Solving the Marathon Bomb Mystery, Part 8: What Can We Do Now?

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB

You won’t believe me, but Lex semper dabit remedium. Yep, it’s true. “The law will always furnish a remedy.” In Part 7, which started with “Sinners in the hand of an angry God,” I consulted federal law in search of remedies. We saw various punishments meted out for the crimes of conspiring, murder, violence under color of law, obstruction of justice, treason, misprision (my fave), and terrorism.

Meted out? Well, the punishments exist on paper – they only get meted out if something happens, like a grand jury indictment, a bench warrant, a box of matches, or a wrongful-death lawsuit. Where does “justice” reside? It can only reside in the human heart.  It is not a force “out there.”  Here in Part 8, the task is to inventory all available means for converting people’s sense of justice – legally – into consequences. American history is replete with examples of this being accomplished beautifully.

The context in which I am writing this is the context of the FBI having gotten away with many crimes related to the Marathon bombing, including probably the bombing itself.  (Note: even if they weren’t the bomber, they must have conspired with the bomber, and as we saw that makes them equally liable. Such is the nature of “conspiracy”!)

Thus we are concentrating here on the kinds of legal things you can do when the target is slippery. Believe me, our Founding Fathers were no sentimentalists. They knew full well that baddies build up ways to avoid the law, buy-off the law, or even kill the law dead on the spot. So please leave your sentiment at the door today. “This is business.”

Get Creative

The first thing we can do today is go to Boston police or Suffolk County District Attorney and file a charge against Jahar for treason under state law. M’assachusetts does not have statutory law on this topic, hence it has common law.

Clearly a citizen who bombs the city of Boston commits treason thereby. Jahar is a US citizen.  Did he do the bombing? Well, he is on Death Row for it, that should supply sufficient “proof” that he did this treacherous deed.

A Ruse Never Killed Anybody

Needless to say, I mean all this as a legal ruse. Assuming the federal government is too deeply controlled by the Deep State to give Jahar a fair trial (well, it didn’t, did it?) we can employ the one other entity that can give him a trial, namely the state.

This very afternoon M’assachusetts could extradite him from Colorado and toss him into a cell at Walpole prison. He would not be under SAM’s. Those Special Administrative Measures are federal. Hence he would be entitled to visitors.  I could visit him myself. I could ask him why he had a hankering for Dun Meng’s car. Or anything like that. You get the idea.

Note to Jahar advocates: if a treason charge is too rich for your blood, go for loitering or spitting or something. Any prosecutor can find charges. A really good prosecutor, they say, can indict a ham sandwich.

RICO, Dear Old RICO

Anyone who has suffered an economic loss as a result of the Marathon bombing can file a civil RICO suit against the perps, such as the FBI. Congress passed the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act – known as RICO, to make it easier to catch the hard-to-catch Mafia bosses. This law makes the rules of evidence more lenient. Note: most states also have RICO laws.

It’s fun. You only need to show a pattern of corrupt activity. The accused (in this case, the FBI) must have committed at least two “predicate acts” within a ten-year period. Such things as murder and obstruction of justice qualify as predicate acts. Easy-peasy, right?

Former federal judge Nancy Gertner already did some of the work for you. Quoting the Seattle Times of July 26, 2007:

BOSTON — A federal judge today ordered the government to pay more than $101 million in the case of four men who spent decades in prison for a 1965 murder they didn’t commit after the FBI withheld evidence of their innocence.

The FBI encouraged perjury, helped frame the four men and withheld for more than three decades information that could have cleared them, U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner said.

For a template of a RICO case, please see the one I drafted for Troy Davis in 2009. (It is in Maxwell, Fraud Upon the Court, 2015).

Citizen’s Arrest

Can you arrest Henty Kissinger?  I suppose you could. Maybe you even have a duty to do so. He is a known war criminal and the US has explicit domestic law on that.  Three things to know about citizen arrest:

1. It is legal in every state of the US
2. You have to deliver your quarry to the police a.s.a.p.
3. The quarry can sue you if you injure him. (So, go gentle with Henry).

Funnily enough, when an FBI officer arrests someone she is doing it as a citizen –as FBI has no law enforcement authority. I know you don’t believe me. It is hard to believe. But look at the “I” in “FBI.” They are an investigative body. Similarly, if a department store security guard grabs you, he is performing merely a citizen’s arrest. And you can sue him if he injures you.

Play FOIA

The famous Freedom of Information Act of 1966 is federal, codified at 5 USC 552. (For those of you who weren’t alive in the Sixties, you missed a great show!) States have FOI, too. It costs you nothing to get information that you need for education, research, or as part of your civic duty of investigating government.

In your letter you should state that you are writing under the provisions of FOIA. The bureaucrats have a fixed time limit in which they MUST reply.

Right now you could send a FOIA letter, email is fine, to the MIT or Cambridge police.  Ask for information about their destroying the cruise car of Officer Sean Collier, which had not been damaged in any way. Ask when the decision to “total it” was made, and who made it. (Jahar was convicted of harming Collier, or abetting Tamerlan to do so.)

It will pay to call the addressee’s attention to the law maxim Omni praesumunter contra spoliatorem. “All things are presumed against the one who destroys.” Come to think of it, I guess that idea was applied to the dorm mates of Jahar who threw away his computer. It made them look guilty, didn’t it? Like they were trying to hide something?  Do mention the analogy.

What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Attacking a Lawyer in the Wallet

Why in the world would any citizen go for a snooze after reading about the bad behaviour of a doctor or a lawyer? You should go straight to your keyboard and send a letter of complaint to the licensing board.  All complaints they receive MUST be dealt with. The professional person will be asked to give an accounting of himself.

Do you have standing?  I don’t know if the board answers third-party complaints (such as you complaining that such-and-such doctor removed your friend’s tonsils when he was supposed to remove her appendix), but if the matter has public import, you do have standing. All boards should be naturally eager to strike a bad lawyer or doctor off the register – that is why there is a board. It is their bread and butter, so to speak.

An example of a lawyer who courts disbarment would be Judy Clarke or Bill Fick. They visited the family of Jahar in Russia and refused to even glance at the video of Tamerlan’s sidewalk arrest that Aunt Maret was begging them to watch. (So she says and I have no reason to think she would make it up and anyway she said it in sworn testimony.)

Makes you want to yell “Podstava!”

Truth and Reconciliation Committees

You can, without so much as a by-your-leave, start a Truth and Reconciliation Committee today. We need to get at the truth. Here at GumshoeNews that is practically all we do. And after four years, we have earned some “authority” for doing it.

Mark my words, if you start up a Truth thingie, and let the neighbourhood know about it, you will be a sought-after authority in no time flat. The job consists of letting it be known that you will listen to new information and will, in some way, put it on file.

There is precedent starting with the TRC that was established in South Africa in 1990 to make way for the newly racially-integrated state.  Persons — mostly Black – told what had been done to them.  The accused – mostly white – could voluntarily come forward to admit to it and apologize for it. Legislation for that TRC provided an extra motive: Please confess or face indictment.

If you start an informal TRC you won’t have that advantage. And you won’t have the power of subpoena. But that’s OK, we’ve got to start somewhere. Your community library will probably let you use a room for meetings.

In fact, a setting like that may cause the perps to feel safer about showing up to confess.  Another place you could stage a meeting is a bar or at the supermarket, hard by the freezer case.

Go on, try it with a bunch of friends just to say you’ve done it. I tried it once on the steps of the state house. Nobody showed up but I’ll try it again.

Pre-emptive Strike in Self-Defense

Personally I feel my days are numbered, because “they” are going to get me. It’s not too far out to think that. Consider this comment for Paul Verdier, MD, in his very revealing 1977 book, Brainwashing and the Cults:

“When a person has undergone a severe emotional experience – as, for example, in fear – it is common knowledge that [he/she] is then more receptive to new patterns of thought and behavior. Back in the twelfth century whenever the Mongols wished to invade a new territory, they invariably preceded their invasion with a campaign of terror. During this preliminary campaign, inhabitants were reduced to a state of fear and rendered immobile. The Mongols would then take walled city after walled city without any organized opposition from the citizens.” [Emphasis added]

I don’t really know who “they” are, but I’m quite sure that our covert agencies are among their minions. So can we act against them violently along the lines of a pre-emptive strike? I believe you would be arrested for such a thing, but could hope that the well-established right to self-defense would prevail.

The high Court of Australia laid down this test in the 1987 case, Zecevic v DPP:

“The question to be asked in the end is simple. It is whether the accused believed upon reasonable grounds that it was necessary in self-defence to do what he did. If he had that belief and there were reasonable grounds for it, or if the jury is left in reasonable doubt about the matter, then he is entitled to an acquittal.”

Hosti Humani Generis

Going even further out on a limb, there is the right of people to go after a party that is so bad it can be called “the enemy of mankind.” This used to be accepted part of law, called by Cicero hosti humani generis.

An example of how this law was applied in admiralty courts is that slavers (running a slave trade) after the international law forbade the slave trade, could be arrested without regard to national jurisdiction. The slaver had no protection from his own nation if another nation felt like grabbing him on the high seas.

The gist of it is that anyone who does such terrible things is fair game. Hmm. What of someone who knocks down skyscrapers killing 3,000 people? Or who tries to arrange the stages the killing of a lad in a boat type thing?

Outlawry

I will discuss this in a video below. It is like hosti humani generis – there’s a monster out there who can’t be caught by police, so the community is obliged to catch him if they can. Meanwhile anyone who feeds him or harbors him commits a crime by so doing.

Grand Juries

Please listen up. Grand jury is the name of the game. You can forsake all of the above options in favour of this one which is totally, unabashedly legal.

The name grand means not petit. A petit jury is the one we have had since Magna Carta in 1215 where a jury of your peers, to the tune of 12 men, tries your case. A grand jury is a bunch of people in the community – 24, actually – who are empanelled in the same way as a petit jury, such as by being chosen from the list of registered voters.

These never try a case, never decide if John Doe is guilty or innocent.  Rather, they listen to reports, even crude rumors. Then they investigate to decide whether it’s worth indicting the suspect. All of this takes place in secret to protect the suspect against whom a rumor may have been started maliciously.

If you serve on this grand jury, you can subpoena witnesses, who must keep it all confidential and not bring a lawyer with them. You can also interrogate the suspect and she too is not allowed to have a lawyer present. Will wonders never cease.

The point of grand juries that society has the job of identifying crime in its midst. Society must look around and notice what is amiss.  For instance, you can send your information to the Grand Jury foreman of your state right now. Trust me: the attorney general should not have the main say. The people have the say. State AG’s have been illegally taking away the citizen’s authority.  (Federally, the DoJ is completely outrageous on this.)

Even an amateur, informal “grand jury” that you hold in your kitchen can write up an indictment on anyone who you think needs to be indicted. Don’t publicize the names, but insist that the state review it.

All will be well if you understand that criminals should never be allowed to get away with wrecking society because the apparatus of indicting them has become corrupted.

Mommy! Mommy! Help me! The Grand Jury is starting to do its job! Eeeks!

–Mary W Maxwell has illusions of stardom on Youtube. She invites you to watch this “show” filmed in the Editor’s garden in Melbourne: