Barrett Browning is not going to get as speedy a trial as some had hoped. But not his lawyers, who are deliberately trying to delay and postpone, citing all kinds of things -- because among other things they can have most of the sentence then disappear in pre-trial time served.
Dallas News reports about the judge's stay on Brown and his lawyers further contacting the media.
Gosh, that sounds like some sort of evil suppression of free media, no? I mean, slamming journalists for doing their jobs, like Russia and the Central Asian regimes do, barring reporters from "divulging the secrecy of the investigation" pre-trial -- and thereby banning legitimate discussion of crimes or state claims of crimes.
But I'm not sure this is going to pass the sniff test as a First Amendment case and I don't see anybody rushing to make it into one.
That's because the lawyers and support committees are deliberately whipping up a media circus which really does then bring into question the ability of the trial to be impartial.
Brown's attorneys are scrambling to make it seem like their client and they aren't the ones getting the story in the media, but that's pretty threadbare.
Not surprisingly, although the court document doesn't mention him by name, one of the articles the judge has found tendentious and prejudicial is the article by Glenn Greenwald -- while in jail, Barrett Browning called up GG and gave him an interview. Not surprisingly, Greenwald tried to make it out that this indicted felon was some sort of persecuted dissident.
It's like the free-for-all that Prof. Peter Ludlow has indulged in trying to exonerate this creep at the Nation.
The idea that you can be in pre-trial detention and get to whip up a media barrage in your defense by getting the hacker-enabling journos like Greenwald and non-journalist linguistic-professor propagagndists like Ludlow to make noise sort of obviates the whole point of jail, you know?
And jail is where Barrett Brown needs to be given the charges against him, which, of course are not yet proven in a court of law.
Is Barrett Brown a journalist because he started some drug-fueled paranoia-induced database of "facts" on security firms and made a lot of incoherent Youtubes? No, he's just a hacker who blogs a lot. Should bloggers, too, be protected for their journalism, in whatever form it takes?
No, not if it takes the form of linking to pages with stolen credit card numbers and bragging about it, threatening federal agents, obstructing justice -- oh, and hacking into other people's servers to "spill their secrets".
Hacking isn't just lazy journalism; it's crime.
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