Prosecution as Persecution: The Carol Asher Case

 "Hi, my name is Larry Wasden," explained the short, stocky man, flashing a politician's practiced smile and extending a hand. "I'm the Attorney General."

"Mr. Wasden, my name is Will Grigg," I replied, shaking his hand. "Several years ago you tried to put a 66-year-old retired nun named Carol Asher in prison for fourteen years because she acted as a conscientious juror. Have you ever apologized to her for that abuse of discretion?"

My ice-breaker caused Wasden's smile to evaporate, and it was quickly replaced with an expression of perplexed surprise.

"What -- what abuse of discretion? What case are you talking about?" he stammered.

"Carol Asher is a retired nun from northern Idaho who was called to serve on a jury in a narcotics case," I explained. "She was one of several jurors who voted to acquit, and during the deliberations -- made in the confidentiality of the jury room -- she apparently made some comments about the fully-informed jury principle. This was seen as a violation of assurances that she would be bound by the judge's instructions. After the case was dismissed, one of the jurors reported her to the prosecutor -- and your office filed felony perjury charges against her."

"Well, I don't remember any of the details of this matter," Wasden replied as he started to sidle away from me.

"Perhaps you should re-acquaint yourself with them," I suggested.

"I don't really see any reason to," he said, walking away while displaying a dismissive smirk.

The occasion that brought about this brief but telling conversation was a December 12 meeting held at the Portia Club in Payette, Idaho to discuss the state's open records and open meetings law. Wasden and several of his associates -- people whose livelihood depends on official opacity, not public transparency -- were present to teach us how to ask just the right questions in order to get the self-serving answers they were willing to provide.

Wasden was obviously caught off-guard by a polite but pointed question, and more than likely offended by it. After all, a meeting to discuss the open records law was hardly the proper forum at which to demand accountability from a public servant such as himself. 

Hero: Carol Asher, conscientious juror.

My only purpose in attending the meeting was to ask Wasden about the Asher case. I knew he would be in attendance, and intended to confront him about his misconduct – but since he was the one who approached me, I can’t honestly be accused of ambushing him. Our conversation took place about five minutes before the meeting began, which meant that I was able to devote most of my evening to more productive pursuits.

Wasden was utterly mystified by the mention of the Carol Asher case, which was the source of considerable controversy in Idaho back in 2006. He honestly didn't remember who Carol Asher is, which is understandable. But he absolutely didn't care about what his office did to her, which is unforgivable.

“It’s interesting that Mr. Wasden doesn’t remember me or anything about my case, because he was certainly aware of it at the time,” Asher told Pro Libertate. “And after the charge against me was dismissed I wrote him a long, polite letter letting him know that I held no rancor toward him, and explaining why I took the stand that I did. He never responded to my letter.”

If I had inflicted needless misery on an innocent, law-abiding, 66-year-old woman, sleep would be a stranger to me until I had done everything possible to make amends. Beyond what I've learned from the public record and a very brief conversation I know nothing of Larry Wasden. The fact that he has forgotten everything about his attempt to imprison Asher for life suggests to me that his is the untroubled sleep known only to the most innocent of children, and the most incurable of sociopaths.

In late 2005, Asher was called to jury duty for the narcotics trial of William Edward Clark, a young man of Indian ancestry who lived in a northern Idaho village called White Bird. Clark was employed at a local restaurant. He also had a police record replete with petty charges of the kind that suggested he was the focus of frequent and largely unwarranted police attention. 

One afternoon the previous March, Clark was given the keys to the company vehicle – an old pickup truck – and sent to Grangeville with a large load of aluminum cans to be recycled. He stopped at the Tolo Lake Mammoth Replica, locked the truck, and went to see the exhibit. A Grangeville City Police Officer drove by and spotted the truck. 

At the time, Clark was the subject of a “fugitive warrant,” but the available record in the Idaho Repository doesn’t clearly state why. He was sentenced to probation on a misdemeanor battery charge, and then slapped with a statewide “failure to appear” bench warrant that appears to have been revoked in January. In any case, the officer recognized either Clark or the vehicle he was driving, executed a U-turn, and pulled in behind the truck.

When the officer approached Clark, he demanded the keys in order to search the truck. Clark quite properly refused to turn over the keys, pointing out that the pickup was, in effect, a company vehicle that didn’t belong to him. The officer called for backup, and an Idaho County Sheriff’s Deputy soon arrived. The two of them ganged up on Clark, seized the keys, and searched the truck.

On the dashboard of the truck the officers found a CD case containing a tiny ziplock bag in which was hidden .15 of a gram of meth, which had an estimated street value of about five dollars. 

“No physical evidence or eyewitness testimony connected Clark to the drugs,” Asher recalls of Clark’s two-day trial. “The prosecution wasn’t able to demonstrate that Clark was aware that it was in the vehicle. Since it was used by many other people, and the drugs were very carefully hidden, there was plenty of room for reasonable doubt. And since the search was clearly illegal, there wasn’t really any reason for the arrest in the first place. But the court-appointed defense attorney just sat there like a stump and didn’t raise the issue, and the trial judge wouldn’t allow jurors to raise it, either.”

MacGregor.

In his smug assurance that the case was a slam-dunk, the Idaho County Prosecutor Kirk MacGregor didn’t bother to prove it. After all, Clark was a socially marginal Indian kid with a bad reputation and a growing rap sheet; his accusers were two valiant defenders of the public weal; and besides, this was a drug case, which means that the defendant simply must be guilty of something. 

What MacGregor didn’t realize is that there was at least one member of the jury who intended to force the state to prove its case against the defendant.

Prior to the trial, Judge John Bradbury had informed the jurors that they would be able to submit questions directly to him.

“Each of us was given a notepad on which to write our questions, and several of them were given to Judge Bradbury,” Asher relates. “All of them were read by the judge verbatim – except for the two I submitted, which he paraphrased and then dismissed.”

During the testimony of the two police officers involved in the arrest, Asher asked the same question: “In your understanding of the law, Officer, was it lawful and proper to force a search of the defendant’s pickup without first obtaining a warrant?” 

The coprophagous grin of a lazy judge: Bradbury.

“The first time I posed that question, rather than reading it aloud Bradbury simply said that a juror had asked about the legality of the search and he said that at some point prior to the trial it had been `agreed’ that the search was legal,” Asher recalls. “The second time he said something to the effect of, `There’s a juror here who is still having trouble regarding the legality of the search. That matter is decided and must be left aside.’”

When the jury began its deliberations, Asher was amazed – and somewhat disgusted – by the eagerness displayed by the other jurors to offer an uncritical ratification of the prosecution’s case. 

“I listened to various initial comments from at least half of the jurors,” she summarized in an affidavit filed prior to her own trial in 2006. “Rather than focusing on real evidence presented against him (or the lack of it), the young man was being criticized for everything from his casual dress to `looking cocky’ to his (supposed) cocky eye contact and confident smiles he frequently directed to members of the jury.”

When it was Asher’s turn to speak, she expressed “concern about what seemed to me a wrongful search on the part of the police. The jury foreman then reminded me that the judge had ruled out the matter of the search, and that we were not allowed to consider it.”

Displaying the dutiful docility so commonplace among collectivist drones, the foreman insisted that the proper role of the jury was to act as an instrument of state power, rather than an impediment to it. Asher tried to remind her fellow jurors that their duty was to follow the law, rather than ratify the prosecution’s case.

“I can’t take my orders merely from a judge, but am bound by a higher authority to render fair and just judgment according to the dictates of my own conscience in trying to protect the rights of the accused,” Asher explained.

“Well, then, it looks like you could be facing big trouble here,” sneered the foreman. “You just could be charged with perjury.”

After taking comments from the other jurors, the foreman called for a vote. Eight members of the panel voted guilty; Asher and three others voted to acquit. The hung jury resulted in a mistrial. 

As soon as court was adjourned, the foreman – in violation of the confidentiality of jury deliberations – did his duty to the State by reporting Asher’s comments to MacGregor. The vindictive functionary immediately contacted Wasden and demanded that the State of Idaho file a felony perjury charge against Asher. This was clearly an act of petty retaliation. It was also an actionable instance of malicious prosecution for which neither MacGregor nor Wasden has ever been held accountable. 

There is no legal basis in the State of Idaho for the prosecution of a juror who ignores a judge’s instructions regarding the law. Although the Idaho Code dictates that the court will “decide all questions of law which may arise in the course of the trial,” it also states that the judge “can give no charge to the jury” – in other words, he cannot bind them to his interpretation of the law. 

Idaho’s official Guide for Jury Deliberations repeatedly and explicitly state that once the jury begins its deliberations, it has plenary authority to decide the case as it sees fit. The purpose of a judge’s instructions, according to the guide, is to “tell you if there are special rules or a set process you should follow. Otherwise, you are free to conduct your deliberations in whatever way is helpful.”

Some measure of the poverty of the state’s case against Asher can be seen in the haste with which it was dismissed by Magistrate Judge Michael Griffin following a March 7, 2006 evidentiary hearing.

“I’m pretty sure that the charge was dismissed so quickly because they wanted the issue of fully-informed jurors to go away,” Asher observes. “The courtroom was full the day of the evidentiary hearing, and I’ve been told that the court had received hundreds of phone calls from people who were really upset over what was being done to me. It seems clear that the people behind the prosecution simply wanted the matter to disappear and be forgotten.” 

Carol Asher was neither the first nor the only woman face a “perjury” charge for thwarting the punitive impulses of an ambitious prosecutor. Sitting next to her in the Grangeville courtroom on March 7, 2006 was Colorado attorney Paul Grant, who had represented Laura Kriho, another woman who had been maliciously prosecuted for exercising her authority as a fully informed juror in the 1996 narcotics trial of a 19-year-old girl charged with possession of methamphetamine. 

Along with other potential jurors, Kirho was asked by the judge if there was “anything” in her past that “would interfere with your sitting as a fair and impartial juror.” She didn’t disclose that as a teenager she had received a deferred sentence on a minor drug charge, which was subsequently dismissed (but not removed from the record – nothing ever is). She also supported both drug de-criminalization and jury nullification. 

During jury deliberations, Kriho annoyed the other panelists by casting doubt on the reliability of the chief prosecution witness – the arresting officer in the case. She also pointed out that the likely sentence seemed wildly disproportionate to the offense. One juror sent a note to District Judge Kenneth Barnhill demanding that Kriho be dismissed. This led to a mistrial – after which a juror contacted the judge to accuse Kriho of conspiring to hang the jury by not disclosing her beliefs. 

Initially charged with felony perjury, Kriho was acquitted of that offense but found guilty of “contempt” and fined $1,200 by Gilpin County Judge Henry Nieto. 

As Paul Grant pointed out, Kriho was the first American to be convicted of “the newly minted crime of failure to volunteer information during jury selection. No longer is it enough to honestly answer the questions you are asked; now you also have to answer the questions you were not asked, but that you `knew’ the judge wanted answered.”

This was the supposed crime for which Larry Wasden wanted to imprison Carol Asher – and the struggle to beat back that spurious prosecution cost her thousands of dollars she didn’t have. 

 “At the time, I was 66 years old, and although I’ve tried to take care of myself a 14-year sentence would probably have meant that I would have died in prison,” Asher pointed out to me.

This isn’t to say that Wasden is incapable of exercising discretion, and modulating his zeal for justice, as he pretends to understand it, on behalf of first-time offenders. About a year after he tried to arrange for Asher to finish her mortal days in prison, Wasden approved a ridiculously lenient sentence for Kevin Buttars, a former Montpelier, Idaho Police Officer who beat, choked, and sexually assaulted a man named Jared Finley. 

Given that he was armed and committed his crime with the aid of several armed colleagues, his act qualified as aggravated battery under Idaho law, for which the prescribed penalty is up to fifteen years in prison. (By itself, the chokehold he inflicted on Finley constitutes “attempted strangulation,” which is also punishable by a term of fifteen years.) 

At the very least, Buttars was guilty of “unnecessary assault by a police officer,” which for some reason is considered a misdemeanor in Idaho. The specified punishment for that crime is a year in jail and a $5000 fine. This is a lighter punishment than the typical Idaho resident would receive for driving with a suspended license. 

Wasden signed off on a plea deal under which Buttars served two weeks in jail, paid a $500 fine and court costs, and spent a year on probation – time he put to productive use by filing a “wrongful termination” lawsuit against the City of Montpelier.

Lawrence Wasden is the kind of person who would be expansively accommodating toward a violent degenerate in a government-issued costume, while seeking to imprison an elderly woman for the supposed crime of being a conscientious juror. He splendidly embodies one of my oft-repeated maxims: People who don’t despise prosecutors simply aren’t paying attention. 

Your contributions are vital to keep Pro Libertate on-line. Thanks so much, and God bless! 

 

Dum spiro, pugno!

Scratch a "Liberal," find a Fascist: The Case of Barbara Boxer

Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer of California, a bottomless fountain of foolishness, has proposed a measure that would permit governors to deploy National Guard troops to provide "security" at government-run schools. 

“Is it not part of the national defense to make sure that your children are safe?” Boxer asked during a Capitol Hill press conference in the misguided belief that this content-free trope somehow constituted compelling wisdom. 

She blithely stated that her proposal wouldn’t be a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act (which was supposed to prevent the domestic use of the military for the purpose of law enforcement) because it would allow governors to re-purpose troops who are already being used for drug interdiction operations. That is to say, the militarization of schools wouldn’t constitute a new Posse Comitatus violation, but rather expand on an existing one. 

Boxer’s proposal to militarize the schools could have been taken directly from "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012,” a terrifyingly prescient essay published twenty years ago in Parameters, the journal of the U.S. Army War College by military historian Charles J. Dunlap. This glimpse of a dystopian future takes the form of a long letter written by an officer awaiting execution as a traitor to the junta that has seized control over the United States in the wake of military disasters abroad and socio-economic turmoil at home.

"It wasn't any single cause that led us to this point," writes the condemned patriot to a friend. "It was instead a combination of several different developments, the beginnings of which were evident in 1992.” Rather than de-mobilizing at the end of the Cold War, the ruling establishment expanded the military’s mission overseas and made it an even more pervasive presence at home.

Military personnel became "an adjunct to all police forces in the country," the officer recalls; social and economic problems were redefined as "national security" issues and brought under the military's area of responsibility. This is how uniformed military personnel became ubiquitous: People became accustomed to the sight of "uniformed military personnel patrolling their neighborhood.... Even the youngest citizens were co-opted.... [We have] an entire generation of young people who have grown up comfortable with the sight of military personnel patrolling their streets and teaching in their classrooms."

There is a sense in which Boxer’s proposal is redundant, since armed “warriors” are already deployed in countless schools nation-wide: They are called “resource officers,” but they are taught to perceive themselves as front-line troops on a combat footing.

 "You've got to be a one-man fighting force,” self-styled counter-terrorism “expert” John Giduck exhorted police officers at the 2007 National Conference of School Resource Officers in Orlando, Florida. “You've got to have enough guns, and ammunition and body armor to stay alive.... You should be walking around in schools every day in complete tactical equipment, with semi-automatic weapons.... You can no longer afford to think of yourselves as peace officers.... You must think of yourself [sic] as soldiers in a war because we're going to ask you to act like soldiers." (Emphasis added.)

“Resource Officers” are not present for the protection of children; their mission is to intimidate them, and – with increasing frequency – make criminals out of them. A detailed story published by The Guardian of London points out that in 2010, police deployed in public schools issued roughly 300,000 “class C misdemeanor” citations to school children, most of them for trivial disruptive behavior, such as “inappropriate” dress and excessive use of perfume. Those infractions can result in fines, community service, or even time behind bars – and an arrest record that can ruin the student’s future educational and employment prospects. This is a splendid illustration of the “school-to-prison pipeline” in operation.

Although horrific mass shootings like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School are vanishingly rare, “lock-down” drills in which SWAT teams conduct training exercises involving hostage or terrorism scenarios are increasingly commonplace. Many of those “hostage rescue" drills are better described as hostage-taking exercises, since they are used as pretexts for warrantless searches of lockers and student property. 

Child-killer poses with Sandy Hook Survivors.

 Vista Grande High School in Casa Grande, Arizona, held a lock-down drug sweep on October 31. As had happened before in other schools across the country, the students were confined to their classrooms, then led in small groups to another room where they were forced to line up against a wall and be searched with the help of drug-sniffing dogs. 

This exercise introduced a new element: Among the four law enforcement agencies involved in the search was a group of prison guards employed by the Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest for-profit prison contractor.

Notes Caroline Isaacs of the Tucson office of the American Friends Service Committee: “To invite for-profit prison guards to conduct law enforcement actions in a high school is perhaps the most direct expression of the `schools-to-prison pipeline’ I’ve ever seen.” Clearly, the similarities between government-run schools and prisons are not limited to architecture. Posting National Guard troops around government indoctrination centers, as Boxer proposes, would destroy any residual pretense that there is a material distinction between "schools" and "prisons" in what is becoming an undisguised garrison state.

Like most contemporary liberals, Boxer is a passionate militarist who swaddles her enthusiasm for lethal force in rhetoric about compassion and equality. She can call for armed troops to patrol “gun-free” school zones without perceiving any contradiction, because she simply assumes that the rest of us exist only to serve the interests of the political class and its enforcement arm. It is their privilege to compel, and our duty to submit to whatever they choose to inflict upon us. This is what Boxer and her comrades have in mind when they invoke “national security.” 

 

Dum spiro, pugno!

Sandy Hook Massacre: Sympathy from the Devil

“They had their entire lives ahead of them -- birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own,” intoned the murderer of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki as he began the liturgy of official mourning for the victims of the Newtown massacre. 

Every time children die in an outbreak of violence, “I react not as a president, but as anybody else would as a parent,” continued the head of a regime that will not explain to Nasser al-Awlaki why his son Anwar and grandson Abdulrahman – both of the U.S. citizens – were murdered by presidential decree. 

“We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years,” insisted the official who has presided over dozens of lethal drone attacks in Pakistan and other countries with whom the U.S. is not formally at war. 

Tears welled up in Obama’s eyes as he pronounced the familiar, facile phrases of selective sympathy. After ordering that U.S. flags be flown at half-staff for a week, Obama said that he and his wife would hug their children a little closer tonight as he empathizes with the parents whose children were murdered in Newtown. 

It’s doubtful that he was moved to similar thoughts of vicarious bereavement as he contemplated the parents in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan who have been left childless because of his actions.

Shortly after the police had arrived at Sandy Hook Elementary School to offer the service they always provide in such circumstances – that is, drawing chalk outlines and stringing up crime-scene tape – Mr. Obama was informed of the massacre. The minion who conveyed that news to the Child Killer-in-Chief was National Security Adviser John Brennan, who is the official Keeper of the “Kill List” – the roster of people, including U.S. citizens, who have been targeted for summary execution by a secretive executive branch committee. 

Last April, in response to modest but growing public outrage over the Obama Regime’s use of killer drones, Brennan gave an opaque and self-congratulatory speech insisting that the program was legal because those who preside over it consider it to be. 

Killing distant, unarmed people by way of robot-delivered missiles is “legal, ethical, and wise,” he declared. The targeted execution of individuals deemed to be terrorists –without the benefit of trial or any simulacrum of due process – is the result of careful “deliberation,” and conducted in a way that discriminates between combatants and bystanders.

This must mean that Barack Obama and the people who are sufficiently foolish and depraved to obey his orders intended to kill 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki while he was enjoying a backyard barbecue at the home of a family friend in Yemen. 

The Regime has never explained why it murdered that child, let alone apologized to the family for doing so. The closest it has come to an explanation was offered last September by former White House spokesliar (and campaign functionary) Robert Gibbs, who actually claimed that the teenager’s death was his own fault because he had somehow made a poor choice of fathers: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they’re truly concerned about the well-being of their children.”

By default, this is the Obama Regime’s official rationale for murdering an innocent 16-year-old U.S. citizen. How does the logic – such as it is – of Gibbs’s answer differ from whatever rationale drove a maniac to open fire on a kindergarten class in Connecticut? Assuming that the shooter was deranged, he at least had the excuse of insanity. 

Obama, Brennan, Gibbs and their allies, by way of contrast, all profess to be entirely sane. The same is true of Time magazine contributor – and prominent Obama supporter – Joe Klein. Late in the last campaign Klein used an MSNBC panel discussion to offer a stout defense of Obama’s drone strikes, even as he admitted that innocent bystanders – including 4-year-olds – are frequently killed by them. The only concern, Klein insisted, was the possibility that the power to conduct remote killings may find itself in the hands of someone less enlightened than Obama.

For the Obama Regime, child-killing is an instrument of policy. This was made clear in a recent story reported by the Military Times describing how U.S. troops in Afghanistan, fearful over the actions of a group of young men nearby called in an airstrike that killed all of the suspected guerillas – only to find out later that three of them were children, aged 8, 10, and 12. The families of the dead children said that they had been gathering dried animal leavings, which are used as fuel.

The International Security Assistance Force in Kabul issued a statement acknowledging that the airstrike “accidentally killed three innocent Afghan children.” That statement prompted Army Lt. Col. Marion Carrington to tell the Military Times that the children may not have been innocent.

According to Carrington, whose unit is training Afghan police, “In addition to looking for military-age males, [we are] looking for children with potential hostile intent.” Since hostility is the natural, and entirely commendable, reaction to foreign occupiers, Carrington is saying that any Afghan child with sufficient awareness to resent the occupation is a legitimate military target.

What Adam Lanza did once in a fit of murderous irrationality, the Regime over which Obama presides does practically every day – and the killing is carried out by people who act with clear-eyed, clinical indifference to the suffering they inflict. 

Admittedly, that comparison is unfair, since Lanza didn’t have the means to carry out an Obama-style “double-tap” strike: It is the established practice of the CIA to follow up a drone-launched missile attack with a second volley intended to target first responders. In Pakistan, this procedure has resulted in a ratio of fifty innocent victims for every “suspected militant” taken out in a drone strike.

The killer who slaughtered the innocent at Sandy Hook is dead. The Child-Killing Apparatus over which Obama presides continues merrily along. Americans understandably shaken and saddened to the depth of their souls by the horrors in Newtown should consider this: The government that impudently presumes to rule us has made Sandy Hook-style massacres routine for residents of Pakistan. 

Requiescat in pace, filii carissimi