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Old September 25th, 2011 #2261
Leonard Rouse
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No cadre can ever trust you guys, which is what you don't seem to get.

Or do you?

Obtuse or malicious, that is the question.
 
Old September 25th, 2011 #2262
Hadding
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Originally Posted by Leonard Rouse View Post
I already cited my mistake.

You're right on time though, as predicted. You and liar Hadding make quite the tag team.
Why was Pauly so unresponsive to my tags in July, August, September 2010? He was quite the Steele cheerleader himself back then.
 
Old September 25th, 2011 #2263
Donald E. Pauly
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Originally Posted by Hadding View Post
Why was Pauly so unresponsive to my tags in July, August, September 2010? He was quite the Steele cheerleader himself back then.
I supported Steele as long as there was a possibility of his being framed. When his behavior was proven to be crazy beyond a doubt, I changed my mind. His steamy love letters to Tatyana Loginova written from jail did the trick. They are undisputed. The 1500 pages of the trial transcript reinforced it a hundred times.
 
Old September 25th, 2011 #2264
Hadding
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Originally Posted by Donald E. Pauly View Post
I supported Steele as long as there was a possibility of his being framed. When his behavior was proven to be crazy beyond a doubt, I changed my mind. His steamy love letters to Tatyana Loginova written from jail did the trick. They are undisputed. The 1500 pages of the trial transcript reinforced it a hundred times.
Well then you're not really on my team!

Damned independent thinker!
 
Old October 2nd, 2011 #2265
8Man
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Default You Only Think You’ve Got Rights - No Attorney-Client Privilege (Part V)

You Only Think You’ve Got Rights
No Attorney-Client Privilege (Part V)

by Edgar J. Steele


October 1, 2011

I learned that the government secretly and illegally had been recording all my telephone calls to lawyers, save only my judge-approved “attorney of record,” just as I decided to engage Robert McAllister to try my case. By then, of course, all my telephone conversations with “Mac” and attorney Wesley Hoyt (whom I had tried to hire) had been recorded and, with them, every shred of my evidence, trial strategy and witness testimony. The Federal prosecutor knew my defense as well as I did.

Judge Allows Feds to Listen In

What was I to do? As we saw in Part II, both Washington statute and the written jail policy said no calls would be recorded without a court order and no such order had issued. The jail guards refused me access to any telephone except those reserved for inmate use. Those same guards assured me, time and again, that none of my calls were being recorded. If I wanted to find a new lawyer, which I desperately needed to do, I had to use a phone that, unbeknownst to me, was secretly tapped and recorded by the US Marshals Service for the Federal prosecutor seeking to imprison me for the rest of my life.

Nobody told me that the Feds had an unwritten policy that all Federal inmates’ calls to legitimate attorneys not “of record” secretly would be taped. If they had told me, I never would have believed that the Federal judge on my case would bless such blatantly illegal and un-Constitutional conduct… but that is exactly what Judge Winmill did.

But, Wait…

But, wait – it gets even worse. In addition to listening in to my phone calls with lawyers, the government also opened my mail to lawyers and, even, secretly listened in to my “private” in-person conferences with my lawyers.

Next week, I will tell you about my private conferences with attorneys that were secretly monitored by the Feds. This week, let me tell you about a couple of letters I sent to attorneys that were opened by the US Marshals Service and copied for the Federal prosecutor on my case. How do I know? Because, incredibly, the Feds were brazen enough to produce copies back to me in pretrial discovery, replete with Bates numbering stamps.

The Feds Open My Legal Mail

Enclosed is one of those letters. Note that, in both cases, I wrote “Legal Mail” on the face of the envelopes, along with “Atty At Law” in conjunction with each lawyer’s name. Note also that each letter dealt very specifically with my defense.



See those six-digit numbers in the lower, right-hand corners? Those are the “Bates-number stamps” placed on all documents by the Feds that are produced to the Defense (me!) for their use as trial evidence.

I told both Roger Peven (my then-Public Defender) and Mac (my-soon-to-be “Attorney of Record”) about these letters, upon seeing them in the government’s pretrial document production. Neither was surprised and, incredibly both eventually were to do nothing about this blatantly-illegal invasion of my attorney-client-privileged written communications.

In one of the letters, I tried to guide Mac (my soon-to-be-but-not-quite-yet “Attorney of Record”), in transitioning from Peven’s office by noting that Peven’s associate attorney “is useless.” I pointed that out to Peven as likely being why the Feds produced the letter back to us, as an attempt to further divide Peven and myself. Totally ignoring the point I was making about the secret and illegal violation of my attorney-client privilege, Roger Peven told me, “Oh, she (his associate attorney) probably hasn’t even seen it.” Note the matter of fact way that Roger Peven seemed to share my opinion of his associate attorney, who should already have examined every shred of evidence produced to us by the Feds! Mr. Peven neglected to do anything about the un-Constitutional conduct by the Federal prosecutor.

A Crime? Not if the Feds Do It!

I also should note that I placed all “Legal Mail” letters to attorneys, sealed, in the box at the jail labeled “U.S. Mail.” The supervising guard assured me that, once mail went into that box it was “in the U.S. Postal system” and if anybody opened it (other than the addressee) a Federal crime would be committed. Just as with my secretly-recorded phone calls to lawyers, thus was I lulled into yet another naïve complacency.

Copyright ©2011, Edgar J. Steele

Forward as you wish. Permission is granted to circulate this article and its related audio file among private individuals and groups, post on all Internet sites and publish in full in all not-for-profit publications. Contact author for all other rights, which are reserved.
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Old October 2nd, 2011 #2266
-JC
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Default There's scanned documentation in the original...

It's attached.

Last edited by -JC; October 29th, 2011 at 03:34 AM.
 
Old October 3rd, 2011 #2267
-JC
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Default Well bless her heart because, in my opinion, she's on the right side of this issue...

[My apologies for the headline: Judge Lynn Winmill is apparently a "him" rather than a "her."

The feds arguably manage one third of the nation's land and they cave-in to short-term thinkers desperate for revenue to pay the interest on the national debt. Solve the international banking and associated political corruption problem, as suggested by Ron Paul, and everyone's lives will be more economical/ecological. "Everything's connected to everything else."]

Federal court decision puts BLM plans in 6 Western states in question

"A federal judge in Idaho gave Western Watersheds Project an early victory in a lawsuit challenging 18 Bureau of Land Management's resource plans in Idaho, Nevada, California, Utah, Wyoming and Montana.


"U.S. District Court Judge B. Lynn Winmill said that the BLM's plan in southwest Wyoming failed to adequately address the cumulative impact oil and gas development had on sage grouse; and ruled that the BLM's plan for an Idaho national monument erroneously did not include a grazing ban as an option, even though data indicated that sage grouse numbers had dropped by 36 percent in the past 25 years and that grazing played a role.

"The overall effect of Winmill's decision is not yet known, and a status conference is scheduled between the parties on Oct. 27. "

Last edited by -JC; October 9th, 2011 at 12:20 PM.
 
Old October 9th, 2011 #2268
-JC
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You Only Think You’ve Got Rights
No Attorney-Client Privilege (Part VI)

by Edgar J. Steele

October 8, 2011

So far in this chapter, I have shown four instances of prosecutorial misconduct by the Feds secretly and illegally invading my confidential communications with lawyers, twice by listening in to phone calls and twice opening my “Legal Mail” to lawyers.

You also have seen how the US Marshals Service (USMS) believes it has the right to invade communications between any federal inmate and all lawyers who are not “Attorney of Record” for that inmate. I also told you of the secret court hearing in which Federal Judge Winmill sanctioned that grotesquely-illegal and un-Constitutional position.

No Private Attorney Conferences

So – no phone calls to lawyers are private and no letters, either. “What’s left?” you might ask. Plenty. Let me show you two documented instances of the USMS listening in on my supposed “private and confidential” in-person conferences with Attorney Bob McAllister – once just before he replaced Roger Peven as my “Attorney of Record” and again, afterward, during my trial in the Boise Federal District Courthouse.

Just before Bob “Mac” McAllister first came to see me in person at Spokane County Jail, the glass window in the attorney visiting booth mysteriously was broken in the middle of the night. It was the only visiting booth not set up to record all conversations. I had to meet with Mac in one of the regular visiting booths, wired for recording, as a result of this “coincidental” mishap with the glass.

As was Mac’s practice with our phone calls, he always prefaced our personal discussions with a verbal warning, demanding that any eavesdropping be stopped right then and the recording, if any, be filed with Federal Judge Winmill. I hired Mac as my new “Attorney of Record” during our first meeting in that regular conference booth. It was during that, our first in-person conference, that Mac disclosed his intention to me to wait a couple of months, until a pretrial conference set for February 7, 2011, to enter his formal appearance, then move for a continuance to get time to finish the pretrial investigation and preparation that had not yet been begun by my then - Public Defender, Roger Peven.

A month later, Peven was to tell me (among others) of his extreme dissatisfaction about the Federal Prosecutor (Traci Whelan) knowing about all my pre-trial strategies and tactics. Said Peven, huffily: “You might as well call Traci Whelan first and tell her everything, because she hears about it before I do.” Peven was annoyed that I was interviewing lawyers to take over the case from him. Peven cited to me some defense strategies I never discussed on the phone with anybody, as well as Mac’s late entry of appearance and intent to ask for a continuance. Mac had discussed his strategy with me only in our personal meetings in the Spokane County Jail Visiting Booths, which proved that the Feds were listening in to my meetings with Mac just before he filed to formally represent me!

In fact, Mac’s privately-stated intent was used against him at the February 7 hearing by the prosecutor, who quoted Mac verbatim, to oppose the motion Mac then made for a continuance – further proof of the government’s secret and illegal eavesdropping on my personal conferences with my soon-to-be “Attorney of Record.”

But, wait – it gets worse… much worse.

Yes – Even the Judge Listened In!

In one of the many secret hearings and conferences from which I was excluded by Judge Winmill on May 3, 2011 (during my trial!), a blockbuster emerged from the court’s own transcript. Mac never told me a thing about it, either (and, yes, in weeks to come, I will have a great deal to say about Mac’s incredible misrepresentation of me, both prior to and during that trial).

I stumbled upon this secret hearing’s remarkable colloquy several months after the trial, while reviewing late-released transcripts for which we paid much earlier, in preparation for the appeal. You see, we had been challenging the court reporter over some clearly-altered on-the-record talk by Judge Winmill during the trial (also to be the subject of a future article) and, while I am only speculating now, I suspect that she decided she better break loose with portions of transcripts that had been (illegally) held back from us at first.

I wish I could enclose a copy of the transcript from that 5/3/11 secret hearing held by the judge in the afternoon. Problem is, it still is sealed by Judge Winmill’s order and, thus, still is being kept secret from the public.

Earlier that same day, the judge had flip-flop-flipped in ruling that my key witness, forensic sound expert Dr. George Papcun, would not be allowed to testify unless he could be in court absolutely no later than 8:30 the very next morning, an impossibility, as Judge Winmill well knew, because Dr. Papcun was, at the moment, on the other side of the earth, in Tahiti. Dr. Papcun was preparing for his satellite video uplink testimony the next day just as the judge previously had said he could testify.

My Rights Yield to (Nonexistent) Government Rights

In excluding my key defense witness, the judge said that the government had a Constitutional right to confront witnesses in person during the trial. (Not true – that is a right guaranteed only to criminal defendants by the 6th Amendment.) Never mind that I had been denied that very right during the trial by the judge when he allowed the government to play a video taped satellite-uplink deposition given by an absent “witness” who also happened to be on the other side of the world, in Ukraine.

In response to the judge’s ruling denying me my key witness, Mac moved for a continuance of the trial while we flew Dr. Papcun to Boise. Just one day is all that would have been required. “No,” said the judge, while continuing to pressure us to wrap up even earlier than the end-of-week deadline he previously had set (he had a “meeting” the following week, you see).

During that same day’s trial proceedings, I met with Mac, my “Attorney-of-Record,” in the Boise Federal District courthouse Attorney-Client conference room. This was a separate room with concrete walls and a locked metal door, in which Mac and I were supposed to have complete privacy. It was impossible for anyone accidentally to hear discussions in that room while on the outside.

Just Another Illegal Secret Hearing – (ho hum)

Even so, the judge was to confront Mac in the afternoon secret hearing, from which I was excluded, with the news that I had been overheard by the US Marshall’s Service while in private conference with Mac. The judge quoted me as having said to Mac: “Well, if we need a continuance, I can guarantee us three days by just having a medical emergency.” How odd that, of all the talks I had with Mac, that was the only conversation that the USMS claims to have overheard (plus the one before he entered his appearance, of course, in which Mac arguably discussed with me some alleged misconduct of his own).

Mac never told me about this little secret hearing, but now I understand why he then stopped even pretending to present a defense on my behalf. Why he laid down. Why my “defense” took less than one court day. He had been cowed by the judge a second time with the spectre of being charged with criminal misconduct, based upon things said between us in confidence. This time, though, the government couldn’t rely upon their old (wrong) standby argument of “He’s not the Attorney-of-Record.” The Judge was betting that, having denied me my key witness, I would create my own continuance. The Judge was wrong.

Even The Judge Steps In It, This Time

Nor could Judge Winmill this time provide himself, cover, because he willingly listened to what the USMS claimed I said, then used it in a not-very-subtle way to intimidate my lawyer into standing down before even starting to present my “defense.”

Ironically, the “medical emergency” easily could have been justified, because I was barely aware of what was going on in court, due to my ongoing nosebleeds and incredibly intense headaches. I almost called for a time-out before the trial even started, but decided not to do so, only because I figured that the doctors would drug me so badly that I really wouldn’t understand what was happening. My headaches and nosebleeds were well-documented in the records of every jail in which I had been held since my arrest, a result of no follow-up care for the emergency cranial-aneurysm surgery I underwent just prior to my arrest. It would have been a legitimate call, as Mac well knew at the time. I never did make that call, of course. Note that nothing was illegal or wrong about this whole incident, except the Judge and the USMS eavesdropping on my “confidential” attorney conference.

Judge Winmill himself crossed the line when he agreed to hear what the USMS heard while secretly and illegally listening to my “confidential” conversations with my “Attorney-of-Record,” even during the trial. Then, Judge Winmill himself used that invasive eavesdropping in an attempt to intimidate my lawyer.

Just another day in the Amerikan Just-Us System, folks. Your tax dollars at work.

Last edited by -JC; October 9th, 2011 at 12:18 PM.
 
Old October 9th, 2011 #2269
Hadding
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Leonard Rouse View Post
No cadre can ever trust you guys, which is what you don't seem to get.

Or do you?

Obtuse or malicious, that is the question.
Sorry, I just don't see any reason to lie for Steele, especially since the Feds' case is solid and evidence for the Mission Impossible story is nonexistent. Lying at this point just makes you look like ... a liar. Steele would be better off if he'd told the truth and if people like you hadn't encouraged him to keep lying.

I'd just as soon not be in your cadre of liars that don't know when to quit, thank you very much.

Last edited by Hadding; October 9th, 2011 at 12:49 PM.
 
Old October 9th, 2011 #2270
Maxfield Parrish
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Steele will be out in twenty years or so. I'd say just ride out the storm until then, mainly because Eddie probably is guilty of plotting his wife's murder. He can still serve the Cause from behind bars, however, doing his Nickel Rants. Or, in his case, Two Dimes in the Slammer Rant.
 
Old October 9th, 2011 #2271
Leonard Rouse
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hadding View Post
Sorry, I just don't see any reason to lie for Steele, especially since the Feds' case is solid and evidence for the Mission Impossible story is nonexistent. Lying at this point just makes you look like ... a liar. Steele would be better off if he'd told the truth and if people like you hadn't encouraged him to keep lying.
I never encouraged Steele to lie the first time, certainly not to keep doing so.

Naturally, you won't cite a source because you can't. Pieces of shit like you never can.

Quote:
I'd just as soon not be in your cadre of liars that don't know when to quit, thank you very much.
Like all crud, you brand others as being what you manifestly are.

I haven't decided about you, Hadding. Are you a kike? Or are you Covington? Or, as is so often the case, do you just have the same shitty personality characteristcs of those to whom you're attracted, albeit as a nominal enemy?

". . .at this point. . " ". . .don't know when to quit. . ."

At this point, you're rehashing something from a fortnight ago, which reveals you've been stewing about it since then. I must have 'gored your ox,' to use one of the tortured constructions you've laid on others who have crossed you. Obviously, Steele falls into that category, as you continue to post here, out of spite, long after he's been put in prison. It's not just politically stupid, it's unhealthy.

It's uncanny how you alienate everyone you come in contact with--just on a messageboard. That really takes some doing. Congratulations.

Shouldn't you be out with your microscope and fork looking for delicious Covington droppings to expose, when no one would have known anything about them if not for your mentioning?

When I see your crap, Hadding, I'm reminded of something I saw on Usenet over a decade ago. This was before I knew the principals of this non-movement. Some 'anti-racist' wrote "Harold Covington is the Nazi none of the other Nazis like."

That fits you to a T.
 
Old October 9th, 2011 #2272
Donald E. Pauly
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Angry Red Herrings in the Rant

Quote:
Originally Posted by -JC View Post
......
A month later, Peven was to tell me (among others) of his extreme dissatisfaction about the Federal Prosecutor (Traci Whelan) knowing about all my pre-trial strategies and tactics. Said Peven, huffily: “You might as well call Traci Whelan first and tell her everything, because she hears about it before I do.” Peven was annoyed that I was interviewing lawyers to take over the case from him. Peven cited to me some defense strategies I never discussed on the phone with as well as Mac’s late entry of appearance and intent to ask for a continuance. Mac had discussed his strategy with me in our personal meetings in the Spokane County Jail Visiting Booths, which proved that the Feds were listening in to my meetings with Mac just before he filed to formally represent me! Mac never told me a thing about it, either (and, yes, in weeks to come, I will have a great deal to say about Mac’s incredible misrepresentation of me, both prior to and during that trial).
This is a red herring. What damage did it do for the Feds to know what the defense strategy would be? It was incompetent from the start. Why didn't Steele fire McAlister on the spot? The answer of course is that Steele is crazy.

Quote:

Earlier that same day, the judge had flip-flop-in ruling that my key witness, forensic sound expert Dr. George Papcun, would not be allowed to testify he could be in court absolutely no later than 8:30 the very next morning, an impossibility, as Judge Winmill well knew, because Dr. Papcun was, at the moment, on the other side of the earth, in Tahiti. Dr. Papcun was preparing for his satellite video uplink testimony the next day just as the judge previously had said.
The defense had known for weeks that their supposed expert had a vacation scheduled in Bora Bora which could conflict with the trial. Papcun NEVER said that the recordings were faked. There were hundreds of capable experts on this subject across the country and they picked this loser. It also does no good to get an expert if the recordings are authentic.

The judge would allow video testimony only if the link was reliable without freezing up and it was tested ahead of time. The defense failed to get the test done before trial time. This entire issue of the expert not being allowed to testify is bogus. These matters are all clear from the 1,500 pages of the trial transcript.

Last edited by Donald E. Pauly; October 9th, 2011 at 06:23 PM. Reason: typo
 
Old October 9th, 2011 #2273
Hadding
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Leonard Rouse View Post
I never encouraged Steele to lie the first time, certainly not to keep doing so.

Naturally, you won't cite a source because you can't. Pieces of shit like you never can.
I knew you were going to say this.

I said people like you, not you specifically. People like you means people who refuse to admit the possibility that maybe he did it. You're a wacko.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Leonard Rouse View Post
It's uncanny how you alienate everyone you come in contact with--just on a messageboard. That really takes some doing. Congratulations.
I would like to see a list of this "everybody." Let's see. There's John Liability, you, and some of your buddies. Who else?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Leonard Rouse View Post
Shouldn't you be out with your microscope and fork looking for delicious Covington droppings to expose, when no one would have known anything about them if not for your mentioning?
Linder likes my Setting the Record Straight blog. Over 11,000 pageviews, and a similar number on the Phora thread. I think a lot of people appreciate it. I am sure that it has helped straighten out a few people. Why does it bother you?

Last edited by Hadding; October 11th, 2011 at 02:56 AM.
 
Old October 13th, 2011 #2274
-JC
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Default Something that's turned-me-off since 7th grade...

The first time I saw a "hood," a "greaser," whatever one calls them, these days, not only win a fistfight but kick the loser of even someone else's fistfight when when the loser was down, I knew what I didn't like. And I still don't like it.

And it doesn't necessarily follow that one who doesn't like that kind of behavior believes in a victim's innocence, lack of any culpability, what have you, rather it means that one simply supports fair play. How many obviously guilty perpetrators have you seen let-go by The System just because of a technical error? That, I believe, is primarily what's being objected-to even by Steele, at this point.

Claim you're just trying to help get Ed Steele out of jail because he's "crazy?" A brief explanation of exactly what you've been doing, including how forum readers could verify your claims, would be YOUR case.

Last edited by -JC; October 16th, 2011 at 04:12 AM. Reason: a punctuation problem pointed-out to me
 
Old October 15th, 2011 #2275
-JC
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Default No Attorney-Client Privilege (Part VII)...

You Only Think You’ve Got Rights
No Attorney-Client Privilege (Part VII)
by Edgar J. Steele
October 15, 2011

As we have seen so far, the US Marshals Service (USMS) secretly violated my 6th-Amendment right to confidential communications with attorneys in every way possible: telephone, letter and personal conferences. The USMS even gave letter copies and sound recordings to the Federal Prosecutor for use against me right from the very beginning. Then, Judge Winmill gave them an illegal pass when we discovered they had been recording my phone calls to lawyers.

After Attorney Wes Hoyt filed a Substitution of Attorney, whereby he took over my case after I was wrongfully convicted, the Judge pretended that Mr. Hoyt had filed a motion, thus requiring the Judge’s approval, and scheduled a hearing. Recall that we talked of that July 6, 2011, hearing in Part III of this series, where we learned that the US Marshals Service, with the Judge’s blessing, believed it legal to record my conversations with all attorneys not “of-record” and give these recordings to the Federal Prosecutors of my case. At that hearing, Judge Winmill also revealed his wrongful belief that he had the right to decide just who could be my attorney. Then, the Judge went even further and ruled that he had to approve in advance any and all “confidential” communications I wished to have with any attorney, excepting only my new “Attorney of Record” (Wes Hoyt).



(Pages 35 and 36 of the transcript from that hearing.)

Don’t be misled by the Judge’s verbiage about being concerned that a lawyer is not “licensed in the State of Idaho or perhaps Washington.” Remember that this is Federal court. All legitimate American lawyers are allowed to practice before all Federal courts. Besides, even in state court criminal proceedings, a defendant still has a 6th-Amendment right to consult confidentially with out-of-state attorneys.

Here’s the key statement made by the Judge: “If there is a concern by Mr. Steele, then I think he can presumably communicate directly with the court, submitting something in ex parte fashion…” Ok, I do have a concern: I have to file an appeal soon, yet I am not allowed to talk confidentially with any appellate lawyer! So, per his in-court ruling, I wrote to Judge Winmill, “in ex parte fashion,” asking for permission to call two appellate attorneys in confidence. Enclosed is a copy of that 9-page, handwritten letter, in which I also asked the judge a few questions about this new (un-constitutional) rule of his.

The judge never did answer my letter. Guess he isn’t going to, since he since has issued an ex parte order, specifying that, I can’t “communicate directly with the court,” after all. Instead, in order to interview and speak confidentially with appellate attorneys, I must file a formal motion with the court and, then, only through my official, Judge-endorsed “Attorney of Record.” I have asked Mr. Hoyt to do that. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on my appeal, I still am languishing in jail and I am judicially prohibited from confidentially contacting any lawyer other than Wes Hoyt, who literally cannot handle my appeal. Now what am I supposed to do, Judge?

My 9-page letter to Judge Winmill follows.


Copyright ©2011, Edgar J. Steele

Forward as you wish. Permission is granted to circulate this article and
its related audio file among private individuals and groups, post on all
Internet sites and publish in full in all not-for-profit publications.
Contact author for all other rights, which are reserved.

(Due to the difficulty of reading Mr. Steele's hand-written letter to Judge Winmill, the pages below provide a typed version for easier reading. Note that Mr. Steele was only capable of sending his handwritten letter.)

Edgar Steele
Latah County Jail
POB 8068
Moscow, ID 83843
July 14, 2011
Hon. B. Lynn Winmill, Judge
US District Court for Idaho

RE: US v. Steele, Case No. 2110-CC-148-BLW

Dear Judge Winmill:

In accordance with your order during last week’s hearing, I write you to request permission to contact (confidentially) two lawyers who are not my attorney of record at present:

? Riordan of San Francisco
? Benjamin of ?, Idaho

If I have trouble getting these two lawyers’ phone numbers, how do I confidentially secure them?




This rule of yours, restricting my confidential communications to only my “attorney of record,” is new to me and raises a great many questions as to how I am to observe it:
  1. For example, I have been forbidden confidential access, even to my previous attorney of record, “Robert McAllister, through a phone number he gave me that is answered in the name of a furniture store (warehouse). How do I use such numbers to confidentially call my “attorney of record?”
  2. Must I secure your permission each and every time I wish to confidentially contact an attorney who is not my “attorney of record?” That is, the same attorney, again and again?
  3. Must I secure your permission to send confidential “legal mail” to attorneys not “of record?”
  4. How does an attorney not “of record” contact me confidentially? Must he first secure you permission, too?
  5. You specified in court that I must contact you, Judge, which is why I write to you today (though I am having difficulty getting your phone number or address).
  6. This, of course, constitutes an ex parte communication with the court, which I thought was frowned upon, if not actually illegal. Should I contact you through someone else? If so, then who?
  7. Should I be contacting you only through my attorney of record? If so, how do I keep confidential from him the fact of my communicating with other lawyers?
  8. How do I call any attorney, even my attorney of record, if I am short of funds? Calls here at Latah County Jail cost me $0.50 per minute, which mounts up quickly.
  9. If I am not to contact you ex parte, how do I seek you permission to confidentially contact an attorney not “of record” and keep that fact from the prosecution, not to mention the rest of the world?
  10. I have been so distressed by how much of this case against me has been conducted in secret (closed hearings, sealed filings, all those trial sidebars that I was forbidden by you from attending, and so on). Even so, some documents have disappeared from the court record and I see that the trial transcript has been altered in places. I am not suggesting that you would be a party to such things, Judge (except denial of my access to sidebar conferences, of course), but I truly am disturbed by how both the facts of my prosecution have been hidden and the documentation of how it was conducted now seem to be disappearing. How can I possibly organize an effective appeal? Even so, I would like to have some confidentiality for my attorney contacts.
  11. After the way I was deceived by Spokane and Bonner Count jail deputies, I simply do not trust any jail’s personnel to honor my attorney-client confidentiality, not to mention the US Attorney’s office and the US Marshals Service. How do I keep them from knowing about such contacts, let alone prevent their secretly listening, despite written jail policies and specific assurances to the contrary?
  12. Spokane County Jail forbade me from contacting any attorney, except via the inmates telephones. Because inmates in line and on either side of me could hear what is said, how do I keep even “attorney of record” calls confidential?
  13. Spokane County Jail opened my marked legal mail, copied it and gave copies to the US Attorney (just my letters to attorneys not “of record,” I think, though I cannot be sure). In order to comply with your new, more liberal rule, how do I designate such attorneys to the jail so that I do not have that intrusion continue, yet still comply with your rule?
  14. Is this letter going to be opened and read by the US Attorney’s office, since you are not my “attorney of record?”
  15. It is too late for me to talk confidentially with other lawyers before the deadline to file post-trial motions. Is there some form of expedited request/approval for me to speak confidentially with attorneys not “of record?”
  16. I had a hard enough time securing McAllister and, now, Hoyt to sign on as my attorneys of record. McAllister absolutely committed legal malpractice leading to my conviction. I must file a claim with his E & O insurance to finance my appeal, since all my funds (and then some) were expended upon McAllister’s representation. Once word of that claim gets out, no lawyer in America will be willing to come near me. How do I avoid that taint from attaching to me?
  17. Speaking of taints. I was absolutely doomed to conviction by your ruling that I had waived my right to confidentiality in my calls and letters, previously, to attorneys “not of record.” If I do manage to secure a new trial on appeal and if I somehow can find a way to pay for it and if I find a good lawyer to handle my appeal, how do I remove that taint from the US Attorney’s files or, for that matter, from the minds of the prosecutors or, even, from your mind? This worries me greatly, Judge.
  18. Finally, why do the USMS policies forbidding confidentiality in my communications with attorneys not “of record” trump the federal rules and bar ethics rules, Judge, as you so clearly intimated by your remarks during last week’s hearing?
  1. Judge, I do not mean to be contradictory, impertinent or, even, disagreeable with you. The stakes (the rest of my natural life) are too high for me to risk that sort of behavior. However, I am in a fight, literally, for my life and now, with four unjust convictions, my back truly is against the wall.
I have been held in jail, essentially incommunicado, for over a year, therefore prevented from any meaningful defense of myself while I have had two truly horrible and incompetent “do nothing” attorneys of record. Now my money is gone and I wonder how I can pay for the motions or appeal, let alone a new trial. I feel like a drowning man, going down for the third time. Please help me! All I have been asking for is a level playing field, not the stacked deck I have been facing. Just simple fairness, Judge. Why do I not seem to deserve even fundamental fairness?

By the way, every time I have been taken to Kootenai County Jail for holding in relation to hearings before you, I am treated in truly horrible fashion by some of the meanest and rudest county deputies I ever have seen. I am held in a holding cell in booking with no privacy and no shower and forbidden anything to read. Not even the bible I regularly ask for. I must sit there on a concrete bench or a thin mattress on the floor, all day and all night with no rec time, nothing to read and with the temperature so low that I seem to shiver all the time. Do not even the Geneva Accords (to which the US is a signatory) forbid such treatment? Does not the US Constitution forbid “cruel & unusual punishment,” Judge?

Detention is not supposed to be punishment. I have spent a year being punished illegally. I really can’t take it anymore. Please, Judge, Help me!

Respectfully, /S/ Edgar J. Steele

Last edited by -JC; October 15th, 2011 at 03:22 AM.
 
Old October 21st, 2011 #2276
-JC
Doesn't suffer fools well
 
Join Date: Apr 2006
Posts: 5,740
Default Urgent appeal from Ed Steele: He wants your letters to the Supremes...

This will be a very long message. The Edgar Steele Defense Fund, the Steele family and others are mounting a TIME-CRITICAL letter-sending campaign. We are petitioning the US Supreme Court to consider the travesty of Mr. Steele's legal battle. To have the most impact, included in this message is an overview of the letter-sending campaign, three example letters that can be sent to ONE or ALL NINE of the US Supreme Court Justices. Included here are the names of the NINE Justices.

We ask if possible, please consider sending ONE or more hand-signed letters based on the information herein. If possible, before noon, Friday October 21. Yes, that's NOW. We found at the very last moment the need to mobilize immediately.

=========================
At the FES web site -- this page: http://www.free-edgar-steele.com/?page_id=522 is found duplication (and enhancement) of the info contained here. If you'd like US to take care of sending letters to the USSC on your behalf, that is an option.
=========================
Roadmap: First is an issue summary with some instructions. Next are 3 example letters you can use as is, or can tailor. The task is to edit, print, sign, stuff in an addressed envelope, add postage and mail before NOON Friday 10/21.
=========================
October 19, 2011

Dear US Citizens:

Imagine that one day the FBI arrests you. You did nothing wrong, but all of a sudden they are at your front door and you are placed in hand cuffs. Now imagine that you are thrown in jail without bail, kept in solitary confinement and prevented from talking with friends or family. What do you do? Call a lawyer, right? Once you talk with him your troubles should be over, right?

This happens thousands of times every day in our country and you would think that once you get your lawyer on the phone, he/she would arrange to bail you out and all will be well. But, even when you and the attorney can talk,not so fast, Sherlock! You probably didn't know that every word you and your attorney say to each other is recorded and played back to the prosecution!

How do they get away with that, you ask? Well, it’s easy when the judge lets them do it and it appears to be a part of their regular business; as in, “I was just doing my job.” It is not so astounding that there is a 97% conviction rate of all people prosecuted for federal crimes,when you consider this course of action. Are the feds that good? Are the people arrested that bad? How do they get these fantastic (as in the traditional “fantasy” meaning of the word) rates of conviction? One of the secrets will be revealed to you right here. They violate the law and they lie about it! Now they have been caught and catching them will only make a difference if you let the US Supreme Court know that you know and the rest of America is also going to know that they have been caught. According to federal law and rules set down by the United States Supreme Court, attorney-client conversations are supposed to be kept secret. They are supposed to be absolutely privileged. They are sacrosanct. Attorneys speak to their clients with the expectation that their conversations about their case, about trial strategy, about guilt or innocence, are as privileged and protected as doctor-patient conversations or priest-parishioner conversations. This is no longer true.

Federal marshals, operating outside the law and contrary to Supreme Court Rules, are now routinely recording these privileged conversations and playing them for the prosecution. How do we know this? Well, we have witnessed it with our own eyes and ears.

In a recent federal case where First Amendment Lawyer, Edgar J. Steele, was arrested, jailed and isolated in just the same manner as outlined above, the Government’s illegal wiretapping was discussed in open court with a federal judge, where the US Marshal admitted that this is now standard procedure and the judge refused to do anything about it. It is happening nationwide before our very eyes and there are no officials willing to do anything to stop it.

From personal experience and from the experience of others who have contacted us about this outrage, we know what is happening, but the US Supreme Court doesn’t seem to know; or do they? Are they just helping to keep a conspiracy of silence or will they do their job to keep the government honest?

Edgar Steele’s case is the prime example. Attorney Edgar Steele is famous as the “attorney of the damned” for taking cases of people who are politically incorrect and become victims of state and federal prosecutions. Then he embarrasses the government with his brilliant defense tactics. He is loud, he is outspoken and some say even obnoxious, but he has been effective in getting his clients released and their charges either reduced or dismissed.

For his brilliance, he was tagged by the government as a politically disruptive person, but was not prosecuted for his free speech activities under the First Amendment; nor was he attacked for providing a capable defense under the Sixth Amendment. No, that would be too obvious an attack on the U.S. Constitution.

He was arrested on fabricated charges and prosecuted in one of the many phony murder-for-hire-plot cases trumped up by the government in order to entrap people on false charges and put them in prison. Yes, it is true. We have many political prisoners in America. Many other victims of similar federal prosecutions, like Ed, have also been kept in solitary confinement, held without bail, isolated from family and finally convicted in show trials that are nothing but a sham, where the accused is not allowed to present the full testimony of the witnesses of his choice in his defense or if a defense witness is called, the judge will not let them speak what they know, by systematically excluding all exculpatory testimony. Judges today simply sustain all the prosecution objections, which shuts up the witness, so the jury does not hear that the defendant is innocent.

This is what the judge did in Edgar Steele’s “show trial” in May 2011 as he repeatedly told the attorneys, ‘don’t say anything to make the Government look bad.’ Also, another trick used is that judges will not sustain objections made by the defense when government witnesses tell their lies, so the only picture that the jury sees and hears is the one orchestrated by the prosecution. At every turn the defendant’s defense strategy is being defeated.

How could the prosecution be so good and the defense so bad? Well, it turns out the prosecution had the US Marshals bugging Edgar’s conversations with his attorneys and playing them back for the prosecution and their staff so they could anticipate and thwart Edgar’s every move. What is the way to keep a 97% conviction rate in federal cases? Cheat!

What can be done to stop this? Edgar is petitioning the United States Supreme Court to stop this illegal, immoral and outrageous prosecutorial misconduct and you can help. We aren’t asking for your money. We aren’t asking for you to picket the Supreme Court. We aren’t asking for your first-born child. We are simply asking you to politely ask the Supreme Court to fully and fairly consider his petition. Simply ask them to uphold the law, the Constitution and their own rules. Is that something every citizen can do? Can you do that? It is easy. Just ask the Supreme Court to read the petition that Edgar is filing in his own behalf and also in behalf of the other federal detainees nationwide who are suffering the same fate. He is asking the high court to uphold their own rules and prohibit corrupt federal judges from allowing federal prosecutors and US Marshals to continually eavesdrop on the private conversations between attorneys and their clients in federal custody.

If you do this, you might just get the US Supreme Court to do their job instead of sticking their collective heads in the sand and ignoring the evil that is presently running the US Government. Wouldn’t it be nice for a change to have good governance instead of corrupt government?

To achieve the highest impact, sample letters have been provided and it is best to write a letter and mail one to the Chief Justice and one to each of the eight Associate Justices. Letters to the US Supreme Court should use the salutation “Dear Chief Justice:” or for the associate justices, “Dear Justice [Last Name]:” and end with the closing “Sincerely,” or “Regards,”. On the envelope and in the address of your letter, address the letter to “Chief Justice [Full Name]” or “Justice [Full Name].” Mail your letter to: The Supreme Court of the United States, One First Street NE, Washington, DC 20543. Following is a list of the names of the nine Justices with the address. Each letter should state something like this: “Letters of this nature are unusual, but then it is highly unusual that no judicial action has been taken to prevent the US Marshals Service from hijacking the US Supreme Court’s rule-making prerogative in the last 10 years. Why has the Executive Branch been allowed to get away with making rules for the Supreme Court? As a citizen, I want to know why this misconduct has been ignored. The question is: “What will it take to get the US Supreme Court to do its job?”

Also, attached are three sample letters to help those who are unsure of what to write. The whole body of one of these letters or any part may be copied and pasted into the body of your letter or you may use portions to help you write the letter in your own words.

Thank you for your help!

Edgar Steele Defense Fund
=========================
[Enter your full name]
[Enter your address]
[Enter your City, State, Zip]


[Enter Date]


[Enter Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.] or [Justice Full Name]
The Supreme Court of the United States
One First Street NE
Washington, DC 20543

RE: Edgar J. Steele's Petition for Writ of Mandamus and Prohibition
to Prevent Usurpation of Supreme Court Rule-making Authority

Dear [Chief Justice Roberts, Jr.]: or [Justice Last Name]:

I am writing you in support of the above-referenced petition of Edgar J. Steele, which
respectfully requests the United States Supreme Court to enforce its rules regarding
attorney client privileged conversations. History, law and Supreme Court Rules hold
that attorney client conversations are privileged and cannot be recorded and played
for the prosecution, yet this is exactly what happened in Mr. Steele’s case and is
happening nationwide.

The Steele petition asks you to take notice of this abuse of Constitutional rights and
correct the situation before all Americans are deprived of their basic liberty rights.
Please take the time to read the petition and give it due consideration. Thank you.

Sincerely,

[Sign above, enter your full name]
=========================
[Enter your full name]
[Enter your address]
[Enter your City, State, Zip]


[Enter Date]


[Enter Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.] or [Justice Full Name]
The Supreme Court of the United States
One First Street NE
Washington, DC 20543

RE: Edgar J. Steele's Petition for Writ of Mandamus and Prohibition
to Prevent Usurpation of Supreme Court Rule-making Authority

Dear [Chief Justice Roberts, Jr.]: or [Justice Last Name]:

It was my belief that discussions between defendant (or plaintiff) and their lawyer
are guaranteed to be private. I've become aware of Mr. Edgar Steele's legal battle
where the Government repeatedly violated this guarantee. His petition, referenced
above, is due to be filed on October 25, 2011. I support his request for your body
to stop lower courts from invading a litigant's confidentiality.

I do not know law nor its complexities. But I do know that this serious problem will
continue if it is not halted by your higher authority.

Please show citizens that fair, equitable justice remains present in America, not
only for Mr. Steele, but for all those who have fallen victim to rogue behavior on
the part of various agencies throughout this land. Will you review and consider the
Steele petition?

Respectfully,

[Sign above, enter your full name]
=========================

[Enter your full name]
[Enter your address]
[Enter your City, State, Zip]

[Enter Date]


[Enter Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.] or [Justice Full Name]
The Supreme Court of the United States
One First Street NE
Washington, DC 20543

RE: Edgar J. Steele's Petition for Writ of Mandamus and Prohibition
to Prevent Usurpation of Supreme Court Rule-making Authority

Dear [Chief Justice Roberts, Jr.]: or [Justice Last Name]:
I am writing to ask you to please acknowledge and read the Petition for Writ of
Mandamus and Prohibition to Prevent Usurpation of Supreme Court Rule-making
Authority which is being submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court by Mr. Edgar J.
Steele.

This petition will bring to your attention that fact that, as you well know,
attorney/client conversations by law are privileged and cannot be recorded and
played for the prosecution, but unlawfully, this is exactly what is happening
nationwide today and happened to Mr. Steele.

It is my understanding that the Supreme Court is the place where this injustice
can be halted, hence Mr. Steele's petition.

I know that you and your associates will take my request seriously and do what
is necessary to address the concerns in the said petition. I also believe that
you will arrange to have attorney/client privacy re-instated and I pray that you
will arrange to have those who are breaking this law punished.

Thank you very much.

Sincerely,


[Sign above, enter your full name]
=========================
Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.
The Supreme Court of the United States
One First Street NE
Washington, DC 20543

Justice Antonin Scalia
The Supreme Court of the United States
One First Street NE
Washington, DC 20543

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy
The Supreme Court of the United States
One First Street NE
Washington, DC 20543

Justice Clarence Thomas
The Supreme Court of the United States
One First Street NE
Washington, DC 20543

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
The Supreme Court of the United States
One First Street NE
Washington, DC 20543

Justice Stephen G. Breyer
The Supreme Court of the United States
One First Street NE
Washington, DC 20543

Justice Samuel Anthony Alito, Jr.
The Supreme Court of the United States
One First Street NE
Washington, DC 20543

Justice Sonia Sotomayor
The Supreme Court of the United States
One First Street NE
Washington, DC 20543

Justice Elena Kagan
The Supreme Court of the United States
One First Street NE
Washington, DC 20543

Last edited by -JC; October 21st, 2011 at 07:26 AM.
 
Old October 22nd, 2011 #2277
-JC
Doesn't suffer fools well
 
Join Date: Apr 2006
Posts: 5,740
Default An opportunity for the Supremes to do that for which separation of powers was designed...

In America The Rule Of Law Is Vacated
Bank fraudsters, torturers, and war criminals running free...

by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Global Research, August 31, 2011


With bank fraudsters, torturers, and war criminals running free, the US Department of Justice (sic) has nothing better to do than to harass the famous Tennessee guitar manufacturer, Gibson http://rt.com/usa/news/gibson-guitar-raid-wood-489/ , arrest organic food producers in California http://rt.com/usa/news/food-agents-year-milk/ and send 12 abusive FBI agents armed with assault rifles to bust down yet another wrong door of yet another innocent family, leaving parents, children, and grandmother traumatized. http://rt.com/usa/news/fbi-family-adams-home/.

What law did Gibson Guitar Corp break that caused federal agents to disrupt Gibson’s plants in Nashville and Memphis, seize guitars, cause layoffs, and cost the company $3 million from disrupted operations?

No US law was broken. The feds claim that Gibson broke a law that is on the books in India.

India has not complained about Gibson or asked for the aid of the US government in enforcing its laws against Gibson. Instead, the feds have taken it upon themselves to both interpret and to enforce on US citizens the laws of India. The feds claim that Gibson’s use of wood from India in its guitars is illegal, because the wood was not finished by Indian workers.

This must not be India’s interpretation of the law as India allowed the unfinished wood to be exported. Perhaps the feds are trying to force more layoffs of US workers and their replacement by H-1B foreign workers. Gibson can solve its problem by firing its Tennessee work force and hiring Indian citizens on H-1B work visas.

In Venice, California, feds spent a year dressed up as hippies purchasing raw goat milk and yogurt from Rawesome Foods and then, decked out in hemp anklets and reeking of patchouli, raided with guns drawn--always with guns drawn--the organic food shop. The owner’s crime is that he supplied the normal everyday foods that I grew up on to customers who requested them. For this heinous act, James C. Stewart faces a 13 count indictment and is held on $123,000 bail.

How did raw milk become a “health threat?” Far more Americans have died from e-coli in fast food hamburgers and from salmonella in mass produced eggs and chicken. Like many of my generation, I was raised on raw milk. Mathis Dairy delivered it to the homes in Atlanta. Even decades later a person could purchase Mathis Dairy’s raw milk in Atlanta’s grocery stores. How did supplying an ordinary staple become a crime?

The FBI agents who broke down Gary Adams door in Bellevue, Pennsylvania, claim they were looking for a woman. Why does it take 12 heavily armed FBI agents to apprehend a woman? Are FBI agents that effete? If the feds can never get the address right, how do we know they have the name and gender right?

I can remember when it only took one policeman to deliver a warrant and to arrest a person, and without gun drawn and without breaking down the door, tasering or shooting the object of arrest. It turns out that the FBI agents who broke into the Adams home not only were at the wrong address but also didn’t even have a search warrant had they been at the correct address.

The practice of sending heavily armed teams into American homes has resulted in many senseless murders of US citizens. The practice must be halted and SWAT teams disbanded. SWAT teams have murdered far more innocents than they have dangerous criminals. Hostage situations are rare, and they are best handled without violence.

Jose Guerena, a US Marine who served two tours in Bush’s Iraq War was murdered in his own home in front of his wife and two small children by a crazed SWAT team, again in the wrong place, who shot him 60 times. When his wife told him that there were men sneaking around the house, he picked up his rifle and walked to the kitchen to see what was going on and was gunned down. The hysterical SWAT team fired 71 shots at him without cause. Brave, tough, macho cops out defending the public and murdering war heroes. http://rt.com/usa/news/swat-kills-american-hero/

I have seen studies that show that police actually commit more acts of violence against the public than do criminals, which raises an interesting question: Are police a greater threat to the public than are criminals? On Yahoo I just searched “police brutality” and up came 4,840,000 results.
Meanwhile, the real master criminals, such as Dick Cheney, who, if tried for his actions at Nuremberg, would most definitely have been executed as a war criminal, run free. Cheney is all over TV hawking his memoirs. On August 29, interviewed by Jamie Gangel on NBC’s Dateline, Cheney again proudly admitted that he authorized torture, secret prisons, and illegal wiretapping. These are crimes under US and international laws.

Cheney claims breaking laws against torture is “the right thing to do” if “we had a high-value detainee and that was the only way we can get him to talk.”

Three questions immediately come to mind that no member of the presstitute media ever asks. The first is, why does Cheney think the office of Vice President, President, or Attorney General has the power to “authorize” breaking a law? Our vaunted “rule of law” disappears if federal officials can authorize breaking laws.

The second is, what high-value detainees is Cheney talking about? Donald Rumsfeld declared the Guantanamo detainees to be “the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.” http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=43817But the vast majority had to be released when it turned out, after years of their lives were spent in a torture prison, that the vast majority of the detainees were hapless innocents who were sold to the stupid Americans by war lords as “terrorists” for bounties. To save face, the US government has held on to a few detainees, but hasn’t enough confidence in their alleged guilt to put them on trial in a court of law.

The third is why does Cheney think that he knows better than the accumulated documented evidence that torture doesn’t produce truthful or useful information. If the person under torture is actually a terrorist, he knows that his tormentors don’t know the answers that they are looking for and so he or she can tell the torturers whatever serves the tortured victim’s purposes. If the person under torture is innocent, he has no idea what the answers are and seeks to discover what his torturer wants to hear so that he can tell him.

As Glenn Greenwald makes clear, Dick Cheney, who presided “over policies that left hundreds of thousands of innocent people dead from wars of aggression, constructed a worldwide torture regime, and spied on Americans without the warrants required by law” is now being feted and enriched thanks to “the protective shield of immunity bestowed upon him by the current administration.” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28970.htm

Meanwhile Gibson Guitar faces prosecution because of the feds’ off-the-wall interpretation of a law in India, and the owner of Rawesome has a 13-count indictment for supplying customers with a food staple that was a part of the normal diet from colonial times until recently.
In America we have the rule of law--only the law is not applied to banksters and members of the executive branch but, as Greenwald says, is only applied to “ordinary citizens and other nations’ (unfriendly) rulers.”

A country this utterly corrupt is certainly no “light unto the world.”

Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Paul Craig Roberts

Last edited by -JC; October 22nd, 2011 at 08:02 AM.
 
Old October 22nd, 2011 #2278
-JC
Doesn't suffer fools well
 
Join Date: Apr 2006
Posts: 5,740
Default

From Blackstone to Bentham: Why Wrongful Conviction Is On The Rise


The death penalty debate was renewed last year when Republican Gov. George Ryan of Illinois imposed a moratorium on capital punishment. Gov. Ryan's confidence in murder convictions was shaken when he found that there were more innocent than guilty parties on death row. Of 25 condemned murderers, 12 were executed and 13 on death row were cleared of capital-murder charges.

The debate was given added impetus by Carl M. Cannon's article in the June 19, 2000, issue of National Review, and by an academic study released in June, 2000, that concluded that two-thirds of death penalty convictions were successfully appealed during 1973-95. The study has faults, but even when corrected for errors, it still shows a high rate of wrongful conviction.

The death penalty was politicized for the November presidential election by the Chicago Tribune's investigation of 131 executions in Texas since Bush became governor. According to the Tribune, many of the cases "were compromised by unreliable evidence," bad lawyering and unethical prosecutors.

Conservatives defend the death penalty, and liberals reject it. This is a worthwhile debate, but the real issue is wrongful conviction. A defense of the death penalty as a deterrent or appropriate retribution is not a defense of wrongful conviction. No one wants innocent people convicted. Even if they escape execution, innocents still spend years of their lives in prison awaiting exoneration.

The broader issue is the high rate of wrongful conviction. Moreover, wrongful conviction is not confined to capital offenses. If the justice system cannot convict the right person in murder cases, or convict the defendant lawfully according to the rules, how can we have any confidence that police and prosecutors are doing better when it comes to burglary, white-collar criminals, and drug dealers? These convictions do not receive the scrutiny that capital offenses receive. Most result from plea bargains, and plea bargains are seldom subject to appeal even when the defendant is coerced.

Gov. Bush defended Texas executions on the grounds that those found guilty "had full access to the courts. They've had full access to a fair trial." This is the response of many conservatives, and it would be a good one if trials were fair.

But what if trials are not fair and conviction is not a reliable indicator of guilt? After five years of research culminating in our recent book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Larry Stratton and I found that the legal principles that guarantee a fair trial have been eroded by both good and bad intentions.

William Blackstone called these principles "the Rights of Englishmen." Achieved through centuries of struggle to make law accountable and justice just, the Rights of Englishmen insure that law is a shield for the innocent and not a weapon in the hands of prosecutors. Liberals and conservatives alike, in chasing after their favorite devils — drug dealers, environmental polluters, white-collar criminals, and child abusers — have reduced these protective principles to shadows of their former selves.

The Rights of Englishmen are: due process, the attorney-client privilege, equality before the law, the right to confront adverse witnesses, and the prohibitions against attacking a person through his property, bills of attainder, self-incrimination, retroactive law, and crimes without intent.

Each of these protective principles has been breached. Today prosecutors create bills of attainder by tailoring novel interpretations of law to fit the targeted defendant. A favorite tactic is to criminalize civil infractions, as in the Charles Keating savings and loan case. We have indictments and trials based not on a statutory violation but on a prosecutor's "novel theory," as in the Clark Clifford and Robert Altman case. Even accidents and mistakes in filling out government forms have been criminalized, as in the Exxon Valdez and Benjamin Lacy cases. The ancient principle of mens rea — no crime without intent — has been obliterated.

Keating was convicted of a crime that did not exist until he was charged with it. Keating was caught up in the finger-pointing that resulted when ill-considered federal policies caused the collapse of the S&Ls and depleted the deposit insurance fund. Bonds issued by Keating's Lincoln Savings & Loan lost value. Some bond owners claimed that salesmen had assured them that the bonds were federally insured. Under civil tort liability, a case could have been made that the parent organization was economically liable to the bondholders, if misrepresentation about the bonds security could be proved. Instead, prosecutors, with Judge Lance Ito's acquiescence, transformed the civil tort doctrine into a felony. Keating was held criminally liable for the actions of subordinates even though he neither knew about nor approved of the alleged misrepresentations of the bonds security. Keating served four and one-half years in prison before federal district judge John G. Davies declared his conviction to be a violation of mens rea and the constitutional prohibition of ex post facto law and ordered his release.

Clark Clifford and Robert Altman were indicted on the basis of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's "novel theory" that two separate legal transactions comprised a conspiracy of fraud and bribery. The trial revealed that the indictment was based on nothing but the prosecutor's speculation, and the case against the bankers was thrown out of court.

The Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound was an accident. However, the U.S. Department of Justice used an "innovative legal approach" to bring in a criminal indictment. Exxon was slapped with the felony charges of "discharging hazardous substances and refuse without a permit" and "killing migratory birds without a license." As these are acts of intent, the indictment surmises that Exxon intentionally ran its tanker aground in order to discharge hazardous oil and kill migratory birds. This absurd indictment was not thrown out of court. Instead, it was used to extract huge sums from Exxon in exchange for dropping the felony counts.

Ben Lacy, a 73 year old Northern Virginia apple juice producer, made some mistakes in filling out waste-water report forms. Federal prosecutors theorized that Lacy's mistakes were evidence that he was covering up the pollution of a stream on his property. The stream turned out to be pristine, but prosecutors were able to keep this evidence out of court and to try Lacy on their surmise that his mistakes were evidence of a conspiracy to pollute.

Careless delegation by Congress of law-making power to regulatory agencies allows bureaucrats to define criminal offenses by how they interpret the regulations that they write. Statutory authority is combined with enforcement authority in the same hands, permitting vast discretion to regulatory police. A cooperative "offender" may get off with a civil penalty, whereas a person who sticks up for his rights may receive a criminal indictment. The ability of bureaucrats to spontaneously create criminal offenses by bureaucratic interpretation makes law uncertain and unable to fulfill its purpose to command what is right and to prohibit what is wrong.

All of the legal rights that restrained government and made men free have taken a beating in the 20th century, especially in the last two decades. The attorney-client privilege is today seen through a Benthamite lens, and attorneys who aggressively defend their client face indictments themselves.

Jeremy Bentham despised William Blackstone for emphasizing law as a restraint on government. Government needed to be unrestrained, Bentham argued, in order to do more good. With regard to criminal law, Bentham argued that it is wrong-headed to make conviction so difficult when government's purpose is to increase the general level of happiness by combating crime.

Bentham believed in proactively rounding up people who were likely to commit crimes. He believed in compulsory self-incrimination and wanted to revive torture. He hated the attorney-client privilege and believed that lawyers should aid prosecutors in convicting their clients.

Bentham's belief about the proper function of lawyers was given expression in 1990 when the federal government indicted the blue-chip law firm, Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Handler, for not divulging to thrift regulators information pertaining to its client, Charles Keating and his Lincoln S&L. Assistant Attorney General Stuart M. Gerson used Bentham's own words to brand the law firm "an abettor of crime" for not ratting on its client, even though the question of crime had not been established. To win its point the government froze the assets of the law firm and also the personal assets of its 400 partners. The asset freeze seems itself to have been a violation of law, and the government was heavily criticized for it by the New York City Bar Association and prominent legal ethicists. But the asset freeze forced Kay Scholer to settle the case by paying $41 million. In the aftermath, law professors, such as Kevin Reitz in the Duke Law Journal, now warn that "under current law, it could be a serious mistake for a suspect in a criminal case to obtain counsel." In 1999 Janet Novack reported in Forbes magazine that federal prosecutors are attempting further breeches in the attorney-client privilege by threatening a company's lawyers with indictments for defending their client.

Americans are routinely attacked through their property, as asset forfeiture laws are used less for criminal enforcement and more for budgetary reasons. A 1990 Justice Department memo for U.S. attorneys stressed, "Every effort must be made to increase forfeiture income during the remaining months of 1990." The opportunity to augment law enforcement budgets with asset confiscations has skewed the efforts of law enforcement toward asset seizure and away from the apprehension and prosecution of criminals. In 80 percent of asset confiscations, no charges are brought against the confiscated owners.

The asset forfeiture laws are a perfect example of Sir Thomas More's warning against cutting swaths through the law in order to chase after devils. The forfeiture laws were passed in order to strengthen the war against drugs. But as House Judiciary Committee chairman Henry Hyde (R, IL) has warned, the laws target property, not crime. The result is that Americans face "endless possibilities to be caught in the snare of government forfeiture." Grandmothers have lost their homes because of police suspicion that grandchildren used drugs in the house. Owners have lost rental properties, motels, yachts and airplanes because tenants or customers brought drugs or prostitutes to the property. Many have had cash confiscated because any amount over $100 constitutes "probable cause" for police to infer intent to buy or sell drugs.

Recently Rep. Hyde had a small success in making asset forfeiture more difficult, but the federal laws have spread into the states. Today many states permit civil forfeiture for any criminal activity. New Jersey allows forfeiture for any alleged criminal activity.

Every right emphasized by Blackstone has taken a pounding. Retroactive law is commonplace. Retroactive tax increases have become part of life. Superfund liability reaches back generations and falls upon people and organizations that never contributed an ounce of hazardous waste to a Superfund site. In child abuse cases, due process and the right to confront one's accusers vanished when anonymous allegations became the sole basis for seizing children and placing them in foster care. Neighborhoods legally using local zoning ordinances to keep out commercially operated half-way houses and drug treatment clinics have been coerced by the Department of Justice and the Department of Housing and Urban Development into abandoning their right to equal standing in the law.

Two other factors combine with the loss of the legal principles that protect the innocent to produce a high rate of wrongful conviction: the breakdown of the prosecutorial ethic and plea bargains.

For centuries prosecutorial behavior was restrained by conscience and by the carefully inculcated ethic that the prosecutor's duty is to serve justice by finding truth. The purpose of a trial was to weigh the evidence for and against the defendant, not to convict him at any cost. A prosecutor's career and self-esteem did not depend on his conviction rate and the number of people he put behind bars, but, as Supreme Court justices Robert Jackson and George Sutherland put it, on seeing that justice was done. A prosecutor who suborned perjury or withheld exculpatory evidence in order to win a case was seen as a shameful figure.

Crowded court dockets, bureaucracy, budgetary pressures, and careerism contributed to elevating ambition over justice. The emergence of moral causes, or ends that justify the means, such as "saving our children from drugs" and "making environmental polluters pay," contributed greatly to the breakdown of prosecutorial restraint. Today a prosecutor who gives the defendant the benefit of the doubt is regarded as a failure. Robert Merkle was appointed U.S. Attorney by President Reagan and served in that post from 1982 to 1988. Prosecution, he says, is "a result-oriented process today, fairness be damned." Merkle says prosecutors are pressured to justify budgets with convictions, "and that causes them to prosecute absolutely bogus cases to get those statistics." Many former U.S. attorneys have spoken out on this issue. In 1998 Arnold I. Burns, Deputy U.S. Attorney General in the Reagan administration, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that "it is time for a sober reassessment of the power we have concentrated in the hands of prosecutors and the alarming absence of effective checks and balances to prevent the widespread abuse of that power." Perhaps the telltale sign of the seriousness of the situation is the law school textbook, Prosecutorial Misconduct, now in its second edition. In an honest criminal justice system, there would be no need for such a textbook.

Withholding exculpatory evidence has become routine, and suborned perjury is often the only "evidence" in a case. Juries are unaware that in many cases the witness giving incriminating testimony is not only rehearsed in the role but also paid by the prosecutor with money or reduced prison time. In 1998 the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette summed up its investigative reports of prosecutorial misconduct: "Hundreds of times during the past 10 years, federal agents and prosecutors have pursued justice by breaking the law. They lied, hid evidence, distorted facts, engaged in cover-ups, paid for perjury and set up innocent people in a relentless effort to win indictments, guilty pleas and convictions. Rarely were these federal officials punished for their misconduct. . . . Perjury has become the coin of the realm in federal law enforcement. People's homes are invaded because of lies. People are arrested because of lies. People go to prison because of lies. People stay in prison because of lies, and bad guys go free because of lies." It casts doubt on the integrity of the entire criminal justice system when the limited resources of one newspaper are sufficient to expose hundreds of cases of criminal behavior by federal law enforcement officials.

In recent years the prosecutorial ethic has hit rock bottom with the new practice known as "jumping on the bus." Informants sell information on unsolved cases to prison inmates. Sometimes prosecutors and federal agents feed the information directly. The inmate memorizes the case, which gives him the appearance of having inside knowledge. Then the inmate comes forward with information to trade in exchange for a reduced sentence, which under the sentencing guidelines can only be granted at a prosecutor's request. Once a deal is struck, the inmate works with the prosecutor to concoct a case.

Sometimes "jumping on the bus" is used against a person whom prosecutors believe to be guilty but against whom they have no evidence. At other times the goal is to close unsolved cases, and the inmate supplies the name, perhaps that of another inmate. Formerly, self-serving accusations by criminals were treated as leads to be investigated. If the leads panned out, evidence still had to be marshaled. Today, the accusation is the evidence. Prisons are filled with people falsely convicted by other inmates, who use information from confidential federal law enforcement files to corroborate crimes they have not witnessed and to concoct testimony against people who did not commit them.

Inmates have displayed more conscience than many U.S. attorneys and have repeatedly blown the whistle on the scheme. According to investigative reports in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1998, the Department of Justice and FBI have repeatedly turned a blind eye. The reprehensible practice of "jumping on the bus" is so ingrained in law enforcement that it cannot be officially acknowledged without having to release a large number of people from prison and sustain a large number of wrongful conviction lawsuits. Since no attorney general is going to attempt such a clean-up, it means that in the U.S. today the criminal element has a big say in who goes to prison.

Weak and fabricated evidence would run a higher risk of exposure if it were tested in court. But according to the U.S. Department of Justice, only about one case in 20 goes to trial. The rest are settled with pleas. Plea bargaining has many deleterious effects on the criminal justice system.
Conservatives believe that the problem with plea bargaining is that it permits criminals to get off too lightly, thus undermining the deterrent effect of punishment. However, the problem with plea bargains is far more serious than reduced deterrence.

Plea bargains undermine police investigative work. As few cases go to trial, police have learned that their evidence is seldom tested in the courtroom. Carelessness creeps in. The sloppier the investigation, the less likely is the right person to be apprehended.

Prosecutors have found that plea bargaining greatly increases their conviction
rates and that they can coerce a plea by raising the number and seriousness of the charges they throw at a defendant. Defendants are swayed by the cost of a defense and by the realization that conviction at trial on even one of the charges can carry more severe punishment than a plea to a lesser charge. The sentencing differential alone is enough to make plea bargaining coercive.

Plea bargaining originated as a way of meting out punishment in a timely fashion. But as time passed, plea bargaining corrupted the justice system by creating a fictional crime in the place of a real one. The practice of having people admit to what did not happen in order to avoid charges for what did happen creates a legal culture that, as it develops, eventually permits prosecutors to bring charges in the absence of crimes.

As a little yeast leavens the whole loaf, systematized falsehoods about crimes corrupt the criminal justice process. By making the facts of the case malleable, plea bargaining enables prosecutors to supplement weak evidence with psychological pressure. John Langbein, a noted legal scholar, compares "the modern American plea bargaining system" with "the ancient system of judicial torture." Many innocent people cop a plea just to end their ordeal. In effect, we have resurrected torture, because confession and self-incrimination have replaced the jury trial.

Conservatives need to understand that the problem of corrupt justice goes deeper than law enforcement personnel and cannot be corrected by cleaning out the Clinton DOJ. The very concept of law that protects us from tyranny has been lost. No longer the people's shield, law has become a weapon in the hands of government. Justice is no longer a concern of the justice system.

What can be done? Nothing without a rebirth of veneration for justice and the Constitution. Our plight is that law, as defined by Blackstone, has lost the allegiance of American elites. Jeremy Bentham prevails with his view that government must be less restrained so that it can do more good. Legal scholars identify with the causes that coercive power has advanced. Tyranny is always the consequence of unrestrained power. That is the reason Americans feel increasingly defenseless not only in the criminal justice system but also more generally when facing the government that they supposedly control.

March 31, 2001

Dr. Roberts is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

Last edited by -JC; October 22nd, 2011 at 08:15 AM.
 
Old October 28th, 2011 #2279
Donald E. Pauly
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Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Las Vegas
Posts: 4,130
Angry Cyndi's Latest Interview

Cyndi was interviewed on the Jamie Kelso show on 20 October, 2011 and I missed it. I am listening to it as this is being posted. The interview is 50 minutes at 32 kbytes/second and is about 11 Megabytes. My initial assessment is that Cyndi is going over all of the red herrings and not discussing any of the real issues.

http://reasonradionetwork.com/downlo...w-20111020.mp3

Last edited by Donald E. Pauly; October 28th, 2011 at 11:57 AM. Reason: typo
 
Old October 28th, 2011 #2280
Donald E. Pauly
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Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Las Vegas
Posts: 4,130
Angry Disappointing Interview

A Supreme Court letter writing campaign is silly. The Supreme Court can only act on legal arguments in front of it. In the first place the whining about the prosecutor overhearing Steele's conversations with his lawyer is a red herring. No admissions of his involvment in the supposed crime were ever introduced in court. Steele is filing the request for a Writ of Mandamus to the Supreme Court himself. It is a total waste of his time because it has nothing to do with a motion for a new trial or an appeal.

The trial was a fiasco due to the incompetence of Steele's now disbarred lawyer. Steele had every opportunity to claim that it was not his voice on the recordings. He had every chance to explain his steamy love letters to his Ukrainian girlfriend Tatyana Loginova written from his jail cell.

There are hundreds of audio experts across the country and he had to pick an incompetent who took a vacation to Bora Bora in the middle of trial. This supposed expert offered to let Steele buy out his vacation for $45,000. He never did say that the recordings are faked. This key fob recorder was in Fairfax's pocket during all of the recordings. The background noise from being there and rattling around should be a perfect signature to show that the two recordings are continuous and genuine.

Cyndi whines about Steele being moved to Moscow, Idaho. It is his fault because he filed a stupid grievance and threatened to sue the Bonner County chaplain for not giving him a free book on Taoism. His daughter could have given him the $10 book and not caused any trouble. Now Cyndi has a three hour drive to visit him instead of a 30 minute drive.

Only a few of us want to talk about the elephant in the living room. Steele went crazy after aorta surgery and did essentially everything that he was charged with doing. Arguing about these silly legal matters has nothing to do with the truth of the case. His lawyers milked him for all of his supporter's money. Steele is unable to participate in his own defense because he is too crazy.

Last edited by Donald E. Pauly; October 29th, 2011 at 11:06 AM. Reason: Typo
 
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