Mr. Torres Gets a Dose of ‘Murican Police State

A story that sounds like fiction but isn’t.

Meet Guillermo Torres. Mr. Torres was arrested at his workplace on July 25, 2016 and charged with murder. While being arrested Mr. Torres went into a panic attack so severe it required him to be taken by ambulance to a local hospital. After being treated at the hospital, Mr. Torres was charged with murder and his bail set at $2 million. Mr. Torres sat in jail for 17 days. What happened during those 17 days?
The LA Police Department held a press conference celebrating that they had caught the murderer in a cold case crime where the victim was murdered 16 years earlier. The LAPD accused Mr. Torres of leading a double life. They celebrated the work of their investigators in capturing a “Most Wanted” criminal.
So what was their evidence? Well you see they had a picture of the killer from 16 years earlier. And after using the FBI’s technology to project what the person would look like today, they found that Mr. Torres looked like the FBI projection of the aged killer. One might wonder what else they had on him. Did they have a DNA match? No.
Did they attempt to confirm his identity before charging him with murder? No. So what’s with the picture? Well they took the aged picture of the perpetrator and someone who had seen Mr. Torres said he looked like the picture. And then his nightmare began because of a fiction created by the police state.
After suspicions of his innocence were starting to rise, a judge ordered him to be released to home confinement and to wear an electronic monitoring device. Meanwhile, Mr. Torres couldn’t work to support his family. The good news for him was that both of his employers were helping him fight back the police state because they believed the LAPD was completely wrong about Mr. Torres.
Last Thursday, September 8, 2016, after DNA analysis confirmed the innocence of Mr. Torres, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Sergio C. Tapia II told him, “You are discharged from this matter.” But after he was released for NOT being a murderer, he had to figure out how to put his life back together. He had to go back to work and figure out how to live down the idea that people would now question whether he was really a murderer or not.
Oh, and one more thing he had to figure out. Upon being discharged by the judge, he was presented with an ambulance bill for over $1,000 when he suffered the panic attack. Talk about insult to injury.
How can such things happen in America? And how can a single person defend this kind of abuse? There’s no doubt the defenders of the police state will do so. But reasonable people should start to question how these things are happening in a country that already has all kinds of police state abuses.
While we are being asked to remember 911 today, perhaps we should remember 9/10 too. That’s the day before the police state had a good excuse to create technology that makes us strip for airport gate entry, that wrongfully places people on terrorist watch lists, that launched the Department of Homeland Security, that fueled the spy state of the NSA, and that pushed the FBI to develop software that the LAPD used to capture and abuse the innocent like Mr. Torres.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-innocent-man-freed-20160908-snap-story.html

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