.

Silly me! I had based my prediction on my own experiences with the same DA’s Office forty years ago this year. Once again, I find that America has changed dramatically in the course of my lifetime and, as always, for the worse.

Back in the 1980s, then as now, NYC was a corrupt democrat party machine-run one-party state. The democrats were liberals then, but they were cynical, corrupt, pragmatic liberals. Today’s democrat party sometime ago surrendered power to commie crazies like Bill de Blasio and professional race-baiters like Alvin Bragg.

The 1980s DA’s Office backed off and threw the case against me by informing the Grand Jury what the law actually says partly, I expect, because it was the right thing to do, but probably more significantly because it had been made clear to them that prosecuting me would bring down on their heads huge amounts of controversy and public criticism.

The 1980s guys were primarily pragmatists. Alvin Bragg is an ideologue whose career is built upon whipping up the emotions of his homies over all sorts of imaginary grievances. He can no more pass up the opportunity to depict that deceased deranged black criminal as a martyred victim than a rat can pass by a piece of cheese sitting on the trigger of a trap.

It is no fun, I can tell you, living with a possible upcoming criminal trial and facing big time legal costs for a defense, while contemplating (even a minority possibility of) conviction and imprisonment.

Happily, Daniel Penny’s Legal Defense Fund on GiveSendGo has, as of right now, amassed $2,883,009, and the law really is on his side. If he really goes to trial, the statute will for sure be read to that jury.

The Laws of New York > Consolidated Laws of New York > CHAPTER 40 Penal > PART 1 > General Provisions > TITLE C > Defenses > ARTICLE 35 Defense of Justification

SECTION 35.30
Justification; use of physical force in making an arrest or in preventing an escape

4. A private person acting on his or her own account may use physical
force, other than deadly physical force, upon another person when and to
the extent that he or she reasonably believes such to be necessary to
effect an arrest or to prevent the escape from custody of a person whom
he or she reasonably believes to have committed an offense and who in
fact has committed such offense; and may use deadly physical force for
such purpose when he or she reasonably believes such to be necessary to:

(a) Defend himself, herself or a third person from what he or she
reasonably believes to be the use or imminent use of deadly physical
force. …

Bill Otis, at Ringside at the Reckoning, identifies precisely why Alvin Bragg’s fabricated Trump Indictment is such a spectacularly outrageous violation of the American political process and could very well mark a key transition point in the transition from Republic to Empire.

How many zillion column inches of anguished outcry have we seen about the January 6 Capitol protesters, Donald Trump’s egging them on (which he did, there’s no use in denying it), and the damage it all did to America’s most hallowed tradition of governance — the peaceful transfer of power from one party to the (sometimes viscerally antagonistic) opposing party? Liberals and others have wailed daily for more than two years that it was Trump’s threatening and soiling this tradition that was by far the most grievous of his numerous grievous sins as President. ..

[I strongly disagree with the omitted short paragraph. DZ]

It’s now time to ask the critical question that Alvin Bragg’s indictment raises but, oddly, has been all but absent from public discussion over the last week: What exactly has made possible the tradition of a peaceful transfer of power?

It’s one thing above everything else — the losers’ faith that the winning party won’t use the power of government to put them in jail. Last week, that faith disappeared from America.

It disappeared courtesy of a radical DA in a one-party, Trump-hating jurisdiction. No matter what happens from here on in, America won’t be the same. It will be a darker place, and it will be darker whether or not Trump paid hush money to a porn star and whether or not that can be turned into a campaign finance violation — much less into roughly three dozen felonies. Throwing away the critical foundation of the most important tradition of American governance is not, and on any sane accounting cannot be, worth it.

This is not to say that Trump or any other office holder or former office holder should be above the law. They shouldn’t, lest another of our hallowed traditions — that the law is no respecter of persons — likewise be vanquished. But no one should be below the law either, and for a prosecutor to launch the enormous power of his office against a political enemy for a crime as technical, and on a legal theory as exotic, as this, is to operate in way that any mature and realistic person would recognize as being, not law, but giddy revenge.

RTWT

Julius Caesar, recognizing that he would soon be facing the same kind of cooked-up charges and weaponized justice system that Donald Trump is currently facing, simply ignored the laws and crossed the Rubicon with his legions under arms.

Babylon Bee:

NEW YORK, NY — District Attorney Alvin Bragg is reportedly set to indict Trump this coming Tuesday for the removal of a mattress tag back in 1997. According to sources, new evidence was discovered in the mattress tag cold case by grizzled Detective Harry Jakes, who utilized modern advances in forensic science to place former president Donald Trump at the scene of the crime.

“We got him dead to rights,” said Bragg in an unnecessary press conference. “No one removes a mattress tag in my city and gets away with it!”

RTWT