Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

murder n., v. <-dered, -dering> 1. the unlawful killing of a person, esp. when done with deliberation or premeditation or occurring during the commission of another serious crime (first-degree murder) or with intent but without deliberation or premeditation ( second-degree murder).
Random House Dictionary
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The scene has been a staple terror of WWII and "behind the iron curtain" spy movies - being suddenly awakened in the dead of night by the crash of jack booted thugs kicking down the door. Suddenly the quiet night air is filled with the roar of low flying aircraft, the bark of attack dogs, and the clatter of heavily armed men. Gunfire punctuates the cacophony while search lights blind your still sleepy eyes. The tension soars as dark shapes burst into the room shouting something, fingers twitching on triggers, safeties off.

Startled and confused, do you make a sudden involuntary move like raising your hand to protect yourself? Do the dark shapes, their brains saturated with adrenaline and predisposed to expect resistance, react to your surprise by unleashing the overwhelming deadly force they have directed at you?

Just what is it about the above scene that is so frightening, so universally abhorrent? The real terror of the scenario is being under the absolute control of someone who intends harm to you - of being helpless in the presence of malevolence. You know that the dark forms with the guns and lights can kill you without being held personally accountable - but they will be punished if they allow you to defend yourself and kill or injure one or more of their gang. No one would ever willingly put his life so absolutely in the hands of someone with so little motivation to preserve it.

No good ever comes from this scenario in the movies, and the same holds true for real life. In the traditional American vision, this scene is only supposed to play either the big silver screen or the little phosphor one - certainly not in sunny southern California, land of bikinis and convertibles. It's completely unthinkable to the typical California sun worshiper that they could suddenly find themselves experiencing such terror first hand. After all, America isn't Nazi occupied Yugoslavia in 1942 (or Serbian occupied Bosnia in 1995...).

Donald Scott was a reclusive millionaire living on a spectacular ranch in the mountains near Los Angles. He sought peace and safety in his isolated home - far from the crime and violence of LA. Being a lawful citizen, he had no reason to be concerned about the "drug war" - he wasn't involved. Or at least that's what he thought.

A Government agent searching Scott's property without a warrant from a low flying aircraft falsely claimed he'd seen marijuana growing. Based on this totally groundless internally generated accusation, the police organized a dawn raid. The raid went badly - Scott was shot dead by the "drug enforcement" officers taking part in the early morning assault. No marijuana was found anywhere on Scott's estate.

Scott's ranch would have made rich pickings for the Los Angles Sheriffs Department - it was valued at $5 million dollars. Public outrage over the killing of Scott prompted the District Attorney to investigate. The District Attorney's report found that "...The Los Angles County Sheriffs Department was motivated, at least in part, by a desire to seize and forfeit the ranch..."

It has always been a basic tenet of common law that the violent and uncompensated seizure of a citizen's rightful property is a crime - regardless if the act is committed by an individual, group of individuals, organization, or Government. Causing the death of the rightful owner of property during the violent and wrongful seizure of that property is a crime of first degree murder. It has not yet been officially declared a crime in America to lawfully acquire and occupy a home that has resale value.

The significance of the LA County Sheriff's actions represent a profound precedent in American justice. A number of alarming interpretations that all violate the basic principles of our society can be constructed from the established facts.

Removing all of the lies and distortions fabricated in the attempt to justify the actions of the Government agents, the grim reality is that with malice and forethought, the Sheriffs Department identified a valuable property it wanted to seize for its own profit, and then set about building a justification for a lethal coordinated assault by its agents against the wholly innocent lawful owner of the property. Put another way, the duly sworn agents of the Government first secretly convicted Scott in absentia and without trial of violating a constitutionally proscribed statute - the Sheriffs Department's self declared capital crime of possessing property desired by the State. Those agents then willfully and knowingly violated their oaths of office and constitutionally limited powers in a failed attempt to fraudulently manufacture a more publicly "acceptable" charge against him - all in order to "officially" validate the constitutionally proscribed sentence they had a priori decided to impose upon him without due process.

Peel away the illusionary cloak of respectability provided by the official status of the perpetrators and look at this crime as if committed by "common" criminals. Without their uniforms and paper authority, the assault force becomes just another gang of thugs intending to rob the victim of his property.

The Gang was heavily armed in case the victim resisted, and was mentally prepared to use any level of force to suppress opposition to their intended robbery. In fact, they'd practiced extensively in the use of firearms to kill the occupants of buildings they assaulted, and had a prior history of shooting first and asking questions later. In movie parlance, they came ready and able to shoot it out with anyone who got in their way.

With callous disregard for the victim's life, the gang caused the death of their victim during the commission of the robbery. The Gang then got caught on a technicality while trying to fence the stolen property. If the Gang members were "common" criminals, they'd face charges of first degree murder - murder committed during the commission of an armed robbery. Recent polls indicate that the majority of citizens believe the perpetrators of such a crime deserve the death penalty.

This was no polite knock on the door by uniformed officers with a carefully crafted search warrant seeking specific evidence of a specific crime based on well founded suspicions of criminal activity. The LA County Sheriffs Department had no reason to suspect Scott with committing a crime except through totally unfounded "accusations" generated _within the Sheriff's department itself_. No citizen had filed a formal complaint alleging criminal activity by Scott. There was no proof whatsoever that any citizen had been harmed by criminal activity on the part of Scott. Neither could Scott in any way be construed to represent a clear and present danger to the public.

But in spite of the fact that they had no reason to expect violent resistance from Scott even if he was guilty of their fabricated charges, the Sheriffs Department elected to launch a heavily armed dawn paramilitary assault on Scott's peaceful and totally unsuspecting home. They smashed their way in knowing that they were intentionally creating a situation where Scott's conscious rational mind would not yet be in control, he would be reacting from his most basic fight or flight instincts, and might well instinctively try to defend himself.

In short, far from intending to peacefully apprehend Scott for a nonviolent crime, the Government agents attacked Scott at a time and in a manner most likely to provide them with the "justification" for killing him. Whether or not killing Scott was the clearly stated objective of his attackers is immaterial. What matters is if the agent's actions were performed of their own free will, and if the actual results of those actions could or should have been foreseen by those agents before the fact. Being a Government agent is by definition a voluntary act. International treaties empower and require individuals to refuse to obey illegal or immoral orders. Therefore the agents were exercising their free will.

The official disclaimer in cases like Scott's is that the death occurred as an "unfortunate accident" or as a "regrettable result of unexpected events". The one fact no one disputes is that Scott did indeed die as a direct result of the assault on his home by agents of the Government operating under conditions expressly and intentionally created by those agents. Obviously, Scott's death as a direct result of the raid proves that death was one of the potential outcomes of the planned assault. I believe a case can be made that far from being an unlikely event, this fatal potential carried a high enough probability and was so reasonably recognizable and predictable an outcome, that it should have been readily apparent in any competent analysis of the planned assault.

Whether the assault planners and perpetrators accurately projected the probability of Scott being killed and decided his life could be justifiably sacrificed - or whether they were so incompetent as to not even consider that Scott might be killed - makes no difference to Scott. The fact is that a reasonable person could have been expected to recognize the danger to Scott in the planned assault. As such, it is reasonable to assume that the Government agents were fully knowledgeable before the fact that their intended actions would place Scott's life in danger, with a significant possibility that he would be killed, and were still willing to act with premeditation to cause his death in order to seize his property.

I don't think any reasonable person would disagree that Scott's death was wrongful - that he had done nothing to "deserve" or "warrant" his violent death at the hands of other humans. Nor did Scott do anything to contribute to or cause his own death. Scott's death was wholly caused by the decisions and actions of those involved in the dawn assault on his home. However, even though it can be clearly documented exactly who planned and committed the actions that directly caused Scott's death, the chain of responsibility evaporates that the threshold of the Government Citadel. Scott's murderers are protected by wearing the badge of those sworn to protect him.

A consistently overlooked aspect of the current paramilitary assault tactics used by the police is the concept of imposing punishment without due process as required under the constitution. The very methods used by police assault forces are guaranteed to cause harm to the victim and/or his property before there is any evidence of a crime, and before the victim has been proven guilty in a court of law. Door breakers, concussion grenades, sledge hammers, and the rest of the "basic police building access toolkit" are hardly nondestructive even if the inhabitants aren't killed by police snipers and storm troupers.

In Scott's case, the paramilitary tactics used by the assault force were obviously planned, practiced, and implemented with knowledge and forethought, with the express intention of causing damage to their intended victim and/or his property - a person "presumed innocent until proven guilty" under the highest laws of our country. The assault force came prepared and willing to imposed capital punishment - a sentence far in excess of any legal punishment that might have been imposed even if he had been guilt of the crimes his killers were hoping to charge against him.

The agents of the Government willfully initiating actions that had the predictable potential of resulting in harm to the victim before any guilt had been established or due process been observed. The base justifications for their actions were proven false by the facts in the case (Scott wasn't growing marijuana). However, in addition to acting on false information, the agents also willfully violated all of the legal safeguards intended to protect wrongfully accused citizens in such situations. By violating all of the citizen protection safeguards, the agents stepped outside the constitutional system of checks and balances, acting not as duly sworn officers of the law but willful and knowledgeable violators of the law themselves.

Simple logic and ethics would therefore hold the agents of the Government personally and collectively responsible for all effects of their actions - even those that resulted from their negligent and/or callous failure to fully assess the potentials of their actions. All those who participated in the raid, conspired in its planning, or helped create the situation that made the raid possible, share some measure of guilt for this heinous crime. But none of them have any expectation of ever being held accountable.

The crime of omission spreads the guilt for Scott's murder even farther. Every time a vicious criminal who has willfully deprived one or more innocent persons of their right to live receives the death penalty for his crimes, a massive effort is launched to frustrate the sentence and save the convicted murderer's life - even if the convicted killer doesn't want to be saved. The primary justification of those interfering with the execution of convicted murderers is the possibility that the justice system might convict and wrongly execute an innocent person.

The State, under the guise of the "drug war", is actively engaged in a massive program that has directly caused the wrongful deaths of far more people than have ever been executed under the "official" death penalty. In a blatant display of the true moral bankruptcy of their professed principles, those determined social engineering activists who effectively frustrate the imposition of capital punishment are the same ones demanding that the war on drugs continue. This in spite of the proven fact that the war on drugs is actively damaging countless innocent persons, complete with the proven wrongful imposition without due process of the death penalty against manifestly innocent citizens.

The DA's investigation proved beyond any doubt that Scott's sole crime was to be successful enough in life to acquire the American dream - a nice place in the country. Of course, in spite of the strong and clear wording of the District Attorney's findings, no one involved in the planning, perpetration, or attempted cover-up of Scott's murder has been held accountable. Scott's dead body is the only cold hard reality in this tragedy. Scott was the only truly innocent and unwilling participant in this sordid travesty of justice, and he continues to be the only one "adversely effected" by the officially sanctioned conspiracy and murder perpetrated against him under the increasingly transparent sham of protecting the public from unregulated drugs.

Death is the ultimate violation of civil and human rights. The officially sanctioned murder of innocent citizens by agents of the Government represents the ultimate violation of the most basic purpose and mandate of the Government. No crime transcends this violation of the citizen's inalienable rights as defined in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights.