Not-necessarily-mild-mannered Canadian Scifi author Peter Watts wrongly convicted

[jack]

Original post: http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=932
Latest: http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=1193

Peter Watts had his trial for supposedly assaulting a guard at the US/Canada border. The trial admits that the salient points that:

- his car was searched without explanation on leaving the US
- he got out to ask why
- he didn't at any point offer any violence (he may have tried to push away one of the guards who was hitting him) but didn't promptly comply with some of the orders, mostly after being punched in the face
- despite Watt's account being substantiated, the jury reluctantly concluded that not complying promptly did fall under the aegis of the law, which includes obstructing or failing to obey, with no specification on what are reasonable situations, so he was convicted for this federal crime

The comments have several people who say something like "well, duh, when suffering under a totalitarian regime, you shouldn't talk back, you should swallow abuse meekly so you don't get hit", and seem blind to the obvious rejoinder that Peter was (presumably) not blind to the fact that if you're abused under a totalitarian regime, then it may be wiser (or at least less painful) to submit, but that he'd laboured under the apprehension that the US border patrol wasn't and wasn't supposed to be a bunch of totalitarian thugs.

I mean, come on, I know many countries are a lot, lot worse, and not causing trouble is always wise, and law enforcement officials are naturally trained to be cautious of anyone deviating from standard behaviour in any way, just in case they're dangerous, but "beating up innocent north american civilians for saying 'excuse me, can I help you'" is, you know, not a good thing!

Comments

A rather angry rambling commment...

[hairyears]

"Well, Duh!" is all the answer any of them need, or needed.

Admittedly, it isn't in the mass-media - Google for "Peter Watts beaten up TSA" and see how little you get from commercial media outlets - but everybody who's taken a commercial flight within the USA knows damn' well that he or she is at the mercy of low-rent goons who can do as they please, and take great pleasure in imposing delay and petty humiliations on the cattle that the American public have become.

The people that anger me in this specific incident are the jury: aren't any of them angry? Don't they realise that they, too, can get a criminal record - and a felony, not just a misdemeanor - for the crime of being temporarily disoriented after being smashed in the face by a violent goon? A goon, they now know perfectly well to be above prosecution for assault and perjury, in part by their own decision in the jury room.

Perhaps the jurors were afraid of what the authorities might do to them, or to their dependents, if they came back with a 'not guilty' verdict; getting put onto the 'no-fly' list is the least of it.

And so, for whatever reason - stupidity or cowardice - the jury and the judge have marched deliberately into a Police State, rather than sleep-walking into it through ignorant docility.

I can't help feeling schadenfreude over this one: the pale, doughy mass of comfortable citizens throughout the USA were blithely unconcerned when black people were beaten up in the street by the authorities - their rights and liberties, their dignity and even their deaths did not matter to the vast majority of white Americans. For all I know (but not for all I care!) it's possible that they still don't: I don't believe that a belief in racial equality has ever taken root outside a narrow inelligentsia confined to the coastal cities. What's clear from Peter Watts' mistreatment is that other white people don't matter either; the average journalist in the mass-media will pass in silence when his fellow citizen is beaten up; the police and the judiciary will actively collaborate, and the average white citizen of middle-America - or any twelve of them, just and true, upright citizens selected as the peers of the accused - will not just walk on by, but acquiesce and actively collaborate.




*A footnote: 'Police State' is a cliché, an hysterical exaggeration that we've all heard in the liberal media whenever a Policeman's conduct falls below par. Pehaps we need a better epithet to describe a territory where uniformed goons in the pay of the state can stop anybody's vehicle, swagggering across and demanding submission and immediate obedience from the citizen as of right, beating people up at whim, with impunity and the full support of the police and the courts, obtaining a criminal conviction by perjury - exposed in court and on the record, without even a rebuke from the judge, their superiors, and the authorities that govern them and conferred their legal powers - and, to cap it all, their superiors enjoy sufficient influence with the mass-media that their action will never be public. The United States does not have a free press, in any meaningful sense, when their deliberate disinterest and selective silence amounts to a 'self-censorship' that China and the Russian Federation can only look upon with awe and envy.

And yes, of course it's an isolated incident. Of course it is: and how will you or I - or anybody in a country without a free press - know any different? we don't and can't know just how widespread the violence has become; but we can see from this incident that the cancer has gone deep into the institutions of a country that wad once proclaimed a beacon of democracy... For reasons that are now, from this side of the Atlantic, more than just a little bit unclear.