District attorney Neal Pinkston is loyal to the leading black robes in his tribe, the judges on the courts of appeal and in the supreme court. He is a loyal member of the bar because he directs his Hamilton County, Tenn., associate, David Schmidt and others to harass free citizens of the state of Tennessee out of their rights.
By David Tulis / 92.7 NoogaRadio
Or at least try to — pursuant to judicial policy in Tennessee.
That is the hope of a prosecution by Mr. Pinkston and Jim Hammond, the sheriff of Hamilton County, of Jon Luman, a carpenter and private tradesman who lives in Red Bank, a town nestled against Chattanooga and who travels the roads as a matter of right. And also it is the goal of Mr. Pinkston in a second case like unto it — that against Gregory Parker, a welder, assailed as “driving on revoked.”
This fellowship of the finger is seeking to convert a green book, the “vehicles and motor vehicles” title in the Tennessee code annotated, into a bill of attainder and enforce that volume and all its rules upon a person whose activities are not properly its subject.
A bill of attainder may not sound like a big deal or anything about which to be worried. But it is.
Whenever a government official operates outside the law and against the rights of the people, he rearranges state powers to create an attainder — also called a bill of pains and penalties.
Long outlawed, attainders pop back
Bills of attainder are forbidden in the United States. The text of the constitution, Article I, Section 9, Clause 3, is “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.” An attainder defines people into a position of outlawry as a class, liable for punishment or execution as a class.
The American founders hated despotic absolutist-type rule known among the Stuarts and other monarchs in English history partly because they deny what we know call due process rights.
“As with attainder resulting from the normal judicial process,” a Wikipedia essay says, “the effect of such a bill is to nullify the targeted person’s civil rights, most notably the right to own property (and thus pass it on to heirs), the right to a title of nobility, and, in at least the original usage, the right to life itself. Bills of attainder passed in Parliament by Henry Vlll on 29 January 1542 resulted in the executions of a number of notable historical figures.”
Bills of attainder fell out of favor, Wikipedia dryly notes, because they led to “abuse and the violation of several legal principles, most importantly the right to due process, the precept that a law should address a particular form of behaviour rather than a specific individual or group, and the separation of powers.”
Enjoy trip on public right of way
Mr. Pinkston has converted Title 55 of the Tennessee code into a bill of pains and penalties by outlawing the use of the public of right of way by all comers — except those who have a license and enter into commercial agreement with the state for a privilege. He criminalizes an entire class of people and keeps judges’ dockets full of them, with the cooperation of a wisely misled and ill-informed grand jury.
As all users in self-propelled cars and trucks are outlawed definitionally, Mr. Pinkston and his combine demand at show trials compliance with his government’s absolutist reign over the streets and roads of the people. The presumptive authority is evident every time a cop at a traffic stop demands, “Show me your license, your registration and proof of insurance.”
How does he have arrest and identify authority except as among those who belong to his employer, either city, county or state?
Mr. Pinkston pretends that the public right of way is state property and that it is enclosed against all trespassers.
You ask about this point and ask, “well, why isn’t it state property, or why shouldn’t it be?”
When state governments or a county governments buy or condemn land for a road, they are doing so for the right of way. They pay for the land and build their black ribbon tarmac road across it. But they have done it as stewards for the traveling public and shippers. Members of the traveling public use it freely because the original owner was forced to yield it for public benefit (vs. a private benefit).
Shippers use the road, too, subject to police power in the interest of the public health, safety and welfare.
Government’s role as regards public infrastructure is to serve the public, respect constitutional limits directed against it and to regulate all roadway parties subject to it in a way not violative of the constitution.
The state’s role as regards the roads is to protect the public — the free people under guard by the constitution — and to regulate commercial users. But since state government has become bold against the people and careless of its limits, Messrs. Pinkston, Schmidt and the unidentified lawyer hassling welder Gregory Parker are converting state law so it will serve them as a bill of attainder.
In their regime, all people are required to testify against themselves in criminal matters because no person on the road is free and protected by warrant requirements.
Mr. Pinkston, operating against the constitution but in accordance with state policy, pretends that there is no right of free movement and no right of communication among the people on the people’s roads. Transportation administrative notice Tennessee, a public document prepared by this broadcast journalist, makes it clear that roads belong to the people, with the state being merely the steward thereof. To Mr. Pinkston, such claims are a waste of breath.
Mr. Pinkston’s prosecution of people under Tenn. Code Ann. § Title 55 makes everyone on the road in a self-propelled self-locomoting device (car, truck) a criminal by definition. Prosecutions are the marketing arm of the state in service of that fiction. That all use of the road by car is criminal by by definition, with relief granted only if one enters commercial use through state privilege (driver license).
No doubt, Mr. Pinkston hounds and harasses genuine criminals such as rapists, brigands, thieves, kidnappers, murderers and others. Bravo! This is state duty, and compliant generally to godliness and the 10 commandments. But such prosecutions are the tedium of the job.
Personal risk for lawyer?
The exciting — and personally risky for any state actor — part of the inquisitorial job is the establishment of state hegemony in areas that are not granted that authority by constitutional limits.
Mr. Pinkston, an elected official, through spokeswoman Melydia Clewell has protested strenuously against these kinds of suggestions. No, Mr. Pinkston is pursuing justice, respecting the constitution and enforcing the law, she says in a lengthy 20-minute call to a talk show.
Mr. Pinkston’s department has been under transportation administrative notice since March 5, 2018. It has published no correction, rebuttal or denial, and appears to have accepted the legal conclusions one draws from reviewing the public filing.
These points are, in sum, that the origin of Title 55 is commercial, that its scope is purely commercial, and that even though the court has raised a policy to pretend all travel is commercial, the constitution and many laws and court cases show that such policy is unwarranted, willful, ultra vires and destined to be overturned once the people decide they’ve had enough. Mr. Pinkston may lose office in an election, and, even worse, be the butt of a joke.
But these points will occur only as the police powers reform project gains steam in the next 2½ years, starting here in Chattanooga, and spreading outward, like leaven in a lump of dough.
