Quote from: elk on September 08, 2005, 09:51:31 PM
Bucctoo:
All I'm saying is they should not be provided with stolen provisions -- that's one of the reasons they're in there in the first place -- because they stole.
I'm not sure if you think that I'm advocating that should be treated gingerly; I think their time in prison should be a living hell.
P. S. So what if it's dangerous; it's prison, it's punishment -- it's not a second grade field trip to an art museum. smiley evil smiley
I've been reviewing this forum for awhile, but I finally read a comment sufficiently egregious to motivate me to register. [rant on]
Elk,
I'm one of those scum-sucking felons and ex-convicts you wrote about. I spent over five of the last seven years in vile federal gulags; not for murder, rape, or robbery, but for the mere possession of a gun collection I've peacefully owned since age 14 (in violation of GCA-68). I was targeted for prosecution solely in retaliation by senior DOJ/FBI/BATF officials angry over my published political writings critical of federal misdeeds at Ruby Ridge and Waco and our eroding individual liberty (ex-FBI agents can't write what I did with impunity). They were especially incensed over a letter of mine which appeared in the May/June 1998 issue of American Handgunner magazine.
I watched IRS CID agents steal my garbage every week for six months. I knew what they were trying to find because I'd been taught the same "investigative technique" at the FBI Academy: to gather probable cause for a search warrant. I wasn't sanguine about this development, but I knew there was no evidence of any crime in my trash. I never imagined Cabela's mail order catalogs and an unsolicited subscription offer for a computer magazine could possibly be misconstrued into "proof" of a nonexistent offense (I hadn't bought anything from Cabela's and never owned a PC until last year). But once a tame magistrate affixed his signature on a search warrant, my goose was cooked. Under the bizarre 1984 Leon decision, it's effectively impossible to overturn a search warrant despite perjury in the affidavit (it took me 15 pages to detail all the lies) or deficient probable cause.
On the morning of 29 August 1998, my wife and I were pulled over a few blocks from home on a fictitious traffic stop. Despite being passive and obviously unarmed (it was a hot day and we were wearing shorts and T-shirts), we were both threatened with death at gunpoint by a herd of Sioux Falls PD SWAT cops (my wife was armed with a cup of coffee and a slice of toast so it's understandable why the officers were frightened). Once I was safely shackled face down on the street, a pair of BATF goons arrived to haul me off to jail. Until that moment, I'd never imagined the SFPD doing the scut work for the BATF (my firearms collection was perfectly legal under SD state law). Despite having never committed a violent crime in my life, I was denied bail. The local anti-gun newspaper predictably branded my gun collection as an "arsenal" and some 1-lb cans of FFFG black powder (propellent for a Ruger 'Old Army' revolver) as "bombs." To inflate my "stockpile" of ammunition, every primer, bullet, and empty shell casing on my reloading bench were separately classified as "rounds of ammunition." The pusillanimous law firm which employed my wife fired her due to the adverse publicity over my arrest. Federal agents "interrogated" my elderly mother in Lubbock, TX. She promptly experienced a series of strokes which left her a human vegetable until her death last year.
The Feds confiscated all my money (and disobeyed three court orders directing its return), preventing me from hiring a competent defense attorney. I was assigned a court-appointed lawyer who knew less about jurisprudence, and anti-gun laws in particular, than I did at age ten. I wouldn't willingly let her represent me over a jaywalking citation. When I refused her solicitation to become a BATF informant, she filed a motion (without my knowledge) seeking to have me declared mentally incompetent. After all, anyone unwilling to become a BATF snitch in exchange for a lenient sentence must be deranged. The court dismissed her then granted the prosecution's request for an order forbidding me to speak at trial on any subject relevant to my defense. I waived a jury trial since there was no point in disrupting the lives of 70 prospective jurors when I was barred from speaking to them. My sham bench trial only lasted 2 to 3 minutes as the order still prohibited me from speaking. At sentencing, the judge ruled that BATF agents had fabricated evidence so he reduced my likely sentence from ten to "only" six years.
The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected my direct appeal declaring there is no individual right to keep and bear arms in America (no surprise there). Three minutes into the 15-minute oral argument before the 8th Circuit, a judge interrupted and exclaimed, "This court doesn't want to hear anything to do with the Second Amendment." Later, denying my Section 2255 motion, my trial judge admitted I was "legally innocent" of nearly all the charges against me, but wrote that legal innocence "doesn't constitute a substantial miscarriage of justice." The judge then castigated me for not citing some relevant case law proving the charges were illegal before he sentenced me (case law I had no way of discovering while confined without bail or access to a law library). "Ignorance of the law is no excuse," the judge wrote. It was OK, however, for the court to be "ignorant of the law" when it sentenced me on counts it now admits were illegal and it was OK for the prosecutor to be "ignorant of the law" in filing charges he had to know were invalid.
Elk, you may be delighted to know that by stealing nearly all my family's assets, the Feds easily covered the cost of my incarceration. Plus, I was compelled to work for years (6 days a week, often 13 hours a day) in a UNICOR slave labor plant which manufactured human silhouette targets for BATF and IRS agents to shoot at. Since I shared precious little in common with most of my fellow inmates, you will be happy to learn that my years of imprisonment can only be charitably described as a "living hell." I hope you derive comfort from that fact. To provide a scant bit of legal protection for her, I had to divorce the woman I've loved for 29 years. I'm now on "supervised release," may not leave South Dakota without written permission by a federal political officer, may be reimprisoned for years if I possess a pocketknife or register to vote, and my residence is often subjected to warrantless searches. Like every other lowly felon in this "free country," I may be incarcerated for up to ten years if I possess so much as a single firecracker. I do so hope I haven't been treated too "gingerly" for your tastes.[rant off]
James L. Waller
former Captain of Infantry (Abn), USA
former Special Agent, FBI
Later in this thread Mr. Waller wrote:
I posted offering to publish the 16-page letter he mentions, and he was kind enough to send it to me. Here it is:
