Mr. Dana, who has a history of mental illness and arrests, was stopped around 10 p.m. on Aug. 17, after the police received complaints that he had damaged a light outside a restaurant in Northwest Washington.
A group of police officers and federal agents arrested him for property destruction. As he settled into the back of a police car, he asserted that he was drunk after having consumed seven drinks. An officer’s body camera captured his comments. He became irate, yelling at the officer driving the vehicle that he would return to the restaurant and beat up someone. “I’m not going to tolerate fascism,” he declared, vowing to “protect the Constitution by any means necessary. And that means killing you, Officer, killing the president, killing anyone who stands in the way of our Constitution.”
The officer immediately radioed his dispatcher to “notify Secret Service — he just made threats to kill the president.” ] Not long afterward, Mr. Dana began to sing. A Secret Service agent reviewed the video of his comments and filed a charging affidavit against him.
“He is not a danger,” his lawyer, Ms. Mullin, told the judge. “The danger here is having federal agents roaming the streets.”
Judge Upadhyaya urged the two sides to reach an agreement on conditions for his release, but as the hearing wore on, she began to lose patience with the prosecutor, Conor Mulroe. Mr. Dana was a menace, he argued, insisting that his mental health problems should not be an excuse to allow him to keep harassing people and businesses.
Mr. Mulroe added that given Mr. Dana’s long history of “quite erratic behavior,” he should remain in jail while awaiting trial.
As the hearing continued, Judge Upadhyaya became exasperated with Mr. Mulroe.
“I know what you’re doing and I just have no tolerance for it,” she snapped. “There has to be a common-sense application of the law.”
Her last case of the day involved a man who had been arrested in Washington based on a warrant in nearby Virginia. Finding no one else able to transport him at night from one jail to another, she persuaded Ms. Mullin, the defense lawyer, to do it.
Archived at https://archive.is/Fz4L3
Judge: Defense attorney, can’t you find some way to compromise with this prosecutor I just acknowledged is being an unreasonable fascist prick but will in no way sanction? It would make my life a lot easier.
Judge: Hey defense attorney, the government wants to keep this person in prison but hasn’t allocated anyone to securely transport him, could you help them out and do it for them?
Judge: “The time and resources of the court are stretched beyond belief,”
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the system that gave us four or five decades of mass incarceration before this is so completely useless when it comes to disincentivizing fascism, but it is just completely absurd watching how the authority figures here just keep letting the unreasonable people throw temper tantrums and get whatever they want and keep asking the reasonable people to clean up bigger and bigger messes on behalf of the unreasonable people