Left’s Plan: Protect Criminals; Constrain the Police & Leave the Public Defenseless

Opinion
Part One

New York – -(AmmoLand.com)- The radical Left’s call for massive bail reform may be a boon to criminals, but it is a threat to the public.

In the summer of 2015, The Left-wing New York Times, ever the friend and close confidante of seditious Deep State Government Bureaucrats and of smug, fabulously wealthy, extraordinarily powerful, and abjectly ruthless Radical Left establishment “elites,” ran a feature in its Magazine, titled “The Bail Trap.” The Times ran the story as a purported exposé of an unfair criminal justice system.

The Times’ reporter, Nick Pinto, laying out the theme of the feature story, wrote: “thousands of innocent people are sent to jail only because they can’t afford to post bail, putting them at risk of losing their jobs, custody of their children — even their lives.”

Typical of “feature” stories at the NY Times’ newspaper, the writer of this feature, “The Bail Trap,” attempted to garner public sympathy for the plight of seemingly innocent people by drawing the reader’s attention to one cherry-picked anecdote.

The NY Times writer, Pinto, mentioned a New Yorker, Tyrone Tomlin, who, having been arrested for carrying a controlled substance, was faced with one of two unpleasant choices resulting from that arrest: one, Tomlin could either plead guilty to a misdemeanor, serve thirty days on Rikers Island, and then walk free; or, two, he could plead not guilty and then await trial. The Court set Tomlin’s bond at $1,500.00 if Tomlin refused the plea deal and wished to remain free while awaiting trial. Tomlin did refuse the plea deal, pleaded not guilty, but, unable to post bond, had to remain in jail until his trial date. The NY Times thought this patently unfair: namely the bail, not the circumstances leading to Tomlin’s arrest the latter of which Tomlin bears sole responsibility for as there was no doubt about Tomlin carrying a controlled substance.

The Times’ reporter, alluding, as he apparently thought, to the immorality of arresting a person for simply carrying, and not selling a controlled substance, did acknowledge that Tomlin had a lengthy criminal history, and that history included multiple felony convictions. Still, unperturbed by and dismissive of the fact of multiple felony convictions, the reporter argued that requiring bail of individuals like Tomlin, who, apparently, can ill afford bail, is patently unfair. The gist of Pinto’s argument became the germ for radical bail reform measures Leftist governments would institute several years later.

The article demonstrates how closely tied a seditious activist Press is to Radical Leftists in Congress and to Leftist State Governments—constantly feeding ideas to each other for the purpose of dismantling our Constitution, undermining our fundamental, immutable, natural rights, and destroying a free Republic.

The New York Times feature writer, Pinto, sanctimoniously and deceitfully remarks:

“Of the 2.2 million people currently locked up in this country, fewer than one in ten is being held in a federal prison. Far more are serving time in state prisons, and nearly three-quarters of a million aren’t in prison at all but in local city and county jails. Of those in jails, 60 percent haven’t been convicted of anything. They’re innocent in the eyes of the law, awaiting resolution in their cases. Some of these inmates are being held because they’re considered dangerous or unlikely to return to court for their hearings. But many of them simply cannot afford to pay the bail that has been set.”

“. . . innocent in the eyes of the law, awaiting resolution in their cases”? The Times’ feature writer is evidently referring to the oft-used mainstream media phrase, ‘presumption of innocence,’ a well-known platitude.

The idea conveyed is that the accused is presumed innocent until or unless guilt is proved in a Court of law. Often bandied about as self-evident true, this notion, as with so many others—some concocted out of whole cloth, like the idea that semiautomatic weapons that may happen to look like military weapons are to be classified as ‘assault weapons’ and are therefore to be banned from the civilian citizenry as ‘weapons of war’—is facially false. Yet the false idea, taken as true and absolute, becomes the basis for instituting a plethora of unconstitutional and bizarre governmental policy measures.

That is the case with the presumption of innocence platitude. The false idea behind the platitude becomes the rallying cry of Leftists calling for extreme criminal reform measures—measures that are both unnecessary and that, once implemented, are dangerous to the safety and well-being of the polity.

“Whoa, there you may cry, we all believe you are innocent until proven guilty by a court of law!” Ok, but here is the thing…

The Presumption Of Innocence Platitude Does Not Apply To An Arrest, Arraignment, Or Pre-Trial Detention

Radical Leftist activists of all stripes—Marxists, Socialists, Communists, and Leftist anarchist groups—misapprehend, misconstrue the legal significance of the concept of ‘presumption of innocence’ that they flippantly and frivolously toss around in their baseless attack against the criminal justice system.

The phrase, ‘presumption of innocence,’ is nothing more than an informal and inaccurate banality. It is not an affirmation of innocence. Yet, Leftist activists, such as our NY Times Reporter, ever evincing concern, real or imagined, over the seeming plight of criminals awaiting trial, lose sight of this fact. They attach more import and purport to the platitude than the platitude merits, and fail to appreciate, or otherwise ignore, what it does apply to. We expand on this concept more in our next article, tune in tomorrow.

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