Greetings & Good Hello. Trepidation increases, mystery skews. Today ‘Fat Boy’ told me it was his baby’s 1st birthday – and that there had been an earthquake in Thailand. I had missed the news coverage about the earthquake, but I could still catch an interesting and helpful segment on how American families can avoid “clutter” by “sharing” “essentials”, such as skin care products. It must be something to think about if you are one of the half a million migrants grinding through the Darien gap – to realize that some day you too could divest your life of unnecessary clutter by sharing essential jars of moisturizers and exfoliants with your loved ones – provided you live that long. Go USA! I haven’t heard anything more about the earthquake – I hope my family is ok. There is no way to find out – and besides, the guards here would struggle to find land on a map, let alone Thailand. I gave Fat Boy half a hot pickle for his birthday meal – but I can’t really take the credit, I just now remembered he mentioned about the birthday.
Or did that happen earlier? Sometimes I don’t recall the sequence of things very well. It is a joke my wife and I share – we do not remember the years of events in our life very well – just roughly. We know some key dates, like our daughter’s birthday – and we can reason from there. But mostly things get muddled up. That, I think, is because we have a lot going on and there is very, very little consistency in our lives. Our lives are quite chaotic, strange and filled with extreme dynamism. For example, I have spent almost all of this year in jail! In 2020 I was stuck in the U.S. from May to October.
Quite seriously, this makes keeping track of events oft-times difficult. When it comes to my war regarding contact with the Republican Party – that stretched from mid 2020 through early 2022. This, by the way, is what AUSA Gregory Radics calls “quick” – which just astounds me. What also astounds me is how corrupt my own memory of events has been. It took me until late March to obtain a copy of a portion of the evidence I sought – the emails from one of my accounts. Note that, had I not been in detention I would have had this by last June, but, by virtue of being in detention it took until March for me to get this evidence. Moreover, I only got this evidence because the mail processing officer made a mistake while she was in a hurry and gave me this mail instead of another piece of mail. Thus, after almost a year, and quite by accident, I was able to begin to reconstruct the events of my charge.
What has leapt out at me more than anything is how quiescent the battle was during much of 2021 – until something happened around September. I do not know what – perhaps it was a lull in emails followed by a restarted campaign? Was it a political event? What is the event to which I was responding? This is not clear to me – but I think it is a reasonable question to ask.
I am comfortable taking responsibility for my actions, but first I would like to have a clear understanding of what those actions were. More importantly, I am not comfortable with the narrative being that I have an unreasonable reaction to “essentially junk mail” – which is what Radics asserts and which is asserted by both of my defense counsels. What bothers me is that no-one can defend the position other than by appeal to “a normal person wouldn’t behave like you did”. This, it turns out, is based on something very interesting – a special superpower known to lawyers. It also relates to another story on the news this morning.
The news story this morning was about California lawmakers working on legislation to require businesses to allow employees to ignore communications during non-work hours. This disconnect is perfect for the CCA! The confinement of communication to specific times and conditions is exactly the sort of boundaries that a consent-based approach to communication is set up to achieve. The first step is making consent part of the communication dialogue – is it ok to communicate? If not directly, are there alternatives or indirect or passive means of communication? Take the recipient’s interests, concerns, and disposition into account instead of assuming presumptive consent to penetrate every digital orifice – every exposed inbox or message queue.
While listening to the news story, by blood began to boil. My defense counsel’s sagely wisdom “why not just ignore the mail”, and variants thereof – why not [recipient process] – kept coming to mind. I agreed with the news story’s presentation of the hyper-connection fatigue, the sheer difficulty of adapting to all the changing and varied platforms. My lawyer barely knows how to manage a single email address and struggles with a phone – he is 10 years older than me and I am willing to bet he never set the clock on his VCR or microwave. This person has failed to help me reconstruct events in my case because he is still trying to “get the laptop” – he does not understand, and I have given up trying to explain to him, that I already got “the Sent folder” from “the Cloud” – he just does not understand why the emails are not “on the laptop” like they are on T.V. This person does not understand the need for laws like those in California. However – as a lawyer he is uniquely qualified, by the court, to determine what “normal” people do.
I am not joking about this. In law there is a concept that something, say whether an e-mail was threatening, is subjectively assessed if the subject perceives it as such. So far so good – a subject makes a subjective assessment. But here is where lawyers get stupid – they define something as objective if a “hypothetical normal person” would come to the same conclusion. This is where I say, yes, I understand the contrast, but I would distinctly not call that “objective” – I would call that “conventional” or some other descriptor. I would reserve “objective” for the case of mechanically reproducible results, empirically verified, subject to the systems of falsifiability. One is compelled to accept objective beliefs because the data so instructs, and one holds these beliefs with a certain quantified confidence.
Then again, we need to excuse lawyers – they confuse persuasion with proof.
In terms of communication law, however, lawyers now become extremely dangerous. A “normal person” to a 62 year old luddite who thinks a Digital Watch (TM) is a really neat idea and is only marginally connected, does not have the same physiological response profile to media as, say, a 20 year old who has never been without less than 1Gb/sec or augmented reality. Physiologically the child is not a “normal person” to the geezer. The standards of “empirical objectivity” bear this out, but the standards of “legal objectivity” do not. In fact, the standards of legal objectivity look to be adaptive at several orders of magnitude too slow of a rate to keep up with changes in the definition of normalcy – the physiologically, empirically objective definitions of normalcy – evolving due to technology. This makes the law a threat. I face this threat on April 10th.
In fact, I faced this threat on May 30th when Judge Regina Cannon included, in her decision to lock me up for a year pre-trial, her belief that I could not possibly keep in touch using e-mail and not use a phone. I must certainly use a phone extensively, therefore I must be lying about my phone use, because, as she said, she just couldn’t imagine it. I am still trying to get that transcript – it arrived at the facility a 7:00am April 2nd, 11 months after detention. The facility has not yet delivered it – tomorrow morning will be 48 hours. We shall see if the facility believes that court transcripts are worthy of the “favor” of delivery. Eventually I will get the transcript and I will have Judge Canon’s exact words.
On April 10th my defense counsel and the prosecution will stand against me in an effort to convince the court that I am mentally defective if I argue that a person can become hypersensitive to certain digital stimulation – the exact argument being made in California. Unfortunately, I have to make this argument solely using my wits and the knowledge brought to detention a year past. If the past is any guide I will not be fed and I will not be given my daily blood pressure medication – I will prepare for this by being chained in a cell and psychologically abused. From this diminished capacity I will stand alone, with all forces against me, including my own advocate, with my life on the line and be required to try to manipulate proceedings to make my argument in the context while being railroaded towards a guilty plea.
This is the reality of our legal system. it is not noble. It is currently not something of which we ought to be particularly proud – but it is the system we have and so we are best served by morphing it rather than trying some bold new grand experiment. This perhaps is why I champion the CCA – even though I disdain the courts.
Eric Charles Welton
Prisoner #94911
Columbus County Detention Center
April 3, 2024