Florida sheriffs: Keep ‘Stand your ground’ as written | FLORIDA TODAY | floridatoday.com
The Florida Sheriff’s Association is no longer neutral on the state’s controversial “stand your ground” law.
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, the new president of the association, announced Friday that members agreed earlier this week without opposition to support the law “as currently written.”
“Our current judicial system is comprised of multiple checks and balances to ensure fair and equitable application of all laws, including ‘stand your ground,’ ” Judd said in a prepared statement.
via Florida sheriffs: Keep ‘Stand your ground’ as written | FLORIDA TODAY | floridatoday.com.
Sheriff Judd is not a good sheriff … he wildly abused the resources of his office to push Governor Crist into signing a death warrant for Paul Beasley Johnson before the appeals process had played out.
A subsequent review of Johnson’s case by Florida’s Supreme Court indicated misconduct … no surprise at all, as misconduct was also found in Polk exonerees Juan Melendez (death row, 17+ years) and James Bain’s (general population, 35+ years) cases. It was also found in the standing conviction of Leo Schofield, in suppression of fingerprint evidence that will exonerate Schofield if ever we get a governor that gives a damn about public corruption. The print in question found in Schofield’s murdered wife’s vehicle belongs to convicted killer Jeremy Scott, who lived near them.
Despite misconduct of record, and despite two decades of statistics on the DNA-proven unreliability of eyewitness testimony, Schofield was denied a retrial, with the judges claiming that eyewitness testimony had greater weight than the print.
Governor Scott is aware of Polk’s misconduct; he signed an Executive Order transferring prosecution of Johnson’s case to another circuit. Scott is aware of tons of police, prosecutorial and judicial misconduct. Scott’s stance is exactly the same as Grady Judd’s … to portray to the public that state governmental checks and balances are working, when nothing could be further from the truth.
There is no harm done if the average citizen pretends that Florida’s government’s is a well-oiled machine, but there’s a lot of harm done when Florida governors and attorney generals pretend that justice is available when it clearly isn’t, and they couldn’t get away with it for a moment without the help of the conservative mainstream media, populated by moguls who’d sell their own grandmas for a buck.
Along those lines – in the same linked Florida Today article – The News Service of Florida‘s reporter Jim Turner informed the public that Stand Your Ground wasn’t used by George Zimmerman’s defense, neglecting to mention that jury instructions included Stand Your Ground, which rendered his statement a willful deception.
Paul Beasley Johnson’s retrial took place in February, with his death sentence reaffirmed.
But Paul Beasley Johnson isn’t the point: The point is that Florida governmental checks and balances are continually re-broken by the likes of Grady Judd, Rick Scott and Pam Bondi, in concert, with the mendacious mainstream media running interference.
The kids demonstrating at Scott’s office over Stand Your Ground – the Dream Defenders – are too legit to quit.
Were Scott too legit to quit, he’d have taken a long, hard look at the Orange County Sheriff’s Office and the 9th Judicial Circuit over John Wesley Dobbs being denied both standard self defense and Stand Your Ground, despite his unwillingness to use the gun he took away from one of his many attackers, known thugs, while onlookers enjoyed the show of John fending off so many people at once instead of calling 911.
And Scott would have looked at John’s case the very first time I asked, long before some 20 as-the-crow-flies miles away, Zimmerman used a gun (although not sliced by a razor blade and box cutter, like John) and was falsely deigned – due to lighter color and very good connections – to have a superior claim to Stand Your Ground than Trayvon Martin.
The only news article about John was in the Orlando Sentinel. In “Murder count hits grim 50 in Orange’s deadliest year ; Racial slurs provoke the county’s record killing, but the general rise in violence is hard to explain,” Reporters Willoughby Mariano, Mark Matthews and Elaine Aradillassaid it was a racially motivated homicide, that the dead man was black.
In actuality, John is black. The dead man was brown, and the dead man was connected. It’s likely why the dead man wasn’t behind bars for the prior 11 arrests reported within the article.
Hang in, Dream Defenders. Get John Dobbs and Marissa only-fired-a-warning-shot Alexander freed, and make justice available for Trayvon Martin, at least in civil court.
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