05/31/13 – Ian Freeman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Wharton.
My website is ScottWharton.org.
You can find my full show archives there, although there's a glitch in them.
But anyway.
And also you can find my interviews, more than 2,800 of them now, going back to 2003 there, at ScottWharton.org.
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All right, first guest today is our friend Ian Freeman.
Host of Free Talk Live, co-host of Free Talk Live, and keeper of the Liberty Radio Network, which I'm still on.
Right, Ian?
Hey, welcome back to the show.
Yes, you are.
And it's good to be back.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And, man, I hate this story, dude.
This is terrible.
There's, well, you tell the story.
Who's Rich Paul?
Rich Paul is a friend of mine, and he is facing 81 years in prison.
How many years?
81.
For the dastardly crime of selling a plant that grows naturally in the earth, as well as selling something that they claim he was purporting as LSD, but despite not actually presenting any evidence that he was claiming that it was LSD, the jury convicted him of that, too.
So, it's a nasty situation that Paul could have taken a plea deal on and gotten zero death, but he didn't want a felony charge on his record, because he's an open carrier.
He really loves the, you know, the freedom to carry a firearm, and he wanted to really go all this thing and possibly get a jury nullification of this, because he's, you know, and I agree with him, he thinks the war on drugs needs to end, and was hoping this jury would be the first jury to kick this back in the state's face.
Unfortunately, juries tend to be very obedient to the state, and they found him guilty.
So, we're still awaiting sentencing in this matter, which should be coming up on the 7th of June.
Okay, so he has not been sentenced to 81 years.
He just faces up to 71 years, or 81 years.
Yeah, he's facing a max of 81 years.
Okay, so lots to go over here.
First of all, how was it that he came to be entrapped by this undercover cop and is selling him some weed?
He couldn't tell that it was an undercover cop?
Or it was one of his friends betrayed him under threat of a worse sentence, or what?
Yeah, it was an informant.
This is kind of an interesting detail to the story.
Basically, the state went after Rich Paul.
They used a heroin dealer to go after a weed dealer.
I mean, that's basically what happened here.
A guy that was facing heroin dealing charges went and entrapped your buddy on a pot dealing charge.
Correct.
Yeah, they used him.
They got five charges.
Four of them was for pot.
One of them was for reported LSD.
So they basically set this heroin dealer free to go back into the streets.
And, you know, I think drug prohibition needs to end, so I think heroin should be legalized, too.
But it just shows you the priorities of the police in this case.
That they were willing to turn loose a heroin dealer, a low-life scumbag, to go after Rich Paul.
And one of the reasons why they did that is the FBI got involved in this case.
And when they arrested Rich, the FBI agent told Rich that he could get off the charges if he would wear a wire into the Keene Activist Center and basically do the bidding of the FBI, which the bidding of the FBI in this case would have been to set up other Free State Project participants and activists and get them arrested, too.
Rich Paul refused that deal.
And when he was able to get away from them and, you know, kind of get out on bail or whatever, he came back and informed us of what had happened.
Do you know how the rat picked out Rich to target?
Was he directed toward the Free State Movement in the first place, the heroin dealer?
The rat was just one of Rich's clients.
So Rich was selling, you know, admittedly was a weed dealer.
I mean, he came right out during the trial and admitted that.
So he was trying to get this nullified.
So this guy was Richie DuPont, Jr.
He was one of the customers of Rich Paul, and at some point he got himself busted for selling heroin.
And so, you know, he was buying like quarter pounds of weed, things like that, from Rich.
So basically, you know, they popped him and he rolled and turned over Rich.
And then they got, once they got their hands on Rich, they said, hey, man, we can try to use this to disrupt this political movement we don't like.
Yeah, and I have a feeling that that was their intention from the get-go.
They were looking to take, they're looking to, you know, to make the Free State Project look bad.
They're looking to take down activists in the Free State Project.
And that's because, as has been pointed out previously by other people who are not friends of the Free State Project, people like State Representative Cynthia Chase, people like the N.H. Labor movement, these people have said within the last six months things that basically, I mean, just to paraphrase, that the Free State Project or the Free Staters are the single greatest threat to the state.
That's what one state representative said.
And she's saying that, and she's accurate, and it's a wonderful compliment, and I appreciate that.
And they're saying that even at about 5% of the movers, and as you may know, Scott, the Free State Project's goal is to move 20,000 liberty-oriented people who are willing to be active for freedom.
And that can mean a lot of things.
It can mean running for political office.
It can mean civil disobedience.
It can mean creating media like you do and I do.
It can mean outreach.
It can mean all kinds of things.
So bringing 20,000 activists together to the same place.
We've only got about 1,100 that are here now, and there are over 14,000 that are going to come.
We're still trying to get to that 20,000 number.
So we're still in the early moving stage here.
I mean, this isn't, the project hasn't really even hit in any way of significance.
We're at 5% of the movers, and they're already calling us the single greatest threat to the state.
So as you might imagine, the state people are pretty threatened by the fact that the Free State Project exists, and they want to do whatever they can to marginalize it and make it look bad.
But ultimately, we've got the best activists, period, and more activists are coming here.
And if you love liberty, there really is nowhere else you really should be besides New Hampshire.
All right, now, so he was offered a plea deal where he could have avoided most of the jail time.
Anyway, he would have just done a little bit of time, and he decided, no, I want to go ahead and take a stand, give the jury the opportunity to strike down this law, basically.
That's pretty brave or nutty.
He's a brave guy.
I mean, he actually was offered zero days in jail.
It was going to be zero days in jail with a felony condition, and he probably would have ended up with some probation or something like that.
But, yeah, he turned that down in the hopes of taking this in front of a jury and finding some jurors with some humanity left inside them.
But unfortunately, on the way out of the trial after convicting him, I confronted the jurors and asked them why they didn't want to make history today, and one of them said, we didn't want to break the law, which showed that they either did not understand the jury nullification instructions or they were too afraid to actually implement them.
So that was a real disappointment.
But juries have continued to be a real disappointment in general when it comes to jury trials and things like that.
They're just so obedient to the state, it's disgusting.
But people continue to throw that out there and to try it, and here in New Hampshire, we actually, thanks to the Free State Project participants who have actually been elected, I know that's a shock, right, libertarians being elected, but thanks to the Free State Project people who have gotten elected, we actually have the jury nullification law here in New Hampshire, which doesn't exist in any of the other 49 states that I know of, that actually enshrines the defendant's right to discuss jury nullification with the jury.
In this case, the judge refused to read the jury nullification instructions during the jury instructions, and that's one of the points that Rich Paul...
Wait, wait, wait, slow down, slow down, slow down.
Very important point, but step back one.
Explain to people about what jury nullification means, because when you say that, I think anarchy, and not the fun kind, but like arson fires and chaos and minorities rising up.
That sounds very dangerous.
Thanks for asking.
You're right.
I presume that people knew what I was talking about.
So jury nullification is where a juror, and this could be you if you're on a jury, have the right to vote your conscience.
So you vote not guilty if you think the law itself is bad.
It doesn't matter how much evidence there is that the person broke the law.
So in this case, Rich Paul was admitting to having sold cannabis.
He was caught red-handed doing that.
But if I were on a jury, I would have found him not guilty because the law is wrong, and that's the point of jury nullification and the point of reaching out to jurors about this.
And you can do this in a lot of places.
You can inform jurors about jury nullification, but only outside of a trial.
You can't, if you're a defendant in most states, mention jury nullification.
You cannot talk about the idea of jury nullification during a trial.
If you bring up jury nullification in a lot of courtrooms around the country, you may end up being held in contempt.
So the system is very afraid of jury nullification because it puts power back in the hands of the juror, and they don't want that.
So that's why New Hampshire was one of the best places to go, and there's actually 101 reasons to move to New Hampshire at freestateproject.org.
But we actually have jury nullification as it's written into the law here that people in court are able to use that as defense.
But it's still brand new.
The law went into effect last year.
So unfortunately, not all the judges are really on board with this, and this particular judge did not read appropriate jury nullification instructions and instead gave the jury kind of the standard, I'm the judge, and what I say goes kind of instructions, and they followed his instructions.
So in other words, he told them what a judge would have told them in any of the other states, which is if you find, jury, that the facts are what the prosecution says they are, I'm telling you that amounts to a violation of the law.
And so if you agree with the facts of the case, then you must convict, whereas you're telling me in any state of the union, a juror could simply refuse to go along with that.
He better not call it nullification.
But any juror could really refuse to go along with that in any state of the union.
But in New Hampshire, the judge is bound by law to instruct the jury, unless you don't think the law ought to apply in this case, in which case, go ahead and acquit him, because that's the new law in New Hampshire, again, like back in the 1790s.
You are correct.
In fact, earlier this year there was a case, I think his name was Doug.
Oh, God, I don't remember his last name.
But anyway, there was a case about a Rastafarian guy who was growing weed in New Hampshire, and they busted him for it.
And he went to trial, and his whole position was jury nullification as well.
Hey, you know, this is my religion.
I have a right to do this.
You know, find me not guilty.
And in that case, he was found not guilty by the full jury.
And the interesting detail to that is that not only were they able to read, not only did the judge read excellent jury instructions in that particular case, and those same instructions were submitted in Rich Paul's case, but the judge ignored them, but in the first case with the weed-growing guy, that there was actually a Free State Project participant who happened to end up on the jury in that case.
And she really did a great job of, you know, swaying these other jurors to nullify the verdict.
So it really shows how one person in a key position can really change things.
And, you know, we hear there are so many stories where you hear some innocent person persecuted, and the jury ends up going along on some compromise charge, right?
Like the most famous case would be the Branch Davidians, where it was 10 to 2 to acquit them all of murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
And then two people on the jury were such cop lovers, they just could not get their head around it.
No way.
You've got to compromise.
You've got to convict them of something.
And so then they convicted them of using a firearm in the commission of the felony that they just acquitted them for, and the judge ended up sentencing them as though they'd been convicted of the felony anyway.
But anyway, the point being that one or two jurors can really make a difference in favor of the prosecution when everybody else knows better.
They can browbeat them into convicting somebody of something, and the same is also true in the opposite, that a juror can not only just refuse by themselves, but can explain to the other jurors that, no, you don't have to go along with this bully.
Yeah, absolutely true.
And activists in New Hampshire for years have been doing jury notification outreach.
We've been standing out in front of the courthouses, for instance, or at least here in Cheshire County.
I can't speak for the rest of New Hampshire, but here in Cheshire County where I live, we've been out there every single jury selection, basically, and reaching out to jurors and informing them of this.
There's nothing quite like having a true liberty lover end up on a jury, and that's what happened in this case, and it made a huge difference.
And yet another example of the power of concentrating activists in one geographic area.
I mean the more activists you have in one geographic area, the more likely one of them is going to get picked for jury duty.
The more likely people are going to be getting elected.
And what I'd like to point out is that I was involved with the Libertarian Party for a number of years when I used to live down in Florida, and the Libertarian Party would only be able to dream about the amount of political success that the Free State Project has had in the last five years.
The Libertarian Party hasn't been able to elect hardly anyone in 40 years, but the Free State Project has successfully elected liberty-minded people as both Republicans and Democrats to the state legislature.
That just doesn't happen anywhere else, and it doesn't happen anywhere else because there just aren't enough of us anywhere else.
And so that's why this concept is so important.
And you get people like Rich Paul who have balls of steel to stand up against 81 years in prison and take the charge all the way to the mat based on principle.
I mean you just don't find people like that anywhere else.
So I'm so proud to be involved with these wonderful folks, and hopefully Rich's appeal will be successful.
We're actually involved in a fundraiser right now trying to raise several thousand dollars to, you know, Rich, he can't afford it, to bring an appeals lawyer on board and appeal this, and appeal from what I understand based on the fact the judge didn't read the appropriatory instructions as well as a few other things.
And we're grateful that there's a matching contribution.
So anybody that gives to this, they will have their contribution matched up to several thousand dollars.
So if you want to help with that, you can go to richpaul.freetalklive.com.
Now that will just forward you to a Facebook event with the details.
That's richpaul.freetalklive.com.
And anything anyone can do to help out sure would be appreciated.
I know Rich would really appreciate it.
Yeah, man.
Well, hey, can you imagine?
By the way, how much weed did he sell?
And I guess it's the LSD charge.
You say it's bogus.
I'd like you to elaborate on that if you could, how badly they didn't prove that in court, the LSD thing.
But how much weed was it?
How are they getting away with anything like an 81-year sentence or up to 81-year sentence here, Ian?
Well, unfortunately, New Hampshire has not yet had any significant marijuana decriminalization.
Obviously, that's something that we'd like to change as part of the Free State Project.
We're working on it, but it hasn't happened yet.
And so these are felony sales charges.
He sold a couple quarter pounds and a couple ounces of weed.
And the LSD charge is a little more serious than the weed charge.
But even if it was just weed charges, he'd still be looking at dozens of years in prison.
The LSD was a purported LSD charge, meaning that the product that was sold that the state is claiming was represented to be LSD, but turned out when it was tested it was 2C-I, which at the time, and I don't believe it still is, but at the time it was a legal research chemical.
I believe it's been outlawed since then, but I could be wrong about that.
Anyway, it was legal at the time of the arrest.
When they tested it, they discovered it was 2C-I, and so they couldn't charge him with selling LSD.
So instead they charged him as selling purported LSD, in the same way that if I sold you a bag of oregano and called it weed, I'd still be guilty of selling purported weed, even though it wasn't the illegal product.
So the evidence that was presented, Rich Paul sold the product as acid, but never once referred to it as LSD.
And Rich's position was basically that, well, acid could be street slang for a variety of hallucinogenic substances, including 2C-I.
But unfortunately, the jury decided that that meant it was LSD, and convicted him of that one.
Well, so it wasn't just the informant's testimony.
He conceded that he had sold something and called it acid.
I mean, he didn't get up on the stand and testify.
I think he probably should have, but he did not.
There was just video footage of him cutting these deals.
They mic'd this kid up, and they put a camera on him, and they had all that stuff.
Unreal.
Over a war on pot.
It'd be hilarious if it wasn't your friend facing the rest of his life in a cage.
It's insane.
Until I think of another good question, tell us again about how people can donate to the effort to get this guy a good appeals lawyer.
We've got to get the money together ASAP, because sentencing is coming up on the 7th.
I don't have my computer in front of me right now, so I can't tell you what it's up to, but I know we were over, I think, like around $1,500 last night.
So we need to definitely crank that out, and we've been getting some media coverage, which has been great.
Vice.com has been covering this story.
So it's richpaul.freetalklive.com.
Now, that does forward to a Facebook page, but from what I understand, it is a public Facebook page.
So even if you don't have a Facebook account, that's okay.
You can still go and look at the information there, and there's links to how to contribute.
There's Bitcoin.
We'll take Bitcoin.
There's also, I believe, a standard kind of PayPal slash credit card option as well.
So once again, that's richpaul.freetalklive.com.
We want to help him appeal this thing.
And that could take, who knows, half a year or a year to actually get into court if it's accepted by the Supreme Court, which it should be because it's a criminal case.
But one of the other things you can do if you can't afford to send some money is to talk about the case.
Put one of the articles from vice.com up there on your Facebook page and share that out with folks or share the richpaul.freetalklive.com link with other folks so maybe some of your friends could help out.
And then alternatively, think about coming to New Hampshire.
We've got the Porcupine Freedom Festival.
We've got to get you up here one of these days, Scott.
The PorcFest is coming up here in just a few weeks.
It's June 17th through the 23rd.
It's going to be a week-long, basically it's a party in the woods with 1,000 liberty-loving people.
There's nothing quite like it in the liberty movement, and it's really become quite the premier event, not just for the Free State Project, but just for libertarian types who like to enjoy each other's company and socialize and network and have a lot of fun.
That's where I'll be, and my show will be broadcasting live, and I'm sure we could get you on if you were to come out.
Man, I sure would like to.
Right now, I'm going to see, basically priority one is to see if I can pay the rent at the house I'm living in.
But then after that, world travel is next stop on the list.
Yeah, I understand.
It is a blast, though, to be around 1,000 liberty-loving people on a campground and having a great time with folks.
There's nothing quite like it, and it really gives people a taste for what it's like to live in New Hampshire, where you can literally be around hundreds of other like-minded, liberty-oriented people.
Yeah, that's clever of you to do it in the summertime, too.
Yeah, well, actually, it still gets kind of cool at night, because we are up in the White Mountains.
We're in the northern part of New Hampshire, and it's really just an incredible view, but it's also an incredible group of people that's doing things that just aren't happening anywhere else in the liberty movement.
I know you live in Austin, and that's a pretty good liberty hotspot, but you're still in Texas, and there's 26 million people there.
Here in New Hampshire, we've got 1.5 million people, and that's one of the reasons why New Hampshire was chosen, because of the small population, the relatively small geographic area.
It's a lot easier to have an impact as a liberty-loving activist in a place where, number one, you have more activists, and number two, the population is fairly small, and three, you've got other things that are just automatic bonuses, like no state income tax, no state sales tax.
There's just so many different reasons.
The state legislature only gets paid $100 a year, not in total, but each individual legislature only makes $100 per year, and then there's a small mileage fee to get back and forth from the state house, and that really attracts a different kind of person to that role.
They don't have any secretaries.
They don't have an office.
They fill a locker, and that's it.
So it's a really different situation here.
New Hampshire's got Republicans who vote for gay marriage.
New Hampshire has Democrats who support gun rights.
So none of the standard politics really totally applies, as people might expect here.
Interesting place.
Once upon a time, I pledged that once it got to the magic number, I guess 5,000, that I would move out there.
So it remains a possibility.
You did?
I didn't realize you were a Free State Project participant.
Well, you know, it's been nine years or something was when I signed up for it.
Well, the magic number is approaching, and it's not 5,000.
It's 20,000.
So the original goal was to move 20,000 people here, and we're at over 14,000 today.
So probably within the next couple of years, we'll cross that 20,000 threshold.
Now, you're at 14,000 have signed up, or 14,000 have already moved there?
No, 14,000 have signed up.
The people who have moved amount to several hundred.
We're over 1,100 people that are already here in New Hampshire.
So we've only got about 5% of the goal of total movers, but we're over 70% of the way there as far as people signing up for it.
So we'll probably breach that 20,000 goal within the next couple of years.
And then there's a five-year window in which those 20,000 have to make the move.
So all of the things that have happened so far that have been so newsworthy up here, Scott, and recently we got international headlines with the Robin Hooding situation here in Keene.
I don't know if you heard about that one.
But, you know, we've been generating headlines in a way that the Libertarian Party can only dream of.
I mean, when's the last time the Libertarian Party was mentioned in the news anywhere, let alone getting international headlines for doing anything?
We do that here, and we don't really have much to say about the Libertarian Party here.
People are having success in the Republicans and Democrats.
There are some diehard Libertarian types.
I ran as a Libertarian recently for election.
But did you hear about the Robin Hooding thing?
I'm just curious.
No, but I'd be happy to hear about it if you could stay after the break, but we're coming up against it.
Yeah, sure.
Okay, great.
Well, it's Ian Freeman, the host of Free Talk Live and the keeper of the Liberty Radio Network at lrn.fm, and we're talking about the state of New Hampshire's persecution of his friend Rich Paul and their illegal denial of him, his right to have the jury instructed about the true nature of their power before they decided his fate.
And anyway, so we're going to talk about the Robin Hood thing, whatever that is.
Sounds fun.
Right on the other side of this here.
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Oh man, I'm late.
Sure hope I can make my flight.
Stand there!
Me?
I am standing here.
Come here!
Okay.
Hands up!
Turn around!
Whoa, easy.
Into the scanner!
Ooh, what's this in your pants?
Hey, slow down.
It's just my- Hold it right there.
Your wallet has tripped the metal detector.
What's this?
The Bill of R- That's right.
It's just a harmless stainless steel business card-sized copy of the Bill of Rights from SecurityEdition.com.
Thank you for exposing the TSA as a bunch of liberty-destroying goons who've never protected anyone from anything.
Sir, now give me back my wallet and get out of my way.
Got a plane to catch.
Have a nice day.
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