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Firstly, I am a grounded democrat who will never ever buy into coups. This is the reason why I was a spectator and did not participate in the November 17, 2017 facade. I amongst many, recused myself from the deception of the time, for I knew what it was. The involvement of the military in the politics of the nation in the history of mankind has led to the undermining of the very foundations of democracy in many states. In my study of history at University level, coups have never been a panacea to democracy and happiness of the people.

It was surprising that Kazembe Kazembe in his lack of understanding of my persona threatened my person in the company of our National Security Services Chiefs who are the people’s final line of defense. He stated that myself and my exiled brother Saviour Kasukuwere peddle lies about an imminent coup in our country. This statement is not only a lie but delusion of grandeur. I am grounded in the people and believe in people power not any other force. When I saw my brothers from the Security Services Chiefs in his company, I became proud because General Valerio Sibanda and Police Commissioner General Godwin Matanga and other luminaries of the liberation struggle represent the dreams of the people of Zimbabwe as the liberation struggle was fought for the liberty of its people and their happiness. Their constitutional duty is to be the people’s shield and the territorial sanctification of Zimbabwe. No one disputes their immutable value today and tomorrow to Zimbabwe. They remain the pillar of the security and safety of Zimbabweans. The target politicking of Kazembe Kazembe won’t work in the 21st century to tarnish political contenders and besmirch their reputation in the eyes of the people. All power is grounded in the people and I am on the side of the people and they will stand with me throughout these threats. Let it be reassured. I will never walk this journey alone. I will be with the people behind me.

I have told the people of Zimbabwe several times that my life is under threat and in danger. Some did not take it seriously and others thought it was political grandstanding. I ended up informing my employer the Law Society of Zimbabwe about the security threats and dangers around my life. Many a times, I have escaped assassination attempts on my life through road accidents, maltreatment and torture. I am being trailed on a daily basis by unknown individuals.

My freedom as a person has long been lost. I no longer have a social life but that will never dissuade nor deter me from speaking on behalf of the voiceless and the oppressed. Our people need happiness and their cry is that Zimbabwe belongs to everyone and all of us. We all need a share of the national cake and happiness.

It is cowardice to try and silence everyone into submission when our country is being looted dry right in our eyes. The resources in our country belong to every Zimbabwean. They are not there for the loot of the few. I represent that voice of a starving soul throughout Zimbabwe. Our people are suffering. They need happiness in their lifetime and it is that voice and reason why I speak on their behalf. I speak on behalf of the poverty stricken unemployed youth. I speak on behalf of the starving vendor, a suffering farm labourer, a peasant farmer whose produce has been reduced to nothing, a teacher whose salary can only afford a bar of soap, a packet of matemba and 2 litres of cooking oil, a soldier whose life is so difficult that they are no longer able to send their children to school. A police officer who after the end of the month is not able to make his wife and children happy. University and college graduates who have become faces of destitution. Zimbabwe is filled with sorrowful faces, souls and hearts. They cry everyday for their liberty, freedom and joy. This is a society I am prepared to die for. No matter the amount of intimidation, I will never relent on my calling by God to fight on behalf of the oppressed.

In light of these threats, by this response, I have informed domestic, regional and international authorities about the danger of the threat to my life by the ZANU PF regime through Kazembe Kazembe. Cry Zimbabwe cry. We shall be free one day.

Post published in: Featured

Today 622 RDT screening tests and 552 PCR diagnostic tests were done.

Therefore, to date, Zimbabwe has 320 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including forty-nine recoveries and four deaths.

The cumulative number of tests done to date is 55 709 (32 904 RDT and 22 805 PCR).

Stay at home and avoid going to crowded places. Where people come together in crowds, it is more difficult to maintain physical distance of at least 1 metre.

Post published in: Featured

Tuesday 9 June 2020 marked day 72 of the national lockdown declared by President Emmerson Mnangagwa and has been in place since 30 March 2020.  The Ministry of Health and Child Care reported an increase in the number of confirmed cases increased to three hundred and fourteen (314). The number of cumulative tests done stood at fifty-four thousand five hundred and thirty-five (54 535). Of these, fifty-four thousand two hundred and twenty-one (54 221) were negative. The number of recoveries increased to forty-six (46) and the death toll remains at four (4).
2.0       Methodology
Information contained in this report is derived from the following Forum Members:

• Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP)
• Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA)
• Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR)
• Counselling Services Unit (CSU)
• Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR)
• Zimbabwe Human Rights Association (ZimRights)

6.0  Conclusion
The Forum is concerned with the growing number of COVID-19 confirmed cases at the backdrop of the reopening of schools and tertiary institutions. The Forum urges government to adequately prepare for the reopening of schools to avoid the spread of the pandemic within academic institutions.

The Forum also urges community members to abide by lockdown regulations relating to social distance and the wearing of masks.

Post published in: Featured

Flatten the Research Curve

Flatten the Research Curve

Wolters Kluwer

Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!

How many states are currently planning on administering their July 2020 bar exam?

Hint: The number of states represents 37.3 percent of the July 2019 test takers.

See the answer on the next page.

Attorney General Bill Barr thought he could end the Michael Flynn prosecution by canning all the hard-working Department of Justice prosecutors and having a flunky declare that the government is dropping the case. A case that they’d already won.

That’s… unusual.

And it’s also the sort of thing that requires leave of the court.

Debevoise partner John Gleeson, a former Eastern District of New York judge, joined the Michael Flynn case at Judge Sullivan’s invitation to, in a nutshell, provide an independent answer to the question of whether or not Judge Sullivan should grant leave to allow the DOJ to walk away on the brink of sentencing and, separately, whether or not Flynn should be held in criminal contempt for now claiming that he wasn’t telling the truth when he admitted under oath to committing crimes.

So what did Judge Gleeson think about the DOJ’s arguments for dropping the case? A little inside baseball here, but the word “pretextual” gets prominent billing and that’s not good for the prosecution:

The Government’s ostensible grounds for seeking dismissal are conclusively disproven by its own briefs filed earlier in this very proceeding. They contradict and ignore this Court’s prior orders, which constitute law of the case. They are riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact.

Twitter is replete with lobotomized non-lawyers (and sometimes just bad lawyers) trying to sell the cockamamie theory that Flynn was entrapped by some sort of illegal government sting operation. The basic tenets of this argument don’t hold up to scrutiny — the dates don’t even match up in most cases — but they’re still bleating about FBI collusion.

Judge Gleeson found collusion alright. But not where those folks think it is:

Rule 48(a) was designed to “guard against dubious dismissals of criminal cases that would benefit powerful and well-connected defendants.” In other words, the rule empowers courts to protect the integrity of their own proceedings from prosecutors who undertake corrupt, politically motivated dismissals. That is what has happened here.

Corrupt. Hooboy.

If Trump wants his buddy cleared, all he has to do is pardon him. There’s a constitutional process sitting right there! It would still smack of corruption, but there’s nothing anyone can really do about it. But instead, Barr cooked up this scheme that ends up failing to accomplish the goal and obliterating the reputation of the Department of Justice in the process. These people are the Wile E. Coyote of politics.

Oh, and what about that criminal contempt claim?

The Court has also asked me to address whether it should issue an order to show cause why Flynn should not be held in criminal contempt for perjury. Flynn has indeed committed perjury in these proceedings, for which he deserves punishment, and the Court has the authority to initiate a prosecution for that crime.

It was hard for even the most ardent MAGAheads to deny that Flynn’s two confessions under oath weren’t lies. Prosecutors can put defendants under duress but a sophisticated government official with high-powered Biglaw counsel can’t really retreat to the “oh, I had no idea what I was doing” defense.

The good news for Flynn is that Gleeson isn’t recommending a separate contempt charge, suggesting that Judge Sullivan just add it to his consideration of the sentence for the underlying crime.

(Check out the whole thing on the next page.)

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Welcome listeners to this COVID-19 Special Report podcast presented by our friends at Wolters Kluwer and hosted by Evolve the Law Contributing Editor, Ian Connett (@QuantumJurist).

This report features Ken Crutchfield, Vice President & General Manager of Legal Markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US, who has more than 30 years experience at the convergence of software and information technology

Listen in as Ken and Ian examine the new role of a general counsel in a post-COVID legal environment and what legal professionals should be keeping in mind as we begin to reopen our economy. All of this and more on this week’s COVID-19 Special Coverage Podcast.

I am a well-educated, decent-looking white man. The closest I’ve ever come to being societally oppressed was the time a cantankerous Hy-Vee clerk in Missouri refused my Minnesota driver’s license as an acceptable form of ID to buy a six-pack of Leinenkugel’s.

Given my position of privilege, I didn’t think it my place to write much about the death of George Floyd and the resulting unrest until I’d had the opportunity to think things over, and more importantly, the opportunity to actually join the people on the streets for whom racial inequality is a daily, lived experience. I was in Minneapolis last Thursday, the day of the first of several memorials planned for George Floyd. I didn’t really get very near to the actual ceremony. Instead, I chatted with a few people I knew, and some I didn’t. I looked at several once-familiar buildings, now little more than burned-out shells.

My girlfriend was volunteering at a Minneapolis church. She’s not religious (nor am I), but the neighborhood churches didn’t mind, and hands were needed to pass out food, laundry detergent, clothing, and other household supplies to help struggling members of the community through this tough time. My girlfriend told me what people most appreciated were the diapers and baby wipes for those with young children at home. Some gathered supplies not for themselves, but to make deliveries to neighbors without vehicles. A steady flow of donations came in to replenish the stock as items went out.

Later, I had a thrice-delayed flight to New Orleans that was once again scheduled. On the way to the Minneapolis airport, the riotous fallout, visible in only a few brief flashes from I-35, looked distant compared to the immediate mountains of road construction rubble.

The next day, following several hours of awkwardly clean coronavirus-era travel, I marched with my cousin to the seventh night of protests in New Orleans. Thousands gathered in the French Quarter outside of Jackson Square. The gated park that surrounds a statue of President Andrew Jackson, who was a slave holder, had been locked. Jackson Square was declared closed by the authorities earlier in the day amid calls by some protesters for the statue’s removal.

The French Quarter was a sad shadow of its carefree Mardi Gras iteration. Many of the shops and restaurants had boarded-up windows. No one could agree if it was a prophylactic against vandalism during the pandemic shutdown, a measure in anticipation of a riot, or a bulwark against the tropical storm that was slowly blowing in from the Gulf.

People carried signs:

Black Lives Matter

No Justice No Peace

Police Reform NOW

History Has Its Eyes On Us

Proud To Be A Veteran, Ashamed To Be An American

The World Is Watching. Now’s The Time To Speak.

Almost everyone wore a mask, although bare faces dotted the crowd here and there. Some protesters rolled coolers into the street to pass out sandwiches. My cousin tried, with limited success, to give away cookies.

Speakers kept the crowd rapt for minutes, then hours. Some used fiery rhetoric to decry police violence, yet they all urged calm. The demonstration remained entirely peaceful.

There was a point, though, when an object flew past the woman speaking at the front of the crowd. I perked up from my position at the back of the mass of people, where I’d been leaned up against a pillar scribbling furiously in a pocket notebook. “We’re calm,” said the speaker. “We’re calm,” she repeated. “But if you’re not all about what we’re doing here, please leave.”

“If you are about what we’re doing here, clap once,” she said. A wave of sound pulsed back and bounced off the buildings. “Clap twice!” They did. “Clap three times!” I dropped my notebook and pen and clapped.

The speaker urged the crowd to part “like the Red Sea.” A white man near the front turned from the stairs that served as a stage. He was wearing a mask pulled high over his face, tactical pants, and a T-shirt, which had printed on it in bold letters, “Fuck Gun Control.” The man slunk out the back toward the setting sun, and the rally continued.

Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.