HAYMARKET TYRANNY
Article from the website: Black Velvet Bruce Li
HAYMARKET TYRANNY
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By Greg L | 16 July 2006 | PWC Politics | 3 Comments
After allowing police officers to pursue personal vendettas against citizens using their official authority (previously reported here), and attempting to unlawfully continue a reserve officer program suspended by the town council (reported here), now the town council is attempting to create retroactive law in order to cover for the unlawful actions of their police force. This is going from bad to horrible.
If that were not enough, Haymarket has now decided that it can make changes to Virginia’s Freedom of Information laws and require advance payment for requests regardless of how little it costs to fulfill the request. Is the mayor and town council so fearful of what they’re doing that they have to go to such extreme lengths to hide their actions and try to provide cover for their bad decisions?
Thanks to Philip Van Cleave of the Virginia Citizen’s Defense Leage for working so hard to dig and discover what’s going on about this. He writes:
The [first item] is a resolution by the Haymarket Town Council **retroactively** appointing 3 police officers who the Haymarket Police Chief has been using to enforce laws and run roadblocks for some time. Apparently the council was afraid that a citizen’s lawyer might point out to the court that arrests made by improperly sworn police officers are invalid - so the council invented their own procedure to pretend these officers were always correctly sworn in. In the resolution, council repeatedly recites the legal term “nunc pro tunc” as if the term has talismanic properties.
The term “nunc pro tunc” is normally used in routine divorce matters to backdate the divorce in the interest of all parties. One online legal dictionary states that “Nunc pro tunc literally means ‘now for then.’…This phrase is used to express that a thing is done at one time which ought to have been performed at another. Leave of court must be obtained to do things nunc pro tunc, and this is granted to answer the purposes of justice, but ***never to do injustice***. A judgment nunc pro tunc can be entered only when the delay has arisen from the act of the court.”
So Haymarket is now creating new common law for itself by invoking an innocuous legal term from family law to cover up the fact that un-appointed police officers were enforcing laws? A Potomac News item at here covers this story as if appointing police officers retroactively is a routine matter. We’ll see.
The [second item] is a proposed detour from the VA freedom of Information Act that the Haymarket Council is considering at the apparent recommendation of its Town Attorney, John C. Bennett who also practices “VA law” in Culpeper County.
The plain language of the Virginia FOIA at Va. Code 2.2-3700 et seq. indicates that citizens need only provide their name and address when making FOIA requests, and, that citizen pre-payment can only be required if the public body estimates in advance that the reasonable costs of searching for and reproducing the records will exceed $200. But the new Republic of Haymarket FOIA rules seek, among other things, to make citizens provide their phone number and pay in advance for routine FOIA requests!
If I were a resident of Haymarket, I would NOT be happy about this.
