08/13/13 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome back to the thingamajig here.
It's my radio show, it's the Scott Worden Show.
That's me.
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I keep all my interview archives there, more than 2,900 of them now going back to 2003.
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Alright, next up is our good friend Will Gregg.
His website is called Pro Libertate.
Yeah, that's Latin.
Pro Libertate, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Boy, wouldn't that be nice.
Welcome back to the show.
Will, how you doing, man?
Scott, it's always a pleasure.
Thank you so much for having me on your program.
Yeah, I'm very happy to have you here.
And you know, you're also the author of a book called Liberty in Eclipse, which I really hope that people will read.
And I also hope that they will go to Listen and Think Audio.
It's not quite out yet, I don't guess, but very soon they'll be able to get the audio book of Liberty in Eclipse from listenandthinkaudio.com.
Very generous sponsors of this show.
Good old Derek Sheriff.
And so anyway, yeah, I like the way you write, and I like imagining other people out there reading what you write, because it means that their brains will be better afterwards kind of a thing.
I appreciate that.
I really do, Scott.
Absolutely.
Well, you deserve it.
So, tell me, who is Rita Hutchins?
We've talked about her before, but you know, I think there's probably some people who aren't familiar.
Rita Hutchins is an otherwise completely undistinguished 57-year-old woman from Sandpoint, Idaho, who, as it happens, is a world-renowned quilt artist.
She's somebody who is very big within that subculture.
And within the last two or three years, she's become, in my opinion, one of the most tragic figures in the northern part of the lovely state I live in, my home state of Idaho, because she came to the attention of the local outpost of the state.
She was beaten up on the front yard of her property in November of 2011 by a police officer who, with the help of her comrades, confected some reason to justify handcuffing Rita and abducting her at gunpoint.
This wasn't a legitimate arrest.
What had happened is that Rita, at the time, rented property, and she had a tenant who was a deadbeat.
She arranged to evict the tenant.
The day before the eviction went through, the tenant had been arrested on warrants.
When Rita went by following the arrest to see if the house was okay and if she could begin the process of cleaning it up and restoring it, there was a police officer speaking with the tenant, and so Rita did not want to get involved in that controversy.
She left.
She came back about 20 minutes later, and the conversation was still going on.
The tenant accused Rita of stalking or harassing her.
The police officer followed Rita to her home.
You could say that the police officer actually stalked Rita.
The police officer informed Rita that she wanted to talk with her.
It was a female cop by the name of Teresa Heberer who had stalked Rita to her house, and Rita said, I'm not interested in talking to you.
We have nothing to discuss.
She turned to go inside of her house, and because the police officer didn't have a valid warrant, didn't have probable cause that a crime had actually occurred, and wasn't making a traffic stop, there was no reason for the police officer to inflict herself on Rita any further.
Instead, she assaulted Rita.
She injured her badly enough to require medical attention, called in her supervisor, contrived an obstruction charge to justify the arrest.
That charge was thrown out six months later by a judge who ruled, as any rational and honest person would, that the police officer had no right, no authority to do what was done to Rita.
That means that what happened was an aggravated assault.
Rita filed a damage claim with the city, demanding that she be compensated for her injury and for the medical expenses incurred thereby.
The city government has a management system which is, I think, unusual.
It might be unique, at least in that part of the state, in that the prosecutor's office actually presides over risk management decisions, which is an obvious conflict of interest, because often you'll have a prosecutor who will be implicated in injury, unlawful injury, tortious injury, to a citizen, and so the prosecutor's office turned down this damage claim.
Rita replied by filing a notice that she intended to sue the city and maybe the county government.
She was researching her arrest in August of last year, almost exactly a year ago, when she found herself being harassed by many people, including the city prosecutor, and she got upset over the way she was being treated, and she said that she would come back the following day with a witness, and so she left the building.
Now, that's a very important part of the story, because she was de-escalating the confrontation.
She was walking away.
She was retreating from a further confrontation.
When she left the room, a deputy city clerk, by the name of Melissa Ward, claimed that Rita had thrown a ballpoint pen at her.
Rita denies that allegation.
There's no record in the audio file that I have that I've embedded in the essay that I've written about this subject.
There's no evidence that Melissa suffered an injury.
She was giggling when she said that Rita had thrown a pen at her.
Immediately after this happened, the city prosecutor said, well, should we prosecute her?
So within a few days, or a week or so at the most, Rita was informed that she was the subject of an investigation for criminal battery, because the ballpoint pen she had allegedly thrown had supposedly ricocheted off a desktop and hit the deputy clerk in the arm.
The deputy clerk herself did not file a criminal complaint.
She's not a victim of record.
What happens is that a Bonner County Sheriff's deputy filed a police report, and on that basis, the county prosecutor's office, in the person of Shane L. Greenbank, who's now the chief deputy prosecutor for Bonner County, began the process of prosecuting Rita for criminal battery.
This began about October of last year.
Rita was arraigned, and she was given contradictory instructions as to when she should appear for another pretrial hearing.
She didn't appear at one of the dates for the pretrial hearing, and quite frankly, she was of the opinion that this was a completely illegitimate exercise of being with, it manifestly was.
In April of this year, she was arrested at midnight in her home in Sandpoint by three police officers.
Bear in mind, this is a woman who stands five foot one inches tall.
She weighs something less than 110 pounds.
She's 57 years old.
There's no criminal history on the part of Rita Hutchins, at least before this entire mess began.
I think you might find that there are trivial traffic citations or violations in her record.
She's never hurt a living soul.
She's not a violent person by disposition or inclination.
They sent three police officers at midnight on April 15th, they actually entered the house on April 16th, the morning of April 16th, kicking in the door and dragging her half-clothed off of the couch in her living room.
And in the course of doing so, they conducted an illegal search, and they found what they're describing as drug paraphernalia, meaning a pipe.
Nobody saw her smoke it.
None of the officers made the familiar claim that his spidey sense had detected that she was actually involved in consuming marijuana.
Police officers say they have nearly miraculous olfactory senses.
They can always smell marijuana.
Some of them claim they can smell it when they're operating a motor vehicle heading in the opposite direction from somebody who supposedly is smoking marijuana within a closed vehicle.
I've seen cases of that sort.
None of these officers made that claim.
They simply say that they found drug paraphernalia.
So that's resulted in another charge.
But this happened as the result of a bench warrant issued by a judge by the name of Don Swanstrom, who's no longer a judge in the state of Idaho and might not have been a judge at the time he issued that bench warrant.
We're still trying to clear up whether or not he was actually in service.
He'd actually retired about 11 years ago.
He was considered a reserve judge, and as far as I can tell, he may not have been a judge when he issued this bench warrant.
In any case, under recent Supreme Court precedent here in the state of Idaho, state Supreme Court precedent dictates that you do not issue a day or night warrant for a minor violation or for missing a hearing.
If you're going to deliver a warrant after the sun goes down in this state, it has to be for a felony.
There have to be exigent circumstances involved.
You have to be dealing with somebody who's committing a crime of violence, just somebody who is a flight risk and has a serious offense that's been charged against that person.
This is simply, of course, an exercise in gratuitous cruelty and harassment.
And after she was arrested on April 16th, for the second time, Shane Greenbank filed a motion that she be compelled to undergo a psychological evaluation and this once again is an exercise in cruelty and vindictiveness.
She's never displayed any indicia that she is mentally ill.
What Mr. Greenbank was saying on the basis of what expertise he did not specify is that she displayed strange affects and symptoms of mental illness and that she might not be competent to aid in her own defense.
And so for this supposed reason, he was requiring that she undergo a mental evaluation.
She wasn't inclined to do so.
She's not required to do so.
She has been dealing with one's Fifth Amendment immunity, protection, if you will.
It's not immunity, actually, unfortunately.
The Fifth Amendment guarantees apply to people who do not want to be psychologically evaluated in the context of this sort.
So she ended up being hit with contempt of court charge and had to get bailed out at some considerable expense to herself.
By the way, she's been left impoverished by this as one might expect.
She was temporarily homeless.
She was in the living environment.
Her business has been ruined because these charges have been publicized in the local press, which like every newspaper, acts as a stenographer's office for the local police department prosecutor's office.
After these charges have been publicized, there has been a campaign by people attached to the city government to defame and vilify her in, among other things, the comments section of the Bonaire County Daily B newspaper.
She's been charged with a crime of sexual assault and a murder of a child and a drug dealing android.
And over the course of the last several months, she's faced once again the prospect of being sent to jail indefinitely on a contempt charge unless she relented and allowed herself to be psychologically evaluated, which happened about a week ago.
And the psychologist spoke with her about 10 minutes and said, she's obviously of sound mind.
She's not incompetent in any sense.
So a couple of days later, the charge was withdrawn by Shane L. Greenbank in a remarkably snotty document that, among other things, reiterates the claim that she's mentally ill.
Think of this guy as a prosecutor.
He's not a mental health professional.
A qualified credentialed mental health professional has ruled that she is psychologically sound.
And yet, in the closing paragraphs of this document, Mr. Greenbank says once again, obviously, she's mentally ill.
It's a tragedy that the evaluation and we've done everything we can to minimize the danger that she presents to the community.
And he withdrew the charge because the charge was manifestly bogus to begin with.
But on top of that, the very key part of this document is the phrase, and I'm going to quote it specifically if I can find it.
It's actually toward the end of my essay.
The title of my essay is Punishment Has Been Achieved.
Here's the final paragraph, that document, the dismissal, the petition for dismissal of the charge.
While it is unfortunate that the psychological evaluation did not result in some treatment recommendation that may benefit the defendant and by extension the public, the state has done all it is able to do in order to minimize further risk to the public.
And it acknowledges that Hutchins has spent many more days in jail than she would have if she had actually been convicted of this offense.
And so punishment for this offense and his objective was to inflict punishment.
It was not to determine in an adversarial proceeding whether there was an actual crime here that would warrant punishment.
And the objective of the municipal clique and that part of the Bonner County government that has been involved in the official persecution of Rita Hutchins has been to punish her because she had the temerity to complain after being beaten up on her property by a police officer who was not sanctioned by the city and the county with a lawsuit in order to seek redress for the injury that had been inflicted on her.
By tying her up for a year, it has been a year, in this entirely spurious legal proceeding they have arranged affairs in such a way that she's not been able to pursue her lawsuit.
She's been left almost penniless and as I mentioned she was homeless at least temporarily.
And now she's in a situation where the collateral charge of a drug paraphernalia offense is going to be used to tie her up even further.
Mr. Greenbank, the deputy county prosecutor who filed for the dismissal of the charge having to do with criminal battery has offered a plea deal that could result in her spending a year in jail for supposed possession of what they characterize as an item of drug paraphernalia.
And the really interesting part of this element of the story, Scott, is that the judge who was originally tapped to preside over the paraphernalia charge is a woman by the name of Laurie Muhlenberg who prosecuted the obstruction charge against Rita.
She was appointed a magistrate judge in the interim and she was also the official in the Sandpoint City Prosecutors Office who turned down the damage claim that Rita had filed with the city having to do with being beaten up by Teresa Heberer.
She was the one who turned down the damage claim.
She was the one who tried to put Rita in prison for supposedly obstructing an illegal arrest and now she had been scheduled to be the judge of the paraphernalia charge.
I don't know whether she's recused herself or if that's an abeyance while they're trying to figure out whether they can extort some kind of a preemptive capitulation from Rita, some kind of a plea deal.
I don't know.
But that's how things have been arranged.
There's a certain incestuous tidiness about this arrangement that one finds in dystopian literature or in some of the parodies that we see about the proverbial inbred small-town sheriff's office where the sheriff is also the prosecutor, he's also the judge, and so forth.
They're not the same individual in this specific case, but they might as well be because they have colluded with seamless and, I think, palpably corrupt efficiency to deprive this poor woman of any semblance of due process.
And this is happening in a town of about 6,000 or 7,000 people in northern Idaho, which is a resort community.
There are a lot of people who are living there.
Perhaps that has something to do with the nature of the city government and its local law enforcement bodies.
They figure that as long as they're dealing with people who are just coming through and not staying, that they can prey upon them.
That happens in places like Tanaha, Texas and other places where they have these notorious highway robbery gangs that forfeit cars and money in the name of narcotics enforcement.
I don't know that they're running because these tiny resort towns are absolutely horrible in terms of the way that their so-called justice system works, precisely because they know that they're dealing with transient potential victims.
In this case, she's lived there for a quarter of a century.
She moved to northern Idaho from New York because she had the expectation, happens to have been misplaced, unfortunately, that she would be left alone if she moved to northern Idaho and simply set about making her quilts and enjoying professional and hobby-based association with the people that she was living with.
Once again, it really gives an illustration of the fact that there is no government that is too small to destroy your life, to immiserate you, incarcerate you, and annihilate you if you resist.
I'm sorry, I know this is stupid, but James Madison said that we're setting this thing up so that ambition can be made to check ambition.
Somewhere, there's some Tommy Lee Jones-type prosecutor who's going to make his way in the world by nailing this guy Greenbank to the wall upside down.
What an attractive and winsome idea that is.
You know, there's another case that's unfolding right now in Utah where you have a prosecutor who's actually trying to behave that way somewhat conscientiously.
His name is Sim Gill.
He's the Salt Lake County prosecutor in Utah.
Just within the last few days, he's delivered a report on the, I would call it, murder, the police homicide of a 21-year-old woman named Danielle Willard.
She was shot in the parking lot of an apartment complex in West Valley City last November.
And she had gone to Utah to seek rehabilitation for a drug addiction problem.
A few days before the shooting, she'd actually contacted the police and informed them that she was worried about people breaking into her home who were probably involved in a local narcotics trade.
She'd been harassed and assaulted by these people.
So she made the mistake of calling the police herself.
A couple of days later, she's in the parking lot and two detectives from a now disbanded narcotics investigative unit approached her car.
And the story they say is that, the story they told, rather, is that she was supposedly conducting a narcotics transaction in the parking lot.
When they approached her, she tried to flee and in doing so, they put their lives at risk and so they had no choice but to shoot her to use legal force.
Sim Gill has ruled that the shooting was not justified and he's contemplating criminal charges against the detectives who shot Daniel Willard.
As I mentioned, their narcotics investigative unit has been disbanded.
About 120 cases that they had developed have been thrown out because of pervasive corruption within the unit, including such things as the wrongful labeling of evidence and apparently, perjurious reports that were filed by, among other people, Sean Cowley, who's the lead officer who was involved in the shooting.
So they've done away with the unit.
Investigations and the scrutiny of the West Valley Police Department have shown that it is a stygian pit of corruption as is pretty much every police department in this country.
But Sim Gill is the district attorney who is required to investigate this matter.
He's delivered a 60-page report that's very comprehensive.
He spent months after months interviewing dozens of people.
He reviewed 3,800 pages of documents and he said, this is not a good shooting so chances are we're going to have to prosecute the officers.
Within hours, the machinery of conformity in Utah, which is one of the most conformist states in the union, it is one of the most authoritarian subpopulations in this country, Utah in terms of the deference to constituted authority, started to attack Sim Gill.
Among other people, Chad Benion, who's the head of the Republican committee, the county committee there in Salt Lake County, has accused him of being a cop hater and then he suggested that the problem with Sim Gill is that he's not truly an American because he was born and raised in India and that has, in Mr. Benion's term, tainted him in terms of his ability to review the use of force by police officers.
When asked about this and confronted about it, Mr. Benion said that he stood by that characterization.
You see, the problem is, according to Mr. Benion, that Sim Gill witnessed police abuse in India and that had a formative impact on the way that he views police and their conduct and the way that they treat people as if this were a problem.
You see, Sim Gill, apparently, is somebody who might have a chance, notwithstanding the fact that he's a prosecutor, at passing what I call the Tom Jode test.
People might recall in The Grapes of Wrath, both the book and the movie, Tom Jode had that famous soliloquy that, among other things, said whenever there are two cops beat, not a guy, I'll be there.
In other words, he's empathizing with this victim of officially sanctioned violence.
And my Tom Jode test consists of the question, if you see a police officer using violence against an individual, with whom do you instinctively sympathize?
If you're an American, you sympathize with the person who's on the receiving end of government force.
It doesn't matter whether you come from India or whether you were born in Salt Lake City or Salt Lake County, Utah.
You really should empathize with the guy who's on the receiving end of state force and force the government official to justify what he's doing.
Now, Sengil passed that test.
Chad Benion, like too many other people in Utah, quite frankly, like too many people in Idaho or elsewhere in the United States, sympathized with the state functionary who's either wearing a government-issued costume or carrying costume jewelry, as in the case of these undercover narcotics detectives.
They sympathized with the people who were using lethal force on behalf of the government.
Now, he's, as far as I can tell, well, there might be two or three other examples, but he's the first prosecutor I've seen in the state of Utah, anyway, who's actually critically examined the use of force by police and found it to be wanting, found their excuses, the justifications and rationales to be wanting.
And so he might meet your description, Scott, of your Tommy Lee Jones-style attorney, official attorney, government attorney, prosecutor, who's trying to apply the law even-handedly, and that's the type of reaction that he's provoked in Salt Lake County and Utah in general.
And, by the way, what I mean by that, real quick, about Tommy Lee Jones is there's some movie where he's a prosecutor and he's God's gift to the entire planet Earth and there's nobody who could tell him what to do or what not to do if he wanted to nail the president to the wall he would because he's Tommy Lee freaking Jones.
That's what I mean.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And that's exactly how these guys are to anybody, all of them, except the one you're talking about, to everyone who's not a government employee.
That's exactly right.
There is this assumption that we are the whom rather than the who in the equation.
You know, Lenin famously said that the chief question of politics is who does what to whom.
And we're living under a Leninist system right now, not necessarily in terms of the officially stated ideology, but in terms of the way the power is exercised.
The people who are part of the ruling clique and their corporate allies, the pertinences, they are the who.
The rest of us are the whom.
And a really good example of that, of course, would be what's been done to Bradley Manning because Bradley Manning actually had the presence of mind and the moral sensibility to be trying to interdict war crimes or at least to hold people responsible for committing atrocities under the color of supposed authority.
And he's in a system now where it's just assumed that your first, in fact, your only moral duty is obedience to constituted superiors, to constituted authority.
And so, because he reported war crimes, he faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison, unlike people who've actually carried out war crimes in Iraq, many of whom have been given not only the advantage of due process in every conceivable, reasonable doubt, unreasonable doubt, but have seen their sentences dismissed because of supposed procedural errors or just because they were faithful executors of the executive or faithful instruments of the executive will.
And that mentality really precipitates to every level of government within what I consider to be a pretty much vertically integrated system of oppression here in this country.
It's the same attitude on the part of most local police officers that you saw in that collateral murder video where somebody who was one of the Apache helicopter crew is talking about how eager he was to see one of his wounded victims reach for a gun to justify shooting him.
You could actually hear him lust and ache to shoot that man and just begging that man as if he could hear him to give him a reason that would justify killing him.
And you see that same disposition on behalf of police officers today.
It used to be as imperfectly attuned as our system was to the principles inscribed in the Bill of Rights, it used to be the police at least were trained to de-escalate, to stand down where necessary to restrain themselves with the objective of leaving the scene without taking somebody into custody if that was not necessary in order to enforce the law.
I have a problem with the idea of government law enforcement generically, but at least there was an understanding until about a generation ago that if you did not need to, you should not take somebody into custody.
Today, police officers are trained to see any tremor of potential resistance or reluctance to submit as justification for the use of overwhelming force.
We see that all the time in instances involving among other things the use of tasers against not only teenagers, but young children.
And that's an attitude that has been diligently cultivated for a generation or two.
There was a fascinating observation made way back in 1995 just after the Oklahoma City bombing by a professor of terrorism negotiation at the University of Texas, Dallas by the name of Tony Cooper.
And what he said is that he saw what he called the formation of a curious crusading mentality among certain law enforcement agencies to stamp out what they see as a threat to government generally.
It's an exaggerated concern that they are facing a nationwide conspiracy and that somehow this will get out of control unless it is stamped out at a very early stage.
Right.
That's what Antonio Biller was saying earlier.
We're all insurgents, basically.
Exactly.
Well, he had on 60 Minutes this pay-into-counterinsurgency-warfare as a model for militarized police operations in Massachusetts and elsewhere.
Right.
You know, there was even a story about how when they came home from Vietnam the Marines taught the LAPD how to use counterinsurgency against the blacks south of the 10.
Exactly.
And then they forgot.
And so they had to go back to the LAPD to get counterinsurgency training before the surge into Afghanistan.
Yep.
Hey, tell me this real quick.
I'm sorry to interrupt you.
We've got 15 seconds.
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Will Grigg, you are awesome.
Thank you so much for your time on the show.
Thank you so much, Scott.
You take care.
Everybody, that is the heroic William Norman Grigg, author of Liberty in Eclipse, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Donate!
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