Judging Freedom - MI Gov Whitmer kidnap jury latest

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

Judge tells Whitmer kidnap jury: It's not entrapment if you're already willing https://www.freep.com/story/news/loca... #fbi #kidnap #WhitmerSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, August 22, 2022. It's a pouring rainy day here in the Northeast of the United States and like most of the country we need the rain. It's about 11.15 in the morning. On Friday afternoon in a federal courtroom in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a federal judge was charging a jury, explaining the law to them. You know this case. This is the FBI concocted a case of a plot to kidnap Governor Whitman of Michigan. Now you might say, oh, didn't the FBI lose that case? Well, yes and no. Two years ago, the federal government indicted and last year prosecuted four people for a plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer. The instigator of the plot was an undercover FBI agent. The FBI paid everybody's expenses.

There were 18 people involved. Most of them worked for the government or were in cahoots with the government. A jury acquitted two and then had a hung jury on two. So when there's a hung jury, meaning there's no unanimous vote, we usually don't even know the vote, whatever it was, it wasn't unanimous for not guilty, then the government has the option to try the person again. So the government tried the two as to whom there was a hung jury a second time, and on Friday, the case went to the jury. I call this to your attention because we're probably going to get a verdict pretty soon. It's the same case.

It's the same cast of characters. It's the same people, except the two that were acquitted, obviously, are not in the case. They are free. The jury found last time around, by acquitting these two, that the government concocted the whole case. So the government has presented its case a little differently this time. It's a different judge and the federal and the defenders, the defense lawyers have been complaining loud and long that the judge is favoring the prosecutor in front of the jury. I've never seen this. The judge accepted their criticism and looked at the jury. I've never seen this. The judge accepted their criticism

and looked at the jury and said, don't pay attention to what I say if you think I'm favoring one side or the other. Judges are not supposed to favor one side or the other and then try and take the sting out of it when the sting has already been planted. In doing this, the judge told the jury an accurate but unfortunate definition of entrapment, and that is it's not entrapment if the defendants were willing to commit the crime before the government came into play. Unfortunately, that is the law. The law of entrapment says that for the defendants to be acquitted by virtue of entrapment, the government must plant the seed for the crime in their mind. If the seed was planted in their minds before the government got involved, before the FBI agents got involved, then it's not entrapment. However, there's

another issue here. In America, all defendants are innocent until proven guilty and the government must prove every element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty. So if the defendant says, I'm going to plead the affirmative defense of self-defense or entrapment, then the government must prove that it was not self-defense or not entrapment. So the burden is not on the defendant to prove anything, except in the federal courts in Michigan, in the Sixth Circuit, in that part of the country, Michigan and Ohio, where if you do assert an affirmative defense like entrapment, it is your burden as the defendant to prove it, rather than in most of the rest of the country, it is the government's burden to prove that it was not just semantics. That's a profound burden imposed on the defendant by requiring him or her, in this case him, two of them, to prove anything in order to stay out of jail. The whole principle of presumed innocent is that the defendants don't have to prove anything.

The government has to prove everything. It even has to disprove the defendant's defense. Not the law in Michigan, not the law in the Sixth Circuit, the federal courts in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin. We'll see where this ends up. Government should have nothing to do with creating crime. It's the worst thing the government can do. My first of my nine soon to be 10 books on the U.S. Constitution is called Constitutional Chaos. What happens when the government breaks its own laws? It is replete with examples of government lawbreaking. It's hard to think of anything more lawbreaking than the government

creating a crime that didn't exist. And this crime was created by the FBI weeks before, just a few weeks before the presidential election in November of 2020 to make Governor Whitmer look good and President Trump look bad, and it worked. Michigan went for Biden. The FBI should have no business creating crime. The FBI should have no business getting involved in politics. These defendants should be either acquitted or the charges against them should be thrown out, no matter what the burden of proof is in Michigan. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.