The quality of the jury pool and lynch-mobbing a presumed-innocent person of color as a legitimate way to grieve in Oneonta, New York

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

In my previous article about the criminal case People v Terrence Truitt, started in Oneonta, NY, Otsego County, I mentioned the history of racial profiling in that predominantly white area in criminal cases, and posted one attack on me by a potential juror from the area who called me an asshole simply for mentioning that the defendant charged with arson (in a fire where a former firefighter John Heller died after he saved his 4 young nephews and his fiancée) is presumed innocent.

That is part of standard jury instructions usually given to potential jurors by the court, and that is a fundamental constitutional right.

But no.  Not in Oneonta, New York.  Not in Otsego County.

In Otsego County white men and women come to comment on posts made in local newspapers by all-white police and all-white prosecution in order to "grieve" and "mourn" the victim, and their mode of mourning and grieving is - lynch-mobbing a person of color picked by the police for a crime, and, yes, presumed innocent at the time.

Anybody who mentions presumption of innocence is:

• meddling;
• harassing people;
• deliberately hurting people - that is what I read in comment I was doing by mentioning Terrence Truitt's presumption of innocence

Go away, a@@hole.

You only have to pay taxes to support our local government, including racist police and prosecution, but you have no right to criticize them.

Many, many commentators tried to shoo me away from the thread where people were "grieving" by listing the ways they want the presumed-innocent colored man to die because he was already ruled guilty-by-news release.

Here are some of the comments - any criminal defense attorney worth his salt would have a galore reviewing these comments from potential jurors and likes and loves posted to those comments.

So, here is the perception of white people about the colored (and presumed-innocent) defendant Terrence Truitt charged with a crime of arson in a case where a former firefighter died - charged by local law enforcement that, by virtue of obvious conflict of interest (investigating circumstances of the death of "one of their own") should not have been allowed any place close to the investigation.

Here is my comment.

Here is the reaction to that comment of the potential jurors.

So, all these nice white people 

• want a person of color charged with a crime to die - because they are sure he is guilty, because the police said so in a press conference designed to inflame the jury pool; and
• are viciously attacking anybody who so much as mentioned the very basic concept of presumption of innocence, from their own Constitution.

Here are people who considered it necessary, in response to my "inappropriate" mentioning Terrence Truitt's presumption of innocence, to attack me (and my husband) personally:

And, many people tried to tell me to stop commenting about presumption of innocence and go away from the thread, and even "back to Russia", for various reasons:

One person - a FB friend of a FB friend, approached stalking me on Facebook as a result of my comment about presumption of innocence, quite seriously, to the point of asking to join my group "Independence of Human Rights Defenders" - but then lashing out at me in comments on the Daily Star thread, after I mentioned Otsego County's history of racial profiling:

So, this person presumes the truth in anything the police say to the media before trial - which is the reason why the police conducted the press-conferences, to firmly embed the presumption of guilt in the minds of potential jurors.

Remember, this person, Marshall Kruse, believes that to burn a man of color accused of a crime and presumed innocent is too easy a death for him:

Because I interfere with how people grieve and mourn (and lynch-mob a presumed-innocent man of color):

Only two other commentators out of many, many commentators on that thread mentioned presumption of innocence not in a derogatory fashion:

The comments demonstrate the chances of the accused to get a fair trial in this case in this area - or, possibly, anywhere else, since all this publicity is readily available from any place on this planet.

This area appears to be hopelessly racist - specifically because they consider it a legitimate way to grieve the loss of a loved one to invent ways how to kill in the most horrible manner and inflicting the most torture upon a presumed-innocent man of color before seeing any evidence against him in the court of law, and before any jury verdict.

I will address the contents, and impropriety of those contents, of the police video press-conference and the right of the accused to an open fair trial, in the next articles.

Stay tuned.

The New York prosecutor's lawsuit - a selective approach to infringments upon prosecutorial discretion. Part IX.

Last year, I have started a series of articles about the lawsuit by the New York District Attorney's Association (a nonprofit corporation) to nip in the bud the law that introduced a separate Commission for Prosecutorial Conduct, unanimously passed by both houses of the state Legislature and used by state lawmakers, and by the state Governor Cuomo, to get re-elected - and then stopped in December on the pretext that a lawsuit challenging the law was made.

Here is the text of the prosecutors' lawsuit.

As to other articles in the series, 

Part I can be read here.

Part II - here.

Part III - here.

Part IV - here.

Part V - here.

Part VI - here.

Part VII - here.

Part VIII is here.

In this part, Part IX, I will continue to analyze the prosecutors' lawsuit, and will touch upon a very interesting aspect of it, prosecutors' claim that the Commission on their conduct will supposedly encroach upon their exclusive discretion to charge or not to charge a crime, I wrote about it already in Part VI, from the point of view of prosecutors' indignation that they would be prevented from criminally charging whistleblowers against their own misconduct, but there is one more aspect to it.

I already covered in my previous articles the double standard of prosecutors in claiming that allegedly the existence of the Commission for Prosecutorial Conduct will violate the "bedrock principle of democracy", the separation of powers, because, by New York State Constitution, only the Chief Executive Officer of the State, the State Governor, has authority to remove prosecutors from office.

I already wrote that, despite that statement, prosecutors are happy with the current status-quo when not the executive branch (the Governor), but the judicial (in violation of that same bedrock principle of separation of powers) is authorized to discipline those same prosecutors and remove them from office by yanking their law licenses.  A double standard.

But, there is one more double standard here.

Contempt of court.

There is such an interesting relic, dating back to the 12th-century England, long before the U.S. emerged and long before the U.S. Constitution (that every judge and prosecutor are sworn to uphold) was adopted.

While prosecutors claim that their authority to charge or not charge, prosecute or not prosecute crimes is there exclusive authority, and attack the law that so much as allows a body investigating prosecutors' misconduct (that so far have racked up a giant number of wrongful convictions in the state of New York) to "encroach" upon that prosecutorial discretion - by giving immunity from prosecution to witnesses of prosecutorial misconduct.  Prosecutors are upset that the law has stripped them from their ability to retaliate against witnesses against them, by fabricating criminal proceedings against them.

But, they are, same as with the removal from office issue, absolutely ok to allow judges to charge people with contempt of court "committed in the judge's presence" - and to act as a complaining alleged victim, witness, prosecutor, jury and judge all in one in such cases.

No problem for the prosecution.

And, no problem for the prosecution that there exists a law in the State of New York allowing (supposedly) private parties, not at all any kind of prosecutors, to bring criminal and quasi-criminal ("civil contempt" which New York courts treat no differently than criminal contempt) charges of contempt of court BY MOTIONS within civil proceedings.

That is not, to those same prosecutors, an encroachment upon their "prosecutorial discretion".

I wonder, why the double standard?

Judiciary Law

Racial profiling and framing people of color by the all-white police force and the all-white prosecution in Otsego County continues? People v Terrence Truitt, Otsego County.

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


Imagine that people viciously attack you for a comment made online.

What would you think your comment should be to "invite" this particular attack?

That's about me.

You know what kind of comment actually triggered it?

This one.

My comment regarding presumption of innocence was made about comments of members of the potential jury pool in this case, members of the local community, about the defendant charged with arson that resulted in a death of a beloved local person, a white person, a former firefighter, who has saved his young nephews and his fiancée before perishing in the fire himself.

Charges were filed on the 31st of December, 2018, against this man who is, unmistakably, a person of color,

in a town and county with the all-white police force, all-white District Attorney's office, everybody in the local government intermarried and related to one another, and in a town and county with a long and disgusting history of racial profiling in criminal proceedings.

By the way, this is the picture posted by the police and prosecution of the defendant in the local newspaper:

The picture provided to the newspaper portrays the defendant as a white man with a tan.

The picture provided by the defendant's brother clearly shows that the defendant has African American or Middle Asian ancestry.

And, the GoFundMe Legal Defense Fund campaign filed on the Internet by the defendant's brother Timothy Truitt was DELETED by the GoFundMe site - so, GoFundMe allows fundraising of accusers like Christine Blasey Ford, but not of indigent people who are presumed innocent and charged with crimes.

Still, I was able to regain what Timothy Truitt published about his brother and about his case from the cached file.  Here it is:

That means that the defendant's brother:

• was not satisfied with the defense provided to Terrence Truitt by his assigned counsel James Hartmann, husband to a law clerk of a criminal court judge (Nancy Deming, law clerk to judge Gary Rosa, Delaware County), I will concentrate on the quality of James Hartmann's representation a little further;
• already found a private attorney to represent Terrence Truitt better, and that attorney asked for a $5,500 retainer - as shown by the fundraising goal, and
• in the first 6 hours of the fundraising campaign, 5 people donated $225 total, so the goal was doable, 

but somehow GoFundMe - probably, prompted by outrage of the "local community", because of the report of one Brad Hess,

and the demand to shut it down by Leah Hernandez, both white people:

deleted the fundraising campaign and denied the indigent defendant an opportunity to hire a proper attorney for his defense.

So, the mugshot was offered to the public as a tanned white-like man.

The mentioning of racial profiling,together with the fundraising campaign for the defendant of color, was deleted, at the request of a at least two local white people, a man and a woman, 

And that is happening in an area with a long history of racial profiling.

I have listed some of those racial profiling cases in the civil rights lawsuit I have filed on behalf of my now-former client Timothy Baron, the text is available here.

I have lived in the area from 1999 to 2015, for 16 years, and during all of those years I worked in a law office, first as a legal assistant to a criminal defense attorney, then as a criminal defense/civil rights attorney myself.

Upon my memory alone, there were several cases of racial profiling in Oneonta, NY.

• The parking garage case, when smaller black young males were attacked in the Oneonta parking garage by bigger white male students, the black males defended themselves and, as a result of their self-defense, one of the white attackers ended up with a sever brain damage.  The attackers were not charged, but the attacked were.  One pled guilty at the urging of his brainless assigned counsel, one (represented by my husband) had his indictment dismissed and not reinstated, and the other three, I believe, were acquitted by the jury;
• A case where a black law professor was grabbed just because he is black by the police who were looking for a "young black male", that was all to the description of the potential criminal;
• And another black professor was grabbed by police, Dr Ibram Rogers, because a student complained about alleged stalking by a "young black male", that was enough to grab any black male that the police put their tired (of drinking) eyes upon;
• A case where the City of Oneonta, the Otsego County and its police department was sued in federal court for detaining all black students of SUNY Oneonta - and even one black female who, the police thought, looked like a black male - because a white old lady complained that a black young male burglarized her.  That case as taught to me in law school - where the New York State Court of Claims, a white judge, Thomas J McNamara, actually found no problem with such racial profiling and dismissed the lawsuit (but for the woman who was arrested as a black man).

A year after I have filed this lawsuit, coincidentally or not, the Mayor, Dick Miller, one of the main defendants in the lawsuit, committed suicide.

Here is what he was accused of in the civil lawsuit by my client - with witnesses available of what Dick Miller said:

My client also provided information about Oneonta city officials denying people of color opportunities to own businesses and forcing businesses owned by people of color, at a loss, to white people, on contrived fabricated pretexts:

Here is how a racially profiled criminal case develops in Otsego County, New York:

As to the rampant police, prosecutorial, judicial and assigned defense attorney misconduct in this case (all white people, as well as the potential grand jury and jury pool will be), as well as the way potential jurors in Otsego County New York perceive the concept of presumption of evidence and choose ways to grieve, I will tell you in my next articles about the criminal case against Terrence Truitt.

Stay tuned.