Troy Davis – No SCOTUS Stay… (Update)(x2)

but they haven’t executed him yet.  This is a little weird.  I’m not arguing with it, but it’s just a little weird.  With the death warrant, or whatever they call it in Georgia, they usually do it unless they’ve been told not to – they don’t wait in case some higher authority says to stop.

Maybe the gathering crowds have something to do with.  Has the feel of a tinder box.

There are two problems here, I think.  One is the racial angle.  I mean, it’s just there.

The second is, this just doesn’t seem like an execution worthy crime.  Even if it’s all true and he’s guilty, there’s nothing to support an execution except that the victim was a police officer.

Maybe more to say on this later.

Update:  Sadly, there are two comments in a story from the UK about all this that may contain hints as to why they may be holding off:

Listening to 750 WSB right now and the reporter on the ground there is reporting that the number of riot police has increased greatly in the last few minutes and that the police helicopter has returned. He seemed to think that was an ominous sign. There are about 600-800 protesters there and the police are in riot gear and heavily armed. I have a feeling that this isn’t going to go well.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2040054/Troy-Davis-U-S-Supreme-Court-delays-7pm-Troy-Davis-execution-minute-appeal.html#ixzz1YdZfLaqP

I went to high school with Troy. He threatened to kill me. “I’ll kill you, Cracker.” Those were his exact words. He was convicted of another shooting eariler in the evening. He hated white people and took pride in killing a white police officer. I have seen his guilty smirk face to face,

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2040054/Troy-Davis-U-S-Supreme-Court-delays-7pm-Troy-Davis-execution-minute-appeal.html#ixzz1YdZuQzhW

Put another way, this situation has become very racially charged and potentially violent, and the authorities are afraid.  They do not act on principle, they act on fear.  They have  low character.

Update 2:  SCOTUS says no dice and execution is underway, as of about 11:10 PM EDT.  Very sad.  More on this later, perhaps.

The Appellate Division Cover Up

Late January of ‘09, I think, I get this letter back from the clerk of the Appellate Division, at that point one Patricia Morgan, saying that my application to resign has been “rejected” because it doesn’t “comply” with Rule 1022.26(b).  Which is complete, utter, made up bullshit.  Prosecutors, judges, court reporters, miserable little clerks – at this point they’re all just making shit up and actively hiding the truth.

So I write back and tell her I’m a fucking attorney and you’re a clerk and this application goes to five judges, not a goddamn clerk, and they rule on it, not you.  So fuck with me no more.

I didn’t put it quite that way, but that was the idea.

Two months later I get a ruling all right:

One important thing about this ruling is that it reinforces the pecking order.  They “rejected” the application for the very same incoherent reason that the clerk had cited, showing that the Appellate Division through its five judges is incoherent and wrong exactly the same way the clerk is.  Of course since there are an infinite number of ways to be wrong and only one way to be right the idea is they are backing the clerk no matter how stupid or wrong she is.  It’s a power thing, not a reason thing, and lawyers are below clerks.  That’s the message.  Well, one message.

The other message is, of course, that all this – what they did to Sephora Davis, how fucked up they are, how fucked up the Grievance Committee is, how any self respecting lawyer or even human being is going to resign when confronted with this incorrigible insistence that an atrocity is going to be willfully committed and then concealed – all of it is itself a big, dark, secret.  Shhh.  If you say anything else you will be in contempt, you will be “disciplined”, you will be jailed, you will be ruined.

Well, too late on that last part.  I was already ruined.  As for the rest?

Fuck them.

So now I’m thinking it’s time to leave the country before they do some other fucked up destructive thing, this time to me.  I mean, why wouldn’t they?  What’s to stop them?

The Actual Resignation

So that takes us up to, what?  About November of 2008.  Sephora has now been in prison for almost two years.  The Appellate Division and the federal court in Rochester have been tried and found wanting.  The Attorney Grievance Committee harbors some shameful – really criminal – and clandestine approval of prosecutorial misconduct, such that when a defense attorney goes to them with that issue they respond by immediately exonerating the prosecutor without investigating anything and intimidate the defense attorney, opening an investigation into his conduct for daring to complain about the prosecutor although of course they will say it’s for something else.  And they insist that this mindless perfidy is to be kept deathly quiet.  It’s all a big secret.

From an attorney “discipline” standpoint – and I put that word in quotations because it is obviously so selectively applied as to be laughable – the Appellate Division and the Attorney Grievance Committee are basically the same thing.  They live in the same building, with the same reception area.  The Grievance Committee brings its proceedings against attorneys in the Appellate Division, which admits attorneys to practice in New York and oversees them and disciplines them unless they are prosecutors or government lawyers or big firm lawyers in which case the Appellate Division covers up the wrongdoing and attacks the victims of it.

And More On The Resignation Thing – Interlude With Judge Larimer

So now it’s time for the “post-conviction” collateral proceedings and for reasons I won’t go into right now the first place to go was the local federal court in Rochester with a petition for a writ of habeas corpus.  I prepared that petition over the next few months and had it ready for filing by February of ’08.

I had by this time become very cautious, because the goings on with the Grievance Committee not only indicated incompetence, it also potentially pointed to something sinister and dangerous for me if it wasn’t incompetence.  Sephora was incarcerated nearby at Albion, but for some reason I wasn’t able to get over to see her to sign the petition so I brought it in my own name as her “next friend” which is allowed under the statutes authorizing federal habeas corpus.  I went to downtown Rochester and served the Attorney General at his office down there and then went over to file the petition in the District Court at the federal building on State Street.

Well, well.  They were all upset that I had brought the petition in my own name and started giving me a hard time, like they weren’t going to accept it for filing.  But one problem I had was that I had already served the Attorney General – like you are supposed to – and I didn’t trust the Attorney General’s office, which after all had appeared on that prohibition proceeding in the Appellate Division and pretty much nobody over there would even talk to me about it.  In other words, I wanted the petition publicly filed right then because I didn’t want the AG’s office privately alerting the scumbags down in Livingston County that this is what I was up to, whereupon the scumbags down in Livingston County, who had already raped my client and suborned perjury and threatened and intimidated witnesses and threatened me, might finally take the next logical step in the chain and, you know, kill me.  And the public filing of the petition right then would be something of a deterrent to that since there would be a public record of what I was doing right before they killed me, creating the risk in their mind at least that if they did kill me someone would connect the dots and suspect what they did.  Whereas if the petition didn’t get filed, then until it did I was at a heightened risk, and however speculative the risk might have seemed why should I take any additional risk at all because of some piddling clerk at the federal court?

In other words, I wanted the Petition filed as a matter of self protection and risk management.

More On The Resignation Thing

I told you it was going to be a long story.

Fast forward from there about seven months, to October of 2007.  I come across the archived news report that Todd Gaddy had been arrested back in December of 2006.  For some reason, not only does this make me really mad because they were just brazenly tampering with and intimidating my witnesses, but it also starts me thinking back to what else had happened around December of ‘06:  the letters that had come to Sephora’s parents’ house from Paige and Theriault indicating that they had been questioned; the arrest of Gaddy; the dismissal of the prohibition proceeding.  And then the odd placement in the letter of caution I got in March, referring to the Grievance Committee having closed its investigation of Moran after discussing the dismissal of the proceeding in the Appellate Division.

I knew that the Grievance Committee could be directed to conduct an investigation by a referral from the Appellate Division, so I asked myself as I sat there months later, in the fall of 2007 looking at that archived news report of Gaddy’s arrest:  was it possible that such a referral was made, while my prohibition proceeding was still pending, and the Grievance Committee “investigated” and then closed the so-called investigation without ever contacting me?  Me, who had been investigating the matter for two years and knew everything about it?  Me, who had witnesses lined up that I hadn’t even identified in court papers and nobody else knew about?  Me, who – unlike the morons at the Grievance Committee – actually knew legal type stuff, such as that Grand Jury proceedings are conducted in secret?

It seemed inconceivable to me that they could be that stupid and careless and biased.  Or worse.  And that’s when things started to get downright scary, even in Rochester.

The Resignation Thing (cont’d.)

This is a continuation of a previous post.

First I met with one of their investigators, who took some information.  Then I had a phone conversation with one of the attorneys in the office named Dan Drake.  Drake accused me of being “mentally ill” and making “wild allegations”.  Then he started harassing me over my tardy registration fees, which were kind of near the bottom of my list of things to do since I was trying to resolve the Sephora Davis matter and leave the state.

This was in April of 2006.  Remember that.  It becomes important later in the story.

So then more shit happens in Livingston County Court and Judge Kohout down there makes this big screw up about what was in the Grand Jury transcripts, but now the Grievance Committee is hovering around asking questions so Kohout and the court reporter change the transcript of the proceeding to cover up her error.  This is a minor blip by comparison to everything else but it happened right around the same time, which made things even more complicated than they already were.

Then Drake “determines” that there’s nothing to my complaint within about 48 hours after no doubt “investigating” it thoroughly, and sends me a letter saying he has decided to drop his investigation of Moran and start “investigating” me.

Like I was going to be intimidated by that.  I mean seriously, what an asshole.

Hail Mary (Update)

Troy Davis’ attorneys have filed an application for a stay of execution, which will otherwise take place tonight at 7 PM.  It’s gone to “Butts County Superior Court”, which for some reason doesn’t sound promising.  Whether that court has jurisdiction to do anything or not, I really don’t know not being familiar with the rules in Georgia.

Won’t be for lack of trying, as they say.

Update:  Meanwhile the brutal, oppressive and backward regime of Iran is releasing two young American hikers that they have held as “spies” for the last two years.

There’s a catch, though:  they have to go to Oman first.  Ever been to Oman?

So that sort of puts the bookends in place, doesn’t it?  Over here in the enlightened country we are going to more or less senselessly off this 43 year old man for a crime he may have committed when he was 19; Iran’s legal system manages to admit and correct a mistake in about two years.

I wonder if Iran has ever had a lawyer’s strike?