On the value of reputation

Update: Terence Triutt has been released from prison as innocent, charges dropped.

This year, I have started the series of articles about the criminal case of Terrence Truitt, pending now in Otsego County, New York, see my previous blog articles about this case here and here.

A man of color is charged with arson that has ALLEGEDLY led to a death of a local former firefighter, a white man.

He was charged by an all-white police, and prosecuted by an all-white prosecution team, in front of all-white judges, and represented by a white attorney married to a white law clerk of a white judge.

In a city and area notorious for its racial bias and racial profiling in criminal cases.

Terence Truitt's reputation at this time - as well as his chances for a fair trial anywhere on this Globe - are destroyed by well-orchestrated pre-trial publicity.

Any mentioning that he is presumed innocent until and UNLESS found guilty by a fair jury of his peers meet with violent personal attacks from local people considering that the family and friends mourning the person who ALLEGEDLY died in a fire have a right to mourn by presuming guilt of whoever the police publicly points their collective fingers at.

My next blog is going to be dedicated to the bigger timeline of events in that same area, well documented, 

that may show that Terrence Truitt was no more than a fall guy carefully chosen by the police to cover up for the likely murder of the former local firefighter John Heller - for reasons having nothing to do with family feuds which is what insinuations at this time are about, that Terrence Truitt's brother Gavin lived with is girlfriend in the same building and was abusing his girlfriend (how the police jumped from that to the conclusion that Terrence Truitt set fire to the building with a lot of people, including his own brother, and for what motives, is still a mystery).

But, this blog I want to dedicate entirely to the value of reputation.

Those in power have valued their reputation from the time immemorial - above all else.

Innumerable people were tortured and executed in horrible ways because they dared to criticize authority - religious or secular.

Criticism of those in power was deemed, for millenia and centuries, heresy, treason, "seditious libel".

People who dared to do that, against all odds, were cast out of societies, cast out of churches (anathemized), and declared outlaws, which meant in earlier times that anybody had a right to kill them (or rob them of what they have) with impunity.

If you think that times have changed, democratic societies embedded freedom of speech, including and especially permission for members of those society to criticize their government officials, into their Constitutions and strictly enforce this principles, think again.

Let's take my favorite state of New York, the United States of America.

Every public official there, state and local, executive, legislative or judicial, is sworn to uphold and protect the U.S. Constitution and the New York State Constitution.

Both of these Constitutions contain guarantees of freedom of speech - and that includes, by implication, freedom of criticizing the government.

But, let's look how information criticizing the government, especially the people who can wreak the most havoc in people's lives - judges, prosecutors and the police - is made available to the people.

Or, not available.

Recently, the top New York State Court

(headed by a career prosecutor Janet DiFiore who was saved from criminal prosecution by her position as a criminal prosecutor herself, and her connections to NYS Governor Cuomo whose ass she has saved from federal prison - and who paid her and her husband with positions of super-power in return)

confirmed in a court case that the public does not have a right of access to evidence of police misconduct on Freedom of Information Requests, citing a state law.

That the state law she has cited is blatantly unconstitutional, being invented specifically to impair cross-examination/impeachment of police officers by criminal defense attorneys, and thus state law was meant to undermine federal constitutional confrontation rights under the 6th Amendment - did not bother Janet DiFiore, a former prosecutor, one bit.

So, as it is now, in New York, evidence of police misconduct is secret.

Because it is important for the government to keep their dirty secrets away from people.

And, even when such dirty secrets spill over into lawsuits when those same police officers, let's say, beat some women or try to run them down with cars - those cases are quickly shooed away, by settlements, or by corrupt judges like Otsego County Judge John F. Lambert who first

• reopened default of the former Delaware County Deputy Sheriff Derek Bowie, nephew to the then-DA's office investigator of many years in the lawsuit filed against him by Barbara O'Sullivan for trying to run her over with a police car to destroy evidence of his misconduct, the tablet she has held in her hand,
• reopened it on the idiotic claim that the same Sheriff's Department that served Derek Bowie, for money, with lawsuit papers, was not notified of the lawsuit against Derek Bowie in order to defend him in the lawsuit - which the Sheriff's Department did not need to do anyway because Bowie was sued for intentional misconduct only, and that conduct was within insurance exclusion of the County's liability policy; and
• dismissed it because Barbara O'Sullivan could not comply with discovery claimed by Derek Bowie's taxpayer-paid attorneys - why? - because her house was burned down (which she, her daughter, her unborn grandchild and 2 of 3 of their dogs narrowly escaped alive), and burned down likely by the same Derek Bowie, while the DA's office employing his uncle refused to investigate the vehicular assault of Bowie upon O'Sullivan, or the arson of O'Sullivan's house likely by Bowie, because it was busy prosecuting O'Sullivan on behalf of Bowie because Bowie was allegedly bitten by O'Sullivan's dog (who Bowie tasered) when Bowie came to O'Sullivan's house at night with a forged search warrant (to get that same tablet that he did not manage to smash and destroy the evidence of his misconduct during vehicular assault with police car on O'Sullivan).
• Judge Lambert dismissed the lawsuit of O'Sullivan against Bowie after Judge Lambert also dismissed the criminal case of DA's office employing Bowie's uncle against O'Sullivan, as based on a forged search warrant, after recognizing that testimony of Delhi Town Judge Gumo about issuing such a warrant was perjured because during the supposed issuance of the warrant Gumo was testifying about his misconduct before the Commission of Judicial Conduct and could not possibly sign the search warrant - his court clerk stamped his facsimile on it instead (that Judge Lambert did not admit in his order, but the clerk had to be ordered removed from the courtroom as a potential witness, while ardently trying to get there - knowing that she may be next).  Neither Judge Gumo, nor his clerk were charged criminally for forging (the clerk) and aiding and abetting in forging (Gumo) the search warrant.  My complaint to the Judicial Conduct Commission about Gumo, based on a COURT ORDER dismissing a criminal case based on his perjury, was tossed without anybody every contacting me or Barbara O'Sullivan about it.  Of course, how can a DA's office employing Bowie's uncle charge Gumo criminally for aiding and abetting in forging a search warrant giving Bowie power over his own victim - in arresting her and her daughter, tasing their dog, thus removing them from the house, and searching it for the tablet containing evidence of his misconduct?  The DA then became a criminal court judge, the "Honorable" Richard (Dick, which is a more appropriate name for him) Northrup, and the prosecuting Chief Assistant District Attorney John Hubbard, who is also up to his ears in this case, is now the DA in his boss's former place.

So, Judge John Lambert, the former prosecutor, made the lawsuit against Bowie to go away, and Bowie, while being quietly fired by the Delaware County Sheriff's department in 2016,

and despite two lawsuits of two look-alike women who he assaulted, see also here,

is employed as a valuable police officer some place else now.

So, thank you, Judge John F. Lambert, for helping the police keeping a violent predator on the police force, since he escaped unscathed, he will next time not just beat women up, break their ribs, traser them, put fire to their houses, taser their dogs and assault them with police vehicles, but kill them outright - with such massive support, at public expense, that has already allowed him to escape accountability, he can do nothing less to oblige impress his benefactors.

But, you will never be able to obtain evidence of misconduct of Derek Bowie through a Freedom of Information Law.

Only on Pacer.gov, materials of deposition.

Only in Delaware County Supreme Court (if they did not block the public from those materials, hide them and then destroy court materials of this case, as this particular court has a history of doing, at judges' request), when he was sued by Barbara O'Sullivan who he assaulted.

The same with judges - you won't ever have access to complaints against them, no matter how supported by verifiable documentation.

The same with prosecutors.

Yet, for judges and prosecutors, judges invented for themselves "absolute judicial/prosecutorial immunity for malicious and corrupt conduct" (!), so those lawsuits, without review on the merits, are tossed directly into the garbage bin.

So, there is, on the one hand, freedom of speech protected by the federal and state Constitutions.

On the other hand, the government, aware of the fact that reputation may be destroyed by saying several words about the person publicly - which can never be "unsaid" - devised ways to:

• pretend to create various "public bodies" (where the public is not allowed to directly participate), various "Commissions" on conduct of public officials:
• The useless Judicial Conduct Commission;
• The killed-by-its-father Moreland Commission - disbanded by New York Governor Cuomo when it started to investigate Cuomo and his buddies (the "fighter for human rights" Preet Bharara refused to prosecute him claiming everything is hunky-dory, and this presidential candidate did not commit any crimes in killing an ethics commission because it was reviewing his own ethics;
• The stillborn Prosecutorial Conduct Commission modeled on the useless Judicial Conduct Commission, see the series of my articles about it and the lawsuit interlinked in those articles, where prosecutors, among other things, are very worried about whether the Commission will upset their reputation with the public (a path to the ultimate goal, judgeships);
• The just-suggested Commission for Public Ethics, also to be modeled on the useless Judicial Conduct Commission.

At the same time, the government:

• made those proceedings, and the records of those proceedings, secret from the public;
• blocked the public from directly participating in these proceedings as a jury or grand jury, even when the issue is criminal behavior of public officials;
• populated those "public bodies" with public officials having irreconcilable conflicts of interest in investigating, prosecuting and adjudicating those cases, where, as in Judicial Conduct Commission, the overwhelming majority of the Commission is either judges or people whose livelihood depends on judges, attorneys;
• gave such Commissions insufficient budgets to investigate every complaint, so that they can explain away non-investigation of the absolute majority of complaints by lack of funds;
• blocked the public from having a right to appeal dismissals of meritorious complaints without investigation;
• invented immunities for government officials from civil lawsuits; and
• put criminal prosecution of such government officials into the hands of people whose livelihood and career depends on NOT filing those criminal charges, judicially licensed criminal prosecutors whose case often rests on suborning perjury from the police and on the judge (most often a former prosecutor) turning a blind eye to that misconduct.

Which brings me back to the issue of the value of reputation.

So, let's get it straight.

There is a constitutional guarantee of the freedom of speech, and criticism of the government - on the one hand.

On the other hand, the government has invented ways to block the flow of that information to the public, immunize government officials who engage in misconduct, and make it impossible for the public to obtain effective legal remedies against those government officials for such misconduct.

Yet, when reputation of a member of the public is involved (and, let's not forget that it is the members of the public that are also members of a public sovereign, employers of the government, and those who are, in their position of power, by the U.S. and State Constitutions, higher than the government, and not the other way around), a completely different thing happens.

• The person is first very publicly charged with a heinous crime;
• Information about it is immediately spread - by the government, by those same police officers who treasure their reputation and protect evidence of their misconduct by lobbied unconstitutional laws and clan connections - on the Internet, in a police press-conference then quoted by people as irrefutable evidence of the accused's guilt (over 70+ leads, imagine, the police excluded accidental causes for the fire, they found a can of fire accelerant - with Terrence Truitt's name on it?);

• The lynch mob is immediately in power demanding on the Internet that the accused must be slowly burnt, because the family of a person who died under suspicious circumstances wants somebody's, anybody's (preferably, a colored man's) blood as a part of their grieving process - and those who remind the public of his presumption of innocence should be tarred and feathered.

Why is it so?

Wasn't the right to an open TRIAL given TO THE ACCUSED, as a guarantee of the right to a FAIR trial?

And the public's "right to know" will be satisfied all right during and after that trial, not before?

Isn't pretrial publicity considered a form of police and prosecutorial misconduct?

Don't those same police officers, prosecutors and judges HIDE complaints of their own misconduct from the public - because they know, once a word besmirching a person's reputation gets out on the World Wide Web, the damage to the person's reputation cannot be undone?

So, if the "right to an open public trial" is turned by the government on its head and is turned to besmirching the accused's reputation BEFORE that public trial, and into destroying his presumption of innocence and his chance to get that open FAIR trial from an UNTAINTED jury pool - what is the remedy?

Shouldn't we at least equalize the reputational damage visited upon people accused of criminal conduct - whether they are members of the government or not?

Shouldn't we put down the secrecy/privacy walls of 

• police misconduct;
• prosecutorial misconduct;
• judicial misconduct

proceedings - just as police and prosecutors splurge the information about the accused long before that open public trial, so that any potential jurors who would be picked for the trial, would come well brainwashed by prosecutors?

And, shouldn't the police and prosecutors PROHIBITED, BY LAW, strictly enforceable by grand juries operated only by the public, without any input from prosecutors, to publicize charges, evidence and identity of the accused in the media, newspapers, Internet, press-conferences, to make sure than, when that OPEN PUBLIC TRIAL comes, the jury gets that evidence FOR THE FIRST TIME, not after it was discussed and speculated about by the media and people in the area for months before that trial even began?

As to the interesting timeline of events not included into police press-release on the Terrence Truitt's case, but that may be relevant to the case, my next article.

When people are corrupt and drunk with power, they do not hide their ends very well.

So, as to the interesting ends in People v Terrence Truitt that the local media is afraid to cover - 

Stay tuned.