DeCarlos Brown is insane; Virginia's maps struck down | Hour 1

What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. Some breaking news in the murder trial of de Carlos Brown Junior. There is going to be a competency hearing in Charlotte in the federal case to Carlos Brown Junior, charged with murdering Arena Zarutska last year on the Cat's light rail line, sitting behind her well. She gets on and sits down in the seat in front of him, is scrolling her phone, and out of nowhere, he stands up and stabs her in the neck. She dies almost instantly, and he says he's caught on the Cat's security camera audio as saying I killed that white girl. I think I'm cleaning that up. And then he walked off the train and he's kind of muttering to himself standing on the platform, dripping blood all over the place. Police are called and. He has taken into custody, and then we find out that he has had a very lengthy rap sheet keeps getting turned loose in our local turnstile catch and release judicial system. Obviously suffering severe mental health issues. The last time he had an interaction with police a few months prior to his attack on Zaruska, he was at the hospital trying to get some man made material out of his body. He thought there was some material that had been injected into him and it was controlling his thoughts. And when police told him that does not sound like something for the police to do. It sounds like something that you know, health officials would need to do, he became agitated with them, and he then called nine to one one to request police come down and talk to him as he's talking to two officers. So they take him into custody at that point, and they charge him with misuse of the nine to one to one system. And despite his family, his defense attorney all saying that he needed some sort of mental health evaluation, a psyche val asap never happened, and then he was free to Rome and that's when he murdered Zarutska. So the state has already well, he is charged at the state and the federal. Levels, and uh. They had already done and incompetence, Uh, they his defense attorneys had asked for you know, emotion that he'd be ruled incompetent because he cannot help in his own defense. He doesn't understand anything because he's insane, and that all was kind of put on hold though, And that is usually the case because you've got when you have a federal and a state prosecution going on against the same person, you know, usually one of them takes lead, and usually it's the Feds. So I believe that he's been you know, like, they haven't moved him to any kind of state facility for you know, treatment or anything like that, because the Feds have him in custody and they're running their own process. So then his lawyers go to the federal courts and they ask for this June ninth competency hearing. The lawyers had requested the hearing and a judicial ruling that Brown is incompetent to proceed with the federal case. Proceedings in the state murder case against Brown have already been delayed for six months after he was found incapable to proceed in court. The next state hearing is going to be in October. Mitch Kokai reporting at Carolina Journal dot com. Brown's lawyers filed a motion yesterday in federal court seeking a competency hearing. If Brown is found incompetent to proceed in the federal case, he would remain in federal custody. The lawyer's motion reads, quote. De Carlos Brown suffers from serious mental illness and impairments. Our constitution requires that before he can be tried or possibly sentenced to death, he must first be capable of proceeding in his criminal case. Now, federal examiners with the Department of Justice Bureau of Prisons, or the BOP what as I call it the BOP, they have determined that Brown's mental illness and impairments make him currently incapable of proceeding in his federal criminal case as well. This court should now set a hearing, find mister Brown incompetent and remand him into the custody of the Attorney General for secure hospitalization and treatment. Federal mental health examiners at the BOP obviously here determined Brown is not competent to stand or to proceed. Rather, because he has a mental illness and a mental defect. He does not have a factual understanding of the legal system or his legal situation because of his mental illness. He cannot make rational case related decisions because of his mental illness, and cannot work with his defense attorneys because of his mental illness. According to the motion, he experiences delusions that center around his belief that he was exposed to a material and it quote controls his every movement. He refers to it as the Democrat Party. I'm kidding, I'm kidding, It's not. No. He refers to it as his quote body emergency. The delusions are constant and persistent. Brown's lawyers go on to blame a quote broken mental health and criminal justice system for his failure to get help for his illness. Now, the US Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina, Russ Ferguson, also a former WBT interurn way back in the day. Anyway, his office supports holding a competency hearing. A finding of incompetence quote does not end the case. A finding of incompetence to proceed is simply a snapshot, meaning at this time the defendant cannot understand the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him or assist properly in his defense. That's according to the US Attorney's Office, who go on to say, if the court makes this determination, the governing statute requires the court to order competency restoration. We got to make him sane again before we can put him on trial to kill him. That's the idea here. So that may. Include medication to assist in restoring his competency. The BOP, the Bureau of Prisons, has concluded that defendant's prognosis to become competent to proceed is good with restoration and treatment. So there does there does seem to be some sort of countervailing incentives going on here. For to Carlos Brown, I will take it as true that he is insane. By the video that I watched and hearing the reports and reading the reports over the last halfy or yeah months or so eight months, he does strike me as someone who is clinically, as they say, crazy, right, he does have some mental illness. But if we're going to send him to get treatment and he starts getting I don't want to say cured, but he starts getting helped, right, he starts to kind of emerge from this fog of mental illness schizophrenia. I think his parents said that he had. As he emerges from this fog and he starts realizing what all has happened? Does he not then have an incentive to remain in the fog? Right? Like, isn't that a isn't that kind of a problem. I assume that the psychiatrists are going to be aware of that incentive to not remember or to not get better. But that's where we stand. Next up is the competency here June ninth. We'll keep you posted. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. 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They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creative video dot com. From the text line, Josh says, Jeffrey Dahmer ate like seventeen people and he was fine to go to court. H Yeah, I mean that's fair. Yeah, Doug says, how much time and money will we spend on someone that we know is guilty. We have the video, we have the long rap sheet. We heard last week that his sister is following in his footsteps. Yeah, because she got she got arrested for something too. I saw. Yeah, yeah, like this is this is the problem with the death penalty and how it's administered. And I've been on record, like years ago I was for the death penalty, and then I was against it, and then I was for it again. I've gone back and forth on this. I have changed my mind on the death penalty, mainly because I don't trust government. And that's really what it all comes down to for me, is that I know that we have incarcerated innocent people. We know this, So like, I don't trust government. I don't believe that it does much of anything very well except the military, because it is forced. Government is forced, as George Washington equated it to fire right, it is as a servant. It's a useful servant, but a fearful master. And I worry about the use of the death penalty because there's really no backsies on that. You know, once once you once you put the person to death, like that's it. And if you were wrong, if the government was wrong, or there was you know, some problems at the trial, some prosecutors played, you know, hide the ball with some of the evidence that would have cleared the defendant, you know, stuff like that. That's really why it's like I can't so like right now, I consider myself to be not in favor of the death penalty, not that I am opposed to it, see like, and in a case like this, I'm not opposed to it the FedEx driver that they just convicted for, you know, murdering that little six year old girl that he kidnapped. Yeah, not like, I'm not opposed to that state using it in the case in that case, because like, there are some cases where it is so overwhelmingly clear that it is not just beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the criminal standard, it is beyond a shadow of a doubt, right, Like, there isn't any evidence that is exculpatory. There is no evidence that could clear him because we see him doing it on video. And so now we're going to have this competency hearing where I assume that he will be deemed. Unfit. He will not be deemed he's gonna be deemed incompetent to stand trial. So they're going to lock them away in some mental institution and they're going to try to restore his competency, and then we can put him on trial and put him to death. And I do wonder, like. Is that really the best use of our resources? You know, But at the federal level, I will say those things do proceed a little bit more quickly than you know, you sit on death row in North Carolina. You're not getting put to death, not under a Democrat governor. Let me jump over here to Tim. Hello, Tim, Hey, I'm just gonna repeat what you just said. I mean, I do will see the legit or the logic in nerve is somebody back to hell to put him to death? You know, if this, if this guy was cognizant enough to do the things that he's done, and should never been out of jail, or should have been in a psych ward a long time ago, apparently, but we have too many people letting the criminals run free. What's the point in healing him to kill him? Right? I don't really understand the whole procept. Like you said, it costs the state, the city that fed a bunch of money. That that what's the point is that there's just no logic to it. I don't understand it. Right. And here's the other thing. If we have, if we have essentially done away with involuntary commitment, right, but now we're going to basically involuntarily commit this guy potentially for the rest of his life, right, I mean because if he never restores competency, he never gets out as far as I know, right, I mean, like he's going to be in a psych ward forever, So why not reinstitute the. Well, what's the point in doing that, spending the money to keep a man alive it's going to be of no value to society. Ever again, well yes, but then it's like again, you know, every life has value, even the center, and so like there is there is that. I mean, so I don't want to say there's there's still value. I don't agree with the concept of you know, I mean God's guilty. I mean, you know, the more do you need you see a videotape, you know, so you know, people still would say alleged. I mean there's stuffing alleged about it. I mean, it's he's guilty. He should get the death penalty and get it quickly. I hear you, Yeah, Tim, I appreciate the call. The Hellian says, so when he isn't crazy, he will then realize he needs to remain crazy for his defense. Right, And that's that's what I mean by competing incentives here. Right, You've got the state or in this case, the federal government, and they're trying to restore his competency by it, and they can force him onto meds. They can they can do that, So okay, your incentive is to make him competent. And then at some point as he becomes more competent, he realizes that if he goes full competent, then he's going to get put to death, and so then he's going to try to avoid that and pretend he's never cured. Lisa, Welcome to the program. Hello, Lisa, Hey. I just wanted to interject in this conversation. Back in Biblical times, the death penalty was approved on the witness of two. Now back then two people, of course could lie, but they would pick people from their faith community. So these had to be very very honorable people, and it had to be absolutely I thought, with their own eyes, et cetera, et cetera. The biblical concept of on the witness of two. In this day and age, when you've got it on video and you have DNA, and there's many many cases where we could talk about that, that is the purest, most biblical form of justification for the death penalty. There was a little girl that was taking a seriousy years ago and it was on video. He's behind a building was the most horrific case. And of course there was DNA and everything, and there were people arguing on both sides, but when it came down to talking with people from various churches, everyone had to come into agreements. From studying scripture, Yeah, I'm the witness of two and man, there's not anything more clear than DNA and video. So in that case, and I'm very, very pro life. But in that case, I don't see that there's any problem whatsoever. I think it's rather mandated. Yeah, And that's the thing, Like, that's why I say I'm not opposed to it. I'm not anti death penalty. I'm just it's like I'm not opposed to in all cases, I guess, but I just don't. I don't trust the government enough to just be like, yeah, sure, let's you know, just yeah, just put them all on death row and let God sort them out. Like, no, that's not I don't like that path either, So Lisa, I get that. Yeah. I appreciate the call. Have a great weekend too, all right, take care? Yeah, yeah, Yeah, these are the cases that make me, you know, not oppose to it. From the text line driven by Liberty Buick, gmc marty says to Carlos Brown Junior, insane order to maintain for life, the grave of Arena Zarutzka for treatment, so that like that's a potential sentence, right, I don't know. I don't know if she's buried here. I think she, yeah, she was, Yeah. I think I believe she had a burial here because I think her family said she wanted to be here. Thank you, Marty says, great show. As always appreciate that. David says he was competent enough to make the connection that if he kills that white bleep, they would have to check out what's wrong with him. I've not I've not seen any evidence that he made that connection. Is that. I mean, I'm not saying it's not true. I just haven't seen that. Maybe it's been reported somewhere and I missed it, but I'm not aware of of any kind of like, well, if I do A, then I will get B. But I mean, even if he did think that, right, and he thinks there's some his body emergency, he's got some material in his body that's directing all of his actions, that may be to an insane person, a logical thing to think, whereas a sane person would say, no, that's not seen. You don't kill somebody in order to get mental health help, right, although maybe it is, maybe that would be the rational thing. Yeah, I don't know. Like I said, I haven't heard that. Eddie says all those violent criminals should be euthanized the day they are found guilty. We have gone too far with violent criminals being let out over and over and over and over again just to commit more violent crimes. Okay, I'm going to say something here at it, and I mean it with all. Grace and sincerity. Is that when you when you say things like that, you turn people off from persuasion, because, as I said, we know that we have at the very least incarcerated innocent people. People have been found guilty at a trial and they've been innocent. And when you say, you know, kill them all immediately. So that means no appeals process, which every other defendant gets. But if they're a violent if they kill, if they kill somebody, then they don't get appeals. So I don't say that's what I mean. It's like, it's not it's not conducive to persuading anybody or even having a conversation. It's just it's just shutting it down. So Kevin says what Brown did to Zaruzka is no doubt a horrible tragedy. There are much more horrible crimes being committed in Charlotte, though that hardly get any attention. Take, for example, Dominique Moody, the poor baby was starved to death by her family. DSS had been called to the home something like fifty times, yet they did nothing to get her out of the situation. I think Dominique's caretakers are more deserving of the death penalty than Brown, who is obviously mentally ill. Right, And that's the thing too, Like you have these laws that are on the books that like, if you cannot participate in your own trial, then you are incompetent to stand trial. Stacey says. The law ensures that a defendant can be active in their own defense. That's the law if he was convicted without a trial. Seriously, who are we democrats now or in tru Like, oh, democrats now, I e. Trump in New York City? If we're just executing mentally ill who caused the death fauci Tim Waltz stop me if this has already been asked, But do you know whether there's an auto pen in vy Lyles's office? I do not know if there is or not. After World War Two, the US Army captured Hideki Tojo, who was Japanese wartime prime minister and a war criminal. He tried to commit suicide by shooting himself and was unsuccessful. He was captured and spent months in the hospital getting better, and then was put on trial and executed in nineteen forty eight. Right, so there's a long history in America of this kind of process unfolding. I'd like to me, it just seems like this is a case for involuntary commitments to be you know, utilized a bit more often now, Right when you got this guy Brown coming through the system over and over and over again, he's obviously so mentally unwell that his own defense attorney is saying like, yeah, we need to get the guy a psyche val and now he you know, it's like what we got to wait until they actually murder somebody, and then will involuntarily commit them to try to get them help, and then if we get them help and they get better, then we kill them. Like That's like there seems there should be a better way, you know, And I think the better way is to maybe move the involuntary commitment prior to the murdering, you know, like that's I'm just spitballing here, all right. Let me shift gears and turn our gaze up to Virginia, where the state Supreme Court throughout the Democrat gerrymandered maps. Huzzah, huzza. I was I was getting nervous yesterday. I think I was talking about this and I was like, I'm getting kind of nervous. They're taking a while, and the longer it takes, you know, the more anxiety I get here, because it's like, hmmm, are they trying to workshop some sort of way to shoehorn a ruling in here that keeps the districts even though it's obviously unconstitutional at a state level? Right, their state constitution laid out a process, and they violated the process in three different ways. So the current map six Democrat seats, five Republican seats will stand. And this is this is not a great day. If you are trying to count seats plus and minus in the Great Gerrymandering War of twenty twenty six. Not a great day if you are counting them with an eye towards winning more Democrat seats, because not only do you now lose the four seats that you thought you may have in your pocket. But you burned through what seventy million dollars in campaign ads trying to convince the voters to vote yes on those maps. You have angered, like really really angered half your state. And now you've lost the four seats too. So you burned all that money, all that good will, benefit of the doubt or support, you burned it all for maps that don't take effect. Was the juice worth the squeeze on that one? I don't believe. So now the reason why they shot this down they only from my reading of it, it's like a forty something page opinion with the descent, and so I read through the majority opinion and it seems like they focused on just one specific aspect of the flawed, unconstitutional process. I'll tell you what that was about it. Also, the descent is kind of disturbing too. We'll get to that in a minute. The Virginia State Supreme Court tosses out the redistricted maps that favored Democrats gave them a ten to one advantage. They gerrymandered it, but they needed a constitutional amendment in order to do it, and the process to pass a constitutional amendment is laid out in the constitution, and their process violated that. According to the majority opinion. It was a four to three majority, okay, which means three of the seven I believe all three of those were Democrat appointments. They're appointed by the General Assembly. But three of them were willing to upend their own constitution in order to make the maps legit right or make them legal, let's say, because they're illegitimate. Because as the majority found, then this is what they ruled on. Was the process is that you have an amendment that is proposed, it has to pass the legislature one time, then there has to be an election of the state legislature. Then there has to be another passage of the amendment after that election. Right, So it's a three step process, legislative approval, an election, legislative approval. And the reason for that is that you give the public direct and indirect methods to express their support or opposition to the amendment. Right. The indirect opinion is expressed through the legislative approval votes. The direct input is in the election. Right. If you've got a if your state senator votes for this bill and you're like no, then you have an option to go to the ballot box and cast a vote against that person and hopefully, you know, oust them from office, and then the next person in there would vote no, and that would express your will that way. That's the process. But the Democrats in Virginia, they the first time they approved the ballot measure, they were already in early voting for the very election where the ballot question was asked. So early voters I like forty five days of early voting up there, and they were already into early voting. And by the time the legislature approved the ballot language, there was like four days I think four or five days before the election. So all those early voters had no way. They couldn't go back and take their ballots back, they couldn't request their ballots back if their lawmaker voted away. They did not proof. So the majority opinion says that the language is that you have to have an election between the two votes. So does early voting count as the election? And the majority says, of course it does. Of course it does because people are voting. Election day ends the voting period, but the election is ongoing for forty five days. Because Democrats have been telling us for twenty years that we have to make it easier for people to vote, and so we have to have more days early voting, no excuse absentee, right, all of the things that we have adopted over the last twenty thirty years or so to make it so much easier for everybody to vote. Because everybody's vote matters, there should be no restrictions whatsoever on any kind of voting law. And now they go into court and argue, actually, Jay Jones, the Attorney General, he didn't even make really this argument, so they kind of conjured up their own argument. The dissent did, and they basically argue that no, no, no, early voting does not count as the election. It's only now, it's only election day. So does that mean we only count votes from election day? Because I kind of feel like the vote total would or the outcome would have been different. The total definitely would have been right, because if it's your if it's your position. These are the judges of the Virginia Supreme Court who are arguing that the election quote unquote is just election day and all the people who voted for the first thirty nine or forty days before the legislature, you know, put this on the ballot or whatever like that for some reason they. Like their votes don't count. Well, that sounds kind of suppression y, you know that sounds Dare I say it racist? Right? Because any kind of vote suppression aka laws, voter integrity laws, anything like that becomes suppressive racist. You're doing it because of racism, that's what we've been told. Amazing how the rationale changes. Actually, it's not really amazing. This is Calvin Ball. As historian Carl Paulus wrote on Twitter earlier today, said, there's no such thing as liberal jurisprudence. It's just whatever they happen to want at the time, even if it doesn't make sense or completely reverses what they've already argued was previously the most important issue of our time. Right, anytime there's any kind of discussion about voter integrity laws, we are subjected to this argument that we are awful people and we just want to you know, disenfranchised voters. This is Jim Crow two point zero. We're racists, right. We hear this all the time. We've been hearing it for thirty years. When we simply say things like, hey, maybe we should remove dead people from the voting roles. I think it was. Was it Washington State that just voted to say no, we're not removing or maybe Oregon one of these states just said no, we're not taking dead people off of the voting roles. They rejected a bill to do that. That would be disenfranchising the dead. I guess I don't know, not really sure, right, Remember, constitutions limit government power, which is why you hear Democrats talk about the Constitution when Republicans have power, because they want to use the Constitution to limit Republicans. But when they have the power, they just blow right past all of that. It doesn't matter, right then they mock Republicans for citing the Constitution. So that's what this has been about. And like, I don't in a perfect world would I prefer that redistricting be done in a quote unquote fair way, however you want to define that, right, sure, However, this has been going on for a very very very long time. Democrats have jerrymandered all of their states, which is why they don't really have any more left to jerrymander, and it's why this is such a bad result for them. All Right, that'll do it for this episode, Thank you. So much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecallanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.