Tag Archives: ACLU needed in Dickinson North Dakota

The American Civil Liberties Union In North Dakota

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When I was a kid growing up in Florida, my family had a subscription to the newspaper the Daytona Beach News Journal.  I didn’t like to read very much, I thought at the time, but I did in fact read a lot.  When I was about 12 or 13, I would read the Daytona Beach News Journal, and I would become angry, irritated, annoyed, incredulous, or amused at the news stories.

I still remember the first times that I read about the American Civil Liberties Union and the impressions that I had.  In reading about the American Civil Liberties Union, I would usually have to stop reading the sentence that I was on, go back, and start reading again from the beginning to make sure that I was reading this correctly.

“They are doing what?”, I would think to myself, “Let me read this headline again.  Let me start over reading this again.  This can’t be right.”  The ACLU was always doing the exact opposite of what a normal person would do, it seemed to me when I was a kid.  Any weird thing that a person was doing, that all normal people were condemning or trying to stop, the ACLU would be defending them.

It wasn’t until I started reading some articles about Jewish attorneys defending Neo-Nazis or White Supremacists, or the ACLU defending Neo-Nazis or White Supremacists, that I began to more seriously consider and think about what these attorneys were doing and why.

You would think that Neo-Nazis or White Supremacists would be the worst enemies of the Jews, Jewish attorneys, or the ACLU.  Why would these people want to defend Neo-Nazis or White Supremacists?  From thinking about it, and reading what the attorneys said, the attorneys had the belief that everyone was entitled to equal protection and equal treatment under the laws of the United States.

I began to see the point of what the attorneys and the ACLU were doing.  Even though a person, their beliefs, and their actions could be repulsive to an individual, group, or majority of people, everyone was entitled to fair and equal treatment under the law.

Thinking about this more, “Why did some attorneys and the ACLU, seem to go out of their way to defend the most hated, controversial, or disreputable people?”  My conclusion came to be, that in order to ensure that everyone, everywhere in the United States had equal rights, equal treatment, had due process of law, and received fair trails, that one of the ways to achieve this was to see to it, and it make it public, that even the most hated, controversial, or indefensible individual was entitled to equal rights, equal treatment, equal protection, a complete legal defense, and that the rights of any individual would not be abridged.

Another way to put this, is that in order to make sure that the laws in the United States are used correctly and applied correctly, and in order to make sure that the Constitution of the United States and its Amendments are followed, particular attention and effort has to be made in extreme legal cases, where it is likely or possible that the law may not be used or applied correctly, to make sure that it is.

It wasn’t until I got older, probably not until I was in my 40s, that I realized through life experience, that the “majority opinion” was not always right, and in fact the “majority opinion” has been one of the most destructive and harmful elements of civilization throughout history.  I began to realize and appreciate more that the founders of the United States tried to build into the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Amendments provisions that would protect individuals from the “majority opinion” or “the mob”.

Examples of cases where the majority opinion or the mob was allowed to determine an outcome are: The crucifiction of Jesus Christ; the conquests of the indigenous peoples during colonization of the world; the dispossession of the Native Americans; slavery of Black people; Holocaust of World War II; internment of Japanese civilians during World War II;  segregation of Black people;  Apartheid in South Africa.

Now, the people of the United States would not openly try to relocate to a new area, take away the land from the people already living there, and murder the people already living there, without the expectation of being charged and tried for theft and murder.  However, the majority opinion, or the majority opinion of the privileged class, during colonization or pioneering was that you could take land from indigenous people and kill them.  The majority opinion at the time, is not always correct in hindsight.

The American Civil Liberties Union has often taken an unpopular, greatly opposed, minority position on issues, lost many court case over these issues, but helped to change the popular and legal opinion on these issues, which we now take for granted.  For instance, in the 1920s when the ACLU was formed, it litigated for people to have the right to meet, organize, and form labor unions.  At that time, author Upton Sinclair was arrested at a labor union rally for merely attempting to read aloud the First Amendment to the Constitution.

In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act was passed which affirmed the right of workers to unionize.  In 1937, the Supreme Court ruled that “peaceable assembly for lawful discussion cannot be made a crime”, which affirmed the right of people to assemble and discuss unionization, but was also the beginning of the end of many state and local laws preventing people from meeting and engaging in discussions that the local majority did not agree with.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the ACLU and the NAACP engaged in litigation and support for the removal of segregation in public facilities, private facilities open to the public, and in public schools.  Segregation existed through the period of slavery, after the Civil War, and into the 1950s and 1960s due to the majority opinion, or the majority opinion of the ruling class, to just go ahead and continue long established racist policies.  Even though the majority opinion at the time in local areas was to leave things as they were, we now see in hindsight that the majority opinion is not always correct.

The ACLU has a long history of calling attention to and litigating against police misconduct.  The ACLU was involved in court cases that upheld the right of individuals to be represented by an attorney, the right to have an attorney present during questioning, the right of legal representation to indigent persons, the right to not be unlawfully detained, the right of individuals to be informed by the police of their Constitutional rights, and the requirement of police to obtain a warrant before searching someone’s home.

In North Dakota, the offices of the ACLU are located in Fargo.  Jennifer Cook is listed as the Policy Director, and Jen Petersen as the Communications Director.  If you go to the website http://www.aclund.org, then click on the “about” tab, then click on the “staff” tab, then click on each of these women’s names, you can read their short biographies.  The Executive Director for the ACLU in North Dakota is listed as Heather Smith.  However, Heather Smith is also listed as the Executive Director of the ACLU in South Dakota.  You can go to the ACLU of South Dakota website and read the short biography of Heather Smith.

This blog post, my previous blog post, and perhaps many of my previous blog posts, are the beginnings of my pleas to the ACLU to have more involvement in Dickinson, North Dakota and to pay more attention to what is going on here. It is kind of ironic, that Fargo which is the most progressive and liberal town in North Dakota has the ACLU, and western North Dakota which is the furthest behind, has no or hardly any ACLU presence.

I ask all local people in Dickinson, and people in western North Dakota, to urge the ACLU to become more involved in Dickinson and pay more attention to what is going on in Dickinson.  The ACLU does more than just litigate, it also has many ways to bring attention to and address problems of injustice and unfair treatment.

Dickinson Needs The American Civil Liberties Union

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I am still very angry about what the City of Dickinson Police Department and the Fargo Police Department did recently.  Even though it has been several days since I wrote three long blog posts about it, not only am I not done, I don’t even know where to begin.

There is plenty enough crime going on in Dickinson every day, committed by habitual career criminals, without the Dickinson Police trying to create crimes and make criminals out of law abiding citizens.  I will begin with two brief examples.

Manish Maharjan, a recent graduate from Dickinson State University, and a key employee of a local well respected company, was recently arrested after he responded to an advertisement placed by an 18 year old girl on the internet.  This was a fake advertisement created and posted by the Dickinson Police Department.  After Manish responded, the Dickinson Police started making up fake scenarios about the girl being under 18 in order to get Manish into a lot of trouble.

Like myself, and everyone else that I know, we have found it very difficult to meet women in Dickinson because there is a shortage of women.  The ratio of men to women in Dickinson is approximately 3:1.  It is very, very common in Dickinson, for men to look for women to date on internet dating sites.  With very few women on any or all of the internet dating sites, men then go look on other internet sites such as Craigslist or Backpage.

The Dickinson Police know full well the situation in Dickinson.  When they place a fake advertisement on the internet in Dickinson posing as a woman offering sex, they know that they will get a response from many different men in Dickinson.  Arresting and charging men in Dickinson when they go to meet a woman that they contacted on the internet, does not help anyone in Dickinson.  But the Police in Dickinson went further than this, they made up a fake scenario after contact had been made, so that the man would face a Class A felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Like I said, there is plenty enough crime happening in Dickinson every day, without the Police in Dickinson trying to create crimes and make criminals out of law abiding citizens.  Why are the Police in Dickinson trying to conceive, plan, and carry out schemes to make criminals out of citizens in Dickinson, so that they lose their jobs in Dickinson and go to jail for many years?

The second example that I will give, happened when I first came to Dickinson in 2011.  I got into the habit of going to the Paragon Bowling Alley bar after work in the evening.  I was playing pool when two men that I did not know walked in and wanted to play pool.  Within about fifteen minutes, they brought up drugs, and then kept asking about where to get drugs.  I was drinking, not thinking, and I almost gave them the phone number of someone that I knew who used any kind of drug he could get.

I suspected that these two guys that came in and wanted to play pool, and began talking about drugs and asking where to buy drugs, were undercover police officers.  Either way, I didn’t care, I just wanted them to shut up about where to get drugs.  Which is why I almost gave them my acquaintance Chris’ phone number.  I didn’t think that they were trying to frame me for being a drug dealer, or for trafficking drugs, but that is exactly what they were trying to do.  What good would this have done to arrest and charge me with being a drug dealer or trafficking drugs, when I neither used nor sold drugs?

The overall point is, What The Fuck Is Wrong With The Police In Dickinson, North Dakota?  Why or how would this be good or beneficial to arrest and charge me with drug dealing, when I neither used or sold drugs?  Why or how would this be good or beneficial to arrest and charge Manish Maharjan with Patronizing a Minor for Commercial Sex Activity, when he never intended or sought to have sex with a minor?

The answer seems to be that the Police in Dickinson, North Dakota are corrupt.  The Police in Dickinson either hate people, get some kind of perverse thrill in arresting and charging law abiding people, or they so want to get ahead in their career that they will conceive, plan, and carry out schemes of entrapment.

I did not like it, and I thought that it was wrong what happened with the death of  Eric Haider in Dickinson.  Eric Haider went missing from a job site in Dickinson, with some evidence that he might have been buried there at the job site where he had been working.  Eric Haider was missing for two years, before his parents hired a private investigation company who located his remains buried on the job site where he had been working.  If the Mayor or Chief of Police in Dickinson would have gone missing while on the job, everyone involved would have been questioned repeatedly over days, weeks, and months, and no stone would have been left unturned.  This was not done for Eric.

I did not like it, and I thought that it was wrong, when the new principal of Trinity High School in Dickinson, Thomas Sander, had been questioned for two days by the Dickinson Police who used “sleep deprivation, intimidation, bullying, threats, deception, lies and the withholding of bathroom facilities, food and water,” until a confession was coerced out of him that he set Trinity High School on fire.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives had to over rule the Dickinson Police Department on this and try to exonerate the new principal Thomas Sander.  The City of Dickinson was then sued by Thomas Sander for “violations of the Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, supervisor liability, false arrest and false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, intentional infliction of emotional distress, abuse of process, gross negligence, willful misconduct, deceit, unconstitutional practice and policy, unconstitutional discipline, training and supervision, defamation, vicarious liability, and deliberate fabrication and material omissions in an arrest warrant affidavit.”

I have looked up and read other court cases in Dickinson, where people from prominent and wealthy families in Dickinson have committed very bad crimes, heinous crimes, and have received very, very light sentences.  I have also looked up court records of people from prominent and wealthy families in Dickinson where I know that they have been convicted of several crimes from reading newspaper articles and other sources, but the NDCourts.gov website containing the court records repository has been expunged for these individuals.

This is why I think that the American Civil Liberties Union needs to have a permanent ongoing involvement in Dickinson, North Dakota.  Ordinary people in Dickinson who are not from prominent and wealthy local families are at great risk of being “railroaded”, “set up”, and “framed” in Dickinson, especially people who do not have family or relatives in Dickinson to make sure that they receive fair and legal treatment, that their rights are not violated, that they have adequate legal representation, that they receive due process of law, and a fair trial.