Things drive me crazy in the UK, what with the precipitous decline in civil liberties by almost every measure. Yet somehow we seem to avoid shockers like this (so far at least):
Craig Patty asked his employee Lawrence Chapa to help take one of his two trucks to the garage, not realizing that Chapa was a DEA undercover planning to fill the truck with weed, which ended in a firefight with a Los Zetas hit squad that killed the driver, who was a DEA informant.
The DEA says it doesn’t owe Patty anything for the more than $100,000 in repairs that were required for the truck, and disclaim any responsibility for the death of Patty’s employee. Also, they won’t do anything about the fact that they led the Zetas to believe that Patty was a rival drug-runner.
A federal judge in Texas dismissed Patty’s lawsuit against the DEA, because when the DEA is undertaking a “clandestine” operation, it can operate with total legal impunity
Oh and sorry about the dead employee but tough shit. Actually I would not be surprised if they did not even say ‘sorry’. I want to run a business in the USA even less than I want to run one here now. Gah.
Just how do states make themselves (and their servants) immune from prosecution and still claim to be lawful societies?
Every case where someone is injured or their property is damaged should have to front court and give explanations (as a bare minimum) for the conduct rather than be gifted immunity. Oh and every abuse should be charged at the highest level of the organisation proven to have approved the operations.
Thats story is tyranny.
The last major supporters of Prohibition in the US are “Conservatives” who complain vociferously about the lawless Obama. Having set precedent with Prohibition. Well I have been warning them for years. I can’t decide if I should laugh or cry.
Jesus F. Christ.
Leading a Mexican drug cartel (in this case the Zetas) to think someone is a rival drug dealing is as bad as killing them yourself.
Indeed it would be better if the DEA just murdered this truck owner themselves – as they might not rape and torture him first (although if they decided to do so – perhaps they would have “immunity” for that as well).
There is, of course, no Constitutional basis for any of this.
The Federal “war on drugs” is unconstitutional in its self – as, unlike Booze (the 18th Amendment) no Constitutional Amendment has been passed giving the Federal government the power to ban drugs it does not like.
And even if a Constitutional Amendment was passed to ban X drug – no “immunity” would exist for this sort of antics by “law enforcement”.
So where has the judge got all this from.
As Antoine Clarke would point out – the judge has got this from the idea of legal “precedent” – which is basically as follows….
“As another unelected judge has made a demented judgement, I can make an even more demented judgment – and thus take the “evolution” of the law even further into Hell”.
This is where removing all PRINCIPLES from law and just letting it “evolve” (a process that even F.A. Hayek supported) leads.
We are told that a sane approach, getting legal PRINCIPLES and applying them to individual cases is “Roman”.
However, there was no thought of Rome in the great Common Law judges (such as Chief Justice Sir John Holt) who did precisely that.
And the alternative – looking at an individual case, deciding on the result you want and then grabbing “precedents” to support the result you want anyway, is demented.
By the way should an unelected Federal judge not behave in this way?
They are not going to get tossed out at the next election – because they were not elected in the first place.
And note – there was no jury trial.
One of the complaints at time of the American Revolution was that unelected judges would not allow juries to control out-of-control government officials.
Exactly the same is happening now.
And look at the officials.
The DEA – the people who enjoy prostitutes paid for by Colombian drug cartels.
And NO the DEA officials concerned were NOT “undercover” – it was considered quite normal for DEA officials going to Colombia to be “entertained” by the drug cartels (some of the most vicious killers on the planet) in this way.
And logically so – after all whilst the DEA might arrest drug dealers individually, the DEA (and the war-on-drugs it represents) keeps up the prices of drugs and makes them glamorous (“forbidden fruit”) for customers – and thus is good (very good) for the drug cartels as a whole.
Indeed without the DEA, and the war-on-drugs it represents, the Colombian drug cartels could not exist.
So the DEA is well worth the price of a few prostitutes for the drug cartels.
“Liberals” such as Mrs Hillary Clinton and “conservatives” such as Mr Peter Hitchens, are in an unholy alliance to keep this blood soaked farce going.
It does make you start to wonder who the good guys are.
I mean, when it comes down to it, the only thing the Mexicans are trying to do is shift some weed from willing sellers to willing buyers. The whole rest of it is down to Uncle Sam.
Quite so BiS. The whole reason a *criminal* enterprise serves this market is because the state wants it that way.
Maybe Claire Wolfe is right. Maybe it IS too late to work within the system.
Hang on. So this business owner, unknown to him, has his property (his truck) used by a Federal agency, again without his knowledge or permission. It was, effectively seized by the Federal government. Doesn’t that alone violate his Fifth Amendment rights?
Your constitutional rights are not worth a mouldy ham sandwich.
Hell due to the fact he even took them (unsuccessfully) to court will probably mean the DEA will suddenly realise they can seize all his property using civil forfeiture rules (I will not deign to call them ‘laws’) because drugs were found in one of his trucks. Yes I know the DEA put them there but so what? Take that Fourth Amendment of yours and use it to roll a joint, because that is all it is worth.
The reported reasoning from the judge is quite blatantly putting bureaucratic convenience over any other consideration.
However, if the driver was a DEA informant and a DEA agent was an employee, then they got what they bargained for, the enmity of the cartels. However, if the employer has been paid for his truck, as appears to be the case, then what else is his loss? The employee’s death is not a loss to the business as such, and the intangible ‘goodwill’ lost would be hard to quantify. I can’t see the ‘goodwill’ of the Zetas cartel being worth much to the business in the eyes of a judge.
The next-of-kin of the deceased might have a better claim for his death.
Mr Ed,
However, if the employer has been paid for his truck, as appears to be the case, then what else is his loss?
But that doesn’t appear to be the case. From the article: ‘The DEA says it doesn’t owe Patty anything for the more than $100,000 in repairs that were required for the truck.’
If I am reading that correctly, then that is $100,000 of property that has, effectively, been seized from the truck’s owner without just compensation. Again, how is this not a violation of his Fifth Amendment rights?
I’m at an age now where I watch the chaos unfolding during a typical James Bond car chase and I wonder who will pay for all the damage and what will happen to all the widows and children of the dead policeman who were only doing their job but who ended up as collateral damage. I also wonder whether the leaders of the countries where these episodes of outright pandemonium occur are happy about some imperialist throwback rampaging across their nation with impunity showing complete disregard for its people and its infrastructure. Then I remind myself that James Bond inhabits a fictional universe that stretches plausibility at every turn and that nothing even remotely like similar could happen in reality.
Then I read a news story like this.
PST, sorry, I misread the post, I must have read what I wanted to believe, that they accepted that the damage to the truck was of course their responsibility (e.g. in English and Scots law of negligence, a reasonably foreseeable harm never mind the tort of conversion) but were querying any claim for the damage to the business beyond that.
My advice to any decent US Citizen. Plan A: Knock on Canada’s door, promise to be good, not to vote for anyone who would replicate your country and renounce your US citizenship.
Plan B: Rand Paul.
Quite, Perry. Paul Marks says ” This is where removing all PRINCIPLES from law …” Have you been hanging around universities & developing bad habits, Mr Marks? What principles? Laws are created by our betters to tell us what we should & should not do. They’re quite arbitrary. But they have created an entire load of legal gobledegoop to fool us that they’re not.
@Mr Ed:
Except that US citizenship is rather hard to renounce unless your tax affairs are in good order and the IRS doesn’t classify you as a ‘fleeing tax asset’ and also reasons…
Option C- emigrate to North Korea. I’ll bet that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S. of A.!
option D- Use crowd-funding to pay for a libertarian movie (perhaps The Probability Broach?) that kickstarts libertarianism in American Society.
JG. Quite, but I would not advise doing a Reginald Perrin and faking your own death only to move over the border in a disguise, and you’d probably find that the IRS have the power to send drones over the 49th parallel to hunt you down.
However, at what point should the lobster climb out of the thermidor, if not the earliest opportunity?
@Nicholas (Self-Sovereignty) Gray:
Well done Nicholas – You’ve pointed out the only country in the world that doesn’t allow immigration in any form. The only way you get to join Nork society is by being kidnapped. Their Juche national policy is basically racist in that regard. 🙂
George H W Bush appointed her in 1992. In addition she was named Texas Judge of the year.
The Bushes were/are RINO’s – they disgust me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_H._Rosenthal