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| State Sen. Tim Carpenter faked a collapse in front of WKOW-TV at the Capitol, and then began his campaign demonizing Black Lives Matter. This fake collapse was preceded by Carpenter's hollered conversation as the Democrat spoke with several protest medics and peacekeepers in an eight-minute conversation captured on audio, Pittman/WORT News. Audio shows Carpenter declining medical attention before his fake collapse. |
Via Medium.
Black Lives Matter don’t really matter, not here.
And
BLM liberation protesters enjoy no presumption of innocence when
protesting police violence, not while the Democratic Party has power.
In massive demonstrations during the 2020 Summer supporting George Floyd and demanding police end their war against the community, human rights workers irked one State Sen. Tim Carpenter (D-Milwaukee) — a drug warrior and self-proclaimed “reactionary” Democrat.
Forget Chicago, Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Kenosha, Madison police have it in for black folks, and Wisconsin Democrats back the police, diligently defend wrongful convictions, harassment, police and prosecutor misconduct, amid a permanent low-intensity war against the darkly complected.
It’s SOP in Wisconsin.
Tim Carpenter is the perfect Democrat, a narcissistic corporatist so self-involved and malicious he would embarrass Joe Biden.
Carpenter is renown in some circles for single-handedly blocking doctor-prescribed marijuana in 2009, the better the State has weapons to imprison black and brown people in the drug war.
So, it was no surprise that Carpenter drove to Madison in late June 2020 and started a melee against a couple of hundred protesters rallying next to the Capitol near Midnight during the height of the George Floyd protests.
Carpenter, (later claiming he was making a late-night Capitol visit on official business), grabbed his phone and started recording the BLM group, a provocative action to which the group took offense.
Protesters explained to Carpenter that rightwing doxxers were recording BLM rallies, increasing fear that night that someone was going to get hurt on a night during which the marchers had to contend with gun shots and cars trying to run the group down.
The melee ensued, after which Carpenter unconvincingly played the victim.
But the group was easy prey for Carpenter and his political campaign, backed by the police, the district attorney and corporate media.
After lecturing the crowd that he was an ally of Black Lives Matter, a laughable proposition, a traumatized Carpenter performed a collapse on the Capitol grounds in front of a WKOW-TV (Madison) crew.
Carpenter did not fall uncontrollably to the pavement; he gently set himself down to a sitting position and laid down on the soft manicured brush. The media dutifully reported he collapsed. It was a charade.
Before and after his performance, Carpenter refused medical treatment.
Carpenter
then enlisted the Democrat Dane County District Attorney to press
charges against someone, anyone, at the Capitol that night.
The DA picked two local socially conscious women with no criminal records, Black Lives Matter protesters Kerida O’Reilly and Samantha Hamer, whom even Carpenter and the police could not identify as so much as laying a finger on the precious state senator.
The two women were each charged with multiple felonies and a misdemeanor — felony crime of Substantial Battery with Intent to Cause Bodily Harm, felony Party to a Crime, and misdemeanor Disorderly Conduct.
Both women faced years in prison in a Court presided over by a Gov. Scott Walker appointee, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Josann M. Reynolds, (R) appointed to the bench in 2015.
Charge stacking like what was endured in these cases serves two purposes. One, to coerce innocent protesters into pleading no contest to charges of which they are innocent; and two, to deter protesting of unlawful police behavior in the streets.
The Democrat-led Dane County District Attorney’s office changed its charging standard for this one case to accommodate Carpenter and the paucity of evidence against the defendants. The conventional evidentiary standard for the Dane County DA is case can be proven to a reasonable doubt, changed to: Reasonable inference. [(See, for example, WISC-TV 2018; Madison . com).
At a probable cause hearing in August 2020, Asst DA William Brown, known for over-the-top prosecutions and Manichean court posturing, admitted, “We don’t know exactly what happens [at the rally] … other than we have a witness that says various people began kicking and punching. There is a reasonable inference that those two people who are aggressively running at him are the ones involved in the exact same incident,” (Rickert, Wisconsin State Journal).
Judge Reynolds is corrupt against defendants’ rights, a status that draws few objections in Dane County.
At the prosecution’s behest, in early Sept 2021, Reynolds issued a radical ruling that compelled the appearance of three, then two area journalists covering the protests though none of these three could identity the defendants as touching Carpenter.
The rationale behind the forced Court appearance of journalists was to establish there was a large rally and ralliers were passionate.
Armed with the testimony that the rally was passionate, the prosecution argued in court that Ms. O’Reilly was passionate and near Carpenter, so it was reasonable to infer she assaulted Tim Carpenter.
Thus, we see the Wisconsin judiciary join the bad faith, logical fallacy and ill will on the part of the police and prosecutors who face little recrimination in this political culture wired to give these same police and prosecutors free reign.
After the two women were arrested, Carpenter went on a public relations spree to demonize Black Lives Matter; sponsored a bill to criminalize damaging statutes out of Carpenter’s spite; and accosted and harassed a black candidate for the State Senate, before being forced to apologize after the intercession of the state Democratic Party Chair and the Senate Minority Leader criticizing Carpenter, (The Capital Times, WTMJ — July, Fox News — June 30, Spectrum News One — Aug).
Carpenter was unhinged and petulant.
That the two women were not implicated by any direct evidence was of no apparent concern to Carpenter, the police, and the media who toed the police line all the way.
Bowing to the ridiculous lack of evidence, the DA in April 2021, offered a deal that featured no jail time and a deferred prosecution, that would have wiped the protesters’ record clean, WKOW-TV, (Galli).
No deal, we’re innocent, replied O’Reilly and Hamer.
O’Reilly declined another deal last month that would have dropped all three criminal charges in exchange for pleading no contest to the equivalent of a parking ticket. No deal, said O’Reilly.
BLM protester Samantha Hamer took the deal, fearing she was gambling her life on the whims of a jury.
On Oct. 19, after a two-day trial, the jury verdict was delivered to the remaining defendant: O’Reilly: Not guilty on all counts. The jury deliberated for just three hours.
This was an are-you-kidding verdict, but the resultant local coverage, with the exception of Tony Galli and Peter Culver at WKOW, barely mentioned the verdict.
Instead, overwhelmingly, the not-guilty local coverage is a rehash of the accusations, omitting entirely the fact noone saw the two women touch Tim Carpenter.
O’Reilly told WKOW that she will continue to support Black Lives Matter.
O’Reilly said she also felt relief that the truth came out. She was scared.
“I did not make physical contact with him, [Carpenter],” Kerida O’Reilly testified at trial, a statement even Tim Carpenter was forced to acknowledge in the face of aggressive questioning by defense attorney, Jessa Nicholson Goetz.
So, why this bogus prosecution? Because police and prosecutors want to.
That’s it.
Police face no recrimination for their arrest of the Black Lives Matter protesters. The DA faces no consequences, and Tim Carpenter, beyond burnishing his reputation as an asshole, faces no backlash from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.
Tim Carpenter is running for reelection in 2022. Progressive and pro-Black Lives Matter forces want a candidate to run against him in the Democratic Primary.
But
Wisconsin also needs DAs and a criminal justice system that function as
a check for deceitful politicians, and guard the rights of citizens
against these same politicians and police who pose a threat to a
peaceful community.
#
(Michael Leon is a writer living in Madison, Wisconsin. His stories have appeared nationally in The Progressive, In These Times and CounterPunch. He can be reached at: malleon @ live.com .)
