It seems these troublesome RNC 8 kids set up a website [aka free speech] and talked a lot and were seized by law enforcement before any of the eight took one real physical act in violation of traditional criminal law. I don't believe there was even any jaywalking. I could be in error.
Conspiracy to damage property in furtherance of terroristic aims and intent to terrorize now arguably is the sort of thing that is real cause to pull people off the streets and into jail. Isn't it? The Nazis had their rule of law - judges in robes, governmental prosecutors to screen and filter charges leveled by policing authorities, all the trappings of justice that we have - and they had so many laws that everybody was guilty of violating something - and they had explicit and clearly written and duly passed statutory law against Jews and Aryans intermarrying with terms of "hard labor" as a penalty. It was a state policy to regulate such behavior, and they never stopped running their courts even in wartime.
The basic question is what do you criminalize and when do you say, "Wait for a real action that is out of line with traditional criminal law and a threat to civil protection, to orderly traffic, to something real and actual and not potential or hypothetical, and then arrest the actual perpetrators, and do that before jugging kids who had the misfortune to be talking around a police infiltrator."
What concrete wrongful acts are alleged against these eight defendants?
How free is speech, really, if you can be pulled off the streets before a "Norm brought hockey back to Minnesota" love-in event has even started, because you were talking about it?
Talking in ways a suit with a badge did not like.
A hypothetical question since we know the Gaertner-Fletcher answer, eight kids were treated as they were for talking, and that is how "free" speech without a traditional criminal act is in Gaertner-Fletcher land.
It fits a bit uncomfortably, for me.
The RNC 8 basically, stripped of a lot of rhetoric, were saying the people running things don't really know what they are doing and probably are not making good decisions and things should be more decentralized. Not those words, those thoughts. And not a window broken by any one of them in the record I have seen publicized, not the hurling of a single hard object at a window or a cop. No playing with matches.
Prior restraint. And only that. Over speech.
Let's be fair. Look at it from the other side. Make the opposing argument. Clearly people suggesting such things, talking that way, should be put away -- and throw away the key.
It is how you keep order on the eve of a civic event. Yet we are about to entirely change our national executive, in days, and how are some talking now? It's a fair question.
See, here, here, and (because we should be particularly hard on those criticizing things that impact directly on national security) here. I say we arguably might be too soft in not criminalizing and putting complainers away for a long time, long enough so that they come out of the privatized prisons of the criminal justice system with a respect for the right we have, to maintain a status quo without a lot of whining and discord. It is maintaining order. Law and order. It is a goal in any complex nation, in any cohesive society.
And these brash offenders do it, their criticism, by setting up a website, then using it to deliberately question how things get done. How official acts are done, or how they should be done.
It is interference and we should tolerate none of it. Some in Congress might even question fundamental loyalties, and absent an oath, how can we really ever be sure, of basic loyalties?
Buckley v. Veleo, stripped of its rhetoric said "Money talks." It is protected speech to mix money into politics. But these kids, they were talking words, not tendering cash.
Money talks, fine; people talk, not okay?
Humpty Dumpty's fallen, Ms. Gearther; so try putting him back, at least, instead of blithely following your statutory cookbook about cooking an omelette.
The term is "prosecutorial discretion" and it does not only mean how heavy can you stand on little folks. It means be discerning of subtleties, where lack of good manners really is not a crime.
I suppose the hammer and nail old sayings are still valid - if the only tool you have is a hammer every situation looks like a nail; and the zaibatsu Japanese addition, the nail that stands up gets hammered down.
Opinions differ.
_______UPDATE________
I realized I had done an entire post without saying "Nasser Kazeminy," and thought to myself, "Why do that?". So, just a string of disjointed and unconnected words thrown together haphazardly: Buckley v. Valeo, Nasser Kazeminy, Jeff Larson, lavish dress, lavish manners. Nothing to bind the words together nor to relate them in any relevant way to a post on criminality (actual per some statute or merely in the eye of the beholder).
_______FURTHER UPDATE_________
Screenshot, from the WaybackMachine (click to enlarge and read):
Any reader in favor of police brutality is asked to leave a comment.
An intent to "use this opportunity to make the changes we thirst for manifest and take root before us, making the Republicans/Democrats (whatever you want to call them) obsolete," that's there on the screenshot. I live in Minnesota's Sixth District. The DFL offered revolving-door lobbyist Elwyn Tinklenberg as if fit for Congress. The GOP offered opportunist divisionary theocrat Michele Bachmann for the same purpose.
They don't need anarchists. They are, each party, hard at work doing their best to make themselves obsolete. Successfully so, approaching now irrelevance, with obsolete merely down the road absent some kind of change in the DFL, (with the GOP lost in its unyielding sin of subservience to balance sheets and income statements of almost any kind, true or false, Madoff until crashing being just fine). How can these self-proclaimed young anarchists do more harm to the two parties in my district, than they have done to themselves - with Elwyn Tinklenberg and Michele Bachmann? That's not a rhetorical question. Give me a cogent answer, please. The district is a national laughingstock. Bless Bob Anderson and his courage.
I like the one theory in the first link the Google Alert yielded, see opening paragraph; the suggestion that local minions of government are pressed to show some kind of return on investment. Bang for the buck in return for all the tax money spent on police presence - personnel and equipment.
Gallons and gallons of pepper spray do cost money. Nobody manufactures and distributes tear gas for nothing. It's just not done. There's the balance sheet, now Fletcher-Gaertner give us an income statement, with public impact having arguable but real cash value.
Planning costs, state homeland security bureaucrats given salaries from the fisc, all that adds up especially in multi-million state deficit times.
Without show trials, how can we justify?
Joe Stalin knew how to hold show trials.
Susan Gaertner is an amateur.