{"id":182790,"date":"2015-06-06T17:38:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-06T22:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/06\/06\/live-in-obedient-fear-citizen-46\/"},"modified":"2015-06-06T17:38:00","modified_gmt":"2015-06-06T22:38:00","slug":"live-in-obedient-fear-citizen-46","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/06\/06\/live-in-obedient-fear-citizen-46\/","title":{"rendered":"Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen"},"content":{"rendered":"

In yet another case of prosecutorial overreach, we have motions by the prosecutors in another of the FBI’s entrapment efforts forbid defense counsel from putting forward their case<\/a>:<\/p>\n

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has become such a powerful symbol of government overreach that federal prosecutors in a terror case in Chicago are asking the judge<\/a> to forbid defense attorneys from even mentioning his name during trial, for fear that it would lead the jury to disregard their evidence.<\/p>\n

The upcoming trial is of Adel Daoud, a slow-witted Chicagoland teenager caught in yet another FBI terror sting<\/a> aimed at someone vulnerable to manipulation. An undercover federal agent provided Daoud with a fake car bomb parked outside a downtown Chicago bar, and then let him push the detonator.<\/p>\n

Much of the evidence in the case \u2014 involving Daoud\u2019s online explorations into Islam and jihad \u2014 was gathered through surveillance conducted using secret warrants issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court.<\/p>\n

Prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney\u2019s office in Chicago asked Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman on Wednesday to prohibit the defense from mentioning Snowden\u2019s name \u2014 along with a number of other things, such as the existence of the National Security Agency, or a speech by Senator Dianne Feinstein<\/a> in which she cited \u201ca plot to bomb a downtown Chicago bar\u201d as an example of one that was thwarted thanks to FISA authorities.<\/p>\n

Their concern: Those topics \u201care irrelevant and would tend to elicit jury nullification, so the defendant should be barred from inquiring of witnesses, presenting evidence, or arguing to the jury about them.\u201d<\/p>\n

A key issue in the case has already been extensively litigated. Judge Coleman in January 2014 ruled<\/a> that Daoud\u2019s security-cleared lawyers should be allowed to see all the classified materials the government submitted in order to get their FISA warrants.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

For good measure, the prosecutors also don\u2019t want the defense to claim entrapment, either:<\/span><\/p>\n

[T]he defendant should be precluded from arguing or suggesting that the undercover technique the government used in the underlying investigation was improper. Any argument attacking the government\u2019s investigative techniques would not only be improper, but it should also trigger an instruction that such investigative techniques are entirely proper.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is crap.<\/p>\n

It is corrosive to concept of a fair trial that has developed in the US, and England before it, over the past thousand years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In yet another case of prosecutorial overreach, we have motions by the prosecutors in another of the FBI’s entrapment efforts forbid defense counsel from putting forward their case: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has become such a powerful symbol of government overreach that federal prosecutors in a terror case in Chicago are asking the judge to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,969,1051,972,1041],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-evil","category-hypocrisy","category-justice","category-law-enforcement-misconduct"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182790"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182790\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}