The case of baby Bou-Bou has been settled. Freedom loses.

I wrote about this situation back in December of 2014 but I’ll recap quickly in case you don’t want to read it again.

A man, his wife, and children moved in with relatives because of financial difficulties. The relatives had an estranged son who hadn’t been seen in months. An informant told police the son was selling drugs. The police learned the address of the family. A judge wrote a “no-knock” warrant (kick in the door without warning). The police made no determination that children were in the house and the supposed criminal hadn’t lived there in months. During the raid a flash-bang grenade was thrown into the baby’s crib. The resulting medical bills were in excess of one million dollars. The family sued.

A summary of the defense was written by a fellow named William Griggs and sums it up pretty well.

The act of sleeping in a room about to be breached by a SWAT team constituted “criminal” conduct on the part of the infant. At the very least, the infant was fully liable for the nearly fatal injuries inflicted on him when Habersham County Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Long blindly heaved a flash-bang grenade – a “destructive device,” as described by the ATF, that when detonated burns at 2,000-3,500 degrees Fahrenheit – into the crib.

Merely by being in that room, Bou-Bou had assumed the risk of coming under attack by a SWAT team. By impeding the trajectory of that grenade, rather than fleeing from his crib, Bou-Bou failed to “avoid the consequences” of that attack.

In any case, Bou-Bou, along with his parents and his siblings, are fully and exclusively to blame for the injuries that nearly killed the child and left the family with more than one million dollars in medical bills. The SWAT team that invaded the home in Cornelia, Georgia on the basis of a bogus anonymous tip that a $50 drug transaction had occurred there is legally blameless.

The case was settled for less than the medical bills and split between all family members. No officers, judges, or anyone else was charged with a crime. The settlement money is paid directly from tax-payer revenue. So, taxpayers of Georgia, you are party to this disgusting travesty.

The War on Drugs is, at this point, nothing more than a series of vile schemes to enrich judges, lawyers, law-enforcement officers, private prisons, and a host of others at the expense of our freedom. Let’s end it.

Tom Liberman
Sword and Sorcery fantasy with a Libertarian Ideology
Current Release: The Black Sphere
Next Release: The Girl in Glass I: Apparition