perjury

In the pre-dawn hours of the morning a "Special Agent" organizes a posse. It consists of: United States Marshals, Oakland police officers, one person wearing a Parole Officer jacket, a civilian and the agent.

Some of them are armed.

Using Gestapo tactics, they raid the home of someone I know in Berkeley, CA, where she has lived for over twenty years. Pushing their way inside and refusing to exhibit an arrest warrant, two of them take her into the bathroom. They pat down her and her clothes, and watch her get dressed. The others, without a search warrant, remain in another part of the house where they have access to her legal documents, office files, personal effects and papers.They deny her the right to make any phone calls.

After she is dressed, the posse leads her out onto the street, where they handcuff her in front of all her neighbors. Then they put her in the back of their car and drive to the jail. There she is fingerprinted, mug shot, mocked, humiliated and interrogated by the agent and her civilian companion. She is left in a cell with neither food nor her pain medication, while she awaits her fate.

Under the Federal laws, when a person has no criminal record, a summons or phone call asking them to come down to the Marshall's office would suffice. She had no criminal record.

When she is brought before the Magistrate he reads the charges: PERJURY and FALSE STATEMENTS punishable by a $250,000 and five years in federal prison.

At her trial, she, like so many other defendants in a criminal trial was found guilty and sentenced to prison, even though there was no evidence to convict her of a crime.

I attended her entire trial and at first, I could not believe it and thought hers was a rare case. But four years later, after researching the internet, studying the laws of perjury and false statements, and reading almost every Circuit and Supreme Court decisions regarding both crimes, I found that this was not a unique case at all. And after attending every day of the Martha Stewart and Peter Bacanovic trial, I saw first hand how broken the entire system is, and how important it is that we work at reforming it.

Wrongful convictions are rampant, but I just never knew it.

Large corporations are currently building prisons all across our country. Their motive is profit. In the future, we will see a dramatic rise in the number of Perjury and False Statement charges being brought against people. Could it be that they are looking for non-violent criminals with which to fill these jails? Some experts think so. In Berkeley, sidewalks are painted with the words: "No more prisons".

We must all pay close attention, lest we be next. I personally know of three women, each with no prior criminal history, who have all been convicted within the last few years of Perjury or making False Statements; one is an administrative law judge, on is a minister and one is a celebrity.