From another message board -- a man gives his harrowing tale of being stuck in the so-called "justice system". What a travesty of justice our system often is!


Oh, yeah...I recall all right. They played ring around the rosie as far as judges went. I must have gone before twenty different judges as that was part of the prosecutor and public pretender's game...while they kept sending me for more "evaluations" which I passed each time and kept hammering on me to plead to the two Assault 1 with Deadly Weapon charges and do 15 years...all hard time...no time off no early release.

They actually used the argument that I must be mentally incompetent because I wouldn't take their plea offer (as if I had actually done something much worse and this was a bargain) and insisted on a trial despite the browbeatings from both the successive public pretenders (whom I eventually fired one after the other after waiting months on each one to do something...like get a trial date, interview witnesses, get a better plea bargain, reduce the bail...anything...but NO).

Once I retained a real lawyer, things settled down fast. We had one judge finally for all proceedings. I got out on a bracelet but had to live at my sister's apartment while my own home sat empty. Of course, i had been in the middle of some rennovations the summer I got arrested, so it was torn up and couldn't even be rented. I was allowed to go to my own house only two hours a week while on the bracelet program, so about all I could accomplish was to barely secure the place.

The place had also been burglarized (my entire electronics lab and a pretty healthy set of audio/video gear altogether worth about $75K) just a couple days after I was arrested. A couple of happy crack heads partied that week, I'm sure.

Anyway...I remember all the names of all the ring-around-the-rosy judges and the two bozo public pretenders and the ringmaster, the prosecutor. In the county where this happened, the PA's office is so outrageously flagrant that the Public Defender Group's entire budget comes through the Prosecutor's office. It's an absolute travesty.

The public defenders did exactly nothing but take the worst set of crap charges and harshest punishments the prosecutor could come up with and demand that I plead guilty. I mean nothing else! No investigation, no interviewing witnesses, no motions to suppress, no interviews with the so-called victims, no visits with me in the can to discuss the case, absolutely nothing. When I refused to plead guilty and do 15 hard, they played the "he must be crazy" game for 13 months.

I was naive and broke and I let them until my sister popped for a real lawyer finally, when it looked like I was just going to rot in there until they ran out of shrinks or found one who'd say I was incompetent. They finally gave up on the shrink trip when, after passing three evaluations, they sent me for stay at the state mental hospital for a "more extensive evaluation" which was supposed to take thirty days.

The head honcho shrink threw me out of there and back to jail with a passing grade after 48 hours. As a final insult, my second public pretender then "lost the paperwork" and that caused me to finally fire him. It's tough when you are in jail and the only person legally allowed to speak for you is acting on behalf of the prosecutor's office against your interests.

At this point I must say I've thought I might be highjacking the thread with my true story of Terror In America. But this is a thread about the ruination of our country. I'm right in line here.

Lest I go on too long here, I'll cut it short. But believe me, I remember every bit of it. Every little bit. I'm not going to start publishing names or anything, though. No even slight "appearance of vigilante stuff" for this kid.

But I can tell you I lost the last bits of faith I had in my country as being truly what it purports to be there and then.

I even wrote the Federal Court for a writ of habeus corpus after being in jail 11 months without trial and passing three competency evaluations. No soap. No help. It's all bull unless you pay a lawyer huge bucks.