This is What Happens when You Motivate a Pathologically Anxious and Depressed Person with the Only Force Greater Than His Dysthmia: FEAR
You could have been decent. Ideally, you could have let, er, sleeping drivers lie*2 (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/lie). Or, you could have woken him and told him to leave. OR, you could have said *NEXT* time, he's trespassing
You could have been decent. Ideally, you could have let, er, sleeping drivers lie*2 (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/lie). Or, you could have woken him and told him to leave. OR, you could have said *NEXT* time, he's trespassing. OR, you could have asked him if he needed medical attention. OR, you could have taken him to the station, voluntarily, to ascertain his fitness to drive. OR, you could have questioned him more thoroughly at the scene - and taken notes when he showed the first officer who ever found him sleeping on your campus (or was it the second time - there were SEVERAL) the prescription bottle that states drowsiness as a possible side effect.
Oh, but don't you worry about that this month. Due to an insurance transition hiccough that is still unresolved, one of my medications (fluoxetine, 100mg/day) ran out about a week and a half ago. So I'm not gonna be at risk for any drowsiness side effect. Can't even say for sure if it effected me that way - but I'm not a doc. All I know is that right now I am as far away from sleeping as I have EVER been. I am SPITZING, BLAZING, barely coherently HOT PISSED right now!!
http://www.helium.com/items/1476054-officer-christopher-osullivan-ex-post-facto-void-for-vagueness-self-advocacy-disability-rights
You could have taken several measures to not only ensure the public safety (okay, sure, and order) and at the same time respect the dignity of a guy who has never been in trouble with the law before but for a speeding ticket and, back when he was 17 (?), when he rear-ended another driver on the way TO SEE HIS OPTOMETRIST!!!
Yeah - I've had many of the mishaps and troubles of the geeky and socially inept clutz. I didn't realize that it was a crime to be "odd". I didn't realize it was a crime to be on the property of a PUBLIC community college (where personal safety is, is it not, likely higher) too dog-tired to just start his car and buzz off.
I didn't realize this. Officer number 5 (I think it was number 5 - you wouldn't let me see the records), who told me that "you know, these have been recorded as trespassing don't you?".
I stammered. I was short of breath. I was shocked and pissed and taken aback and scared and outraged and angry and confused and panicky all at once. You wanna see how that feels? No, you do not. Anyway, that was the first time I realized that I might get myself into trouble if I was found on campus asleep in my car after hours again.
So, I wasn't. BUT, wouldn't you know that, at about twenty after 9pm on the very next Friday, one Officer Christopher O'Sullivan just happened upon my car, among the many others in the parking lot at that time, and approached me with what is now a well-accounted incident. Basically, he was looking for me, it would seem, and rather than tell me that I was forbidden from the campus *period*, of which I was unaware, or believe me, I'd have been to a lawyer or judge or some advocate to press charges against YOUR department for this unjust infingement of my liberty and access to public resources, he chose to be confrontational and sarcastic and insulting.
Yes, even then, apparently, I maybe had the power to avoid arrest. I overheard the conversation O'Sullivan had with the desk/dispatcher - while he was searching my vehicle subsequent to my willful and cooperative consent (and of course resulting in nothing suspicious or incriminating except for the pillow in my back seat - as if that's a crime!) - and he indicated out loud over the radio that he was disposed to "let me go" with a summons to appear to answer for this idiocy.
I must have pissed him off when I answered his question truthfully (and very literally, as is my tendency and neurological pathology)) when he asked me, clearly becoming exasperated with me, if I'd rather discuss this with a judge.
I answered "well, yeah, if that's okay" or "yeah, actually, that'd be good" - or something equally, in hindsight, stupid. But my tone was calm, respectful, and yes, a little scared. But I honestly would have prefered to explain things to a judge (by definition, a scholar) and not a police officer (my general impression of this profession being that it is staffed with those who prefer action to thinking, and don't look kindly upon geeks and other wimps).
I don't like that kind of person. I just feel very uncomfortable around them, whether they are wearing a badge, a football helmet, army fatigues, mechanics overalls, or a hardhat. Yes, these are generalities and as such are not universal. But the feeling I get from a guy who grunts or smirks at my vocabulary, or takes one look at my short, long-haired bespectacled self and visibly - YES, VISIBLY!!! - reduces his respect for me on the spot, is one of familiar anxiety and social isolation the likes of which makes me wish I had beaten up on the jerks in high school who shoved me into lockers and laughed at me in gym class.
But, I'm not that kind of person.
I'm a wuss. I'm pathetic. I'm a victim unless I learn to once and for FREAKIN' all stand up for myself and say NO MORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hey, O'Sullivan: NO MORE!!!! Hey, Holland: NOOOOO MOOOOOOOOOOOORE!!!!!!!!!!
You are NOT going to scare me. Go ahead, file more bogus charges. I'll add that to my list of transgressions for which I fully intend to compel YOU to answer.
It is my intention to compel you to appear and answer to violations of the following statues, not all inclusive:
-Chapter 268: Section 6A.
-Chapter 268: Section 13B
-Chapter 265: Section 21 (you remember the ATM visit, Chris?)
-Chapter 263: Section 5 (how can I confront or question witnesses who remain where I am forbidden to go??)
There's more, but I don't wanna show my hand.
I am DONE being the victim. At this point, NO consequence could be worse than continuing to cower before bullies, and that includes the possibility of self-inflicted death depending on the outcome of my little court date on July 10th. But, in all honesty, the way my ears are burning and my arms and hands are shaking and my stomach is cramping and my head is pins and needles and my heart is roaring out of my chest right this very minute - and every time I think about this, I may not last until then. If life isn't fair - I am SO done with it. Whether the bullies haunt me from within, whether they are grunting at me as they toss the pig-skin, or whether they cower behind the badge that gives them an authority they clearly don't respect or deserve.
I'm DONE.
I am DONE!!!
I am *FUCKING* DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
To the Massasoit Police Department: *YOU'RE* not "getting it"!
Public notice to Officers Anne Holland and Christopher O'Sullivan et al, re: intent to file charges for false arrest, groundless, ex post facto no-trespass order, and denial of right to face accuser. These charges are not all-inclusive.
The above named parties leave me no choice but to pursue these, the only means of any hope for justice, and which, because the words that follow are truth and I, (John Doe), do hereby swear, solemnly and publically, to that effect, are protected by my First Amendment right under the United States Constitution.
Be it also noted that the details that follow are not complete, but even presented as such do provide for a reasonable conclusion that my Sixth Amendment rights have been violated, not least because, even as an executive action by a local law enforcement officer, the ambiguous and ex post facto No Trespass Order, and any finding or consequence of any defacto status or outcome (including "continued without a finding", which has resulted in a subsequent dismissal) should be held 'Void for Vagueness' and my record, although not damning or incriminating of me in the slightest, should nonetheless cease to have any traces of this offensive miscarriage of justice remaining.
Further: I profess that the very presumption of innocence, and, upon factual and legal confirmation of same, my co-requisite presumption of the right to the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness - which includes the retainment of all liberties and personal property (including monies illegally coerced and thus far unrefunded), and access to all public resources and property enjoyed by other law-abiding citizens.
The above-named parties are publically ordered to restore proper justice, and to surrender themselves to be held accountable for violating these laws, and the rightful liberties of (John Doe).
This should be done forthwith.
-
The following begins my editorial:
Don't we find ourselves sometimes stuck between two ill-desired courses of... ... I refuse to acknowledge and therefore overtly dismiss "fate", so how about "courses of... action"?
In this note, I am thinking out loud about two lousy choices: one is to continue to rant and write about this issue until people are sick of hearing about it. As a result of my public expositional accounting of this situation thus far, "Officer Christopher O'Sullivan" gets some 519 hits from a Google search. I Googled my own full name (oh, come on - who hasn't done this by now?), and it yields some 26,300! Granted, it probably has more to do with all the online writing I do, and no, it's not mostly about this dumbassery - not even close, but damned if that isn't higher than "Mike Fine" or "Bleeding Gums Murphy"! Hell, it's only 2,000 less than "George 'the animal' Steel", and almost ten thousand more than the phrase "calculating pi"!
What? It was fun! Gotta give myself SOME comic relief from all this ridiculous nonsense, don't I?
So, back to my choices, then. Obviously I could have seen what was behind door number 2 and tried my old standby - STANDING BY and waiting for justice to find ME!
I guess that makes Chris O'Sullivan, Anne Holland, and even Timothy Cruz's courtroom grunt my de facto teachers, as well as my (collective) judge, jury and executioner? Hell, they presumed as much authority by denying me my access to due process.
Yeah - this 37 year old career-paraprofessional, part-time piano teacher and wanna-be writer, who makes a gross annual income south of 30k, and bills that eat absolutely all of that up, and who has no savings whatsoever beyond his MTA/a.f.t./NEA retirement plan, is too well off for court-appointed counsel to help him fight this.
Oh, I tried to find representation on my own. Yeah - that wasn't TOO humiliating. When I was told by one attorney Elliot Savitz that I was "funny" when I replied to his first quote of a price for just the first court appearance - to plead not guilty or whatever - at something like $1,300 - "maybe less depending on the circumstances" - I told him that once you get into four-figures, it's all the same to me. It seems his exasperation with me grew exponentially after that, telling me "if (I) get out of" this thing, that I should be grateful. That's not a direct quote, but the message was the same - I was too nervous and legally inept to explain my situation to this man's satisfaction, and too poor for him to give me the time of day.
You wanna try it? See how small you feel as you click off your phone to lick your wounds because you were made to feel stupid for even getting into this situation, and like a loser for being of lesser-than-middle-class means.
It sucks. And it shouldn't be. I should have access to the means to find the truth and pound it into the heads of those who seem to want to just cover their ears and yell "La la la! I can't HEAR you!".
Well, like I said, cowering before my so-called fate has been my modus operandi for WAY too long, and I am DONE when it reaches the point of legal consequence. It seems a lousy choice to have to make in America. I know that sounds melodramtic or grandiose, that can't be helped. You try using any reference to our country without inflating the import of your words, artificially or not.
But, I am talking about lessons about which I thought I had an above-average understanding. Ha. I never thought myself some Clarence Darrow in lay clothes, but I surely thought that what I now understand to be pathologically literal thinking, would hold me in good stead to at LEAST be able to comply with the letter of the law!
It appears that we are not merely responsible for extra-normal command of the laws as is the necessary competence to avoid the wrath of "ignorantia juris non excusat" (ignorance of the law is no excuse", we are also expected to INFER how members of the executive branch will interpret it!
That in itself is daunting enough - and I dare say unconstitutional - given the absence of ANY curricular resources devoted to this mastery in k-12 education. What is worse, what is absolutely *scandalous*, is that no due diligence to any efforts of compulsory legal competence will EVER adequately prepare one to know how to combat a corrupt, spiteful, or just plain grumpy law enforcement officer (or the "system" or culture of his precinct, nor the "thin blue line") who, once he has made up his mind, has the power to usurp ANY guarentees of due process, or the so-called sacro-sanct "innocent until proven guilty" boast of American jurisprudence.
It is time for the "system" to keep that promise. I'm not talking about a hand-out or any impotent whines that I'm a soft-on-crime liberal. I'm talking about a system that must have as much respect for the law as it demands of the citizenry and we demand of ourselves and each other.
Otherwise, it's "just words". I think it's about time that lady liberty put up - 'cause I'm not about to shut up.
The above named parties leave me no choice but to pursue these, the only means of any hope for justice, and which, because the words that follow are truth and I, (John Doe), do hereby swear, solemnly and publically, to that effect, are protected by my First Amendment right under the United States Constitution.
Be it also noted that the details that follow are not complete, but even presented as such do provide for a reasonable conclusion that my Sixth Amendment rights have been violated, not least because, even as an executive action by a local law enforcement officer, the ambiguous and ex post facto No Trespass Order, and any finding or consequence of any defacto status or outcome (including "continued without a finding", which has resulted in a subsequent dismissal) should be held 'Void for Vagueness' and my record, although not damning or incriminating of me in the slightest, should nonetheless cease to have any traces of this offensive miscarriage of justice remaining.
Further: I profess that the very presumption of innocence, and, upon factual and legal confirmation of same, my co-requisite presumption of the right to the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness - which includes the retainment of all liberties and personal property (including monies illegally coerced and thus far unrefunded), and access to all public resources and property enjoyed by other law-abiding citizens.
The above-named parties are publically ordered to restore proper justice, and to surrender themselves to be held accountable for violating these laws, and the rightful liberties of (John Doe).
This should be done forthwith.
-
The following begins my editorial:
Don't we find ourselves sometimes stuck between two ill-desired courses of... ... I refuse to acknowledge and therefore overtly dismiss "fate", so how about "courses of... action"?
In this note, I am thinking out loud about two lousy choices: one is to continue to rant and write about this issue until people are sick of hearing about it. As a result of my public expositional accounting of this situation thus far, "Officer Christopher O'Sullivan" gets some 519 hits from a Google search. I Googled my own full name (oh, come on - who hasn't done this by now?), and it yields some 26,300! Granted, it probably has more to do with all the online writing I do, and no, it's not mostly about this dumbassery - not even close, but damned if that isn't higher than "Mike Fine" or "Bleeding Gums Murphy"! Hell, it's only 2,000 less than "George 'the animal' Steel", and almost ten thousand more than the phrase "calculating pi"!
What? It was fun! Gotta give myself SOME comic relief from all this ridiculous nonsense, don't I?
So, back to my choices, then. Obviously I could have seen what was behind door number 2 and tried my old standby - STANDING BY and waiting for justice to find ME!
I guess that makes Chris O'Sullivan, Anne Holland, and even Timothy Cruz's courtroom grunt my de facto teachers, as well as my (collective) judge, jury and executioner? Hell, they presumed as much authority by denying me my access to due process.
Yeah - this 37 year old career-paraprofessional, part-time piano teacher and wanna-be writer, who makes a gross annual income south of 30k, and bills that eat absolutely all of that up, and who has no savings whatsoever beyond his MTA/a.f.t./NEA retirement plan, is too well off for court-appointed counsel to help him fight this.
Oh, I tried to find representation on my own. Yeah - that wasn't TOO humiliating. When I was told by one attorney Elliot Savitz that I was "funny" when I replied to his first quote of a price for just the first court appearance - to plead not guilty or whatever - at something like $1,300 - "maybe less depending on the circumstances" - I told him that once you get into four-figures, it's all the same to me. It seems his exasperation with me grew exponentially after that, telling me "if (I) get out of" this thing, that I should be grateful. That's not a direct quote, but the message was the same - I was too nervous and legally inept to explain my situation to this man's satisfaction, and too poor for him to give me the time of day.
You wanna try it? See how small you feel as you click off your phone to lick your wounds because you were made to feel stupid for even getting into this situation, and like a loser for being of lesser-than-middle-class means.
It sucks. And it shouldn't be. I should have access to the means to find the truth and pound it into the heads of those who seem to want to just cover their ears and yell "La la la! I can't HEAR you!".
Well, like I said, cowering before my so-called fate has been my modus operandi for WAY too long, and I am DONE when it reaches the point of legal consequence. It seems a lousy choice to have to make in America. I know that sounds melodramtic or grandiose, that can't be helped. You try using any reference to our country without inflating the import of your words, artificially or not.
But, I am talking about lessons about which I thought I had an above-average understanding. Ha. I never thought myself some Clarence Darrow in lay clothes, but I surely thought that what I now understand to be pathologically literal thinking, would hold me in good stead to at LEAST be able to comply with the letter of the law!
It appears that we are not merely responsible for extra-normal command of the laws as is the necessary competence to avoid the wrath of "ignorantia juris non excusat" (ignorance of the law is no excuse", we are also expected to INFER how members of the executive branch will interpret it!
That in itself is daunting enough - and I dare say unconstitutional - given the absence of ANY curricular resources devoted to this mastery in k-12 education. What is worse, what is absolutely *scandalous*, is that no due diligence to any efforts of compulsory legal competence will EVER adequately prepare one to know how to combat a corrupt, spiteful, or just plain grumpy law enforcement officer (or the "system" or culture of his precinct, nor the "thin blue line") who, once he has made up his mind, has the power to usurp ANY guarentees of due process, or the so-called sacro-sanct "innocent until proven guilty" boast of American jurisprudence.
It is time for the "system" to keep that promise. I'm not talking about a hand-out or any impotent whines that I'm a soft-on-crime liberal. I'm talking about a system that must have as much respect for the law as it demands of the citizenry and we demand of ourselves and each other.
Otherwise, it's "just words". I think it's about time that lady liberty put up - 'cause I'm not about to shut up.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Public notice to Officers Anne Holland and Christopher O'Sullivan et al, re: intent to file charges
Public notice to Officers Anne Holland and Christopher O'Sullivan et al, re: intent to file charges for false arrest, groundless, ex post facto no-trespass order, and denial of right to face accuser. These charges are not all-inclusive.
The above named parties leave me no choice but to pursue these, the only means of any hope for justice, and which, because the words that follow are truth and I, Stanley William Shura do hereby swear, solemnly and publically, to that effect, are protected by my First Amendment right under the United States Constitution.
Be it also noted that the details that follow are not complete, but even presented as such do provide for a reasonable conclusion that my Sixth Amendment rights have been violated, not least because, even as an executive action by a local law enforcement officer, the ambiguous and ex post facto No Trespass Order, and any finding or consequence of any defacto status or outcome (including "continued without a finding", which has resulted in a subsequent dismissal) should be held 'Void for Vagueness' and my record, although not damning or incriminating of me in the slightest, should nonetheless cease to have any traces of this bullshit remaining.
Further: I profess that the very presumption of innocence, and, upon factual and legal confirmation of same, my co-requisite presumption of the right to the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness - which includes the retainment of all liberties and personal property (including monies illegally coerced and thus far unrefunded), and access to all public resources and property enjoyed by other law-abiding citizens - is my right under Federal law, and which thus pre-empts and supercedes any jurisdictional claim and authority by local (and residential, in the case of a community college) law enforcement and Executive personnel, and that said denial of these liberties constitutes an ongoing and prima facie violation of my rights and thus infraction of public law, and is as such, a continuously and presently occuring offense which thus renders any statutes of limitation moot, and is sufficiant cause for a finding of unjust loss on the part of Mr. Shura, and for which he is entitled to remunerative (both compensatory AND punitive!!) retribution.
The above-named parties are publically ordered to restore proper justice, and to surrender themselves to be held accountable for violating these laws, and the rightful liberties of Mr. Stanley William Shura.
This should be done forthwith.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following begins Mr. Shura's (my) editorial:
Don't we find ourselves sometimes stuck between two ill-desired courses of... ... I refuse to acknowledge and therefore overtly dismiss "fate", so how about "courses of... action"?
In this note, I am thinking out loud about two lousy choices: one is to continue to rant and write about this issue until people are sick of hearing about it. As a result of my public expositional accounting of this situation thus far, "Officer Christopher O'Sullivan" gets some 519 hits from a Google search. I Googled my own full name (oh, come on, who hasn't by now?) "Stanley W. Shura", and it yields some 26,300! Granted, it probably has more to do with all the online writing I do, and no, it's not mostly about this dumbassery - not even close, but damned if that isn't higher than "Mike Fine" or "Bleeding Gums Murphy"! Hell, it's only 2,000 less than "George 'the animal' Steel", and almost ten thousand more than the phrase "calculating pi".
What? It was fun! Gotta give myself SOME comic relief from all this ridiculous nonsense, don't I?
So, back to my choices, then. Obviously I could have seen what was behind door number 2 and tried my old standby - STANDING BY and waiting for justice to find ME!
I guess that makes Chris O'Sullivan, Anne Holland, and even Timothy Cruz's courtroom grunt my de facto teachers, as well as my (collective) judge, jury and executioner? Hell, they presumed as much authority by denying me my access to due process.
Yeah - this 37 year old career-paraprofessional, part-time piano teacher and wanna-be writer, who makes a gross annual income south of 30k, and bills that eat absolutely all of that up, and who has no savings whatsoever beyond his MTA/a.f.t./NEA retirement plan, is too well off for court-appointed counsel to help him fight this.
Oh, I tried to find representation on my own. Yeah - that wasn't TOO humiliating. When I was told by one attorney Elliot Savitz that I was "funny" when I replied to his first quote of a price for just the first court appearance - to plead not guilty or whatever - at something like $1,300 - "maybe less depending on the circumstances" - I told him that once you get into four-figures, it's all the same to me. It seems his exasperation with me grew exponentially after that, telling me "if (I) get out of" this thing, that I should be grateful. That's not a direct quote, but the message was the same - I was too nervous and legally inept to explain my situation to this man's satisfaction, and too poor for him to give me the time of day.
You wanna try it? See how small you feel as you click off your phone to lick your wounds because you were made to feel stupid for even getting into this situation, and like a loser for being of lesser-than-middle-class means.
It sucks. And it shouldn't be. I should have access to the means to find the truth and pound it into the heads of those who seem to want to just cover their ears and yell "La la la! I can't HEAR you!".
Well, like I said, cowering before my so-called fate has been my modus operandi for WAY too long, and I am DONE when it reaches the point of legal consequence. It seems a lousy choice to have to make in America. I know that sounds melodramtic or grandiose, that can't be helped. You try using any reference to our country without inflating the import of your words, artificially or not.
But, I am talking about lessons about which I thought I had an above-average understanding. Ha. I never thought myself some Clarence Darrow in lay clothes, but I surely thought that what I now understand to be pathologically literal thinking, would hold me in good stead to at LEAST be able to comply with the letter of the law!
It appears that we are not merely responsible for extra-normal command of the laws as is the necessary competence to avoid the wrath of "ignorantia juris non excusat" (ignorance of the law is no excuse", we are also expected to INFER how members of the executive branch will interpret it!!!
That in itself is daunting enough - and I dare say unconstitutional - given the absence of ANY curricular resources devoted to this mastery in k-12 education. What is worse, what is absolutely *scandalous*, is that no due diligence to any efforts of compulsory legal competence will EVER adequately prepare one to know how to combat a corrupt, spiteful, or just plain grumpy law enforcement officer (or the "system" or culture of his precinct, nor the "thin blue line") who, once he has made up his mind, has the power to usurp ANY guarentees of due process, or the so-called sacro-sanct "innocent until proven guilty" boast of American jurisprudence.
It is time for the "system" to keep that promise. I'm not talking about a hand-out or any impotent whines that I'm a soft-on-crime liberal. I'm talking about a system that must have as much respect for the law as it demands of the citizenry and we demand of ourselves and each other.
Otherwise, it's "just words". I think it's about time that lady liberty put up - 'cause I'm not about to shut up.
The above named parties leave me no choice but to pursue these, the only means of any hope for justice, and which, because the words that follow are truth and I, Stanley William Shura do hereby swear, solemnly and publically, to that effect, are protected by my First Amendment right under the United States Constitution.
Be it also noted that the details that follow are not complete, but even presented as such do provide for a reasonable conclusion that my Sixth Amendment rights have been violated, not least because, even as an executive action by a local law enforcement officer, the ambiguous and ex post facto No Trespass Order, and any finding or consequence of any defacto status or outcome (including "continued without a finding", which has resulted in a subsequent dismissal) should be held 'Void for Vagueness' and my record, although not damning or incriminating of me in the slightest, should nonetheless cease to have any traces of this bullshit remaining.
Further: I profess that the very presumption of innocence, and, upon factual and legal confirmation of same, my co-requisite presumption of the right to the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness - which includes the retainment of all liberties and personal property (including monies illegally coerced and thus far unrefunded), and access to all public resources and property enjoyed by other law-abiding citizens - is my right under Federal law, and which thus pre-empts and supercedes any jurisdictional claim and authority by local (and residential, in the case of a community college) law enforcement and Executive personnel, and that said denial of these liberties constitutes an ongoing and prima facie violation of my rights and thus infraction of public law, and is as such, a continuously and presently occuring offense which thus renders any statutes of limitation moot, and is sufficiant cause for a finding of unjust loss on the part of Mr. Shura, and for which he is entitled to remunerative (both compensatory AND punitive!!) retribution.
The above-named parties are publically ordered to restore proper justice, and to surrender themselves to be held accountable for violating these laws, and the rightful liberties of Mr. Stanley William Shura.
This should be done forthwith.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following begins Mr. Shura's (my) editorial:
Don't we find ourselves sometimes stuck between two ill-desired courses of... ... I refuse to acknowledge and therefore overtly dismiss "fate", so how about "courses of... action"?
In this note, I am thinking out loud about two lousy choices: one is to continue to rant and write about this issue until people are sick of hearing about it. As a result of my public expositional accounting of this situation thus far, "Officer Christopher O'Sullivan" gets some 519 hits from a Google search. I Googled my own full name (oh, come on, who hasn't by now?) "Stanley W. Shura", and it yields some 26,300! Granted, it probably has more to do with all the online writing I do, and no, it's not mostly about this dumbassery - not even close, but damned if that isn't higher than "Mike Fine" or "Bleeding Gums Murphy"! Hell, it's only 2,000 less than "George 'the animal' Steel", and almost ten thousand more than the phrase "calculating pi".
What? It was fun! Gotta give myself SOME comic relief from all this ridiculous nonsense, don't I?
So, back to my choices, then. Obviously I could have seen what was behind door number 2 and tried my old standby - STANDING BY and waiting for justice to find ME!
I guess that makes Chris O'Sullivan, Anne Holland, and even Timothy Cruz's courtroom grunt my de facto teachers, as well as my (collective) judge, jury and executioner? Hell, they presumed as much authority by denying me my access to due process.
Yeah - this 37 year old career-paraprofessional, part-time piano teacher and wanna-be writer, who makes a gross annual income south of 30k, and bills that eat absolutely all of that up, and who has no savings whatsoever beyond his MTA/a.f.t./NEA retirement plan, is too well off for court-appointed counsel to help him fight this.
Oh, I tried to find representation on my own. Yeah - that wasn't TOO humiliating. When I was told by one attorney Elliot Savitz that I was "funny" when I replied to his first quote of a price for just the first court appearance - to plead not guilty or whatever - at something like $1,300 - "maybe less depending on the circumstances" - I told him that once you get into four-figures, it's all the same to me. It seems his exasperation with me grew exponentially after that, telling me "if (I) get out of" this thing, that I should be grateful. That's not a direct quote, but the message was the same - I was too nervous and legally inept to explain my situation to this man's satisfaction, and too poor for him to give me the time of day.
You wanna try it? See how small you feel as you click off your phone to lick your wounds because you were made to feel stupid for even getting into this situation, and like a loser for being of lesser-than-middle-class means.
It sucks. And it shouldn't be. I should have access to the means to find the truth and pound it into the heads of those who seem to want to just cover their ears and yell "La la la! I can't HEAR you!".
Well, like I said, cowering before my so-called fate has been my modus operandi for WAY too long, and I am DONE when it reaches the point of legal consequence. It seems a lousy choice to have to make in America. I know that sounds melodramtic or grandiose, that can't be helped. You try using any reference to our country without inflating the import of your words, artificially or not.
But, I am talking about lessons about which I thought I had an above-average understanding. Ha. I never thought myself some Clarence Darrow in lay clothes, but I surely thought that what I now understand to be pathologically literal thinking, would hold me in good stead to at LEAST be able to comply with the letter of the law!
It appears that we are not merely responsible for extra-normal command of the laws as is the necessary competence to avoid the wrath of "ignorantia juris non excusat" (ignorance of the law is no excuse", we are also expected to INFER how members of the executive branch will interpret it!!!
That in itself is daunting enough - and I dare say unconstitutional - given the absence of ANY curricular resources devoted to this mastery in k-12 education. What is worse, what is absolutely *scandalous*, is that no due diligence to any efforts of compulsory legal competence will EVER adequately prepare one to know how to combat a corrupt, spiteful, or just plain grumpy law enforcement officer (or the "system" or culture of his precinct, nor the "thin blue line") who, once he has made up his mind, has the power to usurp ANY guarentees of due process, or the so-called sacro-sanct "innocent until proven guilty" boast of American jurisprudence.
It is time for the "system" to keep that promise. I'm not talking about a hand-out or any impotent whines that I'm a soft-on-crime liberal. I'm talking about a system that must have as much respect for the law as it demands of the citizenry and we demand of ourselves and each other.
Otherwise, it's "just words". I think it's about time that lady liberty put up - 'cause I'm not about to shut up.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
