9/11 Survivor, War Veteran Col. Wm. P. Brandt speaks of magistration
Southlake, TX – The man was just down the corridor from where the airplane hit the Pentagon on that fateful day.
He survived, and he took the fight to Pakistan and Iraq. What’s more, he came home with everyone in his command alive and well.
Now, he’s a lawyer, and he is an announced candidate for Tarrant County Justice of the Peace, Precinct 3.
There are issues on the table, he says in this exclusive interview with The Sons of Liberty and The Legendary.
Chiefly, the United States is organized on the principle that We The People have granted the government its duties and rights; it’s not the other way around. We have no King, no monarch to decide which way of of living is proper as life, the terms of liberty, the bounds of a lawful pursuit of happiness.
We decide.
Respect for law and order is only part of the equation; “We have to do a better job of respecting freedom,” he says.
And so the duty of a magistrate is to approve affidavits of probable cause for warrants of search and seizure under the terms of the Fourth Amendment. These instruments must be specific as to the items sought, the personal knowledge of the affiant as to their whereabouts, the time and place of his observation, the reason for the seizure of the property so described.
“A judge is under no obligation to sign anything until he is satisfied,” he said.
Satisfaction comes in the form of the “four corners,” the legal test that everything in an affidavit is proper to serve a warrant of search and seizure.
And then there is matter of arrest, in which the same fundamental rules apply as to the name of the accused or an accurate description of the alleged offender, a narrative of the personal observation of witnesses or the peace officer, the date and time of the offense, and the particular act that is unlawful and therefore an alleged violation of statutory law.
In this transcript from a a disqualification hearing, you will find the words of a Waco police officer named Chavez who swore to items of complaint of which he had no personal knowledge, and then applied them to an identical fill-in-the-name affidavit of probable cause for the arrest of 177 persons with no particularity of allegation of complaint. Both the motion for disqualification of a District Attorney failed by the trial judge’s denial, and an intermediate appeals court denied mandamus relief on the issue.
According to a civil rights lawsuit filed by Dallas attorney Don Tittle, “The probable cause affidavit signed by Manuel Chavez on May 18, 2015 fails to identify even one single fact specific to Plaintiff to support probable cause…”
Anything less is simply unconstitutional, defective, and thereby unworthy of magistration, search, seizure, or arrest – none of which is a presentment of guilt in a court of law. That is, an American court of law.
There is no such thing as a general warrant, one of the main sources of colonial activism and the irritation of the patriots who made a declaration of independence from Great Britain among the list of particular grievances described as “a long chain of abuses” visited by the monarch, King George III, upon the citizens of the 13 colonies.
Col. Brandt is a candidate for Justice of the Peace, Precinct 3. He took out a half-hour of his time to explain to we the people just how the mechanics of constitutional and procedural law, the rules of evidence, and common law holdings of the American courts apply to the thorny issues of a world constantly at war over terror, the ill behavior of men, and the allegedly unlawful actions of their various governments.
His jurisdiction would be situated in the highly trafficked land of a magical spaceport buffering the rest of the world, an entire globe any part of which may be reached in a matter of hours through jet propulsion – DFW.
The Metroplex and its huge airstrip serve as a backdrop to all that has gone before, both past and prologue to what is the ever unfolding reality of the present.
So mote it be.
- The Legendary