Recent News Exposure of Colorado Prison System

Recent News Exposure of Colorado Prison System

 

On the evening of March 19^th Colorado Executive Director of Corrections, Tom Clements was shot and killed at his relatively remote home in Monument, (a residential town just north of Colorado Sprigs, - 45 miles south of central Denver).  This is a big deal.  Executive Director is a governor’s cabinet position and often a stepping stone to attorney general.  I originally suspected a disgruntled employee – a la Christopher Dorner – would be the assassinator.   The Director sets policy far above the concerns of most inmates and has more impact on employment and contracting services.

 

I was surprised to hear on the 20^th that suspicion had fallen on a Saudi Arabian inmate who had been denied an international transfer by someone authorized to print the director’s signature on a patterned denial letter.  This should bring to light the deficiency in Colorado Corrections’ posture toward foreign governments; just as the Christopher Dorner rampage should have illuminated gratuitous police violence employed against mentally handicapped.  Did you know that was the seminal issue?  [See the Daily Kos, Feb 9^th, 2013, “Did Cris Dorner get a Raw Deal from LAPD, Read the Courts Opinion in his Disciplinary Appeal”]

 

Prison systems have provisions for interstate and international transfers called compacts – analogous to treaties.  When I entered the system in late 2001 DOC officials had declared that there would not be any returns of foreigners to their home countries.  That refutation of treaty was likely targeted at Mexico.  It is entirely ineffectual, whether restricted to one “problem” country or extended to all treaty nations.  Since all foreign felons are deported upon completion of their sentence one must ask:  What is the point of keeping them for a full period of punishment and supposed rehabilitation ( US prisons have not been rehabilitative for over 25 years) when they can be in a home country prison and be pre-deported?!  The retributive effects of a prison sentence – dislocation from and disability to re-enter society – are complete after five years.  There is no reason to spend US money on foreign inmates beyond this time.  [If you disagree with this then write me a mock letter from a Saudi Arabian prison cell on the day a random government sheik tells you that you cannot transfer your sentence back to the U.S.]  Colorado disagrees; they went so far as to fly a functionary to Saudi Arabia to rationalize to a corresponding functionary why Mr. Arab sex-slave-holder is too valuable to transfer.  Every fraud, waste, and abuse hot-line to the governor’s office should have lit up when the tidbit hit the national news.  The Colorado DOC budget is 10% of the state budget and should not be used for international travel by employees to ostensibly obviate and rationalize the circumvention of rational policy.

 

In fact the rationale for subverting the treaty for international transfers is simply incarceration hubris.  The U.S. prison/industrial complex is so refined that no other system will do for U.S. convicts.  No other country can be trusted to incarcerate as well as the U.S. does!

 

[Further development of this premise can be found in a Reproof article I wrote about Bernard Kerik.  When he could not be confirmed for homeland security chief under George Bush he traveled the world peddling maximum security prison designs, with financial enslavement schemes for construction (see any book by John Perkins about the World Bank, private wealth funds and CCA/corporate partnerships) to every third world country that would accept U.S. style incarceration as a valid addition to their culture!  Please send me follow-up info on his fraud prosecution  ;) ]

 

I digressed - back to the CDOC Commissioner.

 

Around mid-day on the 21^st the driver of a car of a color and style suspected to be involved with the director’s assassination was killed in a shootout in north central Texas.  There was little doubt that this was the trigger man.  It took a day for an ID to be made:  Evan Ebal, a white prison gang parolee.  Quite diametric to my estimate of disgruntled staff; although disgruntled is a good starting point to analyze this rage junkies psycho-pathology.  His beef with the prison system most likely arises from his stay at the maximum security Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP).

 

When CSP was built it was only the eighth administrative segregation (ad-seg) facility in the country.  It represented the hippest way to bury alive less than human homo sapiens.  (see above comment about selling maximum security prison plans around the world. )  It is an ugly permanent lockdown facility that represents the highest form of pissing contest stalemate in our U.S. of A.  What else can you do with an unmanageable inmate…a person who knows they are living a pointless existence with nothing to lose and ready to take it out on anybody in range?  Put them in a box.

 

MEP’s comment:  Why not, they are doing it to grade school children in certain locations around the U.S. and the U.S. Dept. of Education has no rulings regarding this kind of treatment!

 

At CSP a shower stall rolls up to your door 3 times a week and you are permitted to cross the cell door threshold to indulge in hygiene.  You are also permitted to cross the threshold when staff decides a cell extraction is appropriate.  CSP duty is terribly boring so when six staff members get suited up in riot gear and charge a cell they maximize the experience.  These events are supposed to be documented but the camera battery routinely dies or the extractee somehow knocks it out of the videographer’s hands – thus ensuring replacement cost of another video camera without a wrist strap.  The greater cost is the continued beat down after the extraction.  The torture in the cells involves knees to the thighs, ribs, neck and balls accompanied by the arms rotated 90° posteriorly to dislocate shoulder rotator cuffs) and hogtie cuffs applied with excessive force to the wrists and ankles -  then to the beat-down room – euphemistically called the “strip-out” or “cool – out” room.  Here your clothes are cut off and medical staff declares you are not dead.  Then you are kicked and punched until any ability to swing your numb feet and hands upon being unrestrained is lost.  Then, depending on the shift commander’s opinion of you, you may or may not be unrestrained for a two hour naked concrete cool down.  [If this seems exaggerated please contact Louis Buenabenta CDOC inmate # 99096 and ask about how his leg was methodically broken in a cell extraction.]

 

MEP comment:  Mr. Buenabenta is one of thousands suffering from long term effects of these types of injuries.  The U.S. pays out x amount of dollars in disability… The irony!

 

How often would this malice have to be deployed against you before you would feel inclined to kill whomever is responsible for this system of treatment?

 

By morbid irony Tom Clements was sensitive to the numerous issues of ad. seg. prisons.  All the operational protocols and their concomitant abuses, were established in the prison boom of the 90’s and can be ascribed to prison directors near to a full generation before Mr. Clements took the post.  Most often the executive director of corrections post is filled by politically motivated banker/lawyer types as a cabinet level stepping stone to higher ambitions.  Thus they fill the position as a sinecure and work to do little more than minimize public scrutiny. [E.g. the video of an abusive cell extraction in Maine was leaked and the response of corrections officials was anger at the public exposure with no concern nor comment on the content.  Please note that being angry at getting caught with no concern for the offense is a hallmark of sociopathic criminality that judges cite as grounds to aggravated sentencing.]

 

Clements, I am led to believe, had undertaken measures to redefine how inmates were staged out of and released from CSP.  This small consideration is absolutely enlightened in contrast to previous status quo directors.  I believe that had Ebel understood the politics and the evolution of penology in Colorado he likely would have sought out people responsible for the current ad-seg system to exercise his extreme vengeance upon instead of Commissioner Clements.

 

Post –script:

1.)    Regarding international prison transfer - Italian prosecutors want to retry Amanda Knox.  If she is reconvicted:  Should she be allowed international transfer?

2.)    Get involved with civil and activist organizations.  Rid the U.S. of solitary confinement (ad-seg/administrative segregation).

The Blade Runner and Bullet Trajectory

 

 

Prognosticators on the Oscar Pistorius case estimate that the trajectory of the four bullets that killed his girlfriend, are everything to the case.  It is likely in Pretoria South Africa there may be a real ballistics investigation because the defendant and victim Reeva Steencamp are white. Ballistics investigation may be even  more important due to the extensive media coverage.  The second cause seems more likely since cell phone video of Johannesburg cops dragging an immigrant taxi driver handcuffed to a police paddy wagon – a black on black crime – led to the indictment of eight police officers.  No international exposure, no indictments.  Continuing due process in the fair prosecution of the police officers is contingent on continuous international attention.  This is the same for the trajectories of Oscar Pistorius’ four bullets.  The prognosticators await the analysis that a court under scrutiny may produce.

 

Do you know where courts operate away from scrutiny and avoid the analysis of bullet trajectories; that would be the State of Colorado’s eighth judicial district, most specifically, case #01CR465.

 

What really happens in quotidian (everyday) cases is that the state compiles a few inculpatory assumptions – more sensational the better – that become the “discovery” of the case.  The defense does not conduct counter discovery.  It wouldn’t matter.  The offense has the privilege of accusation and the defense only rationalizes. This accepted masquerade advances accusation to the unproven basis for conviction and sentencing.

 

Solution:  Constant on audio/video monitors in all court rooms, that feed to publicly subscribable links.  This is the equivalent of police dash cam coverage for the judiciary.  It can only improve the civil performance of the courts.

 

Peace, Jason

 

Mary-Ellen comments on the implications of the lack of public awareness on how the courts function:  If you recall in the last blog entry, Materially False Information, Jason’s public defender declared a false distance of the gun shot at four feet.  Jason’s description of the incident put him nearly up against the victim, Marc Bender. A gun shot from four feet away would have been a straight through and through.

 

Four feet is not so according to the autopsy report which is verbatim: “…slightly asymmetrical abrasion collar measuring up to 1/16 inch and being most prominent at the 7o”clock margin of the entrance wound and a dense stippling pattern extending out to 1 1/4 inches radially from the center of the wound.  A ¼ inch rim of dark discoloration possibly representing soot immediately surrounded the entrance site.” “The wound path was directed approximately 45 degrees from right to left, approximately 45 degrees upward, and approximately 45 degrees from front to back.”

 

Present at the autopsy were Coroner Sina, Investigator’s Fairman and Miller as well as officer’s Hudson, Gilliam, Koenig, and Josey. Quoting Josey, “I also observed powder burns around the wound and the consensus of opinion was that the end of the gun barrel was within a few inches of the victim’s skin and no more than approximately eight inches away when the gun was fired.”

 

The gun was test fired at 1 to 12 inches.  The Colorado Bureau of Investigation never received this information or the gun to do their testing due to the need to sweep Jason’s case under the rug as discretely as possible.

 

Most people are under the misconception that the appeals process reviews evidence.  It does not.  It only reviews “procedure.”  An appeals court, even if it came across evidence that exonerated someone could do nothing if the procedure used was proper.

 

 

 

 

Answer to a question regarding "Materially False Information"

Regarding the following essay by Jason, I have been asked a very reasonable question regarding the premise since Jason obviously did the deed.

 

The lesser part of second degree murder is 'crime of passion' murder in Colorado. I think in Maine it is 'crime of passion' manslaughter instead of second degree. Different states write the law different. States have the right not to follow federal guidelines on sentencing.  The big difference is a 20 year less sentence, 28 rather then 48 years under mandatory minimum in Colorado. I haven't studied other states mandatory minimums but I believe CO ranks as having one of the highest sentencing structures as well as the lowest offerings of "good time."

 

There are facts not mentioned in the essay such as, Jason had been paralyzed by Guillian Barre while in the Air Force and his ankles never fully recovered, he could bicycle but not jog, Marc was 6’4” and weighed 235 lbs, Jason is 5’ 9” and weighed 180 lbs…I think if all of part I, plus additional facts had gone before a jury there is a chance they would have gone with crime of passion which is why I think the DA offered a plea for the first time in 10 years on a homicide.  The prosecution games for the highest amount of years it can get.

 

This was all known by Ms. Hay and she should have bargained for “crime of passion, or at least the lesser amount of years.  That extra 20 years is going to cost Jason and his family dearly, emotionally and financially and the tax payer an extra $1,200,000 as Jason is now entering the later part of his life.  It is 60 to 90 thousand dollars a year to incarcerate the elderly.

 

Materially False Information

Materially False Information

Part I

 

“It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.”

Alfred North Whitehead, 1947 (?)

 

This quote is lifted from “Deadly Decisions, (Christopher Burns, Prometheus Books 2009) in regard to organizations that refuse, or have lost the ability, to objectively evaluate evidence and reach non-deadly decisions.  It is my experience that Mr. Whitehead’s quote is an operating canon for prosecutors.  In the legal theatre the courtroom stage demands “interesting propositions” over mundane truths and the drama produces decisions that are, if not deadly, terrible and without foundation.

 

In my decade effort to contest and digest all the interesting falsehoods our legal system had inflicted upon me, I came to see that anyone associated with this case – friend, family, or foe of perpetrator, victim or witness – is victimized by materially false information. 

 

“Everything you believe is wrong.”

Jason Pecci, re: realization a defendant undergoes when confronted with the dissonance of civic expectation vs. actual treatment by “judicial” system.

 

I am the only witness to the homicide I am convicted of.  Since there was no defense investigation the sheriff’s investigator is the only other person who may know what happened.  This is what really went down:

 

Sunday afternoon April 1^st, 2001. I went for a bike ride and stopped at an acquaintance’s, (Terrance Tucker) house. Earlier in the year, January 4^th, I had left a note on his door asking what he had been up to and he had been incommunicado over the winter.  He was at home now and we put my bike in the back of his pickup truck and retreated to my house.  I invited a new girlfriend (Tracy) to come up from in town and proceeded to cook dinner for the three of us.  Terrence drank a dusty bottle of rot gut tequila from my coat closet and the whole evening turned into a fucking disaster.  (If you’re predisposed to off the cuff dinners, drunks and incompatible people are contra-indicated.  Terrance is not compatible with anyone and should have been left incommunicado – spastic, social retard.)

 

By agreement with my near-ex-wife / housemate we would not have anyone over when the other was expected home, thus I announced we had to leave by 10 p.m.  Terrance decided going to the local bar was prudent and collapsed in exuberance about midway from the porch to his truck.  Tracy was equally disgusted with having to leave and with the revolting extent of Terrance’s drunkenness.  We decided to plant Terrance at the bar and then make a plan to extract ourselves from his toxicity.  The bar was a non-starter for Tracy and me.  My house mate and I had agreed to avoid that bar for reasons of scandal  (the bar was her boyfriend’s base of operations and all the patrons were entangled in some form of adultery, whoring or other debauchery) until our divorce was final.  Tracy didn’t want to experience the debauchery of any bar.

 

I drove Terrance, in his truck, to the bar and he stumbled in.  Tracy and I retreated to the boat ramp in her car, where I fielded her complaints of exposing her to such a souse as Terrance and decided that I should dislocate myself from the whole shitty scene there and crash in town at her apartment.

 

She dropped me back at the bar to pick up blind drunk Tucker and take him home and I noted that my house-mate’s car was in front of the bar’s front door and that we may not have had to leave my house.  Tracy said, “Just come to my place,” and I agreed to be there by 11:40.  It was approximately 11:00 then.

 

Terrance was just inside the front door.  The ease of locating him was inverse to his mental accessibility.  He could not understand why I felt responsible to extract him from the bar and get him home, nor could he understand the logistics I was dealing with, trying to swap vehicles and get into town, the toxic drunk.  My housemate was standing next to Terrance and both were facing the bar. I could not deal further with Terrance with her in such close proximity.  I told her the house would be available to her; that I was not staying there that evening.  Her boyfriend, Marc Bender, turned and glared at me over her, as offering them the house was some presumed slight.  The situation was untenable.  I held my hands up in the air and stated in the general direction of the bartender, “He’s your problem,” and left.

 

Two prosecutors (Jolene Blair and Greg Lammons) would later say that this was a verbal altercation with the glaring boyfriend of such magnitude as to inspire me to kill him. The surveillance video clearly shows that we did not speak, nor did I enter any further than necessary to try to extract Terrance.

 

I walked back to my house and changed from flip-flops to shoes and warmer clothes, packed toiletries in my backpack, wrote a note saying I would clean the dinner mess the next day and left in my truck.  The prosecutors characterized this as one single act of acquiring my revolver.

 

I was angry that I had been making an effort to vacate the house and avoid the bar while my housemate was blatantly parking her red car in front of the front door of the scandal zone, and generally flaunting the divorce agreement we had made.  One, of course, should not put stock in verbal divorce agreements, but I could not see past the insult.  I wanted to address her provocation and was contemplating damage to her car – maybe pushing it sideways into the next parking place. Since I had to drive by the bar to go to town why not at least spit on the windshield.  As her car came into sight I saw that my housemate and her boyfriend were sitting in it.  Ramming was then excluded.   Instead, I coasted in on a ramming vector to the passenger side and veered behind the car.  This was later seen as an act of aggression, not for the ramming feint but for blocking the car in.

 

My housemate immediately made herself available at my drivers window to apologize for her prevocational behavior by asking me what the fuck my problem was.  Fair question.

Why should I not be a tolerant whipping post?  I responded equally that she was not reversing this: she was the one in violation and it was my turn – for the first time – to be angry.  Since I do not know how to be angry and argue I overshot a little here.  The net result is that my not-yet-ex-wife / housemate challenged me to kill her. “Go ahead if that’s what you really want to do.”

 

Well, since my revolver was in reach (I keep it under my truck seat emulating my room mate’s partner in a horse trading venture – very cowboy) and her raise was called by my production of the gun.  The prosecutors of course acquitted her of any responsibility for the spousal challenge to homicide and I alone was reckless for introducing a weapon to an emotionally charged situation.  Wasn’t the situation charged by the challenge to kill?

 

So the old lady jumps out of her shoes and splits back to the driver’s side of her (our?) car and scowls at me over the roof.  I reversed the truck almost parallel to the car on it’s passenger side and put the truck in forward gear to leave.  I almost made a getaway and had a different life.  I just couldn’t leave unaddressed the smug, “fuck you, see how much of a loser you are, I win again,” look she was shooting at me.

 

[I have wondered dozens of times each of the 4325 days I have been incarcerated if the vehicles had been reversed and when looking over my shoulder to back up the truck I looked away from the car; would I have driven obliviously away?]

 

So, I put the truck in neutral, set the brake, and got out to really delve into this confrontation; unfortunately with the gun in hand.  The housemate did not want to continue over playing her hand, although we did tentatively argue at the back of the truck while she encouraged the beau to retreat to the bar with her.  He chose to step between us.

He came in from my right and I put my firearm up to his chest and he stepped in, toe-to-toe with me, pinning the arm between us.  I extracted the arm and looked up at Marc with what I recollect as general incomprehension.  He spoke by pushing me with his chest, in what I would describe in a pre-sentencing investigation (PSI) report as a “bulldozing fashion.”  The gun was in my hand hanging at my left side.  I fired a shot straight down, without moving my hand.  Marc calmly looked down at the hand then back down at me {Marc was 6’4” 235 lbs} and pushed again with his chest.  I was then off balance and half stepped backward with my left foot and flipped my left wrist and fired the gun literally from the hip.  Marc spun 90 degrees to the right and fell incomprehensibly dead.

 

Nothing made sense.  How had a low shot had such effect:  There was no one around (the housemate had fled into the bar after Marc had commandeered the situation.  My vision was grainy black and white and my ears were ringing.

 

 

 

 

 

Materially False Information

Part II

 

So, here I stand having likely killed someone and I cannot put together any cognition.  “What the fuck…?”  How the fuck…”

 

I took two steps to the left and looked at Marc – maybe looking for eye movement.  A wrestling fan named Cliff made a statement that he observed this from the beer garden adjacent to the bar and that I approached Marc’s head to “finish him off.”  Over exposure to world wrestling entertainment had imbued Clifford with both clairvoyance and x-ray vision since he would have had to see through my housemate’s car and read minds for his statement to have any veracity.  Like the drama of the wrestling upon which he premised his life, his statement was entirely false.  This would not deter prosecutors from sensationalizing Cliff’s clairvoyance and over leveraging it to indicate intent. Early on I do not see the connection but as I would discover, conclusory allegations are the privilege and sine qua non (essential element) of prosecutions.

 

Back in reality; I threw the gun into the fender of the truck and yelled, “Fuck” a half a dozen times.  I then went into the bar and told a patron just inside the threshold, nicknamed “Budley,” “I think I just killed Marc,” turned and ran back outside.  In contrast to the alleged earlier confrontation that the surveillance video shows did not happen; the sojourn into the bar and communication with Budley is documented by the video but completely absent from the minds of those who compulsively spin evidence for a living.

 

I ran to find the gun at the front of the truck and wandered further to shoot myself in the head.  I tried to convince myself that instant suicide was proper by incanting, “It’s over,” and “Everything’s fucked,” while alternating the gun from my temple to under my chin.  Budley was yelling that I should “wait…wait.”  I suspect that I only had hesitation in my mind anyway.  I collapsed cross-legged into a semi-catatonia and let Budley take the gun. I remained thus until first on-scene police asked me to put my hands behind my back, to be cuffed and remained that way for a while longer.  I heard that this post-traumatic collapse was reported later on Paul Harvey.  If so, it would be the only accurate reporting.

 

There was, of course, a lot of commotion and the ultimate determination by the later responders that Marc was indeed dead.  All the standard tricks ensued.  A corpulent retired captain (who must have lived to monitor his police scanner) took the collar. In retrospect this was odd. I insisted on consulting with an attorney when he asked permission for “his guys” to search my truck.  He read me my Miranda rights and we rode to jail where he promptly threw up into an office trash can.  Since he was the one who had established rapport and had some legacy credibility we moved to another office and a bleary eyed man with a tape recorder in his lap stared at me while Captain Vomitus tried to solicit information from me.  I reasserted my right to counsel and was allowed to call Tracy and tell her I would not make it to her apartment. It is probable they wanted to pretend that I had not invoked counsel and have me make a homicide admission in exchange for a phone call.  Jail phone rates are absolutely usurious!

Don’t worry, it only get worse. “General information that has proven universally accurate.”

 

I met public defender Kathryn Hay by phone through thick visiting glass early in the morning.  She told me that she would be representing me at the video advisement of charges in a few hours, and not to talk to anyone about anything.  I have never found any percentage in talking to anyone about anything so her instructions made sense.  I told her to order up a death sentence to dispense with the whole matter and our degenerate relationship was under way.

 

I attended the video advisement with a room full of other former citizens who had caught charges over the weekend.  At the microphone I stood out from the lesser offenders in the room when a disembodied judge advised me that I was charged with felony menacing and first degree murder.  Ms. Hay made all the required perfunctory statements on her end of the video link.  I then went to and eight cell close observation pod that would be home for seven months.

 

Ms. Hay came to see me that week. For a reason as yet undisclosed she insisted that I not tell her what happened until a later time.  She informed me that Marc’s mother was demanding the death penalty.  I actually felt scooped.  Asking for a firing squad was my purview and felt it should be publicly known that I had already made the request to counsel.  After Ms. Hay left I empathized with Marc’s mother’s perspective and realized that I had no say in my legal future.  I now know no defendant does.

 

Ms. Hay returned a week later and was ready for me to tell her what happened.  Thus nine days after the homicide I told the public defense counsel all of part one of this essay.  I suspect she had been waiting for the prosecution to investigate before she commanded her own investigation.  I see less than zero tactical wisdom in letting the organs of state power selectively investigate and develop the story they want to tell at leisure.  Hay’s only comment to me was that the homicide was not a first degree murder.  (Homicide is a general term for one person causing the death of another; murder is a legal characterization of homicide.)  She made a less reticent commentary to my father, stating that there were defensible aspects of the case.

 

This was the party line until the grand deception at the sentencing eight months later.  There was a preliminary hearing at which I caught the first whiff of the state’s scam.  A perfectly foul bitch named Jolene Blair, the prosecutor on my case, made assertions that I had an altercation with Marc, acquired a gun and exterminated him with malice, intent, forethought and everything short of a sketch and published manifesto.  A preliminary hearing is perfunctory and has a threshold of evidence will below the standard for trial.  It is only to determine if a crime was committed and there exists sufficient evidence to go to trial.

 

I faithfully believed fabrication and abject conjecture, - this dramatic drivel generated for the theater of a perfunctory hearing, - were not substantive.  That is, they were without merit, without evidentiary foundation, and not admissible.  Well…as I stated earlier; in the theater of the U.S. courtrooms the facts of a case are the prosecutor’s story to tell.

 

“Truth is not a product; it is a process.  It is the result of information quality management practices and standards adopted by the group [the prosecutorial bar] and followed over time.”  - “Deadly Decisions” by Christopher Burns, pg. 57

 

If you have never been assaulted by the criminal justice system you likely will not accept that prosecutors are information oligarchs that control what is produced as truth in criminal courts.  I now understand that I was blind to the assault I was under, a testament to the legitimacy some pomp and judicial procedure can give to systematic treachery.

 

The summer came with a change in angle of the light in the high security, pre-trial,  detainee area. 

 

I would find out years later that my mother was trying to procure a psychological evaluation for me at her expense and my attorney was immensely dismissive of her. Ms. Hay’s position was, since she had snowed my father she was above reproach from the other parent.

 

The summer was spent practicing my focus on futility.  Had I known of the conflicting signals Hay was sending my parents it would have merely validated that sense of futility.  Only my mother foresaw the long shadows of pure deceit.

 

One afternoon in September Ms. Hay came to the jail with her boss, Barb Zollars, head public defender, to sell me on a plea.  Ms. Zollars convincingly stated, “If you go to trial you will be found guilty of first degree murder.”  Given that she did not know the circumstances of the crime she was effectively saying: “We cannot defend you.”  As a lifelong doormat I agreed to the plea and became complicit in their subjugation to the district attorney’s office.

 

Their investigator brought by a boilerplate plea agreement for second degree murder.  You may expect that something as critical as a plea agreement to second degree murder should be attended by the attorney of record.  Well, me too.  She probably could have answered my question about the 5^th amendment waiver caveat in the agreement.  The investigator’s answer was that all the caveats needed to be initialed.  Notwithstanding such a vapid answer I assumed he had done this before and was looking out for my best interest.  Oh the naïveté of a criminal justice virgin.

 

The plea hearing was a shameful masquerade.  Hay opened with a statement that we had met more than I had indicated on the plea questionnaire and that we had gone over the plea agreement together.  The judge asked if that was accurate and I concurred.  The idea – again as a life long door mat- of contradicting my attorney seemed as implausible then as it seems mandatory in retrospect.  (If only I could take a perjury hit on that, and state the truth: plea invalidated!)  The judge than asked Ms. Hay to approach the bench and initial her portion of the plea agreement; she had not even looked at it!

At that point the judge wanted me to state what happened. “Fuck you. I’m under orders from my attorney to not discuss the case,” is what I should have said.  I was not prepared to tell anyone anything and should not have extemporized but babbled that there was an emotional incident and Marc ended up shot.  That was sufficient.  As two deputies pulled me toward the side door Hay says, “You can talk about what happened now,” and she also commented on my responsibility and indicated the need for payment.  I was already humbled beyond imagination and later questioned the necessity of her remark. Was it not her responsibility to present the plea agreement to me and tell me how to accept a plea.  Since I had agreed to avoid a trial at which she would have been impuissant, unable to hold her own; she was off the hook. She went “hands off” and led me to ambush at the plea hearing. 

 

These masquerades are called “providency hearings.”  This reference to divinity is an invention to bestow judicial procedure with power to invent facts.  Give something a holy enough name, with gilded clothes and reverent procedures; it becomes a self perpetuating truth system. (See “Deadly Decisions,” Chapter 9)

 

A judicial district generates a pre-sentencing investigation (PSI) report to premise a sentence upon.  A probation officer named Patricia Lara interviewed me to generate the report.  I wrote two paragraphs explaining how Marc had approached me and pushed in a bulldozing fashion to solicit the warning shot next to my left foot and he continued pushing to solicit the second shot.  Lara did allow my statement in but she inserted two outlandish assertions for the prosecutor:

 

(1.    She stated that my soon to be ex-wife worked at the bar, which implied there could not have been an agreement to avoid the bar.

(2.    She stated that Marc had been “an innocent bystander to the collapse of the marriage.”

 

Regarding #1.  My ex-wife never worked at nor patronized the bar.  This falsehood was inserted to obviate any culpability of her behaving out of the ordinary or in violation of an agreement that would provoke her spouse.  The prosecutor along with the police, who were friends of my ex-wife, needed to suppress her flaunting of the agreement; an agreement made between us while trying to divorce amicably.  Her appearance at the bar that night was provocative and insidious;  it was necessary that she be portrayed as an innocent bystander rather then the agente provocatrice that she was. 

 

Regarding #2.  Marc was not the “innocent bystander to the collapse of the marriage.”  He had invited my spouse to move in with him the first night they had relations and was the impetus for the divorce, but this was irrelevant to the circumstances of his death.  The statement was a plant to introduce the term “innocent bystander” into the PSI report to be extrapolated to the circumstances of his being shot.  “Innocent bystander” is a legal term used to free one of any responsibility.

 

On November 8, 2001, at the sentencing hearing Ms. Hay executed the coup de grace of her deception.  She said, “Jason is a citizen, veteran, college graduate, normal guy who couldn’t resist the reasonable urge to confront his spouse while driving by the bar enroute to town and he is remorseful that the confrontation resulted in him shooting Marc from four feet away.”  What!!??  She said nothing about the lack of communication between Marc and I earlier, nor the spousal agreement to avoid the scandalous bar, or that I was only there to pick Terrance up and return him home.  Nor did she talk about the ex-spouse challenging me to kill her.  Most astounding, she said nothing about me standing still and Marc making contact with me and that I never menaced, spoke to or pointed the gun at Marc previous to the final moment when set off balance.

 

She did diligently aver that I shot Marc from a distance of 4’ even though the sheriff’s investigator had conducted test firings following the autopsy starting a 12” and descending in 1” increment to 0.”

 

The prosecutor suppressed the conclusion of the range testing.  I can assure you that four feet is an overestimate by a factor of 25 – 100!  I described this performance in a post-conviction motion as defecating in the middle of the floor of a fifth floor courtroom in the new $100 million dollar courthouse in the Beverly Hills of Colorado.

 

Once this was teed up for the prosecutor a delightful weasel named Greg Lammons ran with it.  Prior citizenship is irrelevant to sentencing.  All that matters are the materially false presumptions that I had a confrontation with Marc, ran home to get a gun and ran back to blow him away from four feet away.  To be additionally contemptuous he added that any declaration I made in the PSI report regarding the true circumstances must be disregarded by his Honor Terrance Gilmore, a career corrupt prosecutor turned judge; he was voted off the bench in the 2010 election cycle.  Lammons’ rationale was that, (1. since he had not heard of the true scenario before the PSI report it must be a fabrication even though my statement matches the evidence and his fabrication does not, and (2. Lammons refers to the preliminary hearing as evidence and you will recollect from earlier in this essay that a preliminary hearing does not provide evidence.

 

Mr. Gilmore was dishonorably consistent with all his execrable service as a prosecutor, going back 25 years, and needed to make a splash with his first big case as a judge, mine.  He repeated Lammons declaration that I had decided to kill Marc when we did not interact while I attempted to extract Terrance Tucker from the bar. Clairvoyance applied to an imagined event equals delusional schizophrenia outside a courtroom!  He then repeated my attorney’s false range declaration of four feet.  I asked Ms. Hay, “Where is this four feet crap coming from.”  While dictating Gilmore’s sentencing diatribe she replied, “I think it was four feet.”  (Are you kidding!  Twelve years after the treachery I am still livid!)  After seven months she declares at sentencing…during the imposition of sentence…that she is prosecuting me on the false story the prosecutors have invented.  It is unlikely that she ever intended to defend me.  Concurrent with this revelation Gilmore says he sees elements of intent (the pre-requisite for first degree murder) in this homicide and since I had accepted the luxury of pleading to a lower charge he had the luxury of believing, or feigning belief of the materially false information and he sentenced me to the maximum of 48 years plus 5 years of probation.

 

The final knee to the groin was when Hay came to the jail a week later.  She offered to file a notice of appeal and would recommend to the appellate attorney…(can you believe it)…range testing. 

 

Yes, her own notes, after the sentencing, state this.

 

Epilogue

 

A sentencing appeal can only question the discretion of the judge – hyper or hypo – critical, to arrive at an unreasonable sentence.  Since the sentence would not have been unreasonable if premised upon the material falsehoods he feigned to believe the appeal was baseless. Now we are really falling into the legal rabbit hole.

 

Further down in the appeals process are post conviction rules, based on habeas corpus, that should have addressed the duplicitous representation of Hay, the invalidity of the plea, false premises of the sentence…everything that is explained in Part II above.

 

My mother retained an attorney, Barrett Weisz, to navigate the post-conviction maze.  He filed a post conviction claim that focused on Hay’s failure to investigate.  A nice example would have been range testing that would have proven conclusions different from the guesses she made in lieu of investigation.  Basically, do the investigation she was supposed to do and it proves itself.  The problem is a defendant has no right to the evidence after conviction, thus Barrett had to say testing, if allowed, could prove Hay did not properly investigate.  This allowed Gilmore/Lammons (If you were to read the order you can deduce Lammons wrote it and Gilmore signed it) to reply that Barrett’s petition was speculative and by illogical extension, without merit.  We are now at terminal velocity in the bottomless legal rabbit hole.

 

Since Barrett had not treated the repercussions of Hay’s lack of investigation his appeal was narrow and stillborn.  He expressed hope for fair or less biased treatment in the federal courts with a petition for habeas corpus.  He had likely developed the same ennui for the case as Hay.  Since his fees had definitely bankrupted my mother his indifference to the case was moot.

 

I pursued the habeas pro-se (representing myself) and encountered a total disregard that taught me how expatriated the convicted are.  All the repercussions Barrett had left untreated become “unexhausted issues” that were forever forfeited.  The remaining claims were causes that begged a discussion of the effects to gain legal traction.  Thus, like an essay of incomplete sentences under an instructor’s pen, everything was summarily disregarded.

 

The invasions and dismissiveness through district, circuit, and U.S. Supreme Courts is as if the rabbit hole is now deliberately indifferent to any call for a straight answer.

 

During my fifth year of incarceration I read Oscar Wilde’s “A Portrait of Dorian Grey.”

I submit that in the darkest back corners of every judge’s coat closet sits such a portrait of past youthful equanimity and thoughtfulness. Upon the first donning and doffing of a judicial robe it begins to collect particles of curtness and offense that quickly grow into barnacles of hubris and indifference.  Each judges ‘Dorian Grey’ portrait is their portal to the legal rabbit hole – a toll booth that chronicles all the tortured logic, feigned umbrage and perverse rationalization employed to expatriate human beings ever faster, harder and longer.

 

Allow me to close with a footnote to a letter I wrote to Judge Gilmore regarding lack of accountability. 

 

(The full text of this letter can be seen attached to the Opening Brief of the U.S. Tenth Circuit Appellate Court, case # 10-1463.  If the court had compelled Gilmore to answer the letter the legal question of the appeal would have been answered.  The appeal was denied by the court. Not ruled against, nor dismissed, nor other procedural obviation. No, no, no; your words do not merit reading thus we do not deign to grace them with our eyes.)

 

“Congratulations on your success in this regard. I was not able to develop that species of avoidance which is the de rigueur talent for success in our western culture.  Please consider me to proof your memoir when it is drafted.”

 

Copyright 2013, Jason Pecci

Please feel free to copy and distribute this essay; especially to any of the following. (preferably at personal, not work e-mail addresses.):

Kathryn Hay – Colo. Bar # 20817

Barb Zollars – Colo. Bar # 15723

Rebecca Love Kourlis – Colo. Bar 7565 – rkourlis@du.edu

Judge Gregory Lammons – 8^th District Colorado

Terrance Gilmore

Barrett Weisz – Colo. Bar # 27601

And any appropriate bar associations and news outlets

 

Dominic Dunne should write and expose on Gilmore and Stu Van Meveren’s 35 year crime spree in Ft. Collins CO.  These slick operators are animal sociopaths on par with Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito.

 

Peace, Jason

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Colorado Asks its Citizens to Bend Over Further

The following has been submitted to the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition (www.ccjrc.org)

 

Regarding article “Private Prisons and the CCA bid guarantee,” Winter 2012 quarterly newsletter.

 

I am appalled and just perfectly disgusted that Colorado has rendered an “occupancy” guarantee to a private prison contractor.

 

I was part of a group of 480 inmates (720 intended) used as a human bondage pre-payment for financing of new construction of private prison units; thus I have an intimate sense of what a guaranteed occupant is.  I am one of that chattel.

 

First, we were regurgitated by the Owen’s administration to a temporary holding facility in Oklahoma to demonstrate that the state could “produce” inmates to fill new construction that Corrections Corporation of America wanted to undertake in Colorado.  The third tranche of 240 inmates was cancelled by Governor Ritter upon his swearing in.  The truncated number of inmates was still sufficient collateral for CCA to secure financing to build units at two county facilities that can house 1440 additional inmates.

 

Second, when we moved from Oklahoma’s human collateral chattel status back to Colorado State inmates most of us moved into the new units that our bondage leveraged the financing for.

 

Any bid guarantee is an act of codifying this abuse.

 

One only need look back to the stunningly corrupt ploy by Director of Prisons under Owen’s, Nolan Renfrow, to secure a 30 year / 90% occupancy guarantee for GEO Corporation for a facility that only existed as and architectural drawing. This puke was trying to contract with the state, through a shell corporation on behalf of GEO while on state payroll,  thus he was working against the state for a private contractor by trying to sign both sides of a contract.

 

You may conclude that my current disgust arises from being one of the 3,300 inmates guaranteed to CCA this fiscal year, but even more; the aforementioned appalling aspect of my disgust arises from CDOC’s continuing licking of CCA’s boots. They could not be more obsequious and utterly bitch-made in their transfer of $66,000,000 + per year to CCA.

 

The article states that the Colorado Legislature made this guarantee of payment for 3,300 inmates for a year.  If the state was constitutionally allowed to contract for periods greater than one year I’m sure they would have bent over further to accept additional years into the collective civil rectum!  This was in response to a CCA threat to close this very facility I am at.

 

The article further states that this violates the “intergovernmental” contract that CCA operates under in this state. [Contract – § 2.1.1 – “the state does not guarantee any minimum number of offenders that will be assigned to contractor’s facility,”

§ 2.1.3 – “nothing in this contract shall be construed as requiring the contractor to provide space or as requiring CDOC to present for confinement any offenders.”]

 

If one aspect of a contract is broken the entire contract is void.  Thus the corporation is committing the criminal offense of false imprisonment (and kidnapping when they restrain and forcibly move any person) and the state is illegally transferring money from the state treasury to the corporation.

 

Also, why is the contract titled “intergovernmental?” That would be a contract between governments.  Has Colorado extended governmental sovereignty to the corporation?

 

CDOC maintains 7000 parole eligible inmates incarcerated for the following reasons of political expedience:

 

1.)    To maintain the false definition of parole established by the mandatory parole act of 1993 (likely drafted by the corporation to create the excess of inmates they house).

2.)    To maintain the threat of doing parole time incarcerated.

3.)    As a shock absorber to control the number of incarcerated.

 

The first two are impositions on the state by the corporation; the third is the only option to push back on the corporation.  The CDOC must exercise this option in the face of vendor “threats.”

 

Solution:  Release half of the 7000 parole eligible inmates from incarceration onto actual parole and let the population at the three CCA facilities draw down through regular weekly transports until they are devoid of Colorado inmates. Abusive Relationship Terminated

 

 

Intellectual Dead Zone

Blog entry 12/27/2012

I hope you all enjoyed my latest query about ambition and autodidactism, (teaching oneself). You may have seen through to the sub-test which is, fear that I cannot teach myself nor efficiently absorb novel information.  This impending deficiency, more than the shitty character of the lower half of the staff and inmate population, is what can make doing time difficult.

Based on the resentment expressed against educated, well-spoken or otherwise non-ghetto comported inmates I deduce that the system only tolerates fettered and degenerate minds.  If an inmate does not enter pre-fettered and degenerate then constant exposure to shitty people (both inmate and staff) and restriction of intellectual exercise cultivates a lowest common denominator inmate. Failing this, any expression of dignity will distinguish one as out-of-line with the expected failed person model and segregation pulls one to the deviant average expected. Yes, expected, demanded, even required, to progress through custody levels and achieve discharge of one’s sentence.

All the self-imposed intellectual exercises are proving to have a lack of progress.  This became evident when I returned to the music room, after a three year absence and quickly realized that every endeavor to learn the piano has stalled at the same low plateau.  Autodidactism has a limit and lessons are required to progress beyond that limit. I can assure you that brute force repetition does not convince the frontal lobe to accept – learn – any concepts beyond one’s autodidactic limit.

Oh, Chagrin for the intellectually under stimulated prisoner, Right? Yes, absolutely chagrin for the dormant and intellectually starved inmate.  There are many inmates that undertake self-study in everything from law to music to language to art to science, as well as learning a hobby / craft and physical fitness. Hobby crafts and physical fitness are learned by physical repetition, but everything else runs into the autodidactic limit soon after the first chapter fundamentals. No feedback from an instructor equals no understanding beyond preliminary fundamentals. This is what the tax payer pays for: intellectual dead zones that disable inmates from acquiring knowledge and ever participating meaningfully in the U.S. market place.

Inmates cooperating to learn is an intolerable conspiracy and the only outsiders (non-employees) allowed in are preachers.

To punctuate the point that prisons are drone factories I offer the crippled facility that I reside in to start; it is a corporately owned facility that operates with less program options than a civil facility.  Of these reduced programs the two computer user and one electronic vocations classes running two sessions per day were summarily closed this past spring.  Untouched were vocational janitorial class and construction safety flagger certification. 

Have I slipped past the event horizon of the cerebral black hole I am swirling around?

Write to me at jason.pecci@gmail.com and comment on the closing, and your feelings on the cerebral black hole analogy.

Jason

To get a grasp on what Jason is saying here please watch the movie “The Freedom Writers.” (Hilary Swank and Patrick Dempsey).This movie describes a lazy slovenly education system in some areas that not only mirrors the attitude of the prison system but actually is why our prison system is the largest in the world. This desire to keep inmates in that "intellectual dead zone," also is the reason there are a large number of recidivist. MEP

Blog entry, December 2012

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving.  Here in prison it is a day of altered routine and general congeniality.  Human of course don’t undergo 24 hour temporary personality changes but there is an extra large lunch meal and a suspension of hostilities.  I attribute this to a break in routine because inmates become so hidebound to routine that they attach their prejudices and degenerate behaviors to their “prison routine.”  So we all take a “positive break” and act, if not thankful, housebroken.

My thankful moment occurred upon returning, almost last, from the chow hall to the unit.  I hooked a u-turn at the door of the unit to walk an extra lap and enjoy the windless, cloudless and temperate weather; and immediately noticed the perfect lack of any other humans.  No guards.  No inmates.  No sight of the perimeter truck.  The near silence lent to a sublime moment.  The generators – land caterpillars – had been running 20 minutes earlier.  The moment held for half the walk back until the perimeter truck slid into view and a few straggling Thanksgiving diners debouched from the chow hall.  A solitary outdoor moment that was not shattered by ignorant screaming nor industrial noises; I’ll take it!J

                                                            ________

Regarding ambition – in the context of all the “stay motivated,” “stay positive,” excel under pressure,” and “tricks our brains play,” type of books I read – I have come to the conclusion that I am a motivated dabbler.   Of a dozen interests I usually maintain focus on four and study/practice them, with acceptable intensity, for 20-45 minutes at a stretch.

The dabbler assessment comes from the dozen interests, “want – to – knows;” the motivated assessment comes from having followed through on a few.  ;)  Of course teaching oneself (autodidactism) presents an early plateau to developing any proficiency, which really pisses me off.  I am currently blaming that for my attention span being down to a 45 minute maximum; how can one become proficient without time spent focusing?

Are you fucking kidding me?  At one time I was able to work out for two hours and do two hours of homework without having to force my focus.

After trying to autodidactically learn to play piano, about four different times over the past 13 years, I hope to be taught, and maybe learn.

Tell me about your ambition and ability to focus and absorb information.  You can e-mail me @ jason.pecci@gmail.com and my momager will snail mail all responses on to me.

Are you a dabbler – distracted by multiple interests – single focus?

Are you autodidact – monkey see / monkey do

Are you between organic (practice time short but often) and obsessive (intense long practices)

I feel that due to either aging and/or incarceration, I may be losing my ability to absorb information; maybe just the ability to focus appropriately to absorb information.

Feedback welcome.

jason.pecci@gmail.com