You may remember the radical leftists who vandalized a Confederate statue in Durham. The event was widely covered. It was videotaped and the vandals boasted about what they had done.
One of the activists who toppled a Confederate statue in Durham, N.C., on Monday night is a member of an extreme leftist group that supports the totalitarian regime in North Korea and wants to abolish capitalism.
Taqiyah Thompson, a student at North Carolina Central University, was arrestedTuesday following a press conference in which she defended the actions of the demonstrators and equated police officers to Confederate soldiers and Ku Klux Klan members.
“I did the right thing,” she said. “Everyone who was there — the people did the right thing. The people will continue to keep making the right choices until every Confederate statue is gone, until white supremacy is gone. That statue is where it belongs. It needs to be in the garbage.”
And all the vandals walked.
Why? Judicial nullification by Democrat Judge Fred S. Battaglia appears to be a big part of it. And there's probably a certain amount of prosecutorial nullification too.
An admiring Atlantic article documents the farce.
Even though videos of the statue’s destruction appeared to show the first defendant Dante Strobino, at the protest, the assistant DA didn’t put an eyewitness on the stand who placed Strobino at the scene, and Battaglia wouldn’t permit her to enter an identification by a detective who examined the video. When she tried to recall an earlier witness she had dismissed, the judge refused. As evidence of conspiracy, she produced only a grainy photo taken after the statue came down, of a car with a ladder on top. With no official evidence in the record placing Strobino at the protest, and only the photo to prove conspiracy, Battaglia dismissed the charges against Strobino.
A second trial, for Peter Gilbert, unfolded at greater length, but with similar results. The prosecution called the same witnesses, beginning with a resident who had been driving by and taken a video that she uploaded to Facebook. The video was later published by the AP and Washington Post. This time around, Holmes convinced the judge to disqualify it by pointing out that that the video could have been edited. Battaglia demanded to know why the prosecution hadn’t obtained the video directly from the witness, who had been subpoenaed to appear. The county security manager testified that a surveillance camera had been trained on the statue, but that temporary scaffolding had blocked it. The judge also refused to allow the detective to identify Gilbert solely on the basis of his appearance on video, saying the video was unclear, and noting that once again, no eyewitness had placed Gilbert at the scene.
“Yes, we are going to follow the rules of evidence,” Battaglia scolded the prosecutor. He also noted that even if the photo of the alleged getaway car had been clear, the state offered no evidence that the ladder on the car was the one used in the alleged crime, and that even if it had done that, the most it might have proven was that the driver was an accessory after the fact—not a charge brought in the case. Once again, the defense moved to dismiss the case, and again Battaglia granted the motion.
You get the idea. #Resistance. The voters elected Battaglia. It's up to them if they want to restore the rule of law or legalize vandalism by leftist racists. The question is, do we have the rule of law in this country... or the rule of the left?