West Virginia Prosecutors Prove Once Again Why Individuals SHOULD be Permitted to Sue the State for Malicious Prosecution

The recent acquittal of Autumn Rae Faulkner in Elkins, West Virginia, in which a jury deliberated for only an hour, provides ironclad proof that prosecutors, state and federal, should NOT be protected with any kind of immunity, period. When jurors take only an hour to acquit -- and having served as a jury foreman, I can tell you that much of that time was spent on activities besides talking about the case -- one can bet that they made up their minds even before the prosecution rested its case.

Faulkner was accused of having sex with a 15-year-old student three times in 2008 and 2009. 

It is easy to surmise that prosecutors had NO case whatsoever, and either the so-called "experts" were the stupidest people in the room, or they were the most craven. I wish it were the former, but the latter dominates my thinking.

So, why did the prosecution bring the charges and destroy this woman's life in the first place? They did it because they can do it, and that is what they were telling everyone else. Prosecutors, you see, really don't care about guilt or innocence; they just love showing their authority, and since the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that prosecutors have absolute immunity, they also know that no one in the system will hold them accountable.

In reading the article on the acquittal, I am struck by the utter arrogance that prosecutors had, and the way they dishonestly went about presenting evidence:

Following the trial, special prosecuting attorney Steve Jory said he didn't believe there was anything else the prosecution could have done differently that would have altered the outcome of the case.

"I think we presented every piece of evidence we had available to present," Jory remarked. "The case was fairly tried and the jury made its decision. Apparently they didn't believe we had enough evidence to prove our case." 

 But it gets even better:

Mazzei also highlighted the fact that the state hadn't presented any DNA evidence.

"The state took phones and [Faulkner's] computer, her couch, her comforter, bedding, a car, and no evidence ever came out of that that would prove Mrs. Faulkner was guilty," Mazzei said.

During his final statement, however, Jory told Mazzei that the prosecution wasn't able to present any DNA evidence because "you wouldn't allow your client and her husband to give (DNA) samples and we could not complete lab analysis." When asked after the trial if the court could have compelled Faulker and her husband, Scott Faulkner, to submit their DNA for testing, Jory said that it was possible, but the previous prosecutor in the Faulkner case -- former Randolph County Prosecutor Richard Busch -- had failed to do so.

When asked why he didn't later ask the court to order the Faulkners to submit their DNA for analysis, Jory simply said "there were a lot of factors" involved. (Emphasis mine)

As anyone familiar with criminal law knows, if the state wants evidence, it can get it. My sense is that the prosecutors and police did not seek DNA evidence because they knew there was none, it so leaving things in the realm of mere speculation where they could use innuendo would be more effective. (I imagine prosecutors already had convinced members of the media that Faulkner was a predator, but most journalists will believe anything cops and prosecutors say.) To claim to a jury that the state could not get evidence because the defendant and her attorney told them they could not get it fails to pass the laugh test.

But, when it comes to the use of innuendo, nothing tops this:

The state's evidence - or its lack thereof - was the subject of (Rocco) Mazzei's closing arguments Thursday.

"The state has this theory that a whole lotta text messages somehow equals guilt of sex," Mazzei said, referring to the voluminous number of text messages Faulkner sent to the 18-year-old student based on documents the prosecution subpoenaed from AT&T. "[Jory] wants you to convict her on a number of text messages. You should require the state to prove that this theory ... as it is, this theory is mere speculation. You haven't seen the content of a single text message."

 Wow! So, prosecutors told the jurors that there were a great number of text messages, but did not show their content to jurors in hopes that they would be able to use their imaginations to surmise what Faulker MIGHT have written. As anyone familiar with teacher-student sex cases knows, text messages in the sort of situation prosecutors were alleging existed would have been filled either with sexual innuendo or outright graphic language.

What does this mean? It means that prosecutors read the messages and realized that not one of them were sexual, so they tried to deceive jurors, instead, by lying and suborning perjury.

Lord knows how much money Faulkner and her husband and family spent defending her against charges that obviously were false from the beginning. No doubt, the West Virginia school system will take its revenge by permanently sullying her record.

And what happens to prosecutors who financially ruin innocent people just because they can do it? Nothing. These are people who viciously ruined the lives of others in an attempt to make an obviously fraudulent case look to have substance.

Will the State of West Virginia take action? Don't hold your breath. Once again, we see why prosecutors should be sued; that is the ONLY way they will be held accountable.

Are these prosecutors the proverbial "bad apples" in a good barrel? Think again; in West Virginia, the entire barrel is rotten.

Justice for James? Certainly not in the LMJC or Hamilton County

Honest and decent people do live in the United States, but they no longer work in the "justice" system. Instead, we are seeing a system that is populated with liars, criminals, bullies, and people who have no place in a decent society.

If there is any place in the USSA where that especially is true, it is in the heavily-churched and supposedly "Christian" area of Northwest Georgia, the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit. On Sundays, many of the players in the LMJC go to church and sing about Jesus, and then the rest of the week, they worship their real god, the Devil.

Why do I wrote so graphically? Let me quote Jesus (whom Brian House and Tim Deal claim to worship) who told the Pharisees in John 8:44:

You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. (ESV)

 Deal has lied under oath and at least on one occasion, fabricated a document in which he claimed to be somewhere where he was not. House has lied about his ex parte meetings with prosecutors and went along with Chris Arnt when Arnt openly lied to jurors in the closing arguments of the Tonya Craft trial. In other words, both of these men, along with prosecutors like Arnt, Len Gregor, and Alan Norton are all about lies, and according to the Jesus these men claim to follow, Jesus said that people who lie (and lie consistently) have Satan as their father.

All of this leads me to the present situation of James Combs, who agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor in House's court because, to be frank, he could not trust House to run a fair trial, Norton and Deal to tell the truth, and a Catoosa County jury to listen to evidence. That is a damning indictment upon the people of Catoosa County and Northwest Georgia, who have put these people into power.

From what I have been hearing, Deal and Norton have tried to get James listed as a "sex offender" in Tennessee (where he lives and will be under probationary supervision) even though the misdemeanor to which he pleaded guilty does not carry the "sex offender" label. Nonetheless, dishonesty rules not only in Catoosa County and the LMJC, but also in Hamilton County, home of gang warfare, brutal (and dishonest) cops, and prosecutors who look the other way when felonies are committed in front of them.

From what I also understand, local cops are constantly harassing the Combs family. What can I say except that this kind of behavior from those who wear the blue costumes can be expected.

When Joal Henke testified in October 2010 in Hamilton County Circuit Court (Judge Marie Williams), he committed perjury and then admitted to having committed mortgage fraud, which is a federal offense. In fact, today, I just signed a paper in which I acknowledged that mortgage fraud is a felony punishable up to 30 years in prison.

So, Henke committed two felonies in Hamilton County, one a state crime and the other federal. But does Bill Cox or the local U.S. attorney care? Well, of course not! Why pursue criminals when one can harass and imprison innocent people?

If people wonder why I am so cynical about Chattanooga and North Georgia, all I can say is to look at the liars and thugs that inhabit "law enforcement" and "justice." I continue to wonder if there are any decent people left in public life in my old hometown, but I am having my doubts.

Those "truthful" cops

Thanks to recordings, we often are treated to a regular spectacle: cops lying about arrests, their activities, and then lying under oath. While I would like to think that such dishonest activities are limited to the LMJC, in reality, lying has become a way of life for those wearing the blue costume.

In Coral Springs, Florida, two officers lied under oath, not knowing that their activities had been recorded and now are in the court record. Not surprisingly, both cops still are on the force and have faced no legal problems or discipline at all. Keep in mind that perjury is a felony, something for which regular people go to prison -- unless they are cops or are witnesses whose perjury was suborned by prosecutors. (See Chris Arnt, Len Gregor, Alan Norton, and Buzz Franklin for instructions on how to legally lie under oath.)

The two officers in this story, Nicole Stasnek and Derek Fernandes, both committed perjury (the article has the depositions of each officer, and depositions are taken under oath) and you can see that the officers are lying. In other words, Stasnek and Fernandes both are felons, a nice word for criminals. They also are cops on duty. I wonder how many other members of the "thin, blue line" also fall into that category.

The LMJC Perjury Machine

It supposedly is a crime in the State of Georgia for a prosecutor to knowingly suborn perjured testimony, but laws don't matter in the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit, especially when one it its prosecutors is committing the crime. And while the latest news from the LMJC -- that Buzz Franklin's office is dropping charges against Dale Higgenbottom for an alleged 19-year-old murder.

I never thought the charges made sense, but the kicker is seen in the following paragraph:

Prosecutors' key witness was William Morgan, an inmate who had told investigators that Higgenbottom had confessed to the murder while in jail. But the evidence filed in court on Feb. 28 showed Morgan had written a letter to Higgenbottom's family in 2007, saying he could "clear [Higgenbottom] of the [murder] charges" if they would pay his bail money to free him from jail.

Understand that Morgan was going to give the classic "jailhouse snitch" testimony, and I can guarantee you -- gurantee you -- that Higgenbottom never "confessed" anything to Morgan. What was going on was that Morgan was playing the "jumping on the bus" game in which he was offered something if he gave the testimony that prosecutor Alan Norton wanted to hear.

Now, Norton was slick enough to know that the letter utterly discredited his beloved witness and he was not stupid enough to put Morgan on the stand, where he would have been shredded on cross-examination. Wrote Norton:

"If the letters had come to light prior to the indictment in this case, it is unlikely this case would have been presented to the Catoosa County grand jury."

And Buzz followed with:

"Clearly, we couldn't rely on his credibility."

Uh, no sh*t, Sherlock.

Here is the problem, dear readers. Norton and Franklin knew all along that Morgan was unreliable and that his testimony would be total perjury, but until they saw the letter, they figured that a jury just might believe him. Unfortunately, that was not the only aspect of the prosecution that was questionable, but it clearly was the most illegal.

Morgan was someone whose testimony was for sale, and throughout the country, prosecutors every day use the proverbial "jailhouse snitch" to gain wrongful convictions. While I cannot vouch for the details of what happened in Catoosa County, I can tell readers what often happens.

Police put someone in a cell with a person who just has been arrested (and the police don't have any good evidence but want SOMETHING). The "snitch" has been fed details of the crime (or alleged crime), details that only someone close to the action can know.

In return for either money or a reduced sentence, the "snitch" then testifies that the accused "confessed" the crime to him in great detail. The noted attorney Harvey Silverglate told me that when one of his clients is arrested, he tries to get him out of jail immediately because of the "jailhouse snitch" problem.

I don't know if this happened in the Higgenbottom case, but I can tell you that the whole thing reeks of it. I have my doubts that Morgan is regarded as truthful by anyone, and especially the LMJC officers of the court. However, a guy like Morgan is USEFUL because he can deliver goods for prosecutors who might have no evidence or, worse, actually have someone charged who is innocent.

Norton and Franklin knew exactly what they had in Morgan. I don't know the details of the letter, but I cannot imagine that they were unaware of it before going to the grand jury. Maybe they were and maybe they really believed Higgenbottom murdered a baby, but when they have to rely on forensic evidence that conveniently was changed along with a "jailhouse snitch," one has to wonder if these people have any integrity at all.

Eric Holder: Perjury for me -- but not for thee, Roger

Legendary Major League Baseball pitcher Roger Clemens faces a retrial for perjury for allegedly lying to Congress during a hearing. The U.S. Department of Justice and Congress spared no expense to try to put him into prison after he testified that he had not used steroids. (During his first trial, the federal prosecutor brought in hearsay "evidence" that the judge already had ruled inadmissible, which led to a mistrial.)

Fast forward to this year. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who ultimately is responsible for the Clemens prosecution, told Congress last May that he only had heard of the infamous "Operation Fast and Furious" just a few weeks before. However, as this article demonstrates, Holder had been briefed about this program on a number of occasions during the summer of 2010.

So, assuming that both Clemens and Holder have lied under oath, which action was worst? If Clemens lied, it was about something he had ingested into his body that may have let him throw a baseball longer (and faster) than otherwise may have been the case. Operation Fast and Furious, on the other hand, resulted in scores of people being murdered, shot down with weapons that the government purposely made sure got into the hands of Mexican drug gangs.

From what I can tell, however, the government thinks that what Clemens allegedly did was much worse. Eric Holder will not face a second of scrutiny, as I am sure that the White House and the New York Times will come to his aid. In fact, the NYT recently had an article that tried to whitewash the whole thing, claiming that only Republicans were making any noise about the memos. Holder will not have to worry about being indicted (especially since prosecutors are not in the habit of indicting themselves). There are "two Americas," but they are not rich and poor; they are the Ruling Political Classes -- and everyone else.

Jim Broderick is re-indicted

Ken Buck has not given up in pursuing perjury charges against Jim Broderick, the police detective who framed Tim Masters in his wrongful conviction for the murder of Peggy Hettrick. In last week's post, I noted how Buck could have looked the other way -- as so many prosecutors do -- but did the right thing, instead.

The charges against Broderick were dismissed because the original indictment did not say when the perjury was discovered, which meant that the statute of limitations (three years) against Broderick would have kicked in for his testimony in 1991. This time, however, the indictment is more specific on the date.

I applaud Buck for his diligence and his honesty, and I hope this good deed is rewarded, not punished.

*************************************

We will have some news soon on our pursuit of adoption of Sintija from Latvia. Stay tuned.

"An Absolute Honest-to-God Texas Frame-up"

People have written me on occasion asking if I were familiar with the "Mineola Swingers Club" case, and while I was, I can say I didn't know much about it. As this article in Texas Monthly demonstrates, those who did know the facts decided that the facts were not good enough, and that the only "satisfactory" outcome would be to frame the defendants. And that is what the authorities did.

The facts are fairly well-known. A group of adults supposedly had young children engage in sex behavior on stage at a "swingers club" in Mineola, Texas. The children alleged a number of wild things, but at the beginning the authorities in Woods County could see through it, but, as often happens, someone else got involved, the "child protective" workers did their guilt-assuming, suggestive interviews, and the rest was history. Innocent people went to jail.

Writes Michael Hall:

To recap, from 2005 to 2008, four Tyler children--three siblings and their aunt—all aged 4 through 7, made allegations that in 2004 seven adults, including their parents, had forced them to attend a sex kindergarten in a trailer park, where they learned to play sex games, and then took them to a swingers club in nearby Mineola, where they performed sex acts on stage in front of crowds of as many as 30 adults, who videotaped the shows. The stories told by the kids were wildly inconsistent and sometimes outright bizarre: adults casting spells, wearing witch outfits, and sacrificing chickens; one child said she had flown around on a broomstick. Every single child initially denied to social workers knowing anything about a sex kindergarten or club; it was only after multiple interviews that they started making outrageous allegations. But there was nothing to back them up: no adult witnesses and no physical evidence—no DNA, no fingerprints, not even any videotapes.

In fact, Wood County, where Mineola is located, did its own investigation, back in 2005, when just one child was talking about a sex club. Investigators (including an FBI agent), found absolutely no evidence to back up her accusations.

Unfortunately, the truth was not enough:

This didn’t stop the criminal justice machinery of Smith County. A Texas Ranger got involved and before long he was helping interview the other kids. In 2007 arrests were made; the public was outraged that a sex kindergarten and a sex club would operate under their noses. Three of the adults went to trial in 2008 and their juries, made of good country people who want nothing more than to protect their children, found them guilty in a matter of minutes. A fourth defendant was found guilty last summer.

If you wish to know why I have no hope at all that authorities will want to do what is right, the following pretty much explains the current state of "law" in this country:

I find it unfathomable that so many good people could allow and encourage these prosecutions to go forward. What happened to the lawyerly skepticism of Judge Jack Skeen and DA Bingham and the other men and women in his office?

*Why didn’t they look closer at the kids’ weird, implausible stories?

*Why didn’t they look closer at the foster mother of three of them, a woman named Margie Cantrell who moved to Mineola from California in 2004 and who has a history of manipulating her foster kids? (One of her California kids characterized her to me as “the puppet master” and said, “She brainwashes the kids to believe the stories she makes up.”)

*Why didn’t they give serious credence to the fact that not one of the seven defendants would testify against the others in exchange for a lesser sentence?

If they had done just one of these three, much less all of them, they would have realized the obvious: Nothing happened. There was no crime. There was no sex kindergarten and there were no child-sex shows at a swinger’s club. Ultimately, I can’t help but believe that Bingham knows this. Let’s put it this way: If he really believed these people put on live sex shows with children, would he really be setting them free now?

I always figured the cavalry would ride in and save the day for them. First I thought it would be the office of the Attorney General, which, in the summer of 2009 sent two lawyers to help investigate the case after Bingham tried to recuse his office from further prosecutions. But the AG’s office didn’t do anything. Then in the spring of 2010 two of the defendants had their verdicts thrown out by the 14th Court of Appeals in Houston—a process which saw the DA in neighboring Wood County file an extraordinary amicus brief in which he officially called into question everything the Smith County DA had done. “[N]o evidence was found to corroborate the stories told by the children,” he wrote.

But that was it. No cooler or wiser heads stepped in to actually free these people. In fact, those two defendants whose cases were overturned were going to be folded in with the remaining defendants (two of whom are grandparents of two of the children) into one mass trial in June. It is these six who pled guilty.

No matter how many times these kinds of cases are exposed, no matter how much research is published on problems that we find when "child protective" workers interview young children, no matter how many times that the "evidence" contradicts the Laws of Time and Space, the authorities will bring charges and compliant juries will vote guilty. Why does it happen?

It happens because people in authority are not held accountable for their actions. Protected by legal immunity and the mainstream news media, which needs these people as sources for their stories (no matter how fantastic those stories might be), the bad actors are free to lie, suborn perjury, and conspire with judges to rig trials. Protected by politicians and the U.S. Supreme Court, police, prosecutors, and "child protective" workers will pull off this scam time and again -- because they can do it.

Hall ends with this depressing thought:

Why would they do this if they aren’t guilty? Well, innocent people plead guilty all the time. They confess to crimes they didn’t commit (about a quarter of the DNA exonerations involve some form of false confession) and they plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit. They especially do it when they are certain they will be found guilty, no matter what they do or how good their attorneys are. In these cases we’ve already seen four different juries vote guilty—in the time it takes to watch a movie. These defendants know the realities. They can go to prison for life—or they can go home. They don’t have a whole lot to lose by pleading guilty. Their lives have already been ruined—they’ll always be known for these allegations anyway.

So, Patrick “Booger Red“ Kelly told his mother that he was taking the plea. “I don’t like it at all,” she told me. “But he’s screwed here. Despite all anybody can do, he’s never going to be found ‘not guilty’ in Tyler. He’s at the end of his rope. He told me, ‘Mama, I’m tired. I’m in here for something I haven’t done. I want to go home.’”

I usually believe in the ultimate good will of good people; justice will triumph. Of course, that only happens if people actually do something about injustice. In this case decent people turned away from doing anything about a terrible wrong. They’ve got a word for that, and the word is “evil.”

In Smith County, the bad guys won.

In Catoosa County a year ago, the "bad guys" did not win when jurors saw through the lies of the authorities and acquitted Tonya Craft. But they still are on the job, still trying to frame innocent people, still lying, still suborning perjury, still fabricating "evidence." As long as people like this are in positions of power and authority, the "bad guys" will be winning.

The Ordeal of Michael Rasmussen, Part V: Some Questions for Det. Kim Selkirk

Michael Rasmussen will go on trial this week in Charles County, accused of molesting and sexually assaulting his daughter Apryl, who now is an adult. The person who has most pushed the charges has been Charles County Det. Kim Selkirk, the former bank teller who now wants to help convince a jury to throw Mr. Rasmussen into prison for the rest of his life.

Given the seriousness of the charges, and given the seriousness of the potential outcome, I believe that some questions are in order for Selkirk, who most certainly will be testifying under oath during the trial. (Testifying "under oath" means that if Selkirk does not tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," then she is committing perjury, which is a felony in the State of Maryland. However, don't hold your breath, as police regularly lie under oath and they are charged with perjury only when it is politically-expedient for prosecutors to do so.)

Here are some questions that I would like to ask Selkirk:

1. You claim that Mr. Rasmussen "confessed" to you and Det. Austin when he was arrested in March, 2010, yet you failed to record the so-called confession. Can you explain why you would not record such a thing, given that before then, Mr. Rasmussen was not willing to talk to you or Det. Austin because he had clearly said that he did not trust you?
2.  What made Mr. Rasmussen suddenly trust you on this occasion, and if you proved so trustworthy to him, why did he refuse to sign the "confession" that you so graciously wrote up for him?
3. How was it that you managed to misquote Mr. Rasmussen regarding Apryl's question, "Do you want me to lie to the police?" As per the recorded conversation -- a conversation to which you were privy when it was being recorded -- Mr. Rasmussen clearly tells his daughter, "Tell them what you feel." Can you explain to me, then, how it was that you claimed in those notes you took during the supposed "confession" that Mr. Rasmussen told his daughter to lie when, in fact, nowhere in that conversation he said such a thing?
4. Did you take Mr. Rasmussen's five-year-old stepdaughter to the police headquarters, where you interrogated her for a long time, trying to get her to claim Mr. Rasmussen had molested her?
5. If you took that little girl to be interrogated and spent time questioning her, can you explain why you did not take notes or record the conversation?
6. If that conversation took place, did you attempt to follow the standard protocol when authorities interview children who they believe might have been abused? Did you have a forensic interviewer there, or have an official who was experienced in interviewing young children?
7. Is it true that the child insisted that her stepfather had NOT molested her?
8. Is it true that you got angry at her because she would not say what you wanted her to say?
9. Have you had any conversations with that child's father or have you taken part in any scheme to try to have the children taken away not only from Mr. Rasmussen -- who has not been accused of molesting them -- as well as their mother, despite the fact that the courts clearly had given her custody?
10. Have you made any other misrepresentations of what you claim Mr. Rasmussen said in the recorded phone conversation with Apryl versus what Mr. Rasmussen actually said? If that is true, and you cannot even truthfully report on something for which there is a recording (I'm asking hypothetically, of course), then why should anyone believe your recollection of this supposed "confession" when all there is to show for the conversation are your notes, notes that we know already have serious inaccuracies?

Now, I have just asked a few hypothetical questions, although I am sure that Mr. Rasmussen's attorney will have even more questions for Selkirk when he cross-examines her next week. However, I would like to end this post with just one more question for the detective: When you raise your right hand as you are being sworn in as a witness, will you have the fingers of your left hand crossed as you put them behind your back? Just wondering.

Will Authorities in Hamilton County Ignore the Lawbreaking?

[Update, Friday, November 19, 11:45 AM]: According to the Twitter feeds, Joal Henke and Tonya Craft have reached a settlement, although the terms are not being made public. They have said they will tell the children of the decision, but the terms are confidential, having been reached after a lengthy in-chambers meeting this morning. [End Update]

At this writing, I have no idea how Judge Marie Williams will rule in Tonya Craft's custody case, some things have been established irrefutably: Joal and Sarah Henke conspired with Joal Henke's father to commit federal mortgage fraud, and Joal and Sarah Henke committed perjury. Both are crimes punishable by fines and prison.

Tonya's 30-day trial in Catoosa County established that she was not a child molester or a lawbreaker, but it also is clear that there was a lot of lawbreaking done by those who were accusing her, including the Henkes. Given the state of law in this country, I hardly am surprised when the innocent are charged with crimes while people who DO commit criminal acts are ignored.

I would not be beating this drum loudly if Joal and Sarah had not perjured themselves during Tonya Craft's trial in Catoosa County in an attempt to get Tonya out of the picture permanently with a life sentence. What they did was akin to an attempted murder, and their actions are not the kind of thing that one can or should ignore.

The Henkes and Mortgage Fraud

I first will look at the mortgage fraud, which Joal admitted under oath (although when Joal is under oath, it usually means he is lying). It is not hard to check the records, however, and if his father was the applicant for a VA loan, then we have prima facae evidence of fraud. I begin first with the federal statutes which are draconian:

By extending the federal fraud laws to cover mortgage fraud, FERA also increases the penalties faced by those charged for violating the law. Previously, a conviction for mortgage fraud may have resulted in no more than probation. Now, someone charged with mortgage fraud may face a maximum of 30 years in prison and up to $1 million fine.

Additionally, the statute of limitations for bringing a mortgage fraud claim has been extended from 5 years to 10 years, giving the DOJ a much greater opportunity to build a successful case against someone accused of committing the crime.

In Henke's case, this would not be hard to investigate, since the paperwork is easily made available. If Joal's father claimed in the application that he was going to live in the house and then did not live there, he has committed fraud. Furthermore, under federal conspiracy laws, if Joal and Sarah were aware of what was going on, then they also broke federal law.

Tennessee law is not as strict, as the prison sentences run from 3-7 years. However, because the loan in question was a VA loan, most likely this case would be prosecuted by federal authorities.

The Henkes and Perjury

Tennessee law defines perjury in the following way:

...perjury occurs when a person, with intent to deceive:

• makes a false statement, under oath;
• makes a statement, under oath, that confirms the truth of a false statement previously made and the statement is required or authorized by law to be made under oath; or
• makes a false statement, not under oath, but on an official document required or authorized by law to be made under oath and stating on its face that a false statement is subject to the penalties of perjury. Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-16-702 (2007).

"Oath" means a solemn and formal undertaking to tell the truth and includes an equivalent affirmation permitted by law as a substitute for an oath administered by a person authorized by law to take statements under oath. Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-16-703 (2007).

Perjury is basically lying under oath or on an official document. It is a Class A misdemeanor under normal circumstances. It is elevated to a Class E felony if committed on an application for a handgun carry permit or on a sexual offender registration form. Perjury can be aggravated under certain circumstances. According to Tennessee law, aggravated perjury (a Class D felony) is perjury plus:

• the false statement is made during or in connection with an official proceeding; and
• the false statement is material. Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-16-703 (2007).

There is more:

"Material" means the statement, irrespective of its admissibility under the rules of evidence, could have affected the course or outcome of the official proceeding. "Official proceeding" means any type of administrative, executive, judicial, or legislative proceeding that is conducted before a public servant authorized by law to take statements under oath in that proceeding. Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-16-701 (2007).

The main difference between perjury and aggravated perjury is the importance of the testimony. If the deceptive testimony could affect the outcome of the case, then the offense is aggravated perjury.

If the perjury is judged to be simple perjury, then it falls under the category of a misdemeanor in which a person serves a maximum of 11 months, 29 days. However, it the perjury is ruled to be "aggravated perjury" (in which the perjury could determine the outcome of a case), then it is a Class D felony with the following penalties:

Not less than two (2) years nor more than twelve (12) years in prison. In addition, the jury may assess a fine not to exceed five thousand dollars ($5,000), unless otherwise provided by statute

In reality, most prosecutors don't bring perjury charges, given that there is so much lying in the courts, but they will bring these charges in certain situations. Certainly in the Tonya Craft case, the perjury was what we call "material," that is, it potentially had an effect on the case's outcome.

We already know that Hamilton County DA Bill Cox is moving Heaven and Earth to prosecute teacher Stacy Swallows, yet Mr. Swallows harmed no one. I wonder, however, if Mr. Cox is going to ignore the felonious behavior that has gone on in the building where he works. My sense is that he will, which would say something about Mr. Cox's priorities.

Joal and Sarah won't have to worry about being prosecuted in Georgia, given that their perjury was suborned by prosecutors Chris "Facebook-Cruisemaster" Arnt and Len "The Man" Gregor. I don't know if they will be prosecuted in Tennessee, either, although any prosecutor who might want to investigate the mortgage fraud and perjury would find low-hanging fruit.

Truth for Tonya and Truth for the Rest of Us, Too

As I write this post, Tonya Craft is preparing once again to take the stand in order to tell the rest of the world about the truth. As what happened more than six months ago in Catoosa County, her adversaries depended upon lies.

Six months ago, a jury believed her and set her free. Will Judge Marie Williams do the same?

During the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case more than four years ago, Duke lacrosse coach Mike Pressler urged then-Athletic Director Joe Alleva to look for the truth and not act rashly. Alleva answered with perhaps the most notorious statement in a case known for lies and notoriety: "It's not about the truth, anymore."

It's not about the truth. Think of the heartache and the acrimony and the outright personal destruction that could have been avoided had someone, somewhere, in an official position in the Duke case simply sought the truth. Think of what might NOT have transpired had Duke's administration and faculty demanded that the truth be told instead of running down the rabbit trail of Postmodern lies.

It certainly is not about the truth with Joal Henke and his wife Sarah. Both of them have been caught telling lie after lie, and right in front of Judge Williams. Tonya and her attorneys have documented time and again how Joal and Sarah openly and arrogantly violated the very court orders that Judge Williams set down.

One would hope that this would mean something not only to Judge Williams, but also to everyone else in the Hamilton County court system. One would hope that District Attorney Bill Cox, who apparently is pulling out all stops to throw a popular teacher in prison because he confronted a gang of kids who were out after hours, would take note that Joal and Sarah Henke are openly lying under oath in the very building where he works.

One would hope that anyone who sees what is at stake and has decision-making power can see that Joal Henke is a sociopath, and a serial liar and adulterer, and that such a person should not have primary care of children. One would hope that someone in a position to make decisions would understand that Joal and Sarah lied in a court of law in order to try to send a woman they knew was innocent of child molesting charges to prison, just to get her out of the picture and to destroy her life and to forever separate her from the children she loves.

One would hope that even though the courts of the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit are not about the truth, that the people who make decisions in Hamilton County do care about the truth. One would hope that Judge Williams and others are willing to send men like "judge" Brian Outhouse, Len "The Man" Gregor, and Chris "Facebook-Cruisemaster" Arnt a message that their lies are not welcome in Tennessee.

One would hope that Judge Williams and others in the system would understand that if they permit Joal and Sarah Henke to get away with lying -- and telling transparent lies at that -- then they are sending a message to everyone else that taking an oath to tell the truth in a Hamilton County court means absolutely nothing.

One would hope that someone, somewhere would be willing to say: It IS about the truth, now and in the future. That is what is at stake in Judge Marie Williams' courtroom, and nothing else. It is not about custody; it is about the truth.

The Times-Free Press' Disgraceful Portrayal

I guess Joan Garrett of the Times-Free Press must be burning up the line with John Madewell of Channel 9, as her account of the Tuesday hearing paints a picture of a delusional and vengeful Tonya Craft throwing mud at her ex-husband and his wife in an attempt to take her children out of a loving, nurturing home. I guess this truly misleading article is what Todd Foster meant when he said in taking the top position at the paper that the TFP would be going after "sacred cows."

So, the TFP apparently thinks that Ms. Craft is a "sacred cow" that needs to be attacked. Conversely, Garrett and Foster try to portray a couple of perjurers -- Joal and Sarah Henke -- as wonderful, loving parents who just want what is best for their children. Thus, it is time to deconstruct this piece, which is every bit as disgusting as what Channel 9 did all through the Tonya Craft criminal trial last spring.

As I read through this piece, it strikes me that Garrett has managed to turn it into a "food fight" of "he said, she said" that makes up much of the sordid world of custody battles. Her article basically says that it is Joal's and Sarah's word against Tonya's -- as though there were no other documents in the case, and the current circuit court testimony is the only evidence available.

The story's bias is evident in its headline: "Craft's children doing fine, testimony in custody dispute shows." Granted, Garrett did not write the headline, but I believe it reflects the story. Keep in mind that the testimony did not "show" anything; some people testified who said they believed that the children were "doing fine," but there was no proof.

(From what I can see, Garrett does not need proof that the kids are OK, as she takes the word of a serial liar and adulterer and that of his friends. On the other hand, I doubt Tonya ever could "prove" her innocence to Garrett.)

The first paragraph demonstrates right away where this story is headed:

Tonya Craft's five-week trial on child molestation charges dredged up sordid, intimate details about her and her ex-husband's private lives, but some witnesses testifying in the couple's custody case say all the nastiness has not affected their children.

First, the spring trial produced real-live evidence against Joal for his serial adultery, but there was no proof actually given against Tonya except for Len Gregor's accusations of her wearing a thong and Joal's patently dishonest "I just remembered" testimony in which he claimed she had a lesbian affair with Jennifer Sullivan.

But the most telling paragraph is farther down in the story, when Garrett writes:

In a $25 million federal lawsuit filed against her accusers, Craft claims her ex-husband, the entire Catoosa County government and child therapists conspired to bring a false case against her by manipulating the children who accused her.

Most important, the lawsuit uses "conspiracy," but in the legal sense under federal law. Catoosa County is a defendant because Det. Tim Deal, who is being sued, is a Catoosa County employee. Nowhere in the suit does Ms. Craft claim that "the entire Catoosa County government and child therapists" were conspiring together, as though they had a huge meeting in a big auditorium and hatched out a dastardly plot.

Instead, under federal "conspiracy" laws, when people involved in lawbreaking have any kind of meeting at all, it is considered part of a "conspiracy." Yes, it is a very loose definition, but that's federal law for you.

Garrett goes on:

But during nearly three hours of questioning Tuesday, Henke said he never instigated nor drove the criminal case to court.

While making the children available for interviews and court appearances and also responding to subpoenas himself, he never spoke with his children about the allegation against their mother, he testified in court.

"It wasn't mine to stop," he said. "This wasn't about me. I was concerned with anything that would be of danger to my children. I reacted with the best I knew to do at that time, which was cooperation."

As much as he hated it, when his children had questions or were upset about the case, he said he told them they had to talk with a professional therapist.

"We sheltered them from the news. We sheltered them from the media. We avoided that. They didn't see computers, television," he said.

Now, he said he wants Craft to be involved in the children's lives but doesn't want her to be more involved than he is.

Apparently, Garrett has read nothing of the depositions and trial testimony. She says nothing of the numerous hours that Henke spent talking to people like Sandra Lamb and the Wilsons, who were driving the whole case. She says nothing about all of the times that Henke denied Tonya and her parents visitation rights -- and that, too, is part of the record, even if the Garrett wants to ignore it.

The "professional therapist" of whom he speaks is Laurie Evans, who was so notorious in this case that not even the prosecution -- which openly suborned perjury -- was willing to put her on the stand as a prosecution witness. (The defense subpoenaed her as a hostile witness, and she proved to put on quite a spectacle on the stand.) It was Evans who managed to get Tonya's daughter to claim that not only had Tonya molested her, but that Tonya's mother also got in on the act, something that not even the prosecution was willing to swallow.

Garrett's biased account continued with this gem:

At times during Henke's cross-examination Tuesday, one of Craft's attorney's, Scott King, became so animated and aggressive, Circuit Court Judge Marie Williams told him he had to calm down.

"We are going to switch examiners if you can't keep it together," Williams told King.

It would have been instructive to the readers to understand just why Scott King was zeroing in on Joal Henke, but Garrett ignored something that was very, very important.

Henke, as I noted in my earlier post, claimed under oath that Tonya had failed to take the children to the doctor (even for "baby care" visits) for three years, which he wanted the court to believe was "proof" of neglect.

Scott King, however, was ready and had the medical records of the children in front of him and he had Joal read the dates of the visits. You see, the official record demonstrated beyond a doubt that Henke was lying, and when Henke pretended that he was having a hard time reading those records, Scott King became aggressive in his questioning, and who could blame him? That was when Judge Marie Williams cautioned Mr. King.

Unfortunately, Garrett tried to portray Mr. King as an out-of-control lawyer attacking a loving and caring father who simply was standing up against an alleged child molester. In other words, Garrett deliberately presented a false picture of what was happening.

At this point, I admit that I have passionate feelings about this case, but those feelings are rooted in the facts of what happened. I'm angry about it because prosecutors knowingly brought false charges, prosecution witnesses committed perjury with full knowledge and encouragement of prosecutors and the judge, and the judge tried to rig a conviction.

Don't trust my word on this point. Read the material yourself. Read the depositions, the interviews with the children, the police reports, trial transcripts, news stories, and the literature on false accusations. Read Sandra Lamb's statement regarding Eric Echols, and then watch the video of her encounter with Mr. Echols and then try to reconcile the two; It cannot be done.

My point is that I don't believe in Tonya's innocence because she is attractive or because of personal relationships. I believed in her innocence long before I ever met her or talked to her. All it took was a look at the record, and I understood.

Unfortunately, Joan Garrett is not one of those people who apparently has looked at anything. In reading the article today, I get the sense that she believes that maybe, just maybe, it was a situation of Tonya Craft "beating the rap." In her view, Ms. Craft definitely is not a sympathetic character, but rather just another lowlife trying to manipulate the system to get her kids.

Yes, I know that reporters are busy (and so am I and so is everyone else), but for Garrett to give the account she did is unconscionable. If she claims that she is not familiar with the depositions and trial testimony, then perhaps she should give the trial coverage to someone who is familiar with the material. But whatever the reason, be it ignorance or malice, Garrett and the TFP have proven that they are trying their best to rival Channel 9 for the Slimy Coverage Award in this case.

News Flash! Joal and Sarah Henke Lie Under Oath! (Not That Channel 9 Would Report It)

Tuesday's hearing in Judge Marie Williams' courtroom was about what I expected it to be. Joal Henke and his pregnant wife Sarah lied a lot. They lied under oath, and their friends (including a former minister at Eastwood Church) covered for them. In other words, it was business as usual with the Henkes and the Eastwood crowd. Don't forget that the Eastwood bunch tried to convince everyone Tonya Craft was a child molester, even though the evidence clearly showed otherwise.

Now, if you watched only Channel 9's coverage, you would think that Joal and Sarah are honest, God-fearing people who care only about the welfare of their children. You would have no idea that Tonya's attorneys caught Joal in lie after lie, and that the guy who "suddenly remembered" all sorts of scandalous things about Tonya at her criminal trial had severe memory lapse all through today's session. (Channel 3 has more accurate coverage, not surprisingly, given that Channel 9 worked hand-in-glove with the prosecution in the criminal trial, even giving sympathetic on-camera interviews with prosecutors Chris Arnt and Len Gregor after the acquittal.)

It is hard to know where to begin, but I will begin at one of the lies told by Joal, that being his falsification of his address in order to pull Tonya's children from the school where they were attending and enroll them in Westview School. Once again, as she had in her conversation with Eric Echols, principal Margo Williams denied telling Joal to do it -- which he continues to claim.

Mortgage Fraud, Henke Style

In Tuesday's testimony, we found that Joal's father purchased the house where he and Sarah live, as Joal apparently could not qualify for a loan. (Smart people, those mortgage lenders.)

The problem is that Joal's father got a VA loan, which requires the borrower to live in the residence, and the borrower is required to state that on the application. That Henke's father did NOT live in the house or even intend to live in the house is mortgage fraud, which is a felony punishable by several years in prison.

So, if federal prosecutors in Southeast Tennessee would like a slam-dunk case, they have one right in front of them. Joal Henke's father committed mortgage fraud, and Joal and Sarah Henke were partners-in-crime, and conspiracy to commit mortgage fraud also is a federal felony. Ah! Joal doesn't care where he breaks the law, just as long as he can be a lawbreaker!

Now, as I see it, not only should federal prosecutors be interested in this open fraud, but also the state board of realtors, as licensed real estate agents are not supposed to be committing mortgage fraud. Perhaps someone needs to notify the board of this transgression and let the board take another look at Joal's license.

Here is the Channel 3 tweet on that situation, including the editorial comment:

11:43am Joal's house purchased by his dad, dad lied to get VHA loan, said he would live there, not Joal. (That's a federal offense.)

The Showering Sarah

Before dealing with Sarah Henke's frequent showers with Tonya's daughter, let us deal with another lie that Sarah told under oath Tuesday. Henke told the court that she never tried to "replace" Tonya as the actual mother of Tonya's children.

Yet, all during the trial, Sarah Bass Henke had a Facebook page in which her signature photo showed her holding Tonya's daughter and it was clear on that page (which conveniently was taken down after Tonya's acquittal) that Henke was claiming those children as her own, and she even thanked God for "giving" her those children. The only reason I did not mention it on my blog -- and I did save what I could from it -- was that what Sarah Henke was doing was so vicious and so evil that I did not want Tonya even to look at a picture of another woman stealing her daughter -- and that is exactly what Sarah Henke was doing.

[Update]: It turns out I was wrong. Sarah Bass Henke has a current Facebook page, and she is pictured cuddling to Tonya's daughter. She also writes a number of things pertaining to Tonya's children (claiming them to be her own), saying things like trying to "be a yes mom today" and saying what a blessing it is to tuck in her children at night.

In other words, even now, even after claiming under oath that she and Joal are not engaged in parental alienation, she continues to claim that the children of Tonya Craft are her own. Folks, it doesn't get any more evil than what Sarah Bass Henke is doing -- and continues to do. [End Update]

So, for Sarah Bass Henke to tell the court under oath that she was not trying to cleverly push Tonya out of the picture is a lie, yet another lie on top of other lies. (For those who still might think Sarah was being naive, remember that after Tonya's acquittal, Sarah stood in the courtroom crying, and somehow I don't think these were tears of joy.)

When asked why she showered with Tonya's daughter, Henke once again went with the same perjury she used in Catoosa County: Tonya's children were dirty; they were unkempt; they had matted hair; they stank. Dear, caring Sarah was just showering with the child because Tonya Craft was such an uncaring, unfit mother that she let her own children be walking pigpens.

However, as I posted a few days ago, when Sarah was questioned by attorneys in a deposition in 2009, she did not use the "stinking children" defense. Instead, she said she was just helping the young girl clean shampoo from her hair and the like. It was only at the criminal trial -- and now at the custody hearing -- that Bass Henke tried to employ that rhetorical device known as the Big Lie.

Here is the Channel 3 tweet for the "shower" nonsense:

2:55pm Scott King asking Sarah Henke about showering with Tonya Craft's daughter. She says girl wasn't clean when they picked her up.

Joal Continues the "Neglect" Theme

Sarah was not the only person to push a false "Tonya neglected her children" theme, as Joal insisted that Tonya was refusing to give them even basic medical care by failing to take the children to the doctor even for checkups for three years. Tonya's attorney, Scott King, made short work of Henke's lies. This is from Channel 3's postings:

11:24am King is challenging Joal's statement that Tonya Craft didn't take kids for well child visits for three years.

11:27am Scott King making Joal Henke read kids' med charts. There was no three year gap in their health care.

11:29am Joal seems confused, trouble reading charts. KING: It's not that complicated. JUDGE: Easy, counselor.

So, picture the scene. Joal Henke tells the court that Tonya Craft did not take her children to the doctor for three years, and when Scott King produces the medical charts of the children that demonstrate conclusively that Henke is lying, Henke pretends he is having trouble reading the charts. It was yet another Gotcha! moment in the life of serial liar and adulterer, Joal Henke.

Joal Can't Recall Anything

During Tonya's criminal trial, Joal was a fount of "I just remembered," including recalling what clearly was a nonexistent lesbian affair Tonya allegedly had with her good friend, Jennifer Sullivan. (Notice that "judge" Brian Outhouse refused to allow Jennifer to testify on her behalf.)

However, in testimony Tuesday, Joal seemed stricken with memory loss. (I thought that a "world-class" athlete -- as Joal describes himself -- was disciplined.) Here are some Channel 3 tweets that demonstrate Joal's Alzheimer's act:

11:15am Scott King asking Joal Henke about his conversation with court-appointed therapist. He can't remember what he told her.

11:59am A lot of Joal Henke's answers include "I don't recall" or "I can't remember".

12:28pm Joal continues being "unable to recall" most of King's questions regarding Craft's parents' access to kids.

Why would Joal suddenly be forgetful? It seems that he openly had been violating the court order that Judge Marie Williams herself had set. Here are some more Channel 3 tweets:

11:34am Joal admits he lied on application to get kids in school they weren't zoned for; left mother's information blank on form. (Emphasis mine)

11:36am Tonya Craft had to get court order to access her kids school records.

11:38am Joal called Catoosa court to see if Tonya Craft violated bond by asking for their kids' school records.

11:52am Joal says he denied Craft visitation with their son on Mothers Day 2009. He can't remember why.

11:53am Joal also denied Craft visitation on Mothers Day 2010.

11:57am Joal also denied Tonya Craft's parents' request for time with kids on Mothers Day this year.

There was nothing in the court order signed by Judge Williams that allowed him to do the things he did, yet he did it with impunity. Furthermore, he lied about what he did and why he did it, and when confronted in a court of law, he suddenly got a bout of Alzheimer's Disease. I only can hope that Judge Williams understands that Henke has given her the middle finger, too, because he believes she will do nothing about it.

Joal's Lack-of-Character Witness

In Dennis Norwood's report in The Chattanoogan, he goes into detail about one of the "character" witnesses for the Henkes, Joshua McGiness, who was a former minister at Eastwood Church. According to The Chattanoogan:

A former minister at Eastwood Baptist Church where the Henkes attend, Joshua McGiness, also testified in support of his friend and former tae kwan do instructor, Joal. When attorney Clancy Covert asked him why he had attended the Craft criminal trial, he answered, “To support Joal and Sarah.”

Mr. McGuiness told the judge that while he respected Mr. Henke now, he had not always. Asked by Ms. Craft’s attorneys what changed his mind, McGuiness said, “It was the way he handled his divorce from Ms. Craft.” He stated he did not attend any of the divorce proceedings, but came to his feelings from hearing what Mr. Henke had to say in their church small group meetings. “We asked Joal some pretty tough questions,” he said.

Addressing both Sarah and Joal as to the issue of Sarah showering with the daughter, both said they found nothing wrong with the practice. Ms. Craft had earlier complained to authorities about this practice. It was only after a psychologist associated with the case told her to stop the practice that it ended, according to trial testimony.

As a former minister, Mr. McGuiness said he didn’t find anything wrong with the practice either, saying there were just too many variables and facets to look at.

I think that readers should know that Tonya was pretty much run out of Eastwood Church because she was divorcing Henke. Now, Tonya did not leave him for someone else; no, she left because Joal was sleeping around, abusing her, and then claiming he was a "changed man."

I'm sure that McGuiness would claim that Joal just wanted to "restore his marriage" or nonsense like that. I would put it much differently, and I think that what I am going to say pretty much describes Joal Henke.

Henke is both tenacious and competitive, but he also is a sociopath, a person who will look a person in the eye and then lie with the most sincere voice one can imagine. If he is caught in a lie, he simply tells another, and then another.

It was not that Joal wanted to keep Tonya as his wife because he loved her; he wanted to keep her around because for her to leave -- and leave with the children -- would be for him to lose, and one thing that Joal Henke cannot accept is losing. He was tenacious throughout the divorce proceedings, but when it was clear that Tonya had a stack of videotapes of him having sex with other women, even Henke realized that he was finished.

The faux child molestation case was just another example of him trying to beat Tonya -- because in his twisted mind, she "beat" him at something she she successfully divorced him and won the child custody rights. True, he could manipulate the people at Eastwood Church, and if McGuiness is typical of the kind of person who attends that "emergent church," then it is not hard to figure what is happening there, and why so many people there still insist beyond all reason that Tonya Craft was and is a child molester.

The Wednesday hearing is closed to the press and public because it will involve psychological reports of the children. I only hope that there is one more psychological report: about a certain sociopath named Joal Henke who is unfit to be anywhere but in a jail cell.

Tonya's Custody Hearing Begins Today

At long last, after delays and outright obstruction by Joal and Sarah Henke and their crack legal team, not to mention the lies that have come from that couple, Tonya Craft gets her day in Judge Marie Williams' Circuit Court. One only can hope that the court in Hamilton County has a better performance than what we saw in Catoosa County, "judge" Brian Outhouse presiding.

For anyone who has become cynical about what goes on in American courts today, the entire Tonya Craft saga of the past year provides ample ammunition for such a viewpoint. What are some things we have witnessed firsthand that make one wonder if any judge anywhere in this country has the will to do right? This only is a short list, but it is a beginning:

• "judge" Brian Outhouse clearly tried to rig the proceedings in an attempt to engineer a conviction against Tonya, and the ashen expression on his face after the announcement of the verdict is proof that he had no intention of conducting a fair trial;

• Prosecution witnesses committed perjury, something that has been documented in this blog many times. These are not mere "allegations" or possibilities of perjury; the proof is ironclad and the facts are indisputable;

• Prosecutors lied, suborned perjury, fabricated false evidence, disrupted the proceedings (with encouragement from Outhouse), attacked the defense in violation of all ethical standards, as listed by the Georgia State Bar (not that anyone there cares about prosecutorial misconduct), and demonstrated themselves to be pathetic bullies;

• "judge" Brian Outhouse time and again refused to let in exculpatory evidence, knowing that even a "law-and-order" appeals court would overturn a guilty verdict, but by then Ms. Craft would have served many years in prison;

• A number of people in official positions either lied under oath or shaded the truth in violation of the law, including the prosecutors, Outhouse, and Det. Tim "Dirty" Deal, to name a few. Outhouse had unreported ex parte meetings (a violation of judicial ethics, not that anyone in authority in Georgia gives a damn about such things) with at least one prosecution witness (Sandra Lamb) and prosecutors Arnt and Gregor.

As I have said, these are not unfounded allegations; everything I have listed can be backed up with indisputable facts, and I can say confidently that there is much, much more. The system that put Tonya on trial, took away her children, and robbed her and her parents of their life savings and inheritance has proven to be so utterly corrupt that it is beyond any kind of redemption.

What I am saying is that the court system of the LMJC is on the same level with what existed in the old Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. It is no better, and, in fact, it is worse. Unlike "Dirty" Deal, no one in the U.S.S.R. or Nazi Germany claimed to be a "pro-life Christian," and unlike Outhouse, none of the people went to a local Baptist church. In other words, those court systems of those disgraced regimes made no claim to be doing real justice; they just had raw power and they used it how they wished.

So, Tonya Craft has been able to face down something akin to Roland Friesler's court, and still has prevailed. Today, she faces another situation and one only can hope that Judge Marie Williams will not reward Joal and Sarah Henke for committing perjury.

This last point is instructive. When people flout the law, as have Joal and his wife, they should not be praised or rewarded by judges or anyone else. The Henkes have no business having any children in their household, as they are open and arrogant lawbreakers, and they should be in prison, for perjury is a felony and both of them knew they were lying under oath.

I will go one step further. If Judge Williams grants custody to the Henkes, then she will be announcing to the entire world that perjury works, and will be encouraging future witnesses to lie with impunity.

What is at stake here is not simply a custody issue. What is at stake here is the truth. Courts are supposed to be places where the truth rises to the top, not sinks to the bottom.

I will go even further. There is no better lesson to teach young children than to demonstrate unequivocally that telling the truth is more important than anything else. Joal and Sarah Henke have told lies from the beginning, and I am sure that they will continue to lie (under oath) during these proceedings.

No one -- NO one -- should be rewarded for lying under oath in a situation like this. One hopes and prays that Judge Williams understands this point and does the right thing.

Joal and Sarah Henke: Perjury in Their Own Words, Part III: "The Principal Told Me to Lie"

[Note]: The depositions are not directly related to the criminal charges against Tonya Craft, but, instead, we part of the custody battle that began after Ms. Craft was arrested in 2008. Joal and Sarah were demanding permanent custody of the Henke children, and the depositions are related to that case.

Keep in mind that Joal helped to orchestrate the false charges against Ms. Craft in part as a way to get her out of the picture permanently by having her go to prison for the rest of her life. (He was not the conductor, but played an important role.) [End Note]

After Tonya Craft's arrest in 2008, Joal and Sarah Henke were granted temporary custody of Tonya's (and Joal's) children. One of the first things Joal did was to take the children from the school where they were going and transfer them to Westview School.

There was one problem, however: Joal and Sarah did not live in the district where Westview was located, but for someone like Joal Henke, telling a lie was not a problem. Instead, he simply put a false address and enrolled the children.

As readers will see below, Joal claims that the principal of Westview, Margot Williams, told him to lie. As readers will see below, Joal's version of events differs from that of others. This is taken from the February 18, 2009, deposition. The "Q" is Cary King and "A" is Joal:

Q Have you ever lied on any application relating to the children's school?
A When we spoke with Margo Williams and asked her
Q Would you answer my question, please
A I am answering.
Q yes or no?
A: I am answering the question. I put yes to if we lived in the school district, and we put woody Hollow as the address. And the reason being is we asked the principal: If we cannot get a variance from the school board, we will move in with
her parents, if necessary, to be in that school system. So
Q But you never
A she said go ahead and put Woody Hollow, and if before school starts we have not done that, then then we would we would go from there.
Q All right. Are you done?
A So, yes, I did.
Q You done?
A Yes.
Q Okay. So you lied on your application?
A Yes. I
Q Okay. So you lied to the school

After an objection by Henke's attorney, Charles Dupree, the session continues:

Q See where it says signature of parent or guardian?
A oh, yes. That's my signature.
Q That is your signature. And you filled out this form here, correct?
A Yes, I did.
Q And about four rows down from the top, it says, student address, 9416 Woody Hollow?
A Correct.
Q So that was a lie, wasn't it?
A That was at the time is correct.
Q okay.
A That was not where we lived.
Q And it's still a lie, isn't it?
A Yes. We do not live there.
Q Okay. Have you ever lived at woody
Hollow at any time since these children were enrolled in that school?
A No. We have not.
Q Okay. And who lives at woody Hollow?
A My in-laws

In the July 24, 2009, deposition at Dupree's office, Cary King picks up on this subject. Because the transcript I have is scanned, in the interest of time, I cannot give a full Q and A. However, what transpired is the following:

1. Henke continues to claim that the Westview principal, Margot Williams, told him it was OK to put down a fraudulent address;
2. Cary King asks: "And if Margot Williams said that was not true, would she be lying? (Dupree objects);
3. Henke replies, after Cary asks him again following the objection: "I suppose."
4. Cary King then plays a recording of an interview between Eric Echols and Ms. Williams in which she emphatically answers "No" when Mr. Echols asks her if she told Joal that it was okay to put down "false information."
5. Ms. Williams asks, "Why did he (Henke) tell you that?"

The subject is not covered further, although the CD of the recording made by Mr. Echols is listed as "Exhibit 9." I also will make one other point: Eric Echols was doing a very, very good job of not only uncovering the lies being told by prosecution witnesses and the police and prosecutors themselves, but also finding out past incidents of alleged "bad conduct" by Joal Henke.

Thus, I believe readers can understand why Chris "Facebook-Cruisemaster" Arnt and Tim "Dirty" Deal were anxious to get Mr. Echols out of the picture. That is why they trumped up charges against him, and that is why Buzz Franklin and his little minions have insisted on taking Mr. Echols to trial (which is scheduled to take place in March 2011).

So, if Ms. Williams is correct -- and I believe she is -- then we have yet another instance of Joal Henke lying under oath. This is what is called perjury. Of course, Joal and his attorney, Dupree, will claim that "it is just her word against his." That is true, but let me ask the readers this question: If you had to believe either Margot Williams or Joal Henke, which person would you believe?

I do hope that Judge Marie Williams and the other officials involved with this case will take a hard look at what Joal has said. Furthermore, I believe that every word Joal and Sarah Henke say in court needs to be scrutinized (for obvious reasons).

Further posts will deal with more of Henke's deceit.

Joal and Sarah Henke: Perjury in Their Own Words, Part II: Joal "Just Remembers" to Lie

In putting together posts of the lies that Joal and Sarah Henke told during depositions and the trial against Tonya Craft, Kerwyn and I have found it to be a more daunting task than we could have imagined. We have come to the conclusion that we cannot expose every lie, given that there are not enough bytes in the universe to handle all of that material.

However, with the Tonya-Joal child custody hearing scheduled this week in Judge Marie Williams' court in Hamilton County, we figured that we needed to get something in front of readers to give everyone the opportunity to judge Joal's credibility. That is why we had some of Sarah's falsehoods featured in this post, and now we turn to Joal.

First, there is no way to handle all of Joal Henke's lies in one post, given that I have no intention of competing with Moby Dick and War and Peace for length. Second, if we wait until we have compiled everything, Tonya's children will have grown up and will be celebrating their grandkids. Thus, we need to zero in on a few things.

In this post, I wish to zero in on Joal's April 23, 2010, testimony in which he claimed to have "just remembered" some pretty awful allegations against his former wife. As readers will see, what Joal says is highly questionable, and given that the testimony was drawn out by Chris "Facebook-Cruisemaster" Arnt and upheld by "judge" Brian Outhouse, the two of them are implicated in promoting perjured testimony, not that anyone in an official capacity in the State of Georgia gives a rip.

Almost immediately into the direct questioning, Arnt asks Henke about any allegations of pornography and other extra-sexual activities involving Tonya. Because the transcripts are scanned and not in a format I can copy, I will paraphrase, although I am making sure everything is correct.

Joal replies that Tonya got pornography tapes of women-on-women sex and she and Joal then watched the tape together. (This is something Tonya denies.) Then Arnt asks about an alleged "girls' night out" with her friend Jennifer Sullivan.

Henke replies that Tonya woke up in bed afterward with Jennifer, something that both women deny. It should be noted that "judge" Outhouse refused to let Jennifer Sullivan testify about the alleged incident, declaring, instead, that if Tonya had engaged in "bad acts," that these allegations were germane to the case, since they went to her character.

What is important to point out here is that when Henke was deposed by attorneys twice in 2009, Tonya's attorneys, Cary and Scott King, repeatedly questioned Henke about any affairs or sexual "incidents" that Tonya might have had with others. Henke said that he could not think of any.

Suddenly, he comes to testify and his memory "improves." In fact, Scott King reminded him that none of this material he suddenly was alleging was in any petition for custody, in the depositions, or any other legal document, and the depositions in February and July 2009 lasted for many hours. What was Joal Henke's response?

King: Okay. Have you told the detectives at any time about this pornographic material?

Henke: Just as coming into this trial and just remembering things.

King: So you just remembered it right when this trial started; is that right?

Henke: Probably in the last short while.

So, just as Sarah had "just remembered" that Tonya's daughter was dirty and smelly with matted hair (which is why Sarah claims to have showered and bathed with the little girl), Joal suddenly "remembers" all sorts of things about his ex-wife.

What makes this worse is that Joal Henke's allegations came out on direct with Chris Arnt. Remember that Arnt was familiar with Henke's previous testimony and with the materials regarding the custody fight and divorce, so Arnt also was fully aware that Henke never had alleged anything like he was claiming on April 23.

In other words, Arnt openly and knowingly suborned perjury, and "judge" Outhouse upheld it. This is significant, for in my mind, we are seeing a criminal conspiracy at work (not that it will be prosecuted, of course). The idea that Henke would have forgotten about something like what he had just alleged -- especially when it could have been used as ammunition in a custody battle -- just does not pass the smell test. Henke knew he was lying, Scott King knew Henke was lying, and, most important, Arnt and "judge" Outhouse knew Henke was lying.

Out of the mouth of babes

During Henke's cross examination, Scott King asked him if he had told his daughter that Tonya had lied to the police.

Henke: No
King: Do you know where Child #3 would have gotten that concept?
Henke: No.
King: Okay. Do you know why Child #3 would have said my daddy told me she (Tonya) lied to the police?
Henke: No.

(A few lines below)

King: Do you agree that that would have been a bad idea to tell Child #3 that her mommy had lied to the police prior to the forensic interview?
Henke: Yeah, yes, yes.

The interview to which they were referring is seen below when Tonya's daughter had her infamous "Who's on First" interview with Suzi Thorne, the high school graduate masquerading as a "forensic interviewer" for the Greenhouse and the CAC.

SUZIE: Okay, and you said you used to live with your mom?
CHILD #3: Yeah but she was lying to them.
SUZIE: [Tonya] was lying to who?
CHILD #3: The, uh, police.
SUZIE: What about [What was Tonya lying about]?
CHILD #3: They [police] asked her a question and she was just lying about it.
SUZIE: Well, what did [Tonya] lie [to police] about?
CHILD #3: I don’t know. She just lied about something.
SUZIE: Oh, you don’t know what she lied [to police] about?
CHILD #3: But my dad told me that she lied about something. (Emphasis mine)

So, according to Arnt, Len Gregor, and "judge" Outhouse, Tonya's daughter is a trusted source when she was claiming (after much coaching and manipulating) that her mother had molested her. However, when the child says that her father told her that her mother "lied to the police," that is discounted.

More to the point, Joal Henke contradicted his own daughter in court, and the prosecution went along with it. And why should we not be surprised, given that the prosecutors not only suborned perjury, but also lied to jurors during the closing arguments.

As for relevance in the upcoming custody hearing, it is clear that Joal Henke has engaged in Parent Alienation, and has been pretty successful at it, given that he is both dishonest and manipulative. Courts tend to take harsh action against parents who engage in this kind of conduct; we shall see if Judge Marie Williams takes a hard look at it, or gives Joal a free pass -- as so many other people have done.

We are not simply dealing with lies; no, we are dealing with pathological liars. There is a difference. People will lie at times when cornered, but from what I can gather, Joal Henke lies constantly, and given that the members of the LMJC prefer lies to the truth, I think we certainly can say that people like Arnt, Gregor, and "judge" Outhouse also fit into that category (and Buzz Franklin deserves at least an honorable mention).

In my next post, I will continue to deal with Joal's various contradictions in his testimonies.

Is the Eastwood Church's New Motto "Perjury, not Purity"?

The Eastwood Church, which is the church home of serial perjurers Joal and Sarah Henke, likes to fashion itself as part of the "Emergent Church" movement which claims to emphasize "deeds, not creeds." That is a nice way of saying that the church has a pretty nebulous belief system into which a lot of heresy can be stuffed.

I recently visited its website and read its "mission" statement, and in reading it, I can see how Joal and Sarah believe they are justified by their lies, and there is nothing in Eastwood's "mission" that contradicts that point. An especially telling paragraph states:

Jesus was extremely critical of the religious leaders of His day because they set rules above relationships. We desire to follow in His footsteps and place people above these man-made rules -- whether they are cultural, traditional, or religious.

This sounds good on the surface, but it actually undercuts the Gospel and it certainly can be used as a tool for deceitful, predatory people like Joal Henke. I will explain why I believe that.

Jesus did not speak out against the Law, no matter how much the Emergents want us to believe He did. Furthermore, He did not condemn the Pharisees and other religious leaders for following the Law; he condemned them for breaking the spirit of the Law, for placing the rules that made up their interpretations of the Law above the Law itself.

This is much different than what the Eastwood people want us to believe. They want us to think that as long as we claim to have a "relationship" with Jesus, then everything else is fine. The fact that a number of Eastwood members refused even to look at the evidence and instead blindly followed Joal and Sarah -- despite their obvious perjury -- seems to be living proof that they don't consider things like "truth" to be relevant. In the Emergent view, "truth" is relative; it is subordinate to relationships, and because of it, one can justify almost any behavior that clearly violates the Law of God.

As I am going to point out in future posts, there is no question that the Henkes lied on the stand. They were part of a prosecution strategy that kept introducing "new, I just remembered" material in an attempt to fill the obvious holes in the prosecution's evidence against Tonya Craft. Furthermore, Sarah kept a Facebook page up during the whole trial in which her featured picture was that of her holding Tonya's daughter, claiming that the child was her own.

This, people, is sick, sick, sick. It is evil. It is a woman being willing to lie in a court of law in an attempt to steal the child of another woman, and receiving encouragement from her church in telling those lies.

However, because the lies were about "relationships," the Eastwood Church swallowed the falsehoods whole and justified the action with its "mission" statement. The members of that church fool no one other than themselves, and they certainly don't fool God.

So, if the Eastwood Church needs a new motto, it can be: "Perjury, not Purity."

There is Perjury, and then there is PERJURY: Why I Call the LMJC "Perjury Central"

In describing the criminal gangs that run the LMJC, I have called the whole organization "Perjury Central," and I don't believe I am exaggerating. Now, perjury is quite common these days among police officers (they proudly call it "testilying") all over the country, so having some of its principals lying on the stand is not unique to the "law enforcement" people of Northwest Georgia.

However, the LMJC goes well beyond the garden-variety perjury we see from cops, who tend to believe that the person they targeted is guilty, and that a small lie really does not change the larger picture. That is immoral, in my view, but, nonetheless, it also is understandable.

I would call that "perjury with a small 'p'." It's bad, but it really does not go to the heart of the system. Instead, we tend to see it almost as an occupational hazard, something we don't like, something of which we cannot approve, but still an issue that we cannot solve no matter how much we might want to try to do so.

From what I observed in Tonya Craft's trial, however, the kind of perjury I described above is a mere pittance to what went on every day in "judge" Brian Outhouse's courtroom. The perjury we saw there was massive, and it not only was tolerated -- even encouraged -- by "judge" Outhouse, but it was clear that the lies were part of a deliberate prosecution scheme.

Over the next week or so, I want to concentrate on the perjury and outright fabrication that was committed by the prosecution and its witnesses. We have been through some of these incidents before, although not in much detail. However, readers also are going to see how the under-oath testimony of Joal and Sarah Henke changed dramatically between their depositions, which were taken in 2009, and their April 2010 trial appearance.

The Henkes' testimonies simply are stunning in their dishonesty, and not only did the prosecutors not try to stop the lies, they actually knew that what Joal and Sarah were going to say would be wildly different than to what they said a year before. There is no way to reconcile the two sets of testimonies, both taken under oath. If one is true, the other is false, and both were done under oath, under the weight of someone being charged with perjury.

Here are some things I plan to cover, and I promise to have some new details to these situations, as I have written on them before:

• The comparison of the Henke depositions with the trial testimony of Joal and Sarah. This also will include the fabricated "document" that Sarah claimed to have written, but was not included in the discovery materials;

•  Sandra Lamb's litany of lies while on the stand;

• Sherry Wilson and the "hand rape," her "power bill" escapade, and her claim that no one had threatened Tonya;

•  Suzi Thorne's lie that a "hand rape" had been disclosed to her and the lies she told to Tonya's daughter while interrogating her;

• Tim Deal's fabrication of a document and lying about when he wrote it;

• Chris Arnt's lies to the jury during closing arguments, something the jurors said afterward that they resented, as it demonstrated Arnt's disrespect of them;

• Laurie Evans' bizarre and dishonest testimony while on the stand;

I also will deal with other incidents of lies, and outright perjury. What one has to remember is that perjury was CENTRAL to the prosecution's charges against Tonya Craft. The perjury did not come in the heat of battle or the fog of war. It was not a slip of the tongue, nor was it incidental to the actual charges at hand.

No, this was a case that was built on perjury and perjury sustained the prosecution's theme throughout the entire sorry proceedings. As I go through this upcoming list, I hope that readers will keep in mind that ALL of these people still are employed with the LMJC. "judge" Brian Outhouse still sits as a judge, Len "The Man" Gregor and Chris "Alberto-Facebook" Arnt prosecute criminal cases, Tim Deal and Steven Keith still "investigate" so-called crimes, Suzi Thorne still does "forensic" interviews, Laurie Evans still works as a "therapist" for the Children's Advocacy Center, and Sandra Lamb and Sherry Wilson don't have to worry about the law even though they committed felonies in broad daylight.

In short, the criminal enterprise known as the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit remains open for business. Abandon all hope, ye honest people who have to deal with these people, for not one of them has even a whit of conscience.

Jury and Witness Intimidation in the LMJC

[Update, September 7, 4 p.m.]: Tonya is doing a great job! One wonders if she has been doing all of this all her working life![End Update]

[Note]: Tonya Craft makes her radio debut on WGOW (102.3 FM) today at 3 p.m. on "The Truth of the Matter." If you can listen, please do. My sense is that whatever doubts people might have had about her guilt will be erased by how she handles herself and her audience.

True, there are some prosecutors and judges in the LMJC, along with witnesses who perjured themselves during Tonya's trial that are not going to like the show or how they are portrayed, but perhaps they should have thought about it before decided to press on with obvious lies. If there is one thing I can say about Tonya, it is that she is about the truth. [End Note]

Sometime in the next year, Eric Echols is supposed to be put on trial for alleged "witness intimidation" while he was questioning prosecution witnesses in the Tonya Craft case. Since we have the transcript and the audiotape of Mr. Echols' interview with Jerry McDonald, in which Mr. Echols was supposed to have threatened him, and since there are no threats in the document or the tape, there is no intimidation, and the arrest and charges are prima facae illegal. (Not that anyone employed by the LMJC feels bound by the law. Law is just for mundanes.)

To make matters more interesting, McDonald even said under oath during the Tonya Craft trial that he never had spoken with Mr. Echols, yet another example of an LMJC prosecution witness committing perjury. (That is why I call the LMJC, Perjury Central.)

Interestingly, we do have videotape of an attempt by a witness to intimidate and assault another witness, and that incident is on videotape. Sandra Lamb not only physically assaulted Mr. Echols but also used a racial slur in the process. Granted, we are talking about the State of Georgia, which never could get its "justice" apparatus to look into the dozens of brutal murders in which whites killed blacks and it was all perfectly legal, since judges and prosecutors in the Peach State don't believe they are bound by law, even God's Law.

(In fact, Georgia sheriffs and local "law enforcement" personnel either took part in or helped to cover up a number of these racial murders. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the LMJC judges, police, and prosecutors continue the proud tradition of lawlessness by officials in that state. Don't forget that Sand Mountain, which is in the LMJC, for years had a sign declaring, "N****r, don't let the sun set on you," so we should not be surprised that prosecutor "The Man" tried to appeal to racial prejudice during Tonya's trial.)

However, since witness intimidation supposedly is a crime in the LMJC (although in Eric's case, there was no intimidation, hence, no crime), I would think that Tim "Dirty" Deal, Chris "Alberto-Facebook" Arnt, and Len "The Man" Gregor would want to protect witnesses, given that they have a sworn duty to do so. Think again.

As I was going over some trial details, I came upon this gem from the Chattanoogan's very able Dennis Norwood in his account of Kim Walker's April 26 testimony:

Ms. Walker testified that she received a phone message on her cell phone while she was at the ball field from the same person saying, “You can call back or not call back. If you don’t call back, I have information on you and I will go forward with it.” “How did that make you feel,” asked Mr. Covert. “I felt threatened,” she answered. (Sandra Lamb was the person who made the threat.)

It also was clear from Ms. Walker's testimony that the prosecution and police were engaged in acts of intimidation to try to force her to get her own daughter to claim Tonya sexually molested her. The child was adamant that it did not happen, and so was Ms. Walker, but, as we have found out time and again, the people who run the LMJC are not interested in the truth when they believe lies will serve them much better.

Will anything be done about this? Probably not. We have to understand that the people who run the LMJC and who call the shots in Northwest Georgia are drunk with power and sincerely believe they are above the law. This is a sad fact of life in that part of the country, but it is a fact.

On Deck at Perjury Central

The end of August is upon us, and that means that a new trial calendar at Perjury Central is about to begin. Two of the trials that I will be covering on this blog are those involving Eric Echols and James Combs. Conveniently, Alan Norton will be the ADA in both of them, and since he is anxious to follow the dishonest examples of "Alberto-Facebook" and "The Man," I will be there to tell readers when he is lying, suborning perjury, and generally acting like the felon he apparently wishes to be.

Norton, however, is not the only person in my cross hairs. According to my sources, Holly Nave Kittle is going to be testifying in the bogus child molestation case against Mr. Combs, and I believe that my readers need to learn more about Kittle. As I see it, she is a combination of incompetence, dishonesty, and sheer arrogance, which makes her quite welcome in the LMJC, but does not make her welcome around people who are honest and decent.

(Actually, I know that Kittle has friends among the decent and honest, and I have spoken to at least one of them. If Kittle were doing some other line of work, I would have nothing against her, but since she is engaged in the false accusation industry in which families are destroyed and the innocent sent to prison, I will oppose her and what she does with everything I have, and that means telling the world that when she testifies as an "expert" witness, she is a fraud, a very dangerous fraud.)

Things will be slow for a few more days, but it will pick up, especially after Tonya Craft has her first show on WGOW on September 7. Something tells me that Tonya is going to be a heck of a radio host.

Perspectives on American Criminal Law

This week, I have tried to take a larger perspective on why we see so many instances of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, as we saw in the Tonya Craft case. This case did not happen in a vacuum, and it was the product of a number of developments that have been occurring for a long time. While her acquittal kept her from prison, in the long run so far it has solved no other problems, and it is these problems that need to be addressed.

In a recent article on U.S. law, The Economist presents a scathing picture of an incarceration and conviction system that is out of control, to put it mildly. The article begins with the arrest and imprisonment of a man who was accused of "smuggling orchids":

THREE pickup trucks pulled up outside George Norris’s home in Spring, Texas. Six armed police in flak jackets jumped out. Thinking they must have come to the wrong place, Mr Norris opened his front door, and was startled to be shoved against a wall and frisked for weapons. He was forced into a chair for four hours while officers ransacked his house. They pulled out drawers, rifled through papers, dumped things on the floor and eventually loaded 37 boxes of Mr Norris’s possessions onto their pickups. They refused to tell him what he had done wrong. “It wasn’t fun, I can tell you that,” he recalls.

Mr Norris was 65 years old at the time, and a collector of orchids. He eventually discovered that he was suspected of smuggling the flowers into America, an offence under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. This came as a shock. He did indeed import flowers and sell them to other orchid-lovers. And it was true that his suppliers in Latin America were sometimes sloppy about their paperwork. In a shipment of many similar-looking plants, it was rare for each permit to match each orchid precisely.

In March 2004, five months after the raid, Mr Norris was indicted, handcuffed and thrown into a cell with a suspected murderer and two suspected drug-dealers. When told why he was there, “they thought it hilarious.” One asked: “What do you do with these things? Smoke ’em?”

Prosecutors described Mr Norris as the “kingpin” of an international smuggling ring. He was dumbfounded: his annual profits were never more than about $20,000. When prosecutors suggested that he should inform on other smugglers in return for a lighter sentence, he refused, insisting he knew nothing beyond hearsay.

He pleaded innocent. But an undercover federal agent had ordered some orchids from him, a few of which arrived without the correct papers. For this, he was charged with making a false statement to a government official, a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Since he had communicated with his suppliers, he was charged with conspiracy, which also carries a potential five-year term.

As his legal bills exploded, Mr Norris reluctantly changed his plea to guilty, though he still protests his innocence. He was sentenced to 17 months in prison. After some time, he was released while his appeal was heard, but then put back inside. His health suffered: he has Parkinson’s disease, which was not helped by the strain of imprisonment. For bringing some prescription sleeping pills into prison, he was put in solitary confinement for 71 days. The prison was so crowded, however, that even in solitary he had two room-mates.

If this seems barbaric, it is because it is, yet I suspect that at least some readers here and certainly most prosecutors (and politicians) have no problem at all with what they have seen. In the last decade, Americans have become angrier and, frankly, darker in their outlook, and it is reflected in the use of torture and false imprisonment and outright abuse of the innocent. There is a streak of fairness in many Americans, but it is hidden by the sheer force of official misconduct.

An interview with now-pardoned Richard Paey, a wheelchair-bound man in Florida who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for "abusing" prescription medicine, reveals the extent of the abuse and the outright misconduct that is our "justice" system today. Here are some excerpts:

In October of this year (2007), Florida Gov. Charlie Crist signed a pardon for Richard Paey, a paraplegic with multiple sclerosis who had served nearly four years of a 25-year prison sentence for drug trafficking. Paey, who requires high-dose opioid therapy to treat pain brought on by his MS, a car accident, and a botched back surgery, was convicted of trafficking despite concessions from prosecutors that there was no evidence the painkillers in his possession were for anything other than his own use. When police came to arrest the wheel-chair bound Paey, they came with a full-on SWAT team, battering down the door and rushing into the home of the wheelchair-bound Paey, his optometrist wife, and their two schoolage children.

Prosecutors offered Paey a plea bargain, but he refused, insisting that he’d done nothing wrong, and that he shouldn’t have to plead guilty to a felony for treating his own pain. Paey was tried, convicted, and given a 25-year mandatory minimum sentence. While in prison, the state of Florida paid for a morphine pump that administered painkillers to Paey at rates higher than what the state convicted him of for possessing in the first place. (Emphasis mine)

reason: How were you treated by other inmates?

Paey: Very well, actually. That was one surprise. I’d almost call it a shock. People I would never have associated with—people I’d have been afraid of if I’d seen them in a free-world environment on the street, people with tattoos, crazy hair, and so on—as I got to know them, and was accepted as one of them, they treated me very well. I never had the fear of violence form any of the other inmates. In fact, something else happened. It was the opposite. I found I had more fear of some of the officers who worked in the system and engaged in behaviors that we’d like to think don’t go on in the prison system.

There was an old Cuban man I met when I was transferred to the facility in Lake Butler. When I arrived there, he was the first person I met. He told me the difference between the American prison system and the prison system in Cuba: He said that in Cuba they hit you, but they hit you in front of everybody. He said in America, they beat you behind the building, or in a private room where no one is looking. He’d been in both, and he said that was the difference.

reason: Were you ever beaten?

Paey: I was frequently verbally abused. The older inmates tell me the outright physical abuse has tapered down. As far as physical abuse, there was one time I was hit by an officer. I had been shipped out from Zephyr Hills to Butler after my interview with John Tierney [of the New York Times]. When I got there, they put me in solitary confinement. When I kept collapsing, they had a medical doctor examine me, and he had them move me out of solitary and into a hospital.

So I was sleeping in my bed at around one o’clock in the morning. The lights were on—the lights are always on—and the shift officers were conducting their “shake down”—which means they come in and go through all of your belongings to search for contraband. It seemed to come out of nowhere, he had a radio in his hand, and he swung it down as hard as he could and he hit my legs with it. If I could have gotten out of bed and hit him, I would have. He said to me, “I just wanted to see if you had feeling in your legs.” He saw the wheelchair next to my bed, and that the sheet was covering my legs.

...there are other kinds of abuse that you wouldn’t think about. There were only a handful of officers that were bad, but those few can really do a lot of harm. The kind of thing that goes on today is less noticeable, but it's damaging. Things like leaving the lights on 24 hours a day. I went more than 30 days in solitary where the lights were on the entire time. It was this callous indifference of a particular officer. And other things, like slamming the doors when they do security checks. They come by every hour and give your door a loud kick. When you’re inside a cell and someone comes by and gives that big iron door a kick once an hour, the sound just ricochets between your ears. So systematic sleep deprivation is common. I would see men go into solitary and when they came out weeks later, their hair would be completely gray.

This kind of thing was typical from the officers who weren’t happy with their work, or were looking to inflict additional punishment on inmates. Some of thought prison wasn’t enough for us, that part of their job responsibility was to inflict additional punishment on us.

reason: You mention getting transferred to Butler Lake, the maximum-security prison across the state, several hours further away from your family. That transfer happened shortly after your interview with John Tierney of the New York Times. Do you think the transfer was retaliation—punishment for talking to a journalist?

Paey: That’s what I was told. That’s what a friendly prison nurse told my wife after the interview. And just after the interview, one of the prison officers who was on good terms with me told me that the guard who sat in on my interview with Tierney had gone to his captain about writing me a disciplinary report—which is the first step toward sending someone to solitary. He said I had said thing in the interview that I shouldn’t have said, and that they were going to act on it. There are designated “transfer days” when they move inmates between facilities. About two weeks later, on a day not scheduled to be a transfer day, the sergeant came up to me at around midnight and told me to pack my things. I was being shipped out to Lake Butler. They had no explanation. I couldn’t decline the move. It wasn’t medical in nature.

The move was tough. The sun was up by the time they moved me. It was of those insufferable July days. The van they transfer you in has no air conditioning, and only the driver’s window opens, and only about an inch. So I’m dying in the back of the van, strapped down in my wheelchair in this suffocating heat, where you can’t move, and there’s no air circulating. I ended up falling over, and they had to drive back and do it all over. They ended up taking me an ambulance a few days later.

reason: You say you were put in solitary confinement at Lake Butler. Was that for your health—to keep you from other inmates? Or was that punishment, too?

Paey: Laughs. When I got up to Lake Butler, they didn’t know why I was there. They had no paperwork on my transfer. This is going to sound absurd. Even now I find it difficult to believe. But when my wife Linda began calling the Department of Corrections about my transfer, they told her that a particular doctor had ordered my transfer. Linda called this doctor, got her on the phone. The doctor looked at my transfer order and said, “I didn’t sign that. I don’t know who signed that. Somebody used my signature stamp to sign that. I had no part in this transfer.”

Now, what’s going on, here? I’m being moved out of my permanent camp, which is close to my home and family, I’m being moved to the Siberia of the Florida corrections system, and they put me in solitary confinement once I got there. And nobody knows who authorized it? And the doctor the paperwork says ordered it says she never ordered it? So where do you go from there? What do you do?

reason: And to be clear, this was punitive solitary confinement. You weren’t isolated in a medical ward.

Paey: This place looked like a bomb shelter. Solid cement walls, no windows. You get in through a small hatch. I was pushed inside, and that became my home until Linda’s calls persuaded the doctor to come and see me in August. One of the doctors told me the heat index in there was 105. There’s no air conditioning. I’m in a cell where there’s no air movement. To survive, you strip down to your boxers. You use sink water to soak rags and put them on the back of your neck. They feed you through a slot in the door. There are no bars, like in the movies. It’s all solid, cement walls and doors. That’s where I stayed for two weeks until I started passing out. After that, they moved me to the hospital.

Most people simply don't wish to deal with this, and it does seem that the juggernaut moves on even if citizens try to get in the way. As I noted in yesterday's post, there really is a "ruling class" mentality out there, made even stronger by the fact that government employees -- such as Chris Arnt, Len Gregor, and "judge" Brian Outhouse -- have "captured" the apparatus of the system. They don't "represent" the state; they ARE the state, and the people who supposedly oversee them will bend over backwards to ensure that they can do what they want without any interference from the mundanes who are not part of "Official Georgia."

What is the perspective? Look at the figures below, and you will get a sense of what I mean. This country incarcerates more people than any other and it also incarcerates the highest percentage of its population.

To be honest, I believe we should be ashamed of what we are seeing. It is one thing to lock up violent offenders who actually committed the crimes for which they were convicted. However, it is quite another to throw more than a million non-violent offenders plus the outright innocent into prison, but that is what we are doing, and the powers that be have no intention of stopping -- or being stopped by citizens who might protest this barbarism.

Given the mentality that exists in U.S. government today (at all levels), I am not surprised at the official brutality, a brutality that exists no matter who occupies the White House or Congress or even the U.S. Supreme Court. No, this is what happens when men like Gregor, Arnt, and Outhouse are given power and no accountability. They are part of a larger disease, and it is one for which there seems to be no cure.