Fascism Prevails Again: Hung Jury in Pepper Spray Case

The horror of American fascism has again sunk to greater depths with a second hung jury in the pepper spraying of forest activists' eyes and face by a federal jury in a San Francisco courtroom.

This time we had a verdict of 6 to 2, with 2 fascists insisting that allowing the police to put pepper spray is not such a bad thing, it is not so painful (did they try it on themselves?!) and the protesters deserved it, which is to say, the First Amendment right to free speech and right to petition for redress of grievances (protest) be damned!

The plaintiff protesters were willing to accept a split verdict, but the fascist attorneys, representing the goons of the Humboldt County Sheriffs Department, would not. If neither side accepts a split verdict in a federal case, which otherwise requires a unanimous verdict, then it is hung jury, by definition, favoring the defense, as the horror of pepper spray applied to eyes with Q-tips and direct, close range pepper spray on the face is thus still allowed.

The plaintiffs are considering a third trial, and they should certainly demand another trial, as all our lives are on the line. If the police can get away with this, anyone else is next, and the next victims will certainly not be a handful of people locked down to protest logging of ancient trees, a worthy cause, but anyone else the government does not like, which is to say, the workingclass and its allies.

Every single member of the Humboldt Sheriff's Department and the Humboldt County District Attorney's office who supports this criminal use of pepper spray should be fired immediately and all attorneys who support this use of pepper spray should be disbarred immediately and forbidden to ever practice law again, as they are all criminally insane. The use of pepper spray by anyone should be banned.

We have seen too many verdicts like this in "progressive" California (not part of the old Confederacy), usually in state civil rights cases protesting police brutality, where the jury sides with the police in favor of obvious police brutality, the most famous being the beating of Rodney King and his passenger, with a witness' videotape rolling in the early 1990s. There have been many others since then, including right here in San Francisco and Alameda Counties.

Clearly, the middle class who usually sit on these juries need to be told that to vote for police brutality is to vote for fascism and is to be viewed as a Ku Klux Klan jury. In other words, the attorneys for the plaintiffs have been too nice These jurors need to be put on the spot.

They need to be told exactly what is the meaning of civil rights. Every dab of pepper spray on a person's eyes and every bit of pepper spray dabbed on a face is a horrifying civil rights violation, each worth millions of dollars. Every single blow with the fists, feet, regular sticks or taser guns by a cop against a human being whom everyone admits is not threatening anyone is worth a million dollars as each blow is a clear civil rights violation. Hog-tying anyone is a gross civil rights violation, worth at least a million dollars. Murdering anyone who is clearly no threat is certainly a civil rights violation, worth much more than a million dollars.

This is all the bitter harvest of not having a serious labor movement in this country. It is clear that there are far too many people who have not seen any struggle in their lives and who have not experienced any suffering, sitting on these juries, supporting horrifying police brutality. These bourgeois Babbitts sitting on these juries need to be given stern lectures on the meaning of civil rights and the horror of being viewed as a Ku Klux Klan jury if they oppose civil rights.