I guess I'll tell my story here. It was either here or on the civil rights lawyer thread.
On April 22, I was on business that took me through a town I rarely go through but where I have a couple of old friends. One of them, who I hadn't talked to in three years and works as a probation officer, lost their aunt a couple of weeks earlier, so I dropped off a sympathy card at the front desk of the courthouse and asked if it could be passed along to them. I'd done something similar six months earlier for their co-worker and they thanked me and welcomed me to stop again.
Three weeks later, police showed up at my door and told me I was under arrest for stalking and harassment.
Before the preliminary hearing, the DA gave us a deal to drop the stalking and drop everything else to disorderly conduct, which we didn't take because we didn't think leaving a sympathy card could be construed as an attempt to create a disturbance.
At the preliminary hearing, the probation officer and her co-worker refuted everything they gave in their police report. However, the magistrate, who apparently knew the primary complaintant before she started working at the courthouse, didn't recuse himself and passed the case on to the Court of Common Pleas anyway.
It wasn't the first conflict of interest in this case. The arresting officer's fiancee went to school with the probation officer. The magistrate that signed the arrest warrant was friends with her mother since they were kids. The magistrate that held the prearraignment was the complaintant's internship advisor.
Then, on top of that, not just the judge but the president judge decided to preside over the case. He'd worked with her since April 20222. Normally, a judge recuses themselves from a case involving someone they know that well. He didn't.
My lawyer and I thought we had a very solid motion to get the case dismissed on about a half-dozen reasons, but the likely partisan judge would decide the motions and anything at a jury trial and even my attorney said he was surprised he was keeping the case. He also tried to accommodate the probation officer, who lied about not being able to testify again at the pretrial hearing in person by asking if she could just testify over the phone. Weird.
The DA came back with a deal to cut the stalking and reduce all the harassment to disorderly conduct, and make two of those summary offenses. Then they told us the 3 1/2 days I had to make the decision was down to 12 hours because the complaintant needed to know whether or not she'd have to be at the pretrial hearing.
I talked to my attorney as much as I could and decided to take the plea deal for probation rather than risk a trial that could give me 10 years in jail -- yes, 10 years in jail for a card saying "I'm sorry about your aunt. She was really nice. Your family was lucky to have her" -- and try to go through non-partisan agencies to sue for false arrest and defamation, since all of the conditions for stalking and harassment were eliminated by the complaintants' prior testimony.
I talked to a defamation lawyer that's won cases against these people today. He said I was write, but I don't have a case. First, I don't have a case because I took a plea deal. Second, I don't have a case because you can't sue a judge or a prosecutor, even if they are acting corruptly. Third, I'd have to pursue a case for malicious prosecution against the police and the probation officers, and he said winning that is very rare -- even if I went to trial and won, I probably wouldn't win a judgment for that.
Basically, he said I was right, I had legitimate damages, but the system isn't set up to protect people from something like this, so I just needed to move on. He said he wouldn't even go to the press with my story because I'd probably get into more trouble for doing that.
I had no record, but I lost my job just because I was accused of this. Then the complaintants basically said they made it all up, and I had no way to recover anything because our system protects judges, prosecutors, cops and anyone else in the judiciary from everything. I had no way to protect myself or to recover damages.
We have a president-elect who tried to overthrow the government and broke numerous laws and it's OK, but a normal person is at the mercy of the whims of the system. Yeah, hard for me to see how our country is the greatest in much of anything.
P.S. The probation officer that first said she couldn't be at the pretrial hearing and then said she had to know by the following morning whether she had to be there that cut into my time to evaluate my options, then showed up at the pretrial hearing when she didn't have to be there. The judge had her introduce her fiance, who had nothing to do with the case, to the court. Yeah, this would have been fair.
