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Weather: A 10 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms before 8am. Partly sunny, with a high near 75. Breezy. Tuesday Night: Mostly cloudy, with a low around 61.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
The Palm Coast City Council meets in workshop at 9 a.m. at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here.
The Flagler County School Board meets at 1 p.m. in an information workshop. The board meets in the training room on the third floor of the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. Board meeting documents are available here.
The Flagler County Affordable Housing Committee meets at 3 p.m. at the Emergency Operations Center (EOC), 1769 E Moody Blvd, Bldg 3, Bunnell. Eduardo Diaz Cordero is the Housing Program Coordinator.
The Flagler County School Board meets at 6 p.m. in Board Chambers on the first floor of the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. Board meeting documents are available here. The meeting is open to the public and includes public speaking segments.
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry: Flagler Beach United Methodist Church‘s food pantry is open today from 9:30 a.m. to noon at 1500 S. Daytona Ave, Flagler Beach. The church’s mission is to provide nourishment and support in a welcoming, respectful environment. To find us, please turn at the corner of 15 Street and S. Daytona Ave, pull into the grass parking area and enter the green door.
Budgeting by Values: A Free, Virtual Class to Learn Budgeting Skills, 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. every fourth Tuesday of the month organized by Flagler Cares and Truist Bank, and presented by Financial Inclusion Leader Vladimir Rodriguez. To sign up or get information, call 386/319-9483, text 386/986-0107, or email [email protected].
The NAACP Flagler Branch’s General Membership Meeting is scheduled for 6 p.m. at the African American Cultural Society, 4422 North U.S. Highway 1, Palm Coast (just north of Whiteview Parkway). The meeting is open to the public, including non-members. To become a member, go here.
Book Dragons, the Kids’ Book Club at the Flagler Beach Public Library meets at 5 p.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach.
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy, 8 p.m. at Cinematique Theater, 242 South Beach Street, Daytona Beach. General admission is $8.50. Every Tuesday and on the first Saturday of every month the Random Acts of Insanity Comedy Improv Troupe specializes in performing fast-paced improvised comedy.
Notably: So this is what Israel has in mind when it claims to be working for peace in gaza. This is what J.D. Vance, who is about five times the authoritarian Trump is, has gone to ratify on his last junket at Palestinians’ expense: they call it the “yellow line,” the border that has now split Gaza in half, or not quite half: the destroyed Palestinian half where Hamas still has some authority, and the destroyed Israeli-occupied portion, which accounts for 58 percent of Gaza. Keep in mind, we are talking about a total area of 141 square miles, or basically Palm Coast plus the barrier island. But with 58 percent of that in Israeli control, we’re down to 59 square miles, or essentially Palm Coast north of State 100 (no Seminole Woods, no Quail Hollow, no Colbert Lane). Two million Palestinians are herded there, about 90 percent of them homeless. The 2 million have now been shuffled and reshuffled on the west side of the yellow line, along the Mediterranean. Two million people in that sliver. (Al-Jazeera has a map here.) The remaining strip of Palestinians is itself subdivided into five segments, an Israeli line running across each to ensure the sort of balkanization that prevails in the West Bank, where you need a doctorate in mosaics to understand the shattered map Israelis force Palestinians to live under. Israel is allegedly inviting Palestinians to move into its zone, under its control, as if Palestinians were little chess pieces (as one Palestinian described it) with no care or attachment to any place. It’s not much different than how the American government carried out genocidal population transfers (later imitated by Stalin in Soviet Russia) with Native Americans, with the caveat that what piss-poor land was granted Indians was a bit larger than the open-air prison Gazans continue to live in. This is the peace the Trump plan is proposing. Israelis are supposed to further withdraw, but to a “red line” that still keeps them in control of a third of Gaza, leaving the 2 million to an area the size of Palm Coast, including the area south of 100. Put yourself in those shoes. or in these hands: “Vice President JD Vance and Jared Kushner, a son-in-law of President Trump, both said this week that the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip did not necessarily have to wait until Hamas was disarmed or no longer a threat in the territory,” the Times reports with a straight face. “A cease-fire that came into effect earlier this month divides Gaza along the so-called yellow line — between the eastern, inland half under the control of the Israeli military and the Hamas-controlled part of the enclave. Reconstruction could begin very soon in the Israeli-controlled part, the two Americans, who were on visits to Israel, told reporters.” Kushner and Vance, the Riviera brothers, giving expropriation an American twist. Alas, Palestine.
—P.T.
The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
November 2025
East Flagler Mosquito Control District Board Meeting
Flagler County Commission Evening Meeting
Nar-Anon Family Group
Palm Coast Charter Review Committee Meeting
Palm Coast City Council Meeting
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry
Groundbreaking for SMA Healthcare
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 10-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
Food Truck Tuesday
Flagler Beach Library Writers’ Club
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
For the full calendar, go here.
What impressed me most about the Palestinians’ reality was how small their world actually was and how weak and dependent they had become. “All of Palestine,” Ashrawi observed, “could be gift-wrapped and deposited in the corner of one American state.”‘ And she was speaking as an optimist. By 1991 historic Palestine had pretty much disappeared into a division among Israel, Jordan, and the occupied West Bank and Gaza. The remnants were separated from one another with no guaranteed access for Palestinians anywhere on any given day. Jerusalem, east and west, had been annexed and enlarged (to include West Bank territory) and declared Israel’s eternal capital. From the Palestinian perspective, 78 percent of historic Palestine was gone, leaving a truncated 22 percent available as the area for a Palestinian state. If you factored in all of the settlements, military installations, internal and external closures, checkpoints, and bypass roads, West Bankers and Gazans were living in a very small space indeed.
–From Aaron David Miller’s The Much Too Promised Land (2008).
Ed P says
Unless someone is living off the grid, cut off from all media, it’s impossible not to know what the opposition is against. Locally and nationally, it’s almost straight down the party line. Feels that nothing, including cease fires or reductions in domestic crime is viewed as a positive.
The opposition must recalibrate and explain their platform. In short, tell the people exactly what it is that they are for, in detail, not platitudes. What is their alternative plan?
If the current government shut down continues and federal snap benefits are delayed on November 1, what do the 41-42 million people that rely on them do? Will the states step in to cover the costs? We will know shortly as November 1 approaches.
The political gamesmanship has now become acceptably normal, allowing for homicides as well as inflicting maximum pain on Americans to what end?. Stop the finger pointing and help those that depend on a functioning government.
Pogo says
@Related
…things of a kind:
As stated — make of it what you will
https://www.bing.com/search?q=chronic+wound+definition
Ibid
https://www.bing.com/search?q=goethe+impotent+hate
MAGA’s stooges, Madison Avenue’s flunkies, Click Bait Ads by the pound, fawning dilettantes, self-congratulating winds blowing steadily; is there no time and place for these thoughts and words?
Play us off, Rita…
https://www.bing.com/search?q=doing+the+same+thing+and+expecting+different
Ray W. says
I agree with Ed P. that the “opposition” could redefine their position. But who or what is the “opposition?” In a perfect or bad world, if those on one side don’t get exactly what they want in exactly the way they want to get it, then can the other side always be “bad” and, therefore, the “opposition” to the good? In a two-party system, is one side the opposition one day and the other side the opposition on another day?
As I commonly told my children as they were growing into maturity, if someone defines right and wrong by what they want, then right and wrong can change every day because what someone wants can change every day. In this type of world, no one ever has stability. There is no common sense definition of right and wrong, only an ever-changing individuated sense of right and wrong. In my own childhood, my mother called this the “I wantie curse.” We see something we want and we begin demanding, I want, I want, I want, until we get it.
I suspect that House Republicans know exactly the position of the House Democrats. If the House Democrats are the “opposition”, why then, Ed P., should it automatically be that House Democrats have to redefine their position? Why shouldn’t House Republicans be the ones who have to redefine their position? Or both?
And can it be argued that redefining a known position is traditionally accomplished through negotiation or mediation, a process commonly called “compromise?” Can compromise suggest that both sides to a point can or should consider redefining their positions?
Does it seem to you, Ed P., that the act of forcing only one side in a two-party government to redefine its position might be the exact opposite of what our founding fathers wanted? Our founding fathers implemented checks and balances on every delegated political power so that no one person or no one faction could ever gain unlimited power for an indeterminate period of time. Shouldn’t both parties be searching for areas in which each side’s position can be redefined so that compromise can be found?
As stated in the first paragraph of Federalist Paper #1, every historical form of government known to them had been based on “accident” (meaning accident of royal birthright) or “force” (meaning political power forcibly seized by tyrants or dictators). Each historical effort at governing had failed.
Our founding fathers thought themselves unique among other societies in the world, and that theirs was the place and time to form for an experimental government founded on “reason” and “choice”, and not a government founded on “accident” or “force.”
Can it be argued that running a government based on force without possibility of compromise is, by definition, the exact opposite of what our founding fathers hoped to accomplish?
If it is true that the exercise of political power through force was anathema to our founding fathers, does it follow that should a party in power ever attempt to “force” the opposition to yield without compromise, then is it the party in power that should be the one to consider whether to redefine its position, so as not to vitiate the will of our founding fathers?
Personally, I accept Thomas Jefferson’s point, expressed in a letter to a favored nephew, someone he had raised from childhood after the nephew had been orphaned.
In Jefferson’s view, as he described it in his letter, of all the gifts from Heaven granted by God, reason was the greatest gift.
Jefferson wrote that he had waited until the nephew he loved as a son had graduated from university. Now a graduate, he wrote, it had finally become time for the nephew to use the three forms of reason that he had been taught at university to decide for himself the all-important question of whether God existed, or not.
Jefferson’s era, Jefferson’s form of thinking, is now called in academia the “Age of Reason.”
Can it be argued that we no longer live in a society that follows what academics call an “Age of Reason?” Do we live in a time that my mother called “the I wantie curse” era?
Can what we want change every day? Can our political goals change every day? Can we as a people careen through life, bouncing off wall after wall, never knowing the difference between right or wrong because what we want is constantly changing?
Egg prices go up because a new highly virulent form of bird flu mutated in a wild bird and variant virus began spreading as wild bird flocks migrated? Biden’s fault.
Gasoline prices go up because OPEC voted to significantly cut production quotas? Biden’s fault.
Afghan’s army quickly falls after Trump secretly negotiates a deal with the Taliban, a deal that requires the Afghan government to turn over the Taliban’s leader, plus 5000 more Taliban fighters? Biden’s fault.
Beef prices rise because of extreme drought that damages grazing land and reduces feed grain harvest yields? Biden’s fault.
The pandemic significantly damages economies all over the world, causing recession and disrupting supply lines? Biden’s fault.
In 2024, just after the presidential election, the stock market bumped up. One commenter called it the Trump bump, as if it was evidence of Trump’s mythical power over the economy. I pointed out that after Biden had been elected in 2020, the bump had been significantly higher than the Trump bump. But I didn’t argue that there had been a Biden bump. I argued that each event occurred amidst its own economic moment and that the election might not have been the cause of the bump at all. For example, just before the 2024 election, the Fed had cut the lending rates for the third meeting in a row, by a combined 1 full percent. Could that set of events have been the most significant reason for the bump?
Seems to me we are no longer living in an age of reason. We are living the “I wantie” curse.
For many among us today, lying and lie laundering for political gain has become a virtue. Wishing harm or even death upon “the other” has become political advantage. No one should ever be our “retribution.” People don’t deserve to have their throats slit or “need killing.”
I am old enough to remember the political compromise that was reached in 1983 to fund Social Security into the far future. I remember reading the stories about the act being about to run out of money.
A presidential commission had failed to find common ground. Rep. Dole (R) and Sen. Moynihan (D) stepped up and sought to find a new workable funding algorithm. Eventually, President Reagan and Speaker O’Neill joined the effort. A compromise was reached.
I recall reading about how the new funding scheme was designed to provide sufficient money for 50 years, based on demographic projections.
Here we are, some 42 years later and Social Security is still projected to be funded for another 7 to 10 years.
Will we ever find ground on which to compromise in order to find a new funding algorithm so that our children can believe that Social Security might still be around when they reach the age of retirement? Will some of us have to work to the age of 67, instead of the age of 65, to reach the level of full retirement? 64 instead of 62 to retire at a lesser than full retirement? Will a higher employment contribution be necessary? I don’t claim to have the answers, but something could be negotiated, in whatever form that might turn out to be.
Ray W. says
What follows is a comment about an issue that is occurring all over the country, i.e., the construction of new AI data centers, and the construction of new power plants to provide the energy that they new centers will require to operate.
There seems little reason to believe that an AI data center can’t be built here. Land in certain undeveloped sections of Flagler County is available and affordable. Ground water far from cities is available and plentiful.
Whether city or county staff is preparing for a potential proposal is unknown.
According to a news outlet called The Cloud & Hybrid Channel, in early December of last year, Meta announced its 23rd U.S. AI data center project, this one located in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Meta has four other AI data centers in foreign countries, for a total of 27 soon-to-be-completed centers. In 2024 alone, four other new American-based AI data center projects were announced.
The Richland Parish site will be built on a 2,250 acre “Franklin Farm megasite”, with a campus covering more than 4 million square feet. Up to nine buildings will be constructed. Completion should come to fruition by 2030.
According to Meta’s director of data center strategy, Kevin Janda:
“Meta is building the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible. And this data center will be an important part of that mission. … Richland Parish in Louisiana is an outstanding location for Meta to call home for a number of reasons. It provides great access to infrastructure, a reliable grid, a business-friendly climate, and wonderful community partners that have helped us move forward.”
Meta, according to the reporter, had earlier set a goal of powering each of its AI data centers by “clean and renewable” energy of whatever type. Meta already entered into an agreement with RWE to build a Louisiana solar farm capable of generating 100MW of electricity, a project that is nearing completion.
But the Louisiana project is now expected to received electrical power from a natural gas plant.
According to the story, Meta entered into a partnership with Entergy Louisiana to build in Holly Ridge, Louisiana, a three natural gas turbine combined cycle electricity plant that is expected to generate 2.26 GW of electricity. Included in the terms of the deal are infrastructure improvements that include two new substations, six new customer-owned substations, 100 new miles of 500kV transmission lines and eight new 230kV transmission lines.
As an aside, a three natural gas turbine combined cycle electricity plant is the most efficient form of natural gas plant. The waste heat from the three turbines is directed into a steam boiler that drives a fourth generator. Two gas turbines do not heat the steam turbine to a high enough temperature to reach peak efficiency.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
It makes some measure of sense to build a natural gas power plant in Louisiana, a state at the center of an extensive set of compressed natural gas pipelines. The new natural gas plant can supplement the electrical power provided by the nearly complete solar farm. Electricity demands for new AI data centers are comparatively astronomical. From what I understand, natural gas turbine manufacturers are swamped with orders for new combined cycle plants.
I checked for more articles on AI data centers.
According to a Yahoo Finance article, Texas could benefit from the building of new AI centers in remote locations.
The premise of the story is that multiple oil extraction platforms across the state are so remote that the natural gas that also comes out of the ground when crude oil is extracted has to be “flared” into the atmosphere via an open pipe instead of captured for commercial use, because pipeline infrastructure does not exist to transport captured natural gas.
If an AI data center could be built in a remote location near enough to the remote oil derricks, the theory goes, then a combined cycle natural gas plant could be constructed nearby to provide the necessary electricity to the AI data center, a strategy known in the industry as “collocation”.
Here are some bullet points from the Yahoo Finance article:
– According to a recent Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas survey, “[p]roduction activity in America’s oil and gas sector, concentrated in Texas, fell in the third quarter.” This is the second quarter in a row of production activity contraction. “The US oil rig count fell to its lowest level in nearly four years in August, according to data from Baker Hughes.”
– “The CEO of Diamondback Energy (FANG), an oil and gas producer based in Midland, Texas, laid out a downtrodden outlook for America’s oil industry in a letter to shareholders in August”:
“We continue to believe that, at current oil prices, US shale oil production has likely peaked and activity levels in the Lower 48 will remain depressed.”
– The reporter argues that new sources of revenue could provide a “lifeline” to the crude oil extraction industry. AI data centers could provide that new source of revenue, should oil companies be able to convert the natural gas that is flared into the atmosphere from remote oil wells into commercially profitable natural gas to run electricity plants.
– In 2024, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) predicted that electricity demand in the state would grow by 148 gigawatts between 2024 and 2030. This past April, the growth in electricity demand was raised by ERCOT to 208 gigawatts between 2024 and 2030.
– 50 gigawatts of that expected rise in electricity demand will come from new AI data centers. In terms of scale, 50 gigawatts of electrical power is enough to power every Texas home three times over.
– As of the publication date of the story, four major Texas AI data center projects are in the works:
1. Two months ago, Vantage, a data center developer, announced plans for a $25 billion campus in West Texas that will need 1.4GW of electricity to operate.
2. Skybox Datacenters recently started site work of a 300MW datacenter outside Dallas.
3. New Era Energy & Digital joined with cloud infrastructure provider Sharon AI to announce a plan to build a remote AI data center near New Era’s “existing Permian operations.”
4. OpenAI and Oracle announced plans for a $500 billion “Stargate” center that will need 10GW of electrical power.
– Said a Rice University affiliated Baker Institute for Public Policy research fellow, Gabriel Collins:
“In a world where speed matters, the ability to rapidly build gas pipelines, power plants, wind and solar farms with batteries, and local transmission lines within the Permian give the Basin a distinct advantage for AI developers that need to expand computing power as rapidly as possible.”
– Diamondback announced last February that it is seeking partners to build a “large ‘behind the meter’ natural gas plant” that will “offload some of its gas” to Diamondback to power its own operations, but provide “the lion’s share” of its new source of electricity to data center owners “seeking cheap land and abundant electricity generation.”
– As AI data centers need abundant quantities of water to cool their computers, “produced water”, the water byproduct (groundwater) that comes out of a crude oil well during oil extraction, can be used to cool the data centers.
– On a related note, the reporter cites to a Pennsylvania AI data center developer who plans to remove the operating part of Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power plant and build a natural gas turbine facility in its place to provide 4.5GW of electricity to power the data center campus.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
If there is any better proof of the uselessness of coal in the American electricity generating marketplace, the Pennsylvania AI data center’s plans provide it. An already existing coal-fired plant, the largest in Pennsylvania, is to be torn down so that a natural gas powered plant can be built in its place.
For the past 17 years, not one company has submitted an application for a permit to build a new coal-fired power plant in America. Demand for electricity is skyrocketing and companies are building wind power facilities, solar farms, some with battery backup, and natural gas powered plants. Some have submitted plans to build new nuclear modular power plants. Others are planning to refurbish retired nuclear power plants. No one is attempting to refurbish old coal-fired plants.
Yes, there is great political demand for the professional lying class that sits atop one of our two political parties to foment lies about coal-fired power plants. But there can be a difference between that which is politically important and that which is economically important. It is politically important for certain politicians to lie about coal. The gullibly stupid among us consistently fall for the lies. Some of these most gullibly stupid among us launder the lies. But there is no economic need to build new coal-fired power plants in America. They just cost too much to operate.
I will type this over and over again.
Decades ago, before the onset of the Shale Revolution, a revolution that significantly brought down prices for crude oil and natural gas, FP&L entered into long term contracts to buy electricity from two independently owned coal-fired power plants. The Jacksonville-based plant was called Cedar Bay Generating Plant. The other, in Martin County, was named the Indiantown Co-generation plant.
Once the shale revolution gained momentum, prompting domestic natural gas prices to plummet, it became comparatively too expensive to buy electricity from the two coal-fired plants. But FP&L was contracted to pay the set price for certain amounts of electricity. So in 2016 and then again in 2017, FP&L bought the plants one at a time and immediately shut them down. Reportedly, FP&L cut its contractually obligated electricity generating costs by nearly $100 million. Economic problem solved.
Ray W. says
This from an Alternet article.
During a federal appellate court’s review of its earlier decision permitting President Trump’s deployment of Oregon National Guard troops to Portland, the Department of Justice filed a document in which it admitted that it had “misrepresented key facts” in earlier legal filings.
In the earlier filing, DOJ counsel had represented that, in the reporter’s words, “it was undisputed that nearly a quarter” of Federal Protective Services (FPS) had to be diverted to Portland. The actual number of diverted officers was said to be 115 agents.
This language suggests, but does not prove, that DOJ counsel had provided to opposing counsel a document that listed the presence of 115 FPS agents in Portland and that opposing counsel had then stated that he or she had no objection to use of the document during the proceeding.
An attorney representing to a judge that a fact is undisputed is important, because it tells the court that the fact can be relied on without cross-examination by opposing counsel.
The appellate court, then based its original ruling permitting the deployment of the FPS agents to Portland at least in part on this “undisputed fact”; it held that diverting to Portland that measure of FPS agents away from other duties constituted a “significant strain on federal resources”, as argued by DOJ counsel.
Upon further investigation by DOJ officials, it was determined that the number of FPS agents diverted to Portland was not 115, but no less than 20 nor more than 31 at any given time. DOJ officials immediately corrected what it had originally submitted to the court, expressing “deep regret” over DOJ’s misrepresentation to the court; it labeled the original claim of 115 diverted agents a “material factual error.”
The appellate court first paused its original ruling. It then reinstated the authority of the trial court’s temporary restraining order that denied the president’s claimed authority to deploy federal troops in Portland. The paused appellate ruling is now under additional review.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I am reading story after story of DOJ lawyers being chastised by trial judges and by appellate courts for submitting into the record inaccurate or falsified documents provided to them by agency officials. I have read of federal judges putting on the record that they will no longer abide by a presumption of “regularity” and a presumption of “good faith” that every DOJ prosecutor should enjoy, i.e., that there no longer exists an “automatic deference” to their statements and actions. A federal judge ruled two months ago: “Blind deference to the government? That is no longer a thing. Trust that has been earned over generations has been lost in weeks.”
Perhaps this explains why DOJ lawyers wrote what they wrote when they admitted to the appellate court that what they had submitted into evidence at the trial level was not factually accurate.
This is a serious issue. If federal prosecutors can no longer rely on documents prepared by agency investigators, at risk of their license to practice law, that would place an extremely chilling effect on prosecutors. If judges can no longer rely on the word of a prosecutor, who knows where that will end?
30 years ago, a good prosecutor suddenly quit the office. I was a senior prosecutor. The word went out for a prosecutor willing to try a sexual battery case. A brand new felony prosecutor under my supervision asked if she could try the case, starting Monday morning. Neither of us had heard of the case before. I agreed with her request and told her I would sit in the audience, but would not interfere.
During jury selection, the defense attorney asked what the jury would do if the prosecutor were to suborn perjury. That got my attention and I crossed the bar to sit at the State’s table. During lunch we looked into cases where defense counsel improperly accused a prosecutor of deception. Defense attorneys can be sanctioned if they do so without proof of the deception. After lunch, I was introduced to the jury as co-counsel. The defense attorney expanded his claim to include the victim admitting under oath during deposition that she had asked a friend to lie for her. The police had been called, but had not arrived. I asked the young prosecutor what this was about? She told me that the alleged victim had admitted during deposition that she had asked her girlfriend to lie for her when police got there. The case involved a Spring Break allegation of sexual activity in the shower of the victim’s motel room. The victim had told the police the sex was not consensual. Her friend had agreed with that version. But that was not what she said during her deposition. She admitted that she had invited the defendant to shower with her and that they had ended up engaged in a sexual act. Yes, a shower event can turn into a rape, but consensual sex can turn into a non-consensual act after the fact, too. Asking a friend prior to the arrival of the police to lie for her about the event when they arrive and then lying to the police herself about the event in a he said, she said case stretched way too far into reasonable doubt.
I told the inexperienced prosecutor: What the hell are we doing here? I made a motion to her that is commonly used at motorcycle race starting lines, a gesture for riders to cut their engines and wait for a restart. The gesture is a finger across the neck move.
I told her that it was my call, but we were not in the practice of prosecuting people where our witnesses started off by conspiring to lie to the police by concealing the fact that she had invited the man to shower with her.
I never asked the prosecutor whether that was why he had suddenly quit the office, but he found out what I had done. He told me in court one day that he had been ordered to try the case and he thought it needed to be dropped.
Nearly 16 years ago, while preparing a motion in a death penalty case, I read a fairly recent at the time case involving a fabricated document, in that case a fake DNA report on a fictitious testing company’s letterhead. I no longer remember the case name. The fictitious DNA document had been prepared by a detective with the help of a prosecutor. The fictitious document had been shown to a juvenile suspect in order to induce a confession to engaging in a sexual act with an underage girl.
The appellate court’s order did not reverse the juvenile’s conviction. It did not order the trial judge to dismiss the prosecution. It went further than that. It ordered the trial judge to divest from the prosecutor the legal authority for the State to file a charging document in the case. The proper motion was a motion to divest jurisdiction.
Filing a charging document is perhaps an every day event. Whenever I filed a juvenile petition or an adult Information, I swore under oath that there existed in the file sufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt each and every element of each and every crime charged. I then signed the document in the presence of a notary public. When filed with the clerk of court, the court accepted the document onto its docket by extending to the State its umbrella of jurisdiction to resolve the case. An appellate court ordering a trial court to withdraw its umbrella of jurisdiction over a document signed under oath by a prosecutor is an extraordinary event.
It isn’t that detectives cannot fabricate a story if there is a reasonable basis to believe that it will induce a confession from a suspect, they can. It is that prosecutors, as officers of a court, cannot participate in the fabricating of evidence under any circumstances. It wasn’t that the evidence was never used in trial. It is that the fake evidence existed at all from the hand of a prosecutor. A prosecutor willfully participating in the fabricating of evidence is considered an act of gross governmental misconduct. If the fake evidence is used in any way during a trial, it can be held a “fundamental violation of a defendant’s right to a fair trial.”
If I recall correctly, a concurring opinion held that because documents in a file can be passed to different prosecutors as a matter of routine within an office, there is too great a risk that any new prosecutor assigned to the case might not know that the document was fake and might try to use it as truthful evidence during trial or hearing or during sentencing. Exposing jurors to a fake DNA report, in any circumstance, carries too great a risk of improper persuasion.
Ed P says
Ray W,
“They” are unreasonable.
“They” have zero common sense.
“They” won’t compromise.
“They” have bent reality beyond recognition.
Each side on the political divide lays claims to the above 4 axioms…
Everyone knows, it’s not them. We are right. We are the beacons of truth.
Even when someone has a momentary “ah hah” moment about a single issue, like Senator Fetterman , they are targeted. He will be castigated and pushed out of the party.
I strongly disagree with your assessment that that we aren’t able to identify who is the opposition. The problem is it should not be static, one side or the other. It should be viewed on a per policy issue, one at a time. It is impossible that every policy or action taken by either political party is alway correct. Just as it’s similarly impossible that every policy in incorrect. Today “soup du jour” is nothing can be good if it’s Trump.
I also admit many things Trump are wrong, but not everything.
Independent, intellectually honest thinkers are the exception. Policy debate should replace personality dislikes. It’s past the time of name calling, or finger pointing.
Presenting a better viable solution to an unpopular policy would be refreshing and possibly helpful.