Posted: 2024.10.12
On the windows of the famous building at 102 Petty France in the City of Westminster, just behind St. James’s Park, in the heart of London, are inscribed these words:
That excessive Baile ought not
to be required nor excessive Fines
imposed nor cruel and unusuall
Punishments inflicted.That Jurors ought to be duely
Impannelled and returned.That all Grants and Promises of
Fines and Forfeiture of particular
Persons before Conviction are
illegall and void.Bill of Rights, 1688
When, on a gloomy Saturday, I read these powerful words, I could not help but succumb to the natural response of a freedom-loving American. An incandescent light inside my head guided me unexpectedly to a happy place. I was excited; I smiled; I took pictures of many of the written pronouncements on display on the windows of the building. In my estimation, it is without question that the enshrinement of such categorically inviolate human rights reserved onto themselves by the citizens of England helped create the environment which propelled that small island nation forward to become, at her height, the largest empire known to man since the Roman Empire.
I reflected on those words as I walked through St. James’s Park in the middle of what appeared to be a race of some sort to raise awareness for a cause or other, with crowds of people – young and old, men and women, family and strangers alike, many of them wearing pink – joined together as contestants and making their way toward the finish line at The Queen Victoria Memorial, in front of Buckingham Palace. As is often the case in such moments of reflection, my mind inevitably turned to my own country. I contemplated the difference between the words that I had just digested at Petty France and the treatment of the criminally accused in America. It occurred to me that my country is blessed to have descended from the citizens of that great empire and borrowed from her many of the basic concepts of human rights which so particularly moved me on this day. This particular feature of the English Bill of Rights that guarantees the right to non-excessive bail was captured in the eighth of the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States which became the Bill of Rights. The American text is nearly identical to its English counterpart; it provides:
Excessive bail shall not be required,
nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel
and unusual punishments inflicted.
Upon further reflection, my mind turned to a famous criminal case unfolding in federal court in the Southern District of New York where Sean Combs (popularly known as Puff Daddy or P-Diddy), a record executive, record producer and rapper has been arrested and charged with a slew of alleged crimes that are on the surface alarming but in substance thin. Mr. Combs sought bail but has been denied repeatedly by several judges of that court despite his offer to surrender his passport and post bond worth tens of millions of dollars. According to news reports, the first judicial officer to deny Mr. Combs bail was U.S. Magistrate Judge Robyn Tarnofsky. This magistrate sided with the prosecutors’ speculative argument that Mr. Combs posed a risk if he were to be released for home confinement. U.S. District Judge Andrew Carter was the next. He denied another request for bail despite an offer by Mr. Combs of a bond package that included $50 million bond, house arrest, GPS monitoring and strict limitations on visitors. Inexplicably, Judge Carter ruled that Mr. Combs would need to await trial in jail at the Metropolitan Detention Center, in what many people consider extremely difficult and inhumane housing conditions. This is a notorious prison full of hardcore criminals who may jump at any opportunity to do harm to Mr. Combs, even to take his life. These hardcore criminals can be described as “hyper aggressive individuals with deep-seated criminal impulses who suffer from basic emotional faults,” according to a report describing hard core criminals. Days later, Judge Arun Subramanian similarly denied another bail request by Mr. Combs.
We must take a moment to consider how cruel and callous these judicial actions and the prosecutors’ conduct are. Mr. Combs has not been accused of murdering anyone; he has not been shown to have a propensity to commit murder. He has not been shown to threaten to kill or harm witnesses. The prosecution would have the public believe that a person as accomplished as Mr. Combs, who pulled himself up from poverty by his bootstraps and became a billionaire, somehow deserves to have his life put in jeopardy by living with hardcore criminals well before he is convicted of any crime by a jury of his peers.
Despite the hyperbolic and repetitive sex trafficking charges announced against him, there does not appear to be sufficient objective facts to which reasonable people can point as evidence that Mr. Combs committed a federal crime warranting the over-the-top and destructive raids which the Department of Homeland Security conducted at two of his homes six months before his arrest. The only damning piece of evidence against Mr. Combs so far appears to be a video, allegedly leaked to the Cable News Network (CNN) by the prosecutors, showing Mr. Combs repeatedly kicking his then-girlfriend as she laid on the ground in a hotel hallway. But, the video or the events depicted in it are not relevant to the charges against him, although prosecutors will seek to use it at trial to prejudice the jury against him. It is difficult to watch the video without having negative reactions toward Mr. Combs. It is damning evidence of a character flaw. And, it may be evidence of a crime in California, the situs of the apparent assault. But, it is not evidence of any crime in New York or under federal law. Moreover, it is likely that the statute of limitations has run on that purported state crime, which begs the question: Why is the federal government spending so much resources to go after a man who is a job creator and who poses no real or immediate threat to his community?
The alleged sex trafficking allegations are flimsy at best. It is well-documented in the media and has been known for decades that Mr. Combs has hosted wild parties, and it has been widely discussed that people attending these parties probably took drugs and engaged in sex, some of them with more than one partner. These were well-attended parties, often by the most famous of celebrities and public figures, and reportedly among the most sought after invitations. The Feds now tell us that these parties were known as “Freak Offs”. Some of the scenarios described to have occurred at those parties – consenting adults engaging in conduct that may be lewd and distasteful – are probably not unlike what happens on many weekend nights at fraternity houses on college and university campuses across the country. If those parties are worthy of the federal government’s attention, the federal government is going to need to build many more prisons than our deficit-spending budget can afford.
Prosecutors, especially when they have a weak case, have an affinity for pre-trial detention. It is a tactic used to inflict emotional and psychological distress upon the accused, to weaken his resolve and force him to accept a plea. They often masquerade this desire to break the accused by claiming he may run from justice or may try to intimidate witnesses if he is released on bail. Rarely is this ever true save perhaps in organized crime cases involving the mafia and others like them. It does not take a rocket scientist to see these tactics at play in Mr. Combs’s case. If Mr. Combs was going to flee from justice, he would have done so in the many months between the time he learned he was under investigation and the time of his arrest.[1] But, he did not flee, despite having access to a private plane and ample financial resources. On the contrary, one recent news report from a few months ago showed Mr. Combs at an airport with his private plane. If indeed he traveled abroad but returned home, it would demonstrate a desire on his part to face the charges he assuredly knew were coming. Similarly, he would have intimidated witnesses during all of these months of the investigation if he was inclined to do so. We have seen nothing from the prosecutors evidencing he has done that. Then, what is then, the real purpose of the pre-trial detention? How one federal magistrate and two federal district court judges come to believe under the circumstances that Mr. Combs is a flight risk or poses a danger to the community is beyond comprehension.[2]
It is easy to understand the desire which compels prosecutors to engage in such shameful conduct. They want to win. Apparently, at all cost. What is infinitely more difficult to understand is the poor sense that judges today demonstrate in handling such cases. Why do judges, who should be the leading sentries in the protection and safeguard of the Constitution and the rights of the accused, act as if they are an extension of the prosecutors’ office? Why did they rubber stamp the prosecution’s motions in this instance? Even in some countries in which the judicial system does not emanate from England, there is a presumption that bail will be granted. Admittedly, it does not help that the Supreme Court of the United States muddied the waters on this issue, diluting an absolute Constitutional right to give the government the power to deny bail to certain criminal defendants.[3] In doing so, the Supreme Court deferred to the judgment of lower court judges many of whom, unfortunately, as the Combs case and others have shown, have not demonstrated possession of the level of wisdom or sophistication necessary to handle so solemn a duty. The Supreme Court attempted to place safeguards to ensure that the lower courts would not go overboard in denying bail as such, including for example, the right to appeal the denial of bail, but these safeguards have not prevented Mr. Combs from being subjected to inhumane conditions of detention for more than twenty-six days since his arrest on September 16. If he does not receive appellate relief before his trial, he will remain in that filth of a prison with his life in the balance through the end of his trial, currently set for four weeks beginning May 5, 2025.[4] That means, if he survives assassination or debilitating assaults, Mr. Combs may end up spending more than nine months in prison before a determination of guilt by a jury of his peers.
The American people should be outraged at that. Such ill treatment of a fellow American by our government, in our name, before conviction, in violation of the Constitution should not be countenanced. To remain silent is tacit approval of the injustice perpetrated by the prosecutors and judges. If every American fails to stand up against injustice and unfairness even when it is being done to those who we do not like or those who do not live up to our ideals, injustice and unfairness proliferate and there will be no one to stand up for us, to be there for us when it is our turn to be persecuted.
It does not matter how powerful you are when they come for you. Witness, for example, the trial and tribulations to which former and future President Donald J. Trump was subjected by the same forces – simply because he has refused to play their games and has been vocal about changing our federal government to save our country. Witness the conduct of the New York Supreme Court judge that presided over the alleged fraud case against Mr. Trump, his two adult sons, and their company. The trial was an absolute freak show.[5] This supposed judge did not bother to hide his enjoyment of being in the limelight, of having power, however fleeting, over a former President of the United States. He felt smug at his newfound fifteen minutes of fame. He shamelessly played to the traditional media’s hatred of Mr. Trump by siding with the prosecution on every motion, on every point of law, and in every ruling in a case that never should have seen the light of day.[6] Never before had a government in the United States brought a fraud case in a private transaction involving sophisticated private parties, where all of the parties obtained the benefit of their bargain, and no one lost money or complained.[7]
On the contrary, all of the parties made money on the deals over which Mr. Trump and his families were accused of fraud. The Attorney General of New York should have been sanctioned for bringing so farcical a case, wasting the court’s resources and the taxpayer’s money. Instead, the judge rewarded her by giving her every benefit of the doubt even when it seemed clear that the law could not be stretched as much as she tried to stretch it in a naked attempt to destroy President Trump and weaken him politically. Fortunately for our country, these usurpers got to see the unbending devotion to fixing our country that the rest of America saw on that fateful day in July 2024 in a field in Butler, Pennsylvania, where an assassin’s bullet came within millimeters of taking the President’s life and yet stood up with blood on his face, during a moment of uncertainty, pumped his fist, and reminded us patriots to never surrender, never give up.
One of the basic functions of a judge is to serve as a gatekeeper for the integrity of the court, the justice system, to administer justice fairly, under the law, impartially and without bias. That concept, unfortunately, seems quaint today. In those cases we have watched in New York, the judges not only failed to perform this basic function, they extended cases that should have been dismissed beyond even the prosecutor’s wildest imagination with lawless rulings, issued without regard to integrity or the Constitution. This brings me to another inscription on the glass windows of that famous building in London; it reads:
No free man shall in future
be arrested or imprisoned or
disseised of his freehold, liberties
or free customs, or outlawed or
exiled or victimized in any other
way, neither will we attack him
or send anyone to attack him,
except by the lawful judgment of
his peers or by the law of the land.To no one will we sell, to no one
Will we refuse or delay right
or justice.Magna Carta, 1215
Contrary to the above-posted ideals, Mr. Combs has been arrested and imprisoned, dispossessed of his liberties, victimized and attacked not by the lawful of judgment of his peers or by the law of the land, but by leaks and innuendoes, by an aggressive prosecutor and thoughtless federal judges. If Mr. Combs committed a crime, let him be punished after conviction by a jury of his peers in accordance with the Bill of Rights, not one day before that.
It is worth remembering that the U.S. Bill of Rights was a cornerstone of the foundation of our nation. Our constitution would not have been approved without guarantees that these rights would be enshrined in the founding document. Like the foundation of a building, if the Bill of Rights falls, the entire edifice that sits atop, this country, will also fall. We Americans who love this country must ensure that it does not fall. We must prove ourselves worthy of the constitutional republic which our forefathers left us and the basic human rights which they saw fit to reserve onto themselves and onto succeeding generations. Let us dedicate ourselves to being vocal in the fight to preserve these rights and safeguard the republic for ourselves and for future generations. Let us end the tyranny of the judges and prosecutors. A great people deserves nothing less.
Wherever Law ends,
tyranny begins.John Locke, 1689
-The Consul Regent
Footnotes:
[1] Mr. Combs could benefit from adding a more aggressive lawyer to his legal defense team, particularly one with a strong record of beating federal prosecutors. Mr. Rusty Hardin comes to mind despite his advanced age. Mr. Combs should offer Mr. Hardin whatever Mr. Hardin desires to coax him to leave Houston for the enterprise. Ms. Sydney Katherine Powell should be considered as an addition as well. Her recent legal spats had more to do with politics rather than the law. These two could complement rather than replace the existing team. The attendant expenses of two additional lawyers are small in comparison to the consequences of a conviction
[2] This is not a defense of Mr. Combs. The Consul Regent does not know Mr. Combs. Rather, this is a defense of the Constitution of the United States, particularly the Bill of Rights, the protection of which extends to all Americans.
[3]See, for example, United States v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 739 (1987).
[4] As of this writing, a 3-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is considering Mr. Combs’s appeal of the denial of his bail requests.
[5] New York Supreme Court is the trial level court in New York.
[6] No law was broken; the case should have been dismissed at the outset for failure to state a cause of action.
[7] On the contrary, all of the parties made money on the deals over which Mr. Trump and his families were accused of fraud.
The Consul Regent 