Greetings & Good Hello. Those who find this page are probably not surprised to know that I finally sassed up the wrong people and now face a little state-sponsored retribution. You probably also suspect that there is a little more to the story, and, I hope, expect daubs of color amidst the cinder blocks and corrugated tin. All in due time.
My present circumstance is pre-trial detention in the Eastern District of North Carolina – previously Onslow county, J-Block and currently in the “Fed-pod” in Columbus county. I have learned a great deal about the American legal system, law enforcement, and the penological arts in these 9 months of detention and I do believe that our great nation has succeeded in producing the societal equivalent of the fast-food french fry. The American legal system has all the appearance of substance yet leaves one starving and in desperate need of judicial nutrition.
If your first response to the above was “I bet they all say that” then you would be right – we do, almost to a fault, all bitch about the inequity of “the system”. I cannot think of a fellow inmate who has anything to say other than “If my lawyer only gave a damn!” or “why does it feel like my lawyer works for the prosecution?”. Oddly, I have not heard a single person say “I am innocent” – not a single one. The question of guilt or innocence, which pre-occupies the court and society, is never found. Instead, what I hear is questions about reasonable and appropriate, about police integrity (which is quite suspect), and I see some major groupings of cases – the gangland drugs, the townie stupids, and other. I am other.
It is in this context that a system has evolved to rapidly process highly stereotypical cases. In this evolved system the court is partitioned in two, the criminal and the righteous, with the court serving the role of officiating the proceedings and dispensing punishment. In this system two collaborating case attorneys agree on a resolution to a case, clear it with the judge, and the attorney assigned to the criminal negotiates with the criminal to get their signature on the appropriate documents to accept the determined sentence. For most drug cases and townie stupidity this is fast and efficient.
For example: Citizen X was caught violating their lifetime Walmart ban by carrying 4 bottles of “pre-purchased” cough syrup out the door of the store, something they routinely do. The arresting officer processes the case quickly, the court-appointed defense attorney calls the prosecutor and they have a few words that sound a lot like “Again?” and “Yup.” and “Rehab?” and “6 months?” and it is a done deal.
But what happens when the efforts to rapidly pigeonhole a case go wrong?
This is when you realize that the engine of justice has become so fast and efficient it can no longer function outside of highly patterned crimes with clear delineations of the criminal and the righteous. For example, what about cases of homicide during rape or other cases of self defense? Worse, what happens when those pigeonhole efforts lead to mistakes by the righteous, which then need to be covered up – making the righteous into criminals? It turns out that the best the American legal system can do in these cases is maddeningly insufficient.
What perhaps has been the most eye-opening is the complete fallacy of the concept of “representation”. Conventional wisdom holds that a defendant is represented by an attorney and that attorney advocates for their client. Nothing could be further from the truth. First off, the defendant is not necessary at all; once the attorney has been assigned or attached to the client, the client effectively has no further say in their case. The attorney now “impersonates” the defendant and can speak as the defendant, pursuing the attorney’s interests with no regard for the client – unless, of course, the client fires the attorney. But here is the rub – how can the client find out what the attorney is doing?
For example, if the attorney is filing documents to the court and speaking as the defendant, the client has to somehow get access to those documents in order to find out what the client has, in effect, been saying. In my case, a friend found docket entries via the PACER system and my family sent them to me. The sheriff, however, refused to let me receive those documents on the grounds that my attorney, and not my family, should send me public court documents. My attorney refused to send me the documents as that was “out of scope” for the engagement – talking to the client is not, strictly speaking, required. Thus, I could not find out out what I had been saying to the court, so I wrote to the court myself.
It turns out that defendants should not address the court directly – that is considered a sign of mental defect. Courts prefer that appointed counsel address the court, specifically because that maintains the fiction of “representation” and does not reveal the ugly truth.
The only way for a defendant to have any input in their defense is to “go pro-se”, which means representing yourself. This can be the only way to get access to information, however, in so doing you become immediately liable for 100% of the procedural knowledge of a skilled and experienced officer of the court. These are your options: 0% or 100%.
You can forget the idea of an attorney and client working together to seek justice – that is for TV. The client is warehoused, in ignorance and largely unnecessary, until justice is performed upon them. I am graciously allowed 6 hours per month (1.5 hrs/week) to visit my attorney. I am unique in that I use all of that – I anticipate 30 hrs to make a decision, or 5 months, but the court grants me 1 month. The court does not believe there is a 6 hour limit, since that would be illegal. The effect is to apply pressure for me to “accept a plea” which includes, shall we say, “untrue statements” and covers over misdeeds by the state.
If this seems strange, I would mention a former Block-mate, T, who has been confined to a single room for 7 years for exactly this reason. He has been fighting for one thing – for his attorney, his own defense attorney, to support getting “self-defense” added to the possible defenses (an “affirmative defense”) in a homicide case. For seven years his attorney has chosen to back the prosecution – in this small, North Carolina community – and this choice appears to be solely to protect police “oopsies”. Now, signing a “time served” plea would let him out, but would also hide all of the police misconduct.
In my case the situation is not so dramatic, but it is similar. The government misconduct I don’t want covered up were threats to send my daughter to a concentration camp following an anti-immigration program spouted by Stephen Miller again recently, as well as death threats made against me personally by U.S. Marshals, torture at Bladen county detention center, and forced under- and over-dosing of medications due to medical mismanagement within the detention system. There are, of course, additional insults and abuses – all in due time. One of the plea conditions for me is to block all freedom of information act requests I have outstanding.
The key to the plea agreement is that it maintains the conviction rate of the prosecutors while avoiding a costly trial, which always has a chance of a not-guilty verdict. To its credit, the plea deal, presumably is where you could have a reasonable discussion of the complex context of human behavior before being forced into the simple bivalence of guilty/not-guilty verdict. I originally had great hope for the plea deal – but that is until I found out that I had no voice and that defense attorneys more or less work for the court and prosecutor first, and for the defendant only in so far as the defendant serves the court. Considerations such as the defendant’s interests, concerns, goals, priorities – these are never particularly relevant – because they have no place in the simplistic universe of a court which views the universe in simple guilt = T/F terms.
From the time I was detained, it took over six months to get a “plea offer” from the government. During that time I was begging my attorney to stop meeting with the prosecutor until after talking to me and my attorney was telling the court I was asking for more time. It took 6 months for me to see the first paperwork about my case, and a total of 8 months before anyone asked me a single question about the events. I was then told I was delaying the court and was expected to make a decision on the plea quickly. By my count, in almost 9 months of detention, I have had less than 8 hours of discussion about my case, I still have the same list of unanswered questions about the plea I have had for a month, and I have no access to resources to help, save a weekly 1.5 hr phone call where we make pitifully slow progress due largely to my counsel’s refusal to follow my organizational outline, but also due to the severe communication bottleneck imposed by the United States Marshals – the same federal service that threatened my life.
The funny part about my situation is that I actually think my lawyer – this one – is doing an ok job. My first counsel quit and was ultimately investigated by the state Bar for being ethically compromised. That cost me 7 months of detention and put me in an odd position with my case – and this new attorney is actually doing ok. However, that does not change the fact that his allegiance is only partly to me, we only have 1.5 hrs/wk, and I desperately need a second attorney to act as a fiduciary agent for all the other facets of my detention – focused life, such as dealing with outlaw sheriffs in backwoods Carolina, killer Marshals, dysfunctional medical facilities, or even just getting mail – and not to mention resolving tax issues, expatriation issues, performing investigatory functions, and otherwise doing the lawyer stuff you see on TV.
That’s right, since detained I have not yet been able to obtain or access a single piece of evidence – despite talking about asserted evidence till I’m blue in the face. For instance, in 2020 I was trapped in the United States due to COVID. During that time this guy cyberstalked me and my name kept getting added to Republican campaign websites he managed via the Nation Builder platform. I tried to get a restraining order against him and ultimately I got into a fracas with one of his employers, hence the charges. Now, the government’s evidence conveniently omits any reference to my efforts to get the restraining order and I think it is relevant.
The American legal system is such that it has taken from May 25th until Feb 7th for me to get my first attorney recognition of the existence of the effort to get the restraining order – although I have been writing about it since July (I was busy being tortured in June). There has been no vehicle by which I could talk to my attorney about the events so that something like “my effort to get a restraining order” would even come up, let alone be relevant. When you have conversations on the order of 1hr every 3 weeks, or 1.5hr/week, and there is a lot of “court overhead” it is simply hard to find the time to say “but what about my side of the story?” – In fact, the only way I was able to get that in play was to prepare for trial.
Let’s review – after over 8 months, and on my 2nd attorney, only by basically rejecting the first plea offer and saying “let’s prepare for trial” was the first time, at all, anyone asked me to comment on the events which brought us to this situation – and then only with obvious distaste.
Let’s put this in a little context to fully appreciate what “going to trial” means, especially if you expect a guilty verdict. When the judge determines your sentence, the judge automatically penalizes you if you go to trial. They do this because trials cost the court time and money. The penalty is generally by “interpreting the guidelines” harshly rather than leniently, where “the guidelines” map a set of points to a suggested range of months of punishment. If you “take a plea” you lose three points, for “accepting responsibility” but if you go to trial you gain two points for “obstructing justice”, for a total five point swing. This is a 6-9 month difference, or, for me, with two charges, up to one to one and a half years.
In other words, I have to be prepared to risk one and a half years in prison, after 8 months, just to get my attorney in the right frame of mind to ask me “so what happened?” – and finally to hear, notice, and understand why I wouldn’t shut up about some restraining order bullshit. If you recall, at the beginning of this post, I talked about the speed and efficiency of the modern court system. My first attorney exemplifies that approach – he had analyzed, pigeonholed, and resolved the case before the wire transfer cleared. I was not needed in any way at all and his goal was to manage me into a “plea posture” on behalf of the prosecutor. To a very large extent my current counsel is doing the same.
This is how our system really works – it is not about defendants and prosecutors, it is about defense counsel managing defense product for prosecutors and working together for the glory of the court. The prosecutor and defense counsel, as officers of the court, strive to keep the defendants silent and isolated – and to keep the fiction of an adversarial process alive in the public record. Upon inspection there is no record of the gross miscarriage of justice perpetrated daily in every single American court room.
Television dramas like Law & Order or false court reality TV dilute the image of what really constitutes court. Even a casual observation of real court preserves the illusion – only by engaging it, as a defendant, do you really appreciate how horrifically outlandish this system has become. I truly believe that a defendant has the right to have a voice in their defense, they have the right to counsel – that is to be counseled. The current system of impersonation and replacement, of subjugation and warehousing, is blatantly inappropriate. Worse, it is sustained by the weaponization of court procedure and the ability of prosecutors to lie with impunity.
This was brought home to me in the case of my detention hearing. Held on May 30th I was largely medically incapacitated for the proceeding. My attorney, court appointed, had met with me for about 15 minutes and the court was recommending that I be released on bond. The judge instructed me to stay silent, and in my incapacitated state and knowing I would have a 2nd shot at the detention hearing I felt that was ok.
However, as the proceeding continued and the prosecutor mounted lie after lie I grew nervous and madly scribbled objections on notes and passed them to my attorney as best I could. He got some, but not all. I lost, detention was ordered.
Once in detention, my first attorney worked to keep me isolated and uninformed. This was accomplished by ignoring requests for information, ignoring instructions, arranging ambush-style meetings, and other forms of subtle deception. Concurrently, the Onslow county sheriff’s department, largely through institutional dysfunction and poor policy implementation, managed to block independent access to case related information. Consequently, it was not until November that I fully appreciated the depth of the lies in the detention hearing. This solidified my suspicion that my first attorney had fought my pursuit of pretrial release primarily out of personal convenience and a desire to have control over my information intake – only with solid control could he steer me into a “plea posture” and support the prosecutor and court.
At the time, my father began chemotherapy, my daughter began a new career, my wife was hospitalized, my mother in law entered intensive care, and I lost contact with my business, farms, and career – all of which I could have continued to manage under house arrest. The simple desire by my first attorney to have a convenient means of steering me towards a plea posture for a case he had already resolved in his head seems to be the motivation for a vast destruction in my life and the lives of my family and my community. This is typical of American attorney/client relations as I have come to understand them. This is not “as seen on TV”.
This does not fit the morality play of the guilty vs. the righteous, played merely to sustain the plasticine glory of the court. Perhaps it is fitting that my attorney was the Bar’s liaison to the federal bench, or some such office holder.
From the outside, anyone inspecting the court record would see no trace of the 350 pages of documentation I had produced begging and pleading for my first attorney to pursue actions other than what he was doing. There is no record of the family struggling as a whole against the attorney, nor the lies and deceptions perpetuated by the attorney. Instead, the outside observer would only see me speaking “by and through counsel”, requesting more time from the court – time apparently waiting for the government to act. There would be no indication of torture, discord, or taser-enforced medical overdosing. There would be no hint of the struggle to try to get the pretrial release hearing redone so as to stabilize a family whose principal elders were in and out of intensive care and support hospitalization on two continents. The court calls this “clarity of record” – because it dispenses with the messy reality of the human condition. I believe this is the truth behind the blindfold worn by the lady justice – it symbolizes the court’s desire not to behold the horror for which it is responsible.
So where and when will it end? That is hard to say exactly – the end is drawing near. As my current attorney has threatened, “the court has ways to get where it needs to go” – which, as near as I can tell is victory of the righteous over the guilty, with a lip-service veneer, dutifully maintained by the custodians of the clear court record – maintaining an illusion of an adversarial process between the state and the accused. As long as we don’t look to closely, all is well.
Eric Charles Welton
Prisoner #94911
Columbus County Detention Center
February 15, 2024