Get out of New Jersey while you still can

[dksuddeth]

This shiat is totally farked up.

http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/20/2035.asp

Police may inflict permanent physical damage while forcibly taking blood from a motorist accused of driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI), according to a decision by the appellate division of the New Jersey Superior Court. The court on Tuesday found that police officers from Washington and Hamilton Townships did nothing wrong when they held down Russell Johnston in such a way that his wrist suffered permanent nerve damage as a nurse from Robert Wood Johnson Hospital took his blood.

During the incident, a police officer put his entire weight on one of Johnston's wrists to hold it down and used a handcuff to secure the other. Dr Michael S Grenis testified that Johnston's wrist was damaged as a direct result of the trauma.

"(Johnston) cannot safely lift heavy or fragile objects as the unpredictable sharp jolts of pain that come from any stress on the wrist which stretch the nerve may cause him to drop such fragile or heavy objects," Dr Grenis said during the first trial.

A review of the incident by Joseph J Stine, a former police chief from Pennsylvania, concluded that the level of force used against Johnston was unreasonable and excessive. Johnston sought to bring the question to a jury, but a Mercer County Court judge and the two judge appellate panel disagreed, ruling that no suit could be brought against the officers for the injury inflicted.

"We are satisfied that the actions taken by the police officers to restrain plaintiff were objectively reasonable," the appellate panel ruled. "Defendants are thus entitled to the protections afforded by the qualified immunity doctrine."

A full copy of the court decision is found in a 22k PDF file at the source link below.

http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs...j-johnston.pdf

how many people think this is perfectly acceptable behavior for police to forcibly draw blood? and then have zero liability for any damages caused?

This is why more cops die. People are starting to get pushed to the limit.

[Plan9]

Implied consent gone wrong. Maybe. Implied consent none-the-less.

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

This is why more cops die. People are starting to get pushed to the limit.

You jerk it to Micheal Douglas in Falling Down, don't ya!?

[Willravel]

This law will come down to how the police choose to carry it out. If we get people bleeding to death (which is unlikely) it will change. If it gets belligerent drunk drivers into jail, then it's not so bad.

[Fotzlid]

what it fails to mention is how much of a fight he was putting up or the circumstances surrounding his arrest (other than the DUI).

i've been spit on, punched and kicked by drunk people as well as being subjected to their bullshit ramblings and drunken bravado.
tough shit for him.

[Plan9]

Originally Posted by Fotzlid

...being subjected to their bullshit ramblings and drunken bravado.
tough shit for him.

Airborne!

[host]

Originally Posted by Fotzlid

what it fails to mention is how much of a fight he was putting up or the circumstances surrounding his arrest (other than the DUI).

i've been spit on, punched and kicked by drunk people as well as being subjected to their bullshit ramblings and drunken bravado.
tough shit for him.

http://lawlibrary.rutgers.edu/courts...73-06.opn.html


PER CURIAM

Plaintiff Russell Johnson appeals from the order of the Law Division granting defendants' summary judgment motion. In his cause of action, plaintiff alleged that police officers from Washington and Hamilton Townships used excessive force in the process of physically restraining him to permit medical staff employed by Robert Wood Johnson Hospital to extract a sample of his blood for the purpose of determining his blood alcohol content (BAC). At the time this occurred, plaintiff had been arrested and charged with driving while under the influence of alcohol (DWI).

The motion judge held that the law enforcement defendants were entitled to qualified immunity because, under the circumstances, the actions taken by the police officers were objectively reasonable, and thus entitled to the protections afforded by the qualified immunity doctrine. Plaintiff argues, however, that he presented sufficient evidence from which a rational jury could find that the degree of force employed here was excessive and amounts to a compensable claim against defendants. We disagree with plaintiff's argument and affirm.

In reviewing a matter on summary judgment, we will apply the same standards applicable in the trial court. Brill v. Guardian Life Ins. Co. of Am., 142 N.J. 520, 536-37 (1995); Prudential Property & Cas. Ins. Co. v. Boylan, 307 N.J. Super. 162, 167 (App. Div.) certif. denied, 154 N.J. 608 (1998); R. 4:46-2(c). Here, because the judgment presented for our review involved purely legal determinations, we owe no special deference to the trial court's analysis and ultimate legal conclusions. Shaler v. Toms River Obstetrics & Gynecology Assocs., 383 N.J. Super. 650, 657 (App. Div.), certif. denied, 187 N.J. 82 (2006).

Plaintiff presented evidence, in the form of deposition testimony, indicating that police officers from both municipalities injured him in the process of placing a handcuff onto his wrist. According to plaintiff, one officer "hung" on his wrist "with his weight." Plaintiff's fiancée Cynthia Baxter submitted a certification in opposition to defendants' summary judgment motion corroborating plaintiff's version of what took place.

Plaintiff presented the report of Michael S. Grenis, an orthopedic doctor who opined that as a result of this trauma, plaintiff sustained a permanent injury to his wrist, with unabated symptoms of "numbness" and "hypersensitivity." In this light, Dr. Grenis concluded that

[b]ecause of this condition, [plaintiff] has the restriction that he cannot safely lift heavy or fragile objects as the unpredictable sharp jolts of pain that come from any stress on the wrist which stretch the nerve may cause him to drop such fragile or heavy objects.

Finally, plaintiff also presented a report authored by Joseph J. Stine, a former police chief from Pennsylvania, who, after reviewing the records of the arrest and the encounter at the hospital, concluded that the force used by the officers involved in subduing plaintiff was unreasonable and excessive. Although this conclusion is disputed by defendants, the report was not challenged as inadmissible.

In an excessive force case, a court must determine whether the actions taken by the individual police officers were objectively reasonable in light of the facts and circumstances confronting them. De la Cruz v. Bor. of Hillsdale, 183 N.J. 149, 166 (2005).

In State v. Ravotto, 169 N.J. 227, 231 (2001), the defendant was charged with DWI, and forced to submit to a blood test. The Court concluded that the force used by the police was excessive, and thus warranted the suppression of the test results. Ibid. The Court cited the following facts in support of this conclusion.

Defendant was terrified of needles and voiced his strong objection to the procedures used on him. He shouted and flailed as the nurse drew his blood. Several persons, including the police, and mechanical restraints were needed to hold defendant down. Defendant's fear is relevant to our analysis. A suspect's reaction to law enforcement officials is part of the fact pattern considered by a reviewing court when it determines whether police behavior was objectively reasonable.

[Id. at 241.]

Here, by contrast, the motion judge made the following findings to support her conclusion that the actions taken by the police officers to restrained defendant were objectively reasonable:

You had a resisting individual that could have been endangering himself and the technician. I think he was waving his arm around and Kelly Mitchell was the technician there to take the blood. So they had to apply sufficient force to enable the test to be taken. <h3>And it's very unfortunate that there was an injury but I don't think you reason backwards. I don't think you look at the fact that there was an injury to reason backwards and say they should have done it in some other way.

You had officers there. They had handcuffs. He was a suspect. He was under arrest. He had been taken to the hospital. At the hospital, once they told him he was getting a blood test, he started to resist. They used the handcuff as part of holding his arm down in order to take the blood sample. He wasn't punched. . . . He wasn't hit with a baton. You know, what would a reasonable officer do under the circumstances? Try to hold him down in any way that was possible and reasonable.</h3>

It is also noteworthy that plaintiff's objections here were not based on a fear of needles or grounded upon religious belief.

Viewing all of the evidence presented from the light most favorable to plaintiff, we are satisfied that the actions taken by the police officers to restrain plaintiff were objectively reasonable. Defendants are thus entitled to the protections afforded by the qualified immunity doctrine.

Affirmed.

It looks like a "good shoot". The lesson seems to be, "don't drink and drive". Is this what it feels like to be a conservative? My anti establishment instincts fail me, in this instance.

dksuddeth, nothing happened when "authority" did this:

http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=1124

....That protest that day where everybody got shot was a protest against the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. It was a secret expansion, Nixon had done it the night before and we found out about it the next day - the whole nation did. They did it without an act of congress, without passing any new law or having any meetings. It was completely unconstitutional, so we're out there at noon, about 3,500 students at Kent State were out there. The governor, who certainly was a pro-war kind of guy, Governor Rhodes, he had placed the National Guard inside the heating plant of the school the night before anticipating what would happen when the students found out about Cambodia. Not only did he do that, but he waited until about 9 am on May 4th to declare Martial Law, which suspends all first amendment rights of The Constitution, meaning that any assembly is automatically illegal, you're automatically committing a crime. These National Guardsmen poured out of the heating plant, surrounded the protesters, and with a bullhorn announced that Martial Law had been declared and that we were all going to jail. Everybody starts chanting and screaming and they start shooting tear gas and some of the more ballsy protesters, while they're coughing and choking and puking are trying to throw it back, but most of the kids were anywhere from 50 to 100 yards away from these lines of National Guardsmen with guns. Nobody believed that the guns were actually loaded with live ammo. They just suddenly formed a row. The first one knelt and the second one stood, and they just shot right into the crowd, shot at all of us, down the hill at all of us. The worst thing about it is that 2 of the 4 students killed weren't part of the demonstration, weren't part of an antiwar group. They'd just come out of class from the journalism building at that time and come out on their way to their next class and were looking at the protest, just seeing what the hell's going on, and they got killed. The bullets just went everywhere, it was like a scatter-gun approach, like shooting geese. A lot of the bullets went over the heads of the protesters and kept going straight down the hill. One of the kids that's paralyzed for life was getting into his car to leave campus after his class, and they shot him in the back. He was at least 200 yards away and wanted nothing to do with what was going on. It was shocking.....

Get used to it, or die or go to prison, trying to stop it from happening again or protesting vigorously against it. You live in a place where most are preoccupied with Nascar, Monday night football, American Idol, or Jesus and the bible, it's the land of freedom called America.

Pick your shots. After what happened at Kent State, we had a song ("four dead in Oh-High-Oh"...) and everything. It was just eight months after Woodstock. It didn't help, nothing seems to. This country is much more conservative now than it was in early May, 1970. You need to raise awareness with the most grievous abuses of authority as examples, this "damaged wrist case", is not one of them.

We had a song about this guy, too. I once joined a protest outside the court at his murder trial in New Haven, and I saw him led out of the back of the court house in heavy chains:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/11119
Volume 13, Number 10 · December 4, 1969
A Special Supplement: The Trial of Bobby Seale
By Jason Epstein

....Seale, the Chairman of the Black Panther Party, is however in considerably more trouble than his fellow defendants, for under the New Haven murder charge he faces the death penalty. His defiant behavior in Judge Hoffman's court, which led to his being cited for contempt on November 5, may be understood partly in the light of this fact. But it also became apparent, as his outbursts continued, that he was forcing the Judge either to grant him his rights or to appear in a humiliating moral light.

It would be wrong, therefore, to regard Seale's actions as simply those of a desperate man whose difficulties in New Haven put him beyond any punishment Judge Hoffman might inflict. Seale had argued from the day the jury first entered the court on September 26 that he had been unfairly denied the counsel of his choice and was thereafter illegally denied his right to defend himself. The basis of his first charge was that Judge Hoffman had, unreasonably in Seale's opinion, refused to postpone the trial so that Charles Garry, Seale's San Francisco lawyer, who had successfully defended a number of Black Panthers in California, could attend the trial after his recovery from a major operation which was scheduled for September 15. The basis for Seale's second charge was that the judge, having refused the postponement, then refused to permit Seale to defend himself in Garry's absence. These charges were the substance of Seale's several outbursts in the following weeks, which Judge Hoffman was to recite with such eloquence on the afternoon of November 5, and for which he was to charge Seale with sixteen separate counts of contempt and sentence him to jail for four years, an unprecedented punishment for contempt of court.

In late August lawyers for the defense petitioned Judge Hoffman to postpone the trial so that Garry could attend it upon his recovery. On September 9, Garry himself came to Chicago to make the same plea. On both occasions the Judge, perhaps sensing a dilatory tactic, refused. On September 12 Seale was taken from his cell in a San Francisco jail where he was awaiting extradition to Connecticut, placed in a car by federal marshals, chained to two other prisoners, and driven by a circuitous route to Chicago where he was deposited in the Cook County Jail on the eighteenth.

During this period he was out of touch with the defense lawyers who were not only fearful for his safety but eager to consult with him on the preparation of their case. It was in order to see Seale in Cook County Jail that William Kunstler, one of the defense attorneys, filed an appearance on behalf of Seale, that is, agreed formally to serve as his attorney. It is partly on the basis of Kunstler's having filed this appearance that Judge Hoffman denied Seale the right of self defense.

The right of self defense is guaranteed under the Constitution as well as by statute and has often been exercised, especially by defendants who feel that they are on trial for their political views and who want not only to defend themselves but to use the court, insofar as rules of procedure allow, as a political forum. Judges are required to grant this right provided it is requested early enough in the trial so as not to interfere with an orderly proceeding. Thus, in two Smith Act cases, Eugene Dennis and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn defended themselves, and earlier this year so did ten of fourteen defendants on trial in Milwaukee for destroying draft records.[*]

On September 26, the jury having been chosen and the trial about to begin, Seale submitted to the Court a motion in his own hand asking that the trial be postponed to permit Garry to attend, but in the event that the Judge denied this motion, he wanted it known that he had "fired" his lawyer of record—William Kunstler—and would defend himself. The Judge ignored this motion. Later on the same day, however, after the lawyers for the government and those for the defense had completed their opening statements to the jury and the Judge had asked whether there were any other statements by lawyers before the first witness was called, Seale got to his feet and walked to the lectern which stood before Judge Hoffman's bench. "Just a minute, sir," the Judge asked, "who is your lawyer?"

"Charles R. Garry," Seale replied. The Judge then asked Kunstler whether he represented Seale and Kunstler replied, "No, your Honor, as far as Mr. Seale has indicated, that because of the absence of Charles R. Garry…"whereupon the Judge interrupted to ask Kunstler whether he had filed an appearance for Seale. Kunstler said that he had and the Judge then said that he would let Kunstler make an opening statement on Seale's behalf. Kunstler refused, saying that he "could not compromise Mr. Seale's position…that he was not his full counsel here," at which point the Judge cut him short and called in the jury.

September 26, the day on which this exchange occurred, was a Friday. On September 30, the following Tuesday, Kunstler moved formally to withdraw his appearance for Seale but the Judge denied the motion, presumably because the trial was now in its second full day and the interest of an orderly proceeding outweighed Seale's constitutional right to self defense. Seale, nevertheless, continued to insist that he had "fired" Kunstler and in Garry's absence would defend himself.

The Judge repeatedly denied Seale this opportunity and reminded him that Kunstler, "a very able criminal lawyer from New York," had filed a written as well as an oral appearance for him. The oral appearance to which the Judge referred was a statement made by Kunstler on September 24 that he and Leonard Weinglass, his colleague, would each represent four defendants, thus each lawyer would have a chance to cross-examine government witnesses separately.

It was not only Seale who wanted Garry's services. So did the other seven defendants. By the end of September it had become apparent to many observers in the Court that the Judge, in his haste to get on with the trial, might, by having refused the postponement, have denied all the defendants their constitutional right to counsel of their choice. In a private conversation at this time, Thomas Foran, the prosecutor, dismissed the possibility that the other seven defendants had grounds under the Sixth Amendment to an argument on appeal, but he admitted that he wasn't so sure that Seale's rights had not been violated. Accordingly Foran reminded the Judge that not only were the defendants represented by Kunstler and Weinglass as well as by two local lawyers, but that four other lawyers had filed appearances for the defendants but had never shown up. Foran wanted the record to show that all the defendants, including Seale, were adequately represented and that if an error had been made it was the fault of these four absent lawyers.

Kunstler replied that these four lawyers had never intended to participate in the trial but had agreed only to prepare pre-trial motions. Their work in this respect having been completed, their services were no longer needed. Judge Hoffman, however, responded to the government's tactic by issuing bench warrants for the arrest of the four lawyers, one of whom, a professor of law at UCLA, was awakened by a federal marshal, put on a plane to Chicago, and found himself the next morning, having been photographed and fingerprinted in Cook County Jail, in the lockup one floor above Judge Hoffman's courtroom. That morning, as the four lawyers were facing jail sentences for their failure to honor their appearances, Judge Hoffman told Kunstler that the keys to the County Jail were in the pockets of the defense, by which Kunstler assumed the Judge to mean that "if the defendants waived their right to counsel…with respect to Garry, then the jailhouse would open for these [four] attorneys." The defendants, who later described Judge Hoffman's tactic as "blackmail," refused to relinquish their claim to Garry's services and the Judge, two of whose warrants had been found invalid by the United States District Court in San Francisco and whose own court was now being picketed by angry lawyers from all over the country, was forced to back down.

Seale's demands, thereafter, increased in vehemence despite Judge Hoffman's warnings that if they continued Seale would be bound and gagged. On the afternoon of October 29, <h3>Seale was taken forcibly by two marshals through the door to the lockup and returned, ten minutes later, chained hand and foot to a metal chair. A gag of muslin was in his mouth.

The following morning, since the first gag had proved ineffective and the rattling of the chains against the metal chair had obviously disturbed the jury, Seale was brought to court strapped to a wooden chair. The gag that passed over his mouth and was tied in a knot at the nape of his neck was supplemented by another of the same muslin which passed under his chin and was tied in a sort of bow at the top of his head. Under the gag his mouth was taped. Seale sat quietly throughout most of the day, but as the afternoon session ended he managed to speak in a loud, if muffled, voice, once more insisting on his right to defend himself.

The following morning the gag was further strengthened by an elastic bandage and Seale's mouth was stuffed with some kind of cotton which the marshals had managed to insert by holding his nose. This forced him to open his mouth. The arrangement proved effective, but as Seale attempted to breathe the elastic bandage tightened around his head and he choked.</h3> Mr. Weinglass, at this point, petitioned the Court to loosen the gag and Judge Hoffman, having inquired whether the government agreed and upon the affirmative reply of the assistant prosecutor, Mr. Schultz, ordered the gag loosened.</b>

Kunstler and Weinglass then moved to recess the Court for the rest of the day so that one of them could fly to California and consult with Garry about a way out of the impasse. Upon the urging of the government lawyers, the Judge agreed. Mr. Schultz admitted that the gag and straps might damage the government's case in the eyes of the jury.

When the trial resumed on the following Monday, Seale entered the courtroom free of his gag and straps. However he continued to interrupt the proceedings, insisting on his right to defend himself, evidently aware that his demands, and Judge Hoffman's refusal to hear them, had put the Judge and, indeed, the judicial system itself in a most awkward position, a conclusion which the Chicago Bar Association confirmed at a press conference on the following day. By Wednesday morning the Judge recessed the Court to prepare the following statement which he read that afternoon.
II
The Transcript

(The following proceedings were had in open court, out of the presence and hearing of the jury: )

THE COURT: There is a matter that I wish to take up, gentlemen, before we proceed further with this trial.

I think, Mr. Witness, you may be excused and go into the witness room.

(Witness temporarily excused.)....

There used to be arrests and court trials of authorities who attacked unarmed civilians:
http://www.bostonmassacre.net/trial/acct-preston1.htm
But, that was before "our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty", wasn't it?

[analog]

So a drunk is in a hospital, a nurse goes to get a blood sample (which is standard procedure for anyone admitted to a hospital with a medical (as in, not trauma-based) problem, let alone one with an altered level of consciousness or clearly under the influence of something), and the guy struggles so hard against his restraints that the officer must physically hold him so the nurse can do their job... and you call this "may inflict permanent physical damage"?

First of all, the officer wasn't taking blood. A nurse was. And yes, forcibly- when you're in an altered level of consciousness, medical staff has implied consent to care for you. This includes drawing blood for lab tests which can determine what, if anything, may be causing your medical problem. When you're in an altered level of consciousness, you're not competent to make your own decisions for medical care. It's a long-standing rule.

Paranoid anti-establishment conspiracy retards are the dirty cunts of the world, and that website "thenewspaper" is another in a long line of their soak-up-all-the-bullshit tampons.

If you want to latch onto the word "forcibly", knock yourself out. Yeah, it was done forcibly because the filthy fuck was drunk, had been driving drunk, and was then fighting against his restraints while a medical professional carried out their duties, despite his being a filthy fuck.

I could write another headline for this particular dirty cunt tampon of a "news" site- "EMS worker intentionally and enthusiastically stabs a woman in 4 fingers with a sharp instrument against her protests, then squeezes them vigorously so they bleed."

That would have been me taking blood sugar tests on a woman whose sugar was so low, she was completely out of her mind. She required 2 different drugs to stabilize back to normal, which was an almost sickeningly sweet and kind older southern woman.

That's exactly the type of "twisting of words" you've used to complain, once again, about the police. It's like tabloid journalism, only dumber and fueled by paranoid delusions of persecution.

The cop held his arms down- probably at the wrists, which is a very standard way to hold a person down so they can't hurt you or others, and would explain the damage to his wrists. What part of that implies a new carte blanch for cops to intentionally, permanently damage suspects? That's a whole new level of "reaching".

Second:

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

This is why more cops die. People are starting to get pushed to the limit.

Wow. How pathetically misguided and irrationally hate-filled. It's almost surprising.

[host]

Originally Posted by analog

.....Paranoid anti-establishment conspiracy retards are the dirty cunts of the world....
....That's exactly the type of "twisting of words" you've used to complain, once again, about the police. It's like tabloid journalism, only dumber and fueled by paranoid delusions of persecution......

analog, despite the fact that I agree completely with you that dksuddeth picked a bad example to use to showcase what he perceives to be "the problem", I found your reaction to be too dismissive. This is our history, and authority in the US is alive and kicking today. Whether you're a "blue blood" who graduated from the same prep school that our current president and his father both are graduates of, or you are a minority from an economically segregated, blighted area in an urban California jurisidiction, if you publicly embrace and unwaveringly adhere to a doctrine that authority is prejudiced against, and thus has demonized to the point that it's own ranks react to any defense of it with shock, disbelief, and then belligerence, you are fucked. Much more intensely if you happen to be a minority who frustrates sworn officers' perceived "performance of their duties".... It has nothing to do with "conspiracy theories". Authority is edgey and defensive and has definite ideas of what is appropriate behavior exhibited by "the rest of us", and what is not. That does not make it's decisions correct or lawful.

"The public" has a right to observe and question authority in the course of it "performing it's duties". It's reaction to people doing just that is irrelevant, but the consequences it metes out anyway, are real, sometimes illegal, and do shocking damage to those exercising their rights while acting within the law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corliss_Lamont
Corliss Lamont (March 28, 1902–April 26, 1995), was a humanist and Marxist philosopher, and advocate of various left-wing and civil liberties causes. He is the great-uncle of 2006 Democratic Party nominee for the United States Senate from Connecticut, Ned Lamont[1].

...Lamont was born in Englewood, New Jersey. His father, Thomas W. Lamont, was a Partner and later Chairman at J.P. Morgan & Co.. Lamont graduated as valedictorian of Phillips Exeter Academy in 1920, and magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1924. In 1924 he did graduate work at New College University of Oxford while he resided with Julian Huxley. The next year Lamont matriculated at Columbia University, where he studied under John Dewey. In 1928 he became a philosophy instructor at Columbia and married Margaret Hayes Irish. He received his Ph.D. in 1932. Lamont taught at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and the New School for Social Research . In 1962 he married Helen Elizabeth Boyden.[2]

[edit] Political views

Lamont's political views were Marxist and socialist for much of his life. During the 1930s he was openly Marxist. In 1934, Corliss Lamont identified himself to former communist Max Eastman as a 'Truth Communist', saying according to Eastman, that he “did not accept the policy of political lying to the masses practiced by the official communist parties under Stalin.”

Activism

He served as a director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1932–1954, and chairman until his death, of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which successfully challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy's senate subcommittee and other government agencies. In the process Lamont was cited for contempt of Congress, but in 1956 an appeals court overturned his indictment. From 1951 until 1958, he was denied a passport by the State Department.

In 1965 he secured a Supreme Court ruling against censorship of incoming mail by the U.S. Postmaster General. In 1973 he discovered through Freedom of Information Act requests that the FBI had been tapping his phone, and scrutinizing his tax returns and cancelled checks for 30 years. His subsequent successful lawsuit set a precedent in upholding citizens' privacy rights. He also filed and won a suit against the Central Intelligence Agency for opening his mail....

<h3>The following should be mandatory reading in high school US history and civics class, and in every LE recruit training program. Malcolm X, Dr. Newton, and Mr. Seale should be as honored and as higly regarded as Rosa Parks. J. Edgar Hoover and Richard M. Nixon should be regarded as Booth and Oswald are:</h3>

http://lemming.mahost.org/library/seize/seize2.htm#d
[From Bobby Seale's book, "Seize the Time"]

HUEY: GETTING THE PARTY GOING


THE PANTHER PROGRAM

One day Huey said, "It's about time we get the organization off the ground, and do it now."

This was in the latter part of September 1966. From around the first of October to the fifteenth of October, in the poverty center in North Oakland, Huey and I began to write out a ten-point platform and program of the Black Panther Party. Huey himself articulated it word for word. All I made were suggestions.

Huey said, "We need a program. We have to have a program for the people. A program that relates to the people. A program that the people can understand. A program that the people can read and see, and which expresses their desires and needs at the same time. It's got to relate to the philosophical meaning of where in the world we are going, but the philosophical meaning will also have to relate to something specific."....

..."Don't come in the office high or drunk," Huey told him, "because all you can do is be destructive to the Party because you don't know what you're doing in the first place." We found out that John Sloane had been in the military service and that he was the best man to teach brothers field stripping and shooting of the M-1 rifle. He did that for two or three months. He was out of sight on the weapons and rifle in terms of getting the brothers down. He wasn't jiving. He was with us.

Then other brothers began to come in. We had a Saturday night meeting about three-and-a-half weeks after we opened that office, and we had about twenty-five brothers there. It was me, Bobby Hutton, Huey, Mark Johnson, a brother I knew from the poverty program, John Sloane - we made John Sloane a captain - and then about four weeks later, Warren Tucker came in. We got another .38 from a brother up at Cal. He said he wasn't doing anything with it. We told him we wanted it, we needed it. We were going to defend our people. We said we weren't giving it back to him. He didn't raise any arguments about it. We said we weren't bullshitting. He gave us an old broke-up shotgun too. The next thing we knew, we had about thirty, maybe forty members of the Party. Richard Iokey came in - the Japanese brother who gave Huey and me the M-1 and 9mm - and he got to talking about how he had a .357 Magnum. We got the .357 Magnum from him and a couple more pistols, and the brothers got to getting money together, and started buying weapons.

Every Saturday, we opened up a community meeting in the office and Huey was teaching dudes, brothers, and people from the community the ten-point platform and program of the Black Panther Party, in that storefront office. It was a nice, clean office, too, but it didn't have any furniture in it. Sid Walton came down and gave us twenty, twenty-five chairs, but he never panned out to be much of anything close to the Party. He was too engrossed in a lot of abstract bullshit, although he did a lot of work at Merritt College in terms of furthering the things that Huey had already instituted there.1 But that's the way it all began, in that office on Fifty-sixth and Grove in North Oakland, the first official headquarters of the Black Panther Party.


RED BOOKS FOR GUNS.....

.....Huey said, "Let's go buy some shotguns." So we went to the B.B.B. department store where Virtual Murrell was working at the time, and we bought a shotgun. Huey bought a High Standard. (That's the brand name of the shotgun.) It holds six shots in a magazine after you take the plug out. And one in the chamber. Huey says, "Let's get some double 0 buckshot." I said, "What's double 0 buckshot?" And he said, "That's the same thing that the pigs use. Double 0 buckshot." I said, "Right on." I was right behind him. This brother was out of sight. He knew what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.

We walked up to the counter and were paying for the shotgun after we requested it from the back counter where the sports material was located. We were drunk admiring those pistols, shotguns, rifles, what have you. And the woman at the counter says, and you could tell she was lying, "You know, these FBI men have been coming around to request information and names on everyone who buys a gun in our store." Huey says, "We don't care. That don't make any difference. There is my money. I'm Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party. Here's my money. I want my shotgun." And the woman looked at him, amazed. I don't know who she thought she was tricking, because she wasn't tricking Huey P. Newton - he couldn't give two goddams about who she thought she was intimidating with some supposed FBI investigation.

That's very important about Huey's attitude and his personality and the way he's going and the way he knows he's going. That's very important. Because Huey said, "Here's my money. My name is Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party," and we picked up that shotgun.

So we sold the Red Books, made the money, and used that money to buy guns. Me and Huey and the brothers in the core organization used the Red Books and spread them throughout the organization, because Huey made it a point that the revolutionary principles so concisely cited in the Red Book should be applied whenever they could. That is, whenever they could be applied within the confines of this system. Huey would say, "Well, this principle here is not applicable to our situation at this time." Where the book said, "Chinese people of the Communist Party," Huey would say, "Change that to the Black Panther Party. Change the Chinese people to black people." When he saw a particular principle told in the Chinese terms, he would change it to apply to us. So, from there, we righteously used the Red Book, because we talked about it, and Huey had us practicing the principles. And we used Fanon and Malcolm X - his autobiography and other material on him. Huey integrated all these principles of the other revolutionaries. We taught from all these materials, and from Che Guevara, too. We had initially used the Red Book as a commodity. Huey P. Newton knew the brothers well enough to know that they would not pay a dollar for the Red Book. Huey did know that the radicals on the campus would pay a dollar for that Red Book if we had it. And we were the only ones who had it. I remember SWP's (Socialist Workers Party), CP's (Communist Party), and a lot of people, asking very inquisitively, "Where did you get those books?" And we would say, "That's for me to know and for you to find out. You wanna buy one? Only one dollar. Get your Red Book Quotations from brother Mao Tse Tung. Aw come on." I would holler, "I know you're wondering what in the world are those Negroes doing with those Red Books?" And I would sell three or four.

We knew that at first the guns would be more valuable and more meaningful to the brothers on the block, for drawing them into the organization; then in turn we taught them from the Red Book. Huey was something else. Huey was out of sight. He knew how to do it. Huey was ten motherfuckers. He would say, "Bobby, you and I know the principles in this Red Book are valid, but the brothers and the black folks don't, and they will not pay a dollar or thirty cents for that book. So what we have to do is to get the white radicals who are intellectually interested in the book, <h3>sell the book, make the money, buy the guns, and go on the streets with the guns. We'll protect a mother, protect a brother, and protect the community from the racist cops. And in turn we get brothers in the organization and they will in turn relate to the Red Book. They will relate to political, economic, and social equality in defense of the community."</h3>

That's the way the shit went. At the same time, Huey would go off into Fanon. He would get off into Malcolm X. Huey would relate these principles. He was a motherfucker. You couldn't get around Huey. He knew the Red Book sideways, backwards and forwards. There are brothers in the Party that got to know the Red Book cattycorner. The brothers know that book sideways, backwards, forwards, upside down. Turn that book any way you want to - they tell you in a minute. "The Red Book and what else? The gun! The Red Book and what else? The gun!" That's what Huey would say.

Our last major selling escapade of the Red Book to radicals, leftists, and liberals was many months later at that big, 65,000 strong march against the war in Vietnam that wound up at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco. Huey and I had met Eldridge Cleaver by then. Eldridge spoke at that rally that day and the only time Huey and I took out time from selling the whole while we were there, was to listen to Eldridge's speech.

At the end, we made about $850 and had books left over. We had heard from the China Book Store man that he had received a shipment of 5,000 books, so we picked up about 1,200. They all could have been sold, but the manpower we had was short. Only about fifteen or sixteen brothers showed up that Saturday morning at the Black Panther Party office. First we followed the march up Market Street when it started that morning and followed it for about twenty-five blocks. All I could think of was books, dollars, then guns for us motherfuckers. "Get your Red Books, old liberal ladies." You know, the kind who decided to go against "Lynching" Baines Johnson because brother Martin Luther King finally went against the war.

The old broads, looking at me, amazed, couldn't figure it out. Probably asking themselves, "What are those colored boys doing with those 'communist books'?" As they walked along the street, I walked out into the ranks and held a Red Book up to them and said, "I know what you're thinking, so why don't you buy just one book and satisfy yourself." I gave one a slight smile, and she said, "OK." Her marching partner also wanted one. Hell, the first thing I know, ten books are gone and I'm working up a sweat running back and forth to the bundles that we had to keep moving.

Dollars for Red Books, and I mean those brothers who were working knew this meant more guns so we could defend ourselves and educate all black people to pick up the gun. Just like the Red Book itself says. The Party was in motion. Dollars for books to be able to get more guns.


HUEY BACKS THE PIGS DOWN

Huey was on a level where he was ready to organize the black brothers for a righteous revolutionary struggle with guns and force. It came to a point where, every day, we walked in and out of the Black Panther office, around to my house or around to Bobby Hutton's house, or somebody's house, with guns on our sides, and got in a car, or two or three cars, or four or five cars as it built up, and patroled the pigs on Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes when we went to a meeting during the week we patroled the pigs. We had a camera or two, a law book, and were working on getting some tape recorders in patroling the pig cops.

One day, as we were walking out of the office (I guess we'd been there about a month or so), a pig passed by. He saw us coming out with shotguns and pistols on our sides. About six or seven of us came out of the office there, in the daytime, and we looked at the pig as he passed by, and he jumped on his radio because he saw us coming out of the office with those pieces and stuff. We had just finished field stripping weapons, learning about double 0 buckshot, learning about the 9mm and the .45, and having a political education session.

We had a .45 and a .357 Magnum in the group, and a couple of M-1's. We had three or four shotguns by then. We bought up guns like a son of a bitch then. The pig went down two blocks and turned around, came back up the other side of the street. They were building rapid transit, BART, right down Grove Street there, and he went up the other side of the boulevard and came back. We readily assessed that the pigs were ready to see what the fuck was happening, that this pig had radioed in, and he was running it down how he had "seen some niggers come out of a place here with some guns and blah blop de bloo, etc., etc., come out of this office with guns" and stuff. He was radioing to other pigs to help "get 'em."

Huey had his father's car that day. I think he had just finished paying some bills and he stopped by the office for about a half-hour. By the time we got in the car, the pig was back around down the street and he drove up behind us. And Huey told everybody to remember what he'd said - that nobody in the car should say anything. Only the driver should do the talking, and Huey happened to be the driver. He said, "I'm the driver. Nobody else say anything, and remember the legal first aid." This was the legal aid information that we had printed for the brothers in the Party, and we were teaching them thirteen points of basic, legal first aid, legal and constitutional rights.

Huey used to teach the brothers on that; he wouldn't let them get around it, because Huey understood that the brothers had no guidelines about how to deal with the pigs. So Huey went off in the area of law and he found out the brothers respected law. Huey knew something about law, and he could use it to make it serve him. That's all he was doing, he was bringing them basic things in everyday life about law. That's what Huey dug; he understood that shit. Huey would take those thirteen basic points and try to show a dude where he was fucked up at in the ghetto. That's very important in understanding how the Party first began to function.

So he said, "Nobody say anything, because the minute somebody says something the man is going to try to arrest you. And he's going to arrest you for some jive about interfering with an officer carrying out his duty. He's going to try to prove to all the people who are subject to gather around us here that we have no right with a gun. And he's going to arrest you on a traffic ticket and the people out in the community will think he arrested you because you've got the gun. We want to prove to the people that we've got a right to carry guns and they've got a right to arm themselves, and we will exhaust our constitutional right to carry these guns." That's what Huey was trying to exhaust. Boom. Which he did exhaust, ultimately, when we look at the power structure's moves against the Party over the years.

Huey got in the car and the pig came up to the window. "You have any driver's license?" So Huey rolled the window down. There wasn't more than about a three- or four-inch crack in the window.

Huey handed his license out the window. "Is this your true name?" the pig said. And Huey said, "Yes, that's my true name, Huey P. Newton." "Is this your true address, 841 Forty-seventh Street?" And Huey said, "That's my true address, 841 Forty-seventh Street."

"What are you doing with the guns?" And Huey said, "What are you doing with your gun?" This particular pig decided he wasn't going to argue, so he went back and got his little writing pad where they fill out shit.

"Your true name is Huey P. Newton?" Huey said, "That's right." The pig wrote this down.

"Your true address is 841 Forty-seventh Street?"

Huey said, "That's right." The pig then looked at his license. "What's your phone number?" And Huey said, "Five!" and stopped and wouldn't say anything else. And the pig said, "Five what?"

This is when all the shit between the Party and pigs began. Huey said, "The Fifth Amendment. You ever heard of it? Don't you know about the constitutional right of a person not to testify against himself? Five! I don't have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address so therefore I don't even want to talk to you. You can leave my car and leave me alone. I don't even want to hear you."

"What do you mean?" the pig said. And Huey said, "Just what I said. The constitutional right of any man is that he doesn't have to testify against himself." And Huey had a big M-1 sitting to his right with his hand on it. I had this 9mm sitting beside me, and Huey had this M-1 at his side. Huey was driving. Four other brothers were in the back seat, and one of them was Bobby Hutton. They were being quiet because Huey told them to be quiet. And the pig is going crazy. He's by himself and Huey had all these black niggers in the car going for a motherfucker.

Meanwhile, while the pig is trying to get bad, three cars drove up in back of us, and one in front. Some more were in the driveway. Blop, blop, Hop de bloo. Then another car came up in front of us. A pig jumped out of his car, walked up to our car, and said through the crack in the window, with a hogish voice, trying to sound intimidating, "What's going on here?" And Huey said, "The same basic procedures that are supposed to go on!" Huey rolled the window down another five or six inches. The pigs were looking at the guns in the car.

"Can I see that pistol there?" one of the pigs said. "No, you can't see it!" Huey told him. I was beginning to get skeptical about what was happening because he pointed to my 9mm pistol. Huey was on probation, and if they thought that this was Huey's pistol . . . I didn't know this law stuff the way Huey knew it, so I moved the pistol over beside me real close. It had been lying in the middle of the seat. I said, "No, you can't see it." Huey said, "No, you can't see the pistol, nor this (pointing to his rifle), and I don't want you to look at it. You don't have to look at it."

"Is that your pistol?" he asked Huey. And I said, "No, it's not his pistol, it's my pistol!" I said that because I was thinking the man's gonna jump on Huey because he already told me about the probation law - if he gets caught with a pistol he's burned. But if he gets caught with a rifle, the man can't mess with him because his probation officer told him he can carry a rifle or a shotgun, and he couldn't stop him. The pig said, "Can I see it, or not?" So Huey said to me, "I'll talk." And then to the pig, "No, you can't see the pistol. Get away from the car. We don't want you around the car and that's all there is to it."

"Well, I can ask him if I want to see his pistol or not," the pig says. So I said, "Well, you can't see the pistol!" The motherfuckers try to get indignant. They were blabbing and oinking to each other about who in the hell we thought we were and, "Constitution, my ass. They're just turning it around." Then a pig said to Huey, "Who in the hell you think you are?"

"Look, dammit," and Huey just opened the car door, and this is where Huey got mad. I mean you have to imagine this nigger. He got mad because these dogs were going to carry on and they were bracing up like they were bad. Huey didn't go for this at all. Huey got very mad. He opened up the door saying, "Who in the hell do you think you are? In the first place, this man (pointing at the pig) came up here and asked me for my license like he was citing me for a ticket or observation of some kind. This police officer is supposed to be carrying out his duty, and here you come talking about our guns." Huey put his hand around his M-1 rifle and continued, "We have a constitutional right to carry the guns, anyway, and I don't want to hear it."

The pigs backed up a couple of steps, and Huey was coming out of the car. Huey had his hand back in the car, getting his M-1, and you know, if you've ever seen Huey, he gets growly, but articulate. He came out of the car with his M-1. Huey knows his law so well that he wouldn't have the M-1 loaded inside the car. When he came out of the car, he dropped a round off into the chamber right away. Clack, clup.

"Who do you think you all are anyway?" Huey said to the pigs. And the other pigs are on the sidewalk harassing all the brothers and sisters who have gathered around: "You people move on down the street!" Huey started interrupting. "You don't have to move down the street! Don't go anywhere! These pigs can't keep you from observing. You have a right to observe an officer carrying out his duty." And these pigs, they listened to this shit. See, Huey's citing law and shit. "You have a right to observe an officer carrying out his duty. You have a right to. As long as you stand a reasonable distance away, and you are a reasonable distance. Don't go anywhere."

The pigs kept trying to move the people, saying, "You're gonna get under arrest." So Huey just went over and opened the door to the Panther office and said, "Come on in here. They can't move you out." He took his key, opened the door, and let the people go in. "Now, observe all you want to!" The pig said, "What are you going to do with that gun?"

"What are you going to do with your gun?" Huey said. "Because if you try to shoot at me, or if you try to take this gun, I'm going to shoot back at you, swine. Furthermore" - and he just got off into it - "you're nothing but a sharecropper anyway. You come from Georgia somewhere, you're downtown making $800 a month, and you come down here brutalizing and murdering black people in the black communities. They gave you some sergeant stripes and all I say is that you're nothing but a low-life, scurvy swine. A sharecropper from racist Georgia in the South somewhere.

"So if you draw that gun, I'll shoot back at you and blow your brains out!"

"You, you, you . . ." the pig was mad. "You're just turning the Constitution around." This is the pig trying to slough it off.

Huey said, "I'm not turning anything around. And I got my gun. What are you going to do with yours?" This blew the pigs' minds. They didn't know where to go, man. Huey just walked on around the front of the car. Got on around the front of the car, talking, then went on and opened the office door again, and let some more people in, telling the people they didn't have to go anywhere, citing their constitutional rights and all this stuff, then just jumped on out of the office again and said, "Now what are you going to do?"

Another burly kind of fat pig walked up to about five yards in front of Huey with his hands in his belt, the front of his belly falling over the belt. He asked Huey, "Are you a Marxist?" Huey asked him, "You a fascist?" "Are you a Marxist?" the pig asked in a louder tone of voice. Then Huey got louder. "Are you a fascist?"

Then the pig asked it in a very loud, demanding voice. Lifting his hand out of his belt, the pig said, "Are you a Marxist?" And Huey, louder, "Are you a fascist?" The pig asked three more times in a softer tone, and Huey repeated his question.

Then the pig said, like a stupid fifth-grade kid, "I asked you first."

Huey shook his head unbelievingly and said, "I asked you second. Are you a fascist?" Everybody laughed at the pig.

I was sitting in the car with the hammer of my 9mm cocked back. I said, "These pigs are going to be wild-eyed. I know they're gonna be crazy." I rolled the window down. "What's your name?" I say, "My name is Bobby Seale. Why?" "Want to check you out. Got any identification?" I laid my pistol down, gave them identification; I picked my pistol back up. I said, "My name is Bobby Seale, as it says in my identification. Want to check me out?"

"You were arrested for armed robbery at seventeen."

I said, "You're a goddamned liar. I've never been arrested in my life. I've never been arrested for armed robbery." They didn't even check me out. "You were arrested for armed robbery when you were seventeen. But since you were a juvenile, we can't arrest you for possessing a gun now." I said, "You damned liar. I've never been arrested for armed robbery. I don't want to hear it. Fuck it."

And Huey out there, man, he's calling the pigs swine, dogs, sharecroppers, bastards, motherfuckers, with his M-1 in his hand. And daring them, just daring them! "You don't pull your gun on us." And that's where Huey began to show us. You tell some motherfucker, and you mean it. This is what I remember. Huey was relating to one thing. When he told me, a long time ago, to remember that we might not ever come back home one day, I said, "I'm with you, Huey." I remember that. I remember I might not ever come home one day. "Fuck it, I'm with you."

We were sitting in the car, and Huey made us all stay in the car and be quiet. He was out there, the baddest motherfucker in the world, man. Huey and ten pigs. Three or four of them trying to run off kids off bicycles and tell the people they didn't have the right to stand around, and Huey was going out there, interrupting, "No! Come in the office." Little kids on bicycles got inside the office. We had a big, wide, clear picture window. Niggers just got all over the front of the window, man. They were leaning on it, kissing the window just to listen to this shit. And they would holler, "Go 'head on brother," and "Run it on down. You know where it's at," and "I can dig it," all the while Huey was letting these pigs know where it was at. The brothers observing would see that those pigs were scared of that big gun that a bad black but beautiful nigger had in his hand! Every time Huey would say, "If you shoot at me, swine, I'm shooting back," niggers would have to holler something like, "Tell it, do it, brother." That would let Huey know that he was revolutionizing our culture; educating black people to be revolutionaries; that the gun is where it's at and about and in. A white man two doors down smiled. He was the only one around but he seemed to respect Huey.

Then some people came up after that, after Huey had made this display of going into the office. Other people were standing around and the pigs weren't even moving anymore. And Huey just daring them to do anything. Huey had an M-1 with him, one of the eight round clips in it. What do you do, man? All you do is back up a nigger like that. You do nothing else but that. Anything that happens, this nigger's the baddest nigger you ever seen. Because this nigger is telling ten pigs, "I don't give a damn what you do," and making us all shut up and be disciplined. And we have our shit ready, sitting in the car.

So I said to myself, this is the baddest motherfucker in the world! This nigger is telling pigs, "If you draw your gun, I'll shoot you." Telling this to the pigs standing there. When the pig says, "You're just turning the Constitution around," Huey says, "I'm turning nothing around. I'm exercising my constitutional right. I've got the gun to back it up!" And the pig sees the gun. The nigger told the pigs that if they act wrong or get down wrong, I'm going to kill you. I'll defend myself!

So what do you do? You say, this nigger is bad. This nigger is crazy. But I like this crazy nigger. I like him because he's good. He doesn't take bullshit. You back him up.

So that was the very major incident that happened with the Black Panther Party in front of the Black Panther Party office. And after that, we really began to patrol pigs then, because we got righteous recruits. I think ten or twelve, maybe thirteen extra members in the Party that day, just came and put applications in. We went down to the poverty office again - I was still working there - and drew up a formal application form for enrollment to get into the Black Panther Party. And from there, what did we do? We just patroled pigs.


BADGE 206

One night Huey, Little Bobby, and I were patroling this pig in North Oakland. We had been patroling him for a couple of hours. We'd be about a block away from him wherever he'd go. Sometimes we'd stop and lose the pig, but ten, twenty minutes later he'd make it around again, he'd be back where he was, and we'd patrol him some more. Little Bobby had an M-1, I had a .45. and brother Huey had a shotgun and a law book on the back seat. Brother Huey was driving my old '54 Chevy. I guess we patroled for quite a while, then on Fifty-eighth Street we saw the pig stop up at the corner. We stopped at the corner, and he backed up and parked right in front of the stop sign at the comer of Fifty-eighth and Grove. I remember us saying we were tired of patroling this pig, "Let's go in." It was about 8:30 or 9:30 when we drove down the street and stopped next to the pig. We were stopped at the stop sign. I looked over at the pig. Naturally we were carrying guns in Oakland in those days. The shotgun barrel was sticking up. I was holding on to the shotgun while Huey drove. I was on the right-hand side of the front seat and the shotgun was to my left, next to my left leg. It was standing straight up resting on its butt. I looked over at the pig, the pig looked back and looked over to me and to Little Bobby, who had his M-1 in the back seat between his legs, the barrel of it showing through the window, too.

Huey had completed his stop and he started off again and started turning right, right in front of the pig's car. As we were turning right, the pig flashed his lights on and he flashed his high beams on. Huey kept moving. He didn't stop and didn't speed up. See, those pigs don't shake Huey at all. I guess we drove no more than twenty feet when we could see the red light flashing. He was starting his engine up and pulling out of the spot where he was parked, making a right turn right behind us. Huey kept moving. He got ready to make a left turn right there at the next little corner. He made his left turn and said, "I'm not going to stop till he puts his damn siren on because a flashing red light really don't mean nothin', anything could be a flashing red light." Well, the pig cut his siren on as he was turning the corner following us and when he cut his siren on, Huey stopped. We'd been stopped by pigs a number of times, pigs who'd seen us with guns and didn't know what to do. We were down with it because Huey had put us together and knew how to handle the situation.

This pig surprised us because he stopped his car as soon as we stopped. He stopped his car about twenty-five feet in back of our car. Some pigs stop right up behind you, but he was twenty-five feet from us. He got out of his car and as soon as he did, and came walking from his door, we could hear this pig hollering, "What the goddam hell you niggers doing with them goddam guns? Who in the goddam hell you niggers think you are? Get out of that goddam car. Get out of that goddam car with them goddam guns."

I said, "Huey, this motherfucker's trying to get killed, man. Listen to him."

As he walked up to the car, he said, "Get out of that car."

Huey said, "You ain't putting nobody under arrest Who the hell you think you are?"

The pig snatched the door open. When he snatched it open, he said, "I said get out of that goddam car and bring them goddam guns out of there."

Huey said, "Man, what the hell?" By this time the pig came all the way up, his head inside the door, and he's reaching across Huey real fast. This all happened so fast. He was grabbing hold of the barrel of the shotgun, and I tightened up on it and pulled it away from him. At the same time I was pulling the shotgun away from him, Huey grabbed this pig by the collar, pushed his head back up against the roof of the car, then shifted around and got his foot and kicked him in the belly, shoving him all the way out of the car. The pig fell backwards about ten feet from the car but as he was going out, no sooner had Huey finished putting his foot in this pig's belly, kicking and pushing him out of the car - and the pig was being propelled and off balance, away from the car - than Huey was grabbing hold of the barrel of the shotgun. No sooner did brother Huey's feet hit the ground, but he was jacking a round off into the chamber, "Clack upp," and taking three quick steps.

The pig looked up and looked around, and Huey P. Newton was standing there saying, "Now, who in the hell do you think you are, you big rednecked bastard, you rotten fascist swine, you bigoted racist? You come into my car, trying to brutalize me and take my property away from me. Go for your gun and you're a dead pig." The pig folded his hands up. By this time I'd gotten out of the car on the other side, put the .45 in my hand, and pulled the hammer back. As soon as Huey finished saying what he had to say, Little Bobby jumped out on the back of our car and jacked a round off in the M-1. The pig heard these clicks and looked back at Huey, and the pig folded his hands up. In other words, he was taking his hands away from his gun. Huey had said, "Go for your gun and you're a dead pig. Don't you know by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that you can't remove a person's property from them without due process of law." Huey was mad, loud, and

articulate   click to show 

.

The pig began to walk and he kind of did a half-moon, walking around and away from Huey, .trying to walk back to his car. Huey just stepped back holding his gun on him and the pig came walking back to his car hollering, "They got guns. They got guns. They got guns." He got on his radio, "Niggers down here got guns. Get me some help down here. Niggers got guns, they got guns." This pig was scared.

Black people began to come out of their houses, wanting to know what was going on. Huey said, "Come on out, black people. Come on out and get to know about these racist dog swine who been controlling our community and occupying our community like a foreign troop. Come on out and we're going to show you about swine pigs." People got to coming out. It must have been around 9:30 because we were in the back of Merritt College and people in night school were coming out, and I guess seventy or eighty had gathered up there before the other pigs got there. They had about fifteen cars come down there - fifteen cars and pigs everywhere. So me and Huey and Little Bobby were there with our guns. The people were there. I think Little Bobby placed his gun right back on the back seat again. He was sitting in the seat and he shut the door and got back out. Huey and I had been warning Little Bobby about keeping in his possession the written permission he had, and to carry with him the written permission thing from his father to carry and keep the gun because he was still under eighteen at the time, and I think he didn't have it. He realized that he'd better lay the gun down.

Huey was talking to most of the people and running it down to the people about how racism was rotten. How these pigs were brutal and murderous racists. And every time Huey said something I'd say it right behind him, I'd say the same thing, I'd say, "That's right." And he would say, "Racist dogs pigs occupy our community, come down here to brutalize and kill and murder us. I'm tired of it," and I'd say, "That's right, racist dogs, pigs occupying our community like a foreign troop that occupies territory. Black people are tired of it." Every time Huey said something, I'd say something. The pigs must have thought that we was crazy niggers. A pig walks up and says, "Let me see that weapon!"

Huey says, "Let you see my weapon? You haven't placed me under arrest."

"Well, you just let me see the weapon, I have a right to see the weapon."

Huey says, "Ain't you ever heard of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States? Don't you know you don't remove nobody's property without due process of law?" Huey got loud at those last words. "What's the matter with you? You're supposed to be people enforcing the law, and here you are, ready to violate my constitutional rights. You can't .see my gun. You can't have my gun. The only way you're gonna get it from me is to try to take it."

Then another pig walks up to me, "Come over here by the car."

"I ain't going no goddam place. Who the hell you think you are? You ain't placed me under arrest." "But I have a right to take you over to the car." "You don't have no right to move me from one spot to another."

Huey P. Newton, the Minister of Defense, teaches us and runs it down to us that whenever a cop moves a person from one spot to another, then he's technically under arrest, and if the cop states that you're not under arrest, or doesn't say you're under arrest when you ask, then he has no right to ask you to move from one spot to another.

"You just got through telling me I wasn't under arrest, so I'm not moving nowhere, I'm staying right here."

"Well, you let me see that gun." "I said you can't see my gun," and I ran down the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution just like Huey had run it down. The pigs were frustrated, mad, and didn't know what to do. "Well, I got a right to look at the serial number."

"I already know what the serial number is," I said.

"I got to make sure it has a serial number." So I held my gun in my hand and he looked at it with his flashlight. "Hold it up, let me see."

"No, I ain't holding up nothing. You got a flashlight so you look at it from that distance right there, because you don't get near this gun." So I read the serial number, and I said, "There's the serial."

The pig took the serial number down and after that a police lieutenant came down, and he kept saying, "Well if we charge him, we'll probably lose the case, just for them having guns, we'll probably lose the case because they turn around the Second Amendment of the Constitution about them having a right to carry guns as long as they ain't concealed."

Then one big fat pig says, "Well, we gotta find something. We gotta find something to do to them." He was looking down, he started looking the car over and he said that the license plate was being held on by a coat hanger. It was secure all right, but it was just put together with a coat hanger. "Let's give them a ticket for this here, this here license plate is not adequately secure." He asked Huey for some identification and Huey handed him his license. They said his license looked kind of old so they gave him a ticket for not having a good new license.

Huey later went to court, pleaded not guilty on both counts, and beat both tickets.

The pigs jumped up and left the scene and the black people were asking what was happening. While Huey was calling the pigs all kinds of names and stuff, a lot of the brothers said, "Right on time, Huey. Tell it. Right. Run it down, Huey." Huey talked to the people some more and a lot of them said they were going to come down and join the Black Panther Party. And we did get some of the older brothers and sisters and some young brothers and sisters out there to join. Even a number of white people had a chance to watch that.

Badge 206 was the cop. The cop who almost got his head blown away that night. I kept telling him he was acting a fool. Badge 206. Badge 206. We never forgot his badge. I remembered his badge, Huey remembered his badge, and Bobby Hutton remembered his badge. We put his number on the front page of our newspaper.

[Ustwo]

My poor mouse wheel

When I first glanced at this I imagined police drawing the blood themselves roadside for some reason. That would be bad, drawing blood is not that easy if you are doing it properly for medical reasons.

Then I read it realized no, its not so bad.

There are PLENTY of reasons to leave N.J. but this wouldn't be one of them in my book.

Paranoid anti-establishment conspiracy retards are the dirty cunts of the world,

You know that might be a good name for a new forum here.

[dksuddeth]

Originally Posted by Crompsin

Implied consent gone wrong. Maybe. Implied consent none-the-less.

Nowhere do I recall EVER having consenting, implied or not, to allowing an invasive procedure to be done on my body nor in agreeing that jack booted thugs could forcibly draw my blood. Can YOU show me where I've done that?

Originally Posted by willravel

This law will come down to how the police choose to carry it out. If we get people bleeding to death (which is unlikely) it will change. If it gets belligerent drunk drivers into jail, then it's not so bad.

because you only have the rights we say you should have. nice attitude. no wonder you deplore freedom.

Originally Posted by Fotzlid

what it fails to mention is how much of a fight he was putting up or the circumstances surrounding his arrest (other than the DUI).

i've been spit on, punched and kicked by drunk people as well as being subjected to their bullshit ramblings and drunken bravado.
tough shit for him.

so your hatred of alcohol imparts the belief that the rights of those who drink don't matter. gotcha.

Originally Posted by host

It looks like a "good shoot". The lesson seems to be, "don't drink and drive". Is this what it feels like to be a conservative? My anti establishment instincts fail me, in this instance.

don't drink and drive or we'll pop a cap in your ass. Is there a difference? I can see that there isn't in your mind.

Originally Posted by host

dksuddeth, nothing happened when "authority" did this:

and who are the cowardly sheeple that didn't do anything? what state was THAT in?

Originally Posted by host

Get used to it, or die or go to prison, trying to stop it from happening again or protesting vigorously against it. You live in a place where most are preoccupied with Nascar, Monday night football, American Idol, or Jesus and the bible, it's the land of freedom called America.

Pick your shots. After what happened at Kent State, we had a song ("four dead in Oh-High-Oh"...) and everything. It was just eight months after Woodstock. It didn't help, nothing seems to. This country is much more conservative now than it was in early May, 1970. You need to raise awareness with the most grievous abuses of authority as examples, this "damaged wrist case", is not one of them.

but I bet the death of the cop that uses these methods will, right?

Originally Posted by analog

So a drunk is in a hospital, a nurse goes to get a blood sample (which is standard procedure for anyone admitted to a hospital with a medical (as in, not trauma-based) problem, let alone one with an altered level of consciousness or clearly under the influence of something), and the guy struggles so hard against his restraints that the officer must physically hold him so the nurse can do their job... and you call this "may inflict permanent physical damage"?

First of all, the officer wasn't taking blood. A nurse was. And yes, forcibly- when you're in an altered level of consciousness, medical staff has implied consent to care for you. This includes drawing blood for lab tests which can determine what, if anything, may be causing your medical problem. When you're in an altered level of consciousness, you're not competent to make your own decisions for medical care. It's a long-standing rule.

Paranoid anti-establishment conspiracy retards are the dirty cunts of the world, and that website "thenewspaper" is another in a long line of their soak-up-all-the-bullshit tampons.

If you want to latch onto the word "forcibly", knock yourself out. Yeah, it was done forcibly because the filthy fuck was drunk, had been driving drunk, and was then fighting against his restraints while a medical professional carried out their duties, despite his being a filthy fuck.

I could write another headline for this particular dirty cunt tampon of a "news" site- "EMS worker intentionally and enthusiastically stabs a woman in 4 fingers with a sharp instrument against her protests, then squeezes them vigorously so they bleed."

That would have been me taking blood sugar tests on a woman whose sugar was so low, she was completely out of her mind. She required 2 different drugs to stabilize back to normal, which was an almost sickeningly sweet and kind older southern woman.

That's exactly the type of "twisting of words" you've used to complain, once again, about the police. It's like tabloid journalism, only dumber and fueled by paranoid delusions of persecution.

The cop held his arms down- probably at the wrists, which is a very standard way to hold a person down so they can't hurt you or others, and would explain the damage to his wrists. What part of that implies a new carte blanch for cops to intentionally, permanently damage suspects? That's a whole new level of "reaching".

Second:



Wow. How pathetically misguided and irrationally hate-filled. It's almost surprising.

It is sheeple exactly like you that not only allowed the holocaust to happen, but are guaranteed to be the victims in the next one. knock yourself out slave. Yes, it is YOU, exactly like the jews led to slaughter, who were too afraid to fight for your freedom and your life.

you obviously have zero idea of what this country was supposed to be, only what you see before you as liberty is whittled away in the name of protecting you. I pity you.

[Ustwo]

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

It is sheeple exactly like you that not only allowed the holocaust to happen, but are guaranteed to be the victims in the next one. knock yourself out slave. you obviously have zero idea of what this country was supposed to be, only what you see before you as liberty is whittled away in the name of protecting you. I pity you.

[dksuddeth]

Originally Posted by Ustwo

yes, this shit again.

tell me why I should change my views? should you change yours? or should I just STFU and GBTW?

[Ustwo]

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

yes, this shit again.

tell me why I should change my views? should you change yours? or should I just STFU and GBTW?

http://www.diyplanner.com/node/2735

Greetings all. If you're like me, you may be insane. That is to say, after slogging through work all Winter, your nerves may have become extremely frayed and as a consequence you may have lost your mind. Don't feel bad, it happens to everyone. I've also lost several important pieces of paper, so there's sort of a motif going here. With me I think it was the total lack of sunlight for months at a time. At this time of year, many people feel that they're in need of a vacation, but aren't sure if they may have a small amount of sanity left they can yet work through. Here's a checklist to help you determine whether you've lost your mind and should go on vacation.

Do You Need A Vacation? Try This Checklist:

* You're having repeated nightmares that you're lost in a maze made of jello.
* No one wants to ride the elevator with you.
* You hospitalized the last person who criticized your choice of fonts.
* You've started having long, animated discussions with George Washington.
* You believe Hairy Potter is real.
* Your family hid the knives.
* Last time the printer failed, you went into a two-hour long screaming, crying fit, whimpering, "Its not fair....I, I just want to print."
* You're writing cute little haiku poems about the Manson Family.
* You made a suggestion for a corporate retreat wandering in the blisteringly hot desert for 40 days, contemplating the meaninglessness of existence. You want to do this only for the sunlight.
* You spend a lot of time at home stoking and staring into the fire and you don't have a fireplace.
* You're considering signing up for an expedition to search for the North West Passage because it would get you out of the office.
* The only thing stopping you from forming your own end-of-times cult is deciding on a design for the jackets.
* You start to compare someone hurt attempting to get out of a DUI with the holocaust.

This, of course, is not an exhaustive list. If you have any other ideas about how to tell if you need a vacation, we'd love to see them, so share them with the class. Next week, the kinds of vacations you can take. Until then, keep your pen on the page and your jacket designs tasteful.

[dksuddeth]

Originally Posted by Ustwo

* You start to compare someone hurt attempting to get out of a DUI with the holocaust.

talk about tunnel vision. It's amazing that you of all people, cannot see that forcibly drawing blood from someone, without their consent, is a violation of a most sacred right which is that of self privacy.

Do you, as a dentist, think that the police should FORCE someones mouth open so you can get a tooth indentation for bite mark comparisons?

not that it matters to you, obviously, because you've fallen in to the same category as most other people. That group of people who have no problem overlooking the 'occasional' total deprivation of the right of being because it's an isolated incident or they had it coming by breaking some law or other.

That is how I got around to the holocaust, but you seem to short sighted to see a big picture anyway.

go back to your regular programming, nothing to see here except the ranting and raving of a paranoid conspiracy delusionist.

[Plan9]

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

Nowhere do I recall EVER having consenting, implied or not, to allowing an invasive procedure to be done on my body nor in agreeing that jack booted thugs could forcibly draw my blood. Can YOU show me where I've done that?

Sure, by having a driver's license you automatically give consent to a breath, urine, or blood test.

Implied Consent: Not just a good idea, it is THE LAW!

Since you live in Texas, check out what your own state legislature approved: Implied Consent In Texas

[Ustwo]

Sane: Police should not be allowed to forcibly restrain someone in order to take a blood test since obviously they did not know how to do it without causing permanent harm. Why wasn't the patient properly sedated prior to giving the test?

Insane: This is why more cops die. People are starting to get pushed to the limit.

Its not the message so much as the insane ranting I'm reacting to. No cops are dying because some drunk asshole was trying to refuse a blood test and he got himself badly hurt by the police, and the fact that I think so does not make me the next holocaust victim.

[dksuddeth]

Originally Posted by Crompsin

Sure, by having a driver's license you automatically give consent to a breath, urine, or blood test.

Implied Consent: Not just a good idea, it is THE LAW!

Since you live in Texas, check out what your own state legislature approved: Implied Consent In Texas

Since I neither agreed to give up my rights to my bodily fluids nor sign any document doing the same, I will either kill or be killed in the process of said forced procedure.

[Plan9]

You don't have a driver's license?

[dksuddeth]

Originally Posted by Crompsin

You don't have a driver's license?

no, I don't. for this specific reason.

[roachboy]

sometimes things seem to work this way:

the circular pattern emanates from the left side of joseph cotton's brain and re-enters his head just above his left shoulder.

it is possible for the larger circle to reference other loops.
in this case, doctor strangelove




because of the problems posed by the threat of forced confiscation of precious bodily fluids.

but i want to talk about the question of leaving new jersey
which can be complicated
even though there are official sanctioned routes out of the state



because new jersey is a state of mind:

[Willravel]

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

because you only have the rights we say you should have. nice attitude. no wonder you deplore freedom.

This is a prime example of flame bait and this has nothing at all to do with what I said. It's almost as if you're developing paranoid delusions. I hope that's not the case, but I'm afraid that it's a possibility.

DK, cut this shit out. For you benefit if not everyone else's. While your grip on reality has always been a bit shaky, this thread is demonstrating that even that is slipping away. Food for thought: what happens when someone with developing paranoid delusions who has an affinity for guns and a particular mistrust and hated of law enforcement grows balls? No one here wants the eventual outcome of that scenario to play out. For the safety of your local police and yourself, you seriously do need to take a break from the ramblings and get some perspective.

Oh, and RB, one of your pictures is rexed. Without it your post is confusing, apparently.

[The_Jazz]

OK, we're officially done with the name calling. No more "paranoid" or "freedom hating" or "insane". If you are going to use an adjective about another person or their opinion, you need to stop and think about whether or not it is negative. It doesn't matter who started it or who continued it; I'm ending it.

And roachboy wins with the Dr. Strangelove referrence.

[Jinn]

dksuddeth, I recommend you read How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie.

On most issues, I agree with you. Unfortunately, you'll never change minds by demanding, arguing, and denigrating. It's just not how people work. I think you could be a very powerful social activist, if you only honed your ability to convince others to join your side.

Again, I HIGHLY recommend the book; not just for you, but for anyone who wants to evoke social change by convincing others that your position is the correct one.

As a matter of fact, I think everyone in the OP could've benefited from a little "people training" - even if he was extremely intoxicated, it is very possible that they could've civilly convinced him to concede.

"This is just something we have to do, it'll get you out of here faster..
"We're doing this for your safety and ours.. don't you want to be safe?
"If you let us take your blood, we'll stop bugging you!"
"Now we understand that you might be upset at us, but do you really want to hurt this young lady drawing your blood?"
"You don't seem like a violent person. Do you really want to be violent? Maybe we misjudged you?"

Etc, etc. There's a billion ways to diffuse a situtation without violently holding someone down. And if they took him to the hospital, they had plenty of time to use those techniques.

Maybe having an alcoholic father as a child helped me learn how to peacefully dissolve another person's irrational (or drug-induced anger), but I think that police training should definitely match the time spent on firearms with time spent on people skills.

[Willravel]

Originally Posted by The_Jazz

OK, we're officially done with the name calling. No more "paranoid" or "freedom hating" or "insane". If you are going to use an adjective about another person or their opinion, you need to stop and think about whether or not it is negative. It doesn't matter who started it or who continued it; I'm ending it.

And roachboy wins with the Dr. Strangelove referrence.

Just to clarify, I didn't call DK paranoid. I simply pointed out that he is demonstrating certain behavioral patterns, including paranoia. I doubt he's at a state to be diagnosed with anything, but he could be headed in that direction. It has less to do with the thread and more to do with honest concern.

Edit: to clarify further, it would have been counter productive to my goal (a more stable DK) to start calling him names. What I want is simply to be respectful but frank in my concern. Despite his somewhat radical beliefs, I know that DK is a good person, and the last thing I want is for him to possibly put himself in a dangerous situation.

[connyosis]

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

It is sheeple exactly like you that not only allowed the holocaust to happen, but are guaranteed to be the victims in the next one. knock yourself out slave. Yes, it is YOU, exactly like the jews led to slaughter, who were too afraid to fight for your freedom and your life.

you obviously have zero idea of what this country was supposed to be, only what you see before you as liberty is whittled away in the name of protecting you. I pity you.

Wow. Just wow.
I have to agree with ustwo here (And that's a first), time for a vacation.

IMHO, you drive drunk and endangering other people on the road, you can shove your privacy issues up your ass.

[Plan9]

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

no, I don't. for this specific reason.

No DL? Wow, okay. I have nothing constructive to say about that.

[dksuddeth]

Originally Posted by willravel

This is a prime example of flame bait and this has nothing at all to do with what I said. It's almost as if you're developing paranoid delusions. I hope that's not the case, but I'm afraid that it's a possibility.

DK, cut this shit out. For you benefit if not everyone else's. While your grip on reality has always been a bit shaky, this thread is demonstrating that even that is slipping away. Food for thought: what happens when someone with developing paranoid delusions who has an affinity for guns and a particular mistrust and hated of law enforcement grows balls? No one here wants the eventual outcome of that scenario to play out. For the safety of your local police and yourself, you seriously do need to take a break from the ramblings and get some perspective.

Will, what do you consider based reality and proper perspective? Is it the 'compromise' we should take between what we started with and whats demanded of us? Where does a person, or society as a whole, draw the line on what we're willing to put up with when it concerns our rights, especially to those about our physical being? In my opinion, based on my history with you folks here, some of you our grounded in the viewpoint that the police our your masters, you do what they tell you, and if THEY violate your rights, you simply take them to court and seek justice. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. Others here, somewhere around the spectrum of my viewpoint, still consider the government as OUR servants, not our masters, and as such are not given the power or authority to determine what we can and cannot do at a whim nor are they given power to subvert or undermine our rights without due process of law. When abuses do occur, I advocate defending yourself and your rights and in doing so, am labeled paranoid, delusional, radical, anti-government, and a host of many other negative names. I seriously do not understand and may never be able to comprehend how, in my mind, so many of you are willing to accept the juxtaposition of servant and master as it concerns government and the people.

What worries me most about those that accept the current situations as 'normal', is how much worse do things have to get before you DO take a stand? Will it be too late to do anything about it? Will anything ever be done at all?

Again Will, tell me what YOU think my perspective should be.

[Fotzlid]

As a matter of fact, I think everyone in the OP could've benefited from a little "people training" - even if he was extremely intoxicated, it is very possible that they could've civilly convinced him to concede.

"This is just something we have to do, it'll get you out of here faster..
"We're doing this for your safety and ours.. don't you want to be safe?
"If you let us take your blood, we'll stop bugging you!"
"Now we understand that you might be upset at us, but do you really want to hurt this young lady drawing your blood?"
"You don't seem like a violent person. Do you really want to be violent? Maybe we misjudged you?"

Etc, etc. There's a billion ways to diffuse a situtation without violently holding someone down. And if they took him to the hospital, they had plenty of time to use those techniques.

sometimes those tactics work. sometimes they dont. when they dont, we do what we have to to get the job done. personally, i'm not going to waste a lot of time trying to convice someone who is in police custody for DUI that they should give up the labs when i probably have sick people that need to be tended to.

[dksuddeth]

Originally Posted by JinnKai

dksuddeth, I recommend you read How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie.

On most issues, I agree with you. Unfortunately, you'll never change minds by demanding, arguing, and denigrating. It's just not how people work. I think you could be a very powerful social activist, if you only honed your ability to convince others to join your side.

My wife tells me the exact same thing. I've tried, sometimes I succeed at it, but I REALLY REALLY REALLY have to struggle to maintain that calm, deliberative tone. Most of the time, I just have little patience at it. I chalk it up to being an air traffic controller as a US Marine. In my airspace, what I said, goes.

Originally Posted by Crompsin

No DL? Wow, okay. I have nothing constructive to say about that.

Why or why not?

[flstf]

I always thought that the police had to get a court order to force someone to provide evidence like bodily fluids, DNA, etc.. Also, I always thought that you could refuse a breath alcohol test. I also thought that many attorneys recommend that you refuse the test if arrested for DUI. I guess I was wrong as this case shows.

In any event I think this type of situation could be somewhat avoided by not requiring those charged with a crime to provide evidence against themselves, at least without a court order. I guess I don't trust the methods the police use or the hospital/lab personel they choose to get their evidence.

[Willravel]

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

Will, what do you consider based reality and proper perspective?

I consider what I learned in my training to be a psychologist, or someone who is able to diagnose mental and emotional disorders and apply that to characteristics listed in the DSM4 and other diagnostic tools available to me. I was very fortunate to get a decent education and I feel it would be disrespectful to myself and my teachers not to apply what I learned. While you don't display many symptoms of schizophrenia, you are showing early warning signs of paranoia. If you're interested in learning more about this, google "paranoid personality disorder". I'm not diagnosing you (I am not licensed, nor have I attempted to get a license), but rather simply trying to explain that you're starting to show signs of heading in that direction.

There's no justification for the repeated slippery slope arguments often in your arguments. Police with needles suddenly becomes a case of holocaust. When we point out the extremes of your arguments, you lash out at people instead of addressing our points. You don't trust people, especially people in positions of authority, and assume that they are trying to injure and deceive you. You bear grudges against members.

[dksuddeth]

that didn't answer my question though, but thanks for the lengthy explanation of your opinion of my mental state.

It's easy to sit back and make claims of somebody being paranoid, even in the face of obvious everyday incidents pointed out to you that establish the OP's viewpoints in a very factual manner. Whether I come across as vehemently anti-authority or not is irrelevant, or should be, if one has the ability to take past accounts in to the equation as well and see the big picture of what is being presented to you.
Would 'the slippery slope' argument make better sense to you if I were to write an 8 page essay documenting 30 years of increasing abuse by the government? You seem to agree with it well enough when you decry Bush/Cheney and the other evil republicans as well as including the do-nothing dems lately. With each post I make concerning ever increasing violence by cops against citizens or encroachment of rights by legislatures, or outright and blatant removal of rights by the judiciary, I receive ever increasing calls for me to stop, get back in touch with reality, or recommendations to see a psychotherapist. If you choose to bury your heads in the sand, I cannot help you anymore.

Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get me.....or you.

[Fotzlid]

Originally Posted by flstf

I always thought that the police had to get a court order to force someone to provide evidence like bodily fluids, DNA, etc.. Also, I always thought that you could refuse a breath alcohol test. I also thought that many attorneys recommend that you refuse the test if arrested for DUI. I guess I was wrong as this case shows.

In any event I think this type of situation could be somewhat avoided by not requiring those charged with a crime to provide evidence against themselves, at least without a court order. I guess I don't trust the methods the police use or the hospital/lab personel they choose to get their evidence.

you are correct about the court orders and refusal of breathalizer. at least in my neck of the woods. i dont believe getting one would be a big deal though it might be a bit more difficult after hours.
the cops may not have even needed the blood alcohol level for their case. the hospital may require it for any patient under the influence. the cops could just as easily summoned the person after they process them at the station. most police departments (again, in my neck of the woods) wont hold very drunk individuals in their holding cells. drunk people do die unexpectedly occasionally. the hospital they brought him to may have a policy of obtaining the alcohol levels of any drunk individual. the main reason for that would be liability. they let an obviously intoxicated patient leave and they go get hit by a bus, its the hospitals fault for releasing them.
if the person was resisting, the cops would assist.
then, they wouldnt need a court order. they could just subpeona the results from the hospital when the case came up.
individuals under the influence are not capable of making informed consent, hence the implied consent.

[Willravel]

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

It's easy to sit back and make claims of somebody being paranoid

4 years at a private college and over $100k says differently, but w/e

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

even in the face of obvious everyday incidents pointed out to you that establish the OP's viewpoints in a very factual manner.

Show me the facts that support the following (from this thread alone):

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

This is why more cops die. People are starting to get pushed to the limit.

People are killing police officers because of something that hasn't happened yet? No, of course not. This is a fabrication and exaggeration. It was implemented Tuesday, and no further stories have been out about it, lest of which including incidents of police being killed over it.

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

no wonder you deplore freedom.

This kind of language is as meaningless as "Evil-doers". No one hates freedom, lest of all me. Nothing in my post or posting history would suggest hatred of freedom.

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

don't drink and drive or we'll pop a cap in your ass.

Another fabrication and exaggeration, this time in form of a strawman. You're suggesting that in response to a law that was just passed that has nothing to do with lethal force, police will simply shoot people who refuse to give blood. It's meaningless.

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

and who are the cowardly sheeple that didn't do anything?

Ah, the personal attack. "You don't share my extreme views, therefore you're sheep".

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

It is sheeple exactly like you that not only allowed the holocaust to happen, but are guaranteed to be the victims in the next one. knock yourself out slave. Yes, it is YOU, exactly like the jews led to slaughter, who were too afraid to fight for your freedom and your life.

you obviously have zero idea of what this country was supposed to be, only what you see before you as liberty is whittled away in the name of protecting you. I pity you.

And again with a personal attack. Your lack of education (on everything from the forefathers to current constitutional law) does not mean that you're right and everyone else is wrong. In fact, the less educated are quite often guilty of having to try to only use common knowledge to reach their conclusions. Common knowledge only goes so far. This jumping to the holocaust, for example is probably one of the biggest slippery slope arguments ever made. I'd have to put effort into making an argument that was more of a slippery slope. An example: "If you don't take your vitamins, your immune system could be weaker, you could contract bird flu, and you could be the typhoid mary of our generation. So take your vitamins." This argument makes no sense, but can you tell me why?

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

It's amazing that you of all people, cannot see that forcibly drawing blood from someone, without their consent, is a violation of a most sacred right which is that of self privacy.

There is no suck right in our Constitution or Bill of Rights. Rights other than that are not recognized by the state. I could argue that people have a right to fresh fruit, but that hardly means that I can get it without money and access.

[ubertuber]

Originally Posted by Fotzlid

the hospital may require it for any patient under the influence. the cops could just as easily summoned the person after they process them at the station. most police departments (again, in my neck of the woods) wont hold very drunk individuals in their holding cells. drunk people do die unexpectedly occasionally. the hospital they brought him to may have a policy of obtaining the alcohol levels of any drunk individual. the main reason for that would be liability. they let an obviously intoxicated patient leave and they go get hit by a bus, its the hospitals fault for releasing them.
if the person was resisting, the cops would assist.
then, they wouldnt need a court order. they could just subpeona the results from the hospital when the case came up.
individuals under the influence are not capable of making informed consent, hence the implied consent.

I suspect that this is how the scenario actually went down, and that it encapsulates the logic of the police officers, hospital personnel, and the court.

The hospital most certainly operates under implied consent. How could they not? Furthermore, I've got no problem with people being restrained to protect those hospital workers in the course of their jobs. It's bad enough that they are at risk from your body fluids -- there's no reason for them to also have to fear you punching them in the face while you're drunk or high.

If the blood test results constitute testifying against yourself, they won't be admitted in court.

I'll be totally honest and admit that will's qualifications don't mean anything to me. I'm also not interested in an analysis or diagnosis of dksuddeth's posts. In my eyes, they speak for themselves.

[Jinn]

4 years at a private college and over $100k says differently, but w/e

I hate to break it to you, Will, but four years in college does not qualify you to be a licensed psychologist, psychiatrist or even vocational therapist in any state that I've lived in. Four years of "Pyschology" gives you a basic understanding of human behavior and cognitive science, but it does not make you an expert nor one qualified to make assessments of another person's mental health. There's a reason that such positions require LICENSES. If we left every four-year grad become a shrink, I'd be very scared.

Having an educational knowledge of the DSM and reading your display here, I could easily say that you were demonstrating precursors to Narcissistic Personality Disorder, particularly by criteria 1 and 5 in the DSM IV:

1) has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)

(2) is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

(3) believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)

(4) requires excessive admiration

(5) has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations

(6) is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends

(7) lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others

(8) is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her

(9) shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

And yet, since neither of us have licenses to diagnose or treat either condition, neither of us has the right to malign another for our perception.

[Willravel]

Originally Posted by JinnKai

I hate to break it to you, Will, but four years in college does not qualify you to be a licensed psychologist, psychiatrist or even vocational therapist in any state that I've lived in.

Originally Posted by Willravel

(I am not licensed, nor have I attempted to get a license)

Thank you for restating what I've already said, but next time you may want to read my posts more clearly so you don't waste your time.

Edit: Oops, missed this

Originally Posted by JinnKai

And yet, since neither of us have licenses to diagnose or treat either condition, neither of us has the right to malign another for our perception.

While I don't have a license, I do have schooling and experience enough for me to make educated statements concerning matters psychological. Instead of ad hominem arguments (attacking my education or lack of licensing), though, maybe you'd like to address what I've said? It seems a more correct way of discussing things and, as it wouldn't include a logical fallacy, it would stand a chance of actually proving me right or wrong.

[Ustwo]

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

that didn't answer my question though, but thanks for the lengthy explanation of your opinion of my mental state.

It's easy to sit back and make claims of somebody being paranoid, even in the face of obvious everyday incidents pointed out to you that establish the OP's viewpoints in a very factual manner. Whether I come across as vehemently anti-authority or not is irrelevant, or should be, if one has the ability to take past accounts in to the equation as well and see the big picture of what is being presented to you.
Would 'the slippery slope' argument make better sense to you if I were to write an 8 page essay documenting 30 years of increasing abuse by the government? You seem to agree with it well enough when you decry Bush/Cheney and the other evil republicans as well as including the do-nothing dems lately. With each post I make concerning ever increasing violence by cops against citizens or encroachment of rights by legislatures, or outright and blatant removal of rights by the judiciary, I receive ever increasing calls for me to stop, get back in touch with reality, or recommendations to see a psychotherapist. If you choose to bury your heads in the sand, I cannot help you anymore.

Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get me.....or you.

If anything the government is under more scrutiny than in the past. With easy video and being able to post about anything on the internet things which wouldn't have made ink 30 years ago are now mainstream stories.

I think your basic premise is just wrong. You can write an 8 page essay if you like, or perhaps some other forum poster can teach how to find find 8 pages to cut and paste over, but from what I've SEEN, I'd still say you were wrong.

I doubt captain stupid would have even had his day in court 30 years ago.

[dksuddeth]

Originally Posted by willravel

4 years at a private college and over $100k says differently, but w/e

Show me the facts that support the following (from this thread alone):

People are killing police officers because of something that hasn't happened yet? No, of course not. This is a fabrication and exaggeration. It was implemented Tuesday, and no further stories have been out about it, lest of which including incidents of police being killed over it.

This kind of language is as meaningless as "Evil-doers". No one hates freedom, lest of all me. Nothing in my post or posting history would suggest hatred of freedom.

Another fabrication and exaggeration, this time in form of a strawman. You're suggesting that in response to a law that was just passed that has nothing to do with lethal force, police will simply shoot people who refuse to give blood. It's meaningless.

Ah, the personal attack. "You don't share my extreme views, therefore you're sheep".

And again with a personal attack. Your lack of education (on everything from the forefathers to current constitutional law) does not mean that you're right and everyone else is wrong. In fact, the less educated are quite often guilty of having to try to only use common knowledge to reach their conclusions. Common knowledge only goes so far. This jumping to the holocaust, for example is probably one of the biggest slippery slope arguments ever made. I'd have to put effort into making an argument that was more of a slippery slope. An example: "If you don't take your vitamins, your immune system could be weaker, you could contract bird flu, and you could be the typhoid mary of our generation. So take your vitamins." This argument makes no sense, but can you tell me why?

wow. I thought we had been told about the attacks and so I asked you a set of serious questions, expecting some serious answers and you come back with an attempted rip of my previous posts? Were you unable to answer my serious questions honestly?

Originally Posted by willravel

There is no suck right in our Constitution or Bill of Rights. Rights other than that are not recognized by the state. I could argue that people have a right to fresh fruit, but that hardly means that I can get it without money and access.

this only shows that you don't know how to read the constitution or the bill of rights. Neither is this the thread for that discussion. I started a thread weeks ago about that and you failed to post any significant information or opinion about it.

Now, if you're unable to answer the questions that I posed to you, maybe you should posting other non-sensical crap and attacks?

[Baraka_Guru]

Blood to be drawn from DWI suspects

This article outlines a pilot program being operated out of El Paso.

Some highlights from the article:

The procedure:

1. After a DWI arrest, the arrestee will be taken for a breath test at the police Central Regional Command Center. If the arrestee refuses to take the breath test in a videotaped statement, a prosecutor will request a search warrant for blood from a judge.
2. If the judge at the police station approves the warrant, a nurse paid for by the Police Department will draw a blood sample at Tillman Health Center, which is operated by the city and is behind the police station.

The process:

The blood will be sent to Texas Department of Public Safety lab for blood-alcohol results, which will arrive in around a month. The suspect would still be jailed on a DWI test-refusal charge.

The motivation:

...more than half of the 50 traffic deaths in El Paso this year involved drunken drivers. And about 50 percent of people arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated refuse to take the breath test, making prosecution more difficult.

El Paso police made 2,071 arrests for driving while intoxicated last year.

The caveat:

The search warrant for blood process "creates significant constitutional issues," Weiser said. "What's the next step? We take blood from somebody. What's the next step?"

"It really infringes on a person's right to privacy, particularly someone who may not have been drinking," Weiser said.

My own view on this issue is that DUI is a serious crime. Too many people lose their lives (or their livelihood) as a result of intoxicated drivers. This needs to stop, and it isn't a case of simply telling people to "just stop drinking and driving." Alcoholism is a disease. Alcohol impairs judgement. Alcohol can kill. If we cannot prevent the loss of lives with an imperfect breathalyzer system, then why not go to mandatory blood tests? Do we not make exceptions for those who break the law where lives are at risk? I don't think this is an issue of Big Brother extending his influence over the public; this is policing and the legal system wishing to use a trump card against a nagging problem: Families being destroyed by drunk driving.

They need to work around the constitutional and privacy issues and find what good can come out of the blood tests. Seriously, 50 deaths in one city alone. What else can we do to solve this problem?