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April 21, 2025 - The David Knight Show
21:37
Punishing Those Found “NOT GUILTY” is OK with US Courts
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Here, let's begin with civil asset forfeiture and seizure, which came from the drug war.
But now you have a case where the police have confiscated a vehicle that there was no indication of any wrongdoing by the driver or anyone else.
They're definitely holding this vehicle, though.
This is a plumbing truck.
And this is the business, and they're saying, well, this is impacting our business.
They've had it for so long, and they won't give it back.
And they were the ones who were the victims in this.
A family-owned plumbing corporation in Illinois is being forced into court after cops confiscated a company truck when it was hit in a traffic accident, and they refused to return it to the owners for more than a year.
They're being represented.
By the Liberty Justice Center, the Winnebago County Sheriff's Office, and the local state's attorney are the ones who are illegally seizing and indefinitely holding 15 months so far the property of this plumbing company simply because it was an innocent bystander to an auto accident.
The government cannot take your property without a warrant or warrant exception, let alone indefinitely without giving you any way to get it back just because you were an innocent bystander to somebody else's alleged crime, says the Liberty Justice Center.
We look forward to vindicating the Fourth Amendment rights of First Supply, the plumbing company, and all innocent crime victims and bystanders.
The company lawyer said it was hard enough to have our delivery truck To add insult to injury,
We have spent hours trying to retrieve our property only to be passed from person to person at the state's attorney's office, ignored by the prosecutor, and offered no support.
This all happened in January 2024 when an alleged drunk driver ran a red light and crashed his vehicle into the delivery truck, which was stopped legally at a stoplight.
This person is stopped at a stoplight.
A drunk driver hits them.
Tragically, the driver's passenger was killed on impact.
First Supply was in no way responsible for the accident.
But the Winnebago County Sheriff's Office seized the truck from the scene as evidence without a warrant.
And without any exigent circumstances justifying the warrantless seizure.
Then, in the months following, while First Supply complied with the law, The enforcement investigation, the truck remained locked up.
You see, over and over again, and we're going to revisit this, I'm going to get back to what is going on with this fight with the Trump administration and this illegal alien, Garcia.
Who has been designated as a terrorist.
We'll take a look at the back and forth.
Both sides are pulling out a little bit of this and a little bit of that.
So you're getting a truncated picture from both sides on this.
And then all of that is in the background of where the two parties are on immigration.
But it really is about due process.
And it's about how do we evaluate innocence or guilt.
Because we're talking about a situation that is different from illegal entry.
You know, that is one crime, and you could say that the justifiable punishment for that would be expulsion out of the country.
If we're going to also ignore the fact that people are financially incentivized to come into this country, the welfare magnet and other things like that, but still, if somebody's here illegally, you can deport them.
But to send them to that type of prison...
Is cruel and unusual punishment if the person is not a terrorist.
Now, if they are part of this trendy Uruguay, whatever, the trendy gang, or MS-13, I have no problem with that kind of punishment if they truly are a terrorist, but that needs to be determined.
And so, what we're seeing here is in one area after the other, our government has become lawless.
And when our government no longer needs to follow due process, When they no longer need to charge somebody.
This is civil asset forfeiture's issue for the longest time.
It was brought in as part of the drug war.
And so when you don't have to charge somebody with a crime, and you don't have to find them guilty of the crime before you take the property, you can take the property and never even charge them with a crime, let alone find them guilty.
When you're going to tolerate that, it turns into things like this as well.
And if you're going to allow this kind of Rule by executive fiat, replacing the rule of law, then we're in really dangerous territory.
But getting back to this, at one point a sergeant said the sheriff's investigators were finished with a truck, but still the truck was not released.
The traffic case even was dismissed without the truck's release.
Then a new criminal case was filed.
At no point during the entire ordeal has either officer provided first supply a process, A procedure?
Or even a timeline as to when it can get its truck back?
Now, I don't understand.
When I first read this, I thought it was the drunk driver, the alleged drunk driver, that died.
But perhaps it was their driver in their truck.
I don't know.
I mean, you wouldn't file a criminal case against the drunk driver if the drunk driver died.
So perhaps they, you know, crashing through and hitting this truck that was parked at the...
A stoplight.
Perhaps it killed the plumbing company's driver.
I don't know.
But they said for 15 months, the company has been paying for a truck it cannot use, as well as a replacement.
The Liberty Justice Center said it now has a lawsuit pending over the confiscation of the vehicle, and it cites the Fourth Amendment.
And we need to have due process along these same lines.
Not guilty, but punished anyway.
Now, this truly is amazing.
This is from reason.
And this is something, I've talked about civil asset forfeiture for the longest time.
This is beyond that.
And this is beyond rigging a trial for a political enemy.
This is a kind of corruption that has been embraced by the entire legal system all the way up to the Supreme Court, and they're not doing anything to fix it.
Here is the specifics of this case.
So they've got six guys.
And they go to rob a CVS drugstore in Indianapolis back in 2015.
They go in with armed robbery to go after the pharmacy at gunpoint.
And so there's six of them.
Three people are named here, and three others that are unnamed.
Three people named are Yates, Perry, and McClinton.
McClinton helped to guard the customers.
Yates, who dubbed himself the mastermind of a string of similar robberies, led the charge with Perry.
But their target, the safe, was equipped with a timed lock.
Go! Meaning that they're not going to be able to get the drugs inside for several minutes.
As time is passing, that means that the police could be drawing closer.
So, the group made off with a small bottle of hydrocodone, a sacrificial offering that's been set aside by the pharmacy for such situations as this, along with some kidney medication and some cough syrup containing codeine.
That's it.
Six guys.
And that's their take.
A getaway driver brought the group to a residential area.
Perry, the mastermind.
He's dismayed at how little they had to show for their efforts.
He allegedly declined to share the paltry proceeds and got out of the car.
But he didn't get too far because somebody shot him in the back of the head.
One of the other five guys.
Talk about a group of dumb criminals.
The government zeroed in then on McClinton, who was 17 at the time, but they tried him as an adult.
At his trial, persecution witnesses testified, That he and Perry, the victim, were, quote, like brothers, real close.
Witnesses said McClinton was Perry's, quote, best friend, unquote.
But the same cannot be said of Yates, who was the robbery ring leader.
His girlfriend was two-timing him with Perry, according to testimony from Cleavon Williams, who had participated in other robberies with Yates.
But Yates, who was cooperating with prosecutors, Had implemented McClinton.
Oh, so he turns, he cooperates, turns state witness, and he names somebody else, perhaps for the crime that he did.
It wouldn't be the first time we've seen that type of thing happening.
So, had Williams, after spending a year, housed in the same detention facility as Yates.
So the two of them are there, and they both point the finger to this other guy, McClinton.
But the jury didn't believe these two guys.
They convicted McClinton for his role in the armed robbery, but they found him not guilty of killing Perry.
But then a judge sentenced McClinton for the murder anyway.
How about that?
It reminds me very much of Ross Ulbrich when you look at it.
You know, going back to Ross Ulbrich, Silk Road, and the website had been taken over by some FBI agents.
Passwords and everything in it.
And they were under trial at the same time that Ross Ulbricht was for having embezzled almost a million dollars out of the website.
But they were not allowed, Ross Ulbricht's lawyers were not allowed to mention that exculpatory evidence that would show that, you know, cast a shadow of a doubt as to whether or not it was Ross Ulbricht or these FBI agents who were being tried.
And they were convicted, as a matter of fact.
But that was not allowed to be told to anybody.
But even more egregious, after they convicted him for operating the website, you had in another jurisdiction, you had a district attorney who never indicted Ross for the murder-for-hire accusations or allegations of that.
But he was never indicted.
He was tried in the media, as we see happening with this Garcia guy.
He was tried in the media.
But they never indicted him.
He never stood trial for that, so he was not found guilty.
But the sentencing judge referred to that, for which, again, he had not been found guilty, had not even been indicted, referred to that murder-for-hire thing and gave Ross Ulbrich three consecutive life sentences, meaning that he would never get out of jail.
Now, fortunately, Trump in 2025 pardoned him.
But Trump in 2020 refused to pardon him.
Trump would not pardon Ross Ulbrich.
For this heinous miscarriage of justice just to do justice.
No, that's not good enough for Trump.
But he would pardon him in 2025 as payback for his supporters.
You see?
That's why you have so many white-collar criminals that were pardoned by Trump.
He's got to get something for it.
It's not about principle.
And so, the driving force in this sentence is not what he's been convicted of, said the judge that was there.
Based on his convictions alone, federal sentencing guidelines would recommend that Pratt give McClinton a prison sentence of somewhere between 57 to 71 months, or about 5 to 6 years.
Instead, however, she sentenced him to 19 years.
She sentenced him as if he had been found guilty of the murder charge that the jury had found him not guilty of.
So how does this happen?
Is this a rogue judge?
No, it's much worse than that.
This is built into the system.
The results likely offend most people's understanding of how the U.S. criminal justice system is supposed to operate.
When a defendant hears not guilty, he can expect to avoid punishment for that offense, or so we're told.
The reality is that criminal defendants can be sentenced based on acquitted conduct, meaning Charges that a jury rejected.
See, for the longest time we've had judges, more often than not, tell, instruct the jury that you are not here to judge the law or the punishment that will be attached to it if this person is found guilty.
No, that's why the jury, that you are not here to judge the law or the punishment that will be attached to it.
If this person is found guilty.
No, that's why you are there.
That's a very important reason of why you're there.
You're also there to ascertain innocence or guilt, but you're also there to judge the law and the penalties that are there.
But they always tell you, no, no, no.
You don't judge that at all.
You're just here to find out what the facts are.
And I will determine which facts you're allowed to hear, even.
Right? And then when they don't get their desired outcome by rigging it, by lying to the jury about jury nullification of bad laws and bad punishment, when that doesn't work, and when they look at the facts of the case and they reject the facts of the case,
did you realize that the judges can throw that out as well?
And it's a known established procedure.
They even have a name for it.
Conduct. So, this is conduct.
You did it.
That's your conduct.
Even though the jury acquitted you, you did it, and I'm going to charge you on your conduct, even though the jury said you're not guilty.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court approved acquitted conduct sentencing in 1997, so it goes all the way to the Supreme Court.
It has flown almost entirely under the public's radar.
I didn't even know about this.
In April of 2024, amid pressure from various lawyers, judges, and advocates, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the judicial branch agency that writes the federal sentencing guidelines, the Sentencing Commission unanimously voted to limit the practice,
limit the practice, not end it.
Not end it.
It remains to be seen how much effort that decision will have.
A cohort of left-leaning legal scholars, Constitutional conservatives, yes, there still are some constitutional conservatives out there, apparently, even with Trump in office.
And libertarian think tankers are watching.
They said that in June of 2023, the Supreme Court declined to hear McClinton's argument that he had been unconstitutionally punished for murder after a jury acquitted him of that crime.
But that did not mean that the court was ignoring the issue.
It was Sonia Sotomayor who wrote, The court's denial of cert today should not be misinterpreted.
In other words, not going to hear it.
But here's her interpretation of it.
She said, The sentencing commission, which is responsible for the sentencing guidelines, has announced that it will resolve questions around acquitted conduct sentencing in the coming year.
If the commission does not act expeditiously, Remember during the lockdown,
how the CDC just gave itself the power to stand over evictions and foreclosures as people were being evicted from their jobs and having their businesses foreclosed on by Trump's lockdown orders?
They said, all right, we're just going to stop.
The foreclosures and the evictions.
Well, that left a lot of other people holding the bag.
That just pushed it into a different problem area.
It didn't address the problem.
The problem was lockdown.
And instead of adjusting the lockdown, the CDC gave itself powers that it never had.
And then they extended that under Trump.
And then Biden came along, and they extended it under Biden like three times.
And it came before the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said, well, this is wrong, but you have told us that you're going to fix this.
And so we'll wait for you to fix it.
And the CDC didn't fix it.
So then they came back, and then they took that power away from the CDC a couple months later.
The CDC assured them that they were going to stop doing it, but they continued to do it beyond that deadline.
So here we have a similar situation.
You have the Supreme Court looking at this and saying, this is bad, and we should do something about it, just like the CDC can't tell people that you can't evict or have foreclosures.
They don't have that kind of power.
Well, you can't sentence people for things that they've been found not guilty of, but the Sentencing Commission is dragging its feet and says, yeah, we're going to do it at some point, and so the Supreme Court says, well, we're not going to hear this case.
But if they...
Wait too long, or they don't do this at all, then we will come back and we'll revisit it at that point.
Isn't that pathetic?
Well, you had some people who disagreed with that.
Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett, the three Trump appointees, agreed that it is appropriate for this court to wait for the Sentencing Commission's determination.
Is it, really?
Before the court decides whether or not to grant cert in the case involving the use of acquitted conduct.
And so they agreed with that.
Isn't that amazing?
We'll just let them take care of it.
Of course, we'd seen the same type of thing with the CDC as well.
And it's Kavanaugh and Roberts, particularly in writing in that position, saying, oh, we'll let the CDC fix it.
And if they don't, we'll have to come back again.
So six months later...
The commission unveiled several proposed amendments aimed at curtailing the use of acquitted conduct at sentencing.
And so they came up with an amendment which supposedly took effect on November 1st, but it's hard to predict its impact on future cases for two reasons.
First, the caveat that they put in there about if there is overlapping conduct, they said that seems to leave some wiggle room.
Secondly, the sentencing guidelines are advisory.
They are not binding.
So, if you violate that, you might get a stern tongue lashing, but nothing else will happen.
So, if you've got a judge, a real hanging judge, or he takes a particular dislike to you, you can forget about due process, you can forget about what the jury says.
They've already forgotten about the jury setting in judgment of the law, setting in judgment of the punishment, and so now you've got judges who can...
Forget about the jury and its finding of facts either.
Yeah, we're losing all of our due process.
The common man.
They created common core to dumb down our children.
They created common past to track and control us.
Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing.
And the communist future.
They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
That is what we have in common.
That is what they want to take away.
Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
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