Fletcher's Follies once again

Our good friend and collaborator Joel Rosenberg has published a devastating online article that starkly describes in great detail yet more transgressions (events that the local media don't seem to be interested in, for reasons that will soon become apparent) that are alleged to have occurred under the watch of Ramsey County, Minnesota Sheriff Bob Fletcher, who can't seem to walk ten feet without stepping on his genitalia these days.

Joel, who is a handgun carry permit instructor, wants Fletcher, who is already smack dab at Ground Zero of the current Minnesota Gang Strike Force law-enforcement fiasco, to answer a simple question: Why was Michelle Rae Wilson, a person with an extensive history of serious criminal accusations (including being put under restraining orders at least three times), given a carry permit without question when she applied, when so many other law-abiding citizens in Ramsey County are wrongfully denied their permits for such trivial reasons as a years-old arrest (not a conviction) or a single DUI conviction, neither of which are valid disqualifiers under the Minnesota Personal Protection Act?

You see, Wilson, who parenthetically was never arrested for any of her previous alleged crimes despite seemingly more than enough evidence to do so in many of the incidents, is scheduled to go on trial this November for the 2007 murder of Carl Jackson, her ex-boyfriend.

Curiously, after Wilson was arrested for the crime, Ramsey County Deputy David Rossman, the person who issued Wilson's permit as well as wrongfully denied so many others (and whose arbitrary, not-based-on-the-law decisions have been overturned many times by local judges, causing Fletcher to pay thousands of taxpayer dollars in attorney fees for the applicants, as mandated by state law) submitted to a court a 100-page petition asking to revoke Wilson's permit, a petition that mostly used her prior history as the reasoning for the revocation request.

If there was that much evidence that Wilson was a nogoodnik when she applied for her permit, why didn't Rossman deny her in the first place, especially when one notes that his documented threshold for doing so is so low? It certainly wouldn't be because Wilson's nephew is St. Paul police officer Robert Edwards (the person who has admitted giving her the alleged murder weapon, to boot), now would it?

For that matter, why has Deputy Rossman been reassigned, and no longer oversees handgun permit issuing for Ramsey County? Sheriff Fletcher wouldn't be trying to hide him somewhere else until after the trial, would he?

Read Joel's entire piece. It quite convincingly adds a whole pile of evidence (as if more was needed) to reinforce the thinking of those of us who already thought the Ramsey County Sheriff's Department was both corrupt and incompetent.