24.04.2016 Author: Janet Phelan
Column: Society
Region: USA in the World
While the West, and the United
States in particular, has repeatedly voiced criticism over human rights abuses
in other countries, the US’s own record in terms of detaining and incarcerating
dissidents is now becoming conspicuous.
In presenting a recent report on human rights
issues, US Secretary of State John Kerry stated:
“Here is the truth, we
believe: A government that fails to respect human rights, no matter how lofty
its pretentions, has very little to boast about, to teach, and very little
indeed in the way of reaching its full potential.”
This report itself is heavily weighted in terms
of naming Asian and Middle Eastern countries as human rights abusers. Kerry
reports that “In every part of the world, we see an accelerating trend
by both state and non-state actors to close the space for civil society, to
stifle media and Internet freedom, to marginalize opposition voices, and in the
most extreme cases, to kill people or drive them from their homes.”
The United States is not named in the report.
However, the US is itself a major culpable
actor in such abuses. Despite its continuing and increasingly strained efforts
to self-promote as a defender of human rights, the US is now inhibiting media
and internet freedom as well as regularly imprisoning activists–often without
trial.
The world is already aware of the use of the
Espionage Act to imprison and otherwise intimidate whistleblowers. The cases of Bradley
Manning, Jeffrey Sterline, James
Hitselberger, John Kiriakou, and others have hit the mainstream press.
What the world may not be aware of is that
non-CIA connected individuals, who are merely attempting to correct and/ or
broadcast injustices, are now facing jail time.
You Mean I Forgot to Tell You
About Your Trial?
Tim Lahrman is a name well known to disability
rights activists. A trained paralegal, Tim has been volunteering his paralegal
skills to a growing list of people who are engaged in legal battles against
guardians and lawyers.
For those unacquainted with the issues
concerning adult guardianships, an overview reveals that these guardianships
constitute a legal loophole through which an individual may be declared
incompetent and then stripped of all his assets and the lion’s share of his
rights. In fact, upon the initiation of such a guardianship, the alleged
incapacitated person may not even be allowed to hire a lawyer to defend against
the guardianship. The National Association to Stop Guardian Abuse’s website has
a compelling summary of what rights are lost when one goes under a guardianship.
Robin Gibson, a Los Angeles woman, attributes
Tim Lahrman’s legal expertise to the successful resolution of an ongoing legal
conflict with the guardian for her mother. Recently, the mother was
released from a guardianship which Gibson states was draining her mother’s
estate and wherein the guardian, Frumeh Labow, had virtually sequestered the older
woman from contact with the outside world.
“I owe this all to Tim,“ pronounced an exhilarated
Robin Gibson in a recent interview. “I have finally got my mother
back.“
Gibson is only one of many who have benefited
from Lahrman’s legal acumen and skills. And she may be one of the
last. For Tim Lahrman now sits in an Indiana jail cell, held without bail
on two seventeen year- old misdemeanor charges.
Candice Schwager, an attorney from Texas, has
this to say about Lahrman’s incarceration: “There is an entirely
different agenda behind this seventeen year old persecution. It’s not even
reasonable to think that Goshen keeps misdemeanor cold case files and this was
bad luck. This arrest was retribution because Tim has brought up the crimes of
a clouted political figure.”
Tim Lahrman was himself placed under a
guardianship in 1987. He was at that point in time in his twenties and an owner
of a thriving automotive business which was subsequently ravaged through the
guardianship proceedings.
Lahrman’s guardianship was never legally
terminated. After sacking his business, the guardian, Kenneth Scheibenberger,
“just sort of wandered off,” according to Lahrman.
This left Tim Lahrman in legal limbo. Neither
his rights nor his property were ever restored to him. He was left, in essence,
as a legal zero.
As the law states, Lahrman thus could not have
had the “legal capacity” to commit the two misdemeanors with which he was
charged in 1999 —driving with a suspended license and possession of a small
amount of marijuana.
Tim filed legal notice in the misdemeanor case
of his stated “lack of capacity.” The court took no notice and, after oddly
failing in its legal mandate to summon him for his trial, held the trial
without him present, found him guilty and sentenced him to two years. He was
not present at the hearing and was not subsequently apprehended.
Fast forward to 2016. Tim is not only assisting
others in their guardianship cases but has now filed a number of lawsuits in
his own matter.
Filed on January 20, 2015 in the U.S. District
Court for the Northern District of Indiana, South Bend Division, Tim Lahrman
also sued Elkhart County Superior Court No. 2 (Stephen R. Bowers, Judge), the
Chief Judge of the Indiana Court of Appeals, the State of Indiana, the Office
of Indiana Attorney General and the Indiana Supreme Court Division of State
Court Administration. Lahrman was picked up in March of this year on the
seventeen year- old stale and expired warrant, and is being held in Elkhart
County Jail without bail. His writ of Habeas Corpus, filed with the court this
past week, was reportedly denied by Judge Bodie Stegelmann. According to
reports, Judge Stegelmann has ordered Lahrman into a psychiatric evaluation.
Attorney Schwager, who has filed notice in this
case, states that Tim was put into “the hole”—solitary confinement—this past
week after asking his public defender for her name and also requesting the
court file. The request apparently frightened her. Schwager has more on the case.
The public defender subsequently withdrew and
the judge has ordered Tim to appear pro se—without legal counsel.
I Don’t Know You But I Am Sure You
Are Incompetent
Another disability rights activist, Cary Andrew
Crittenden, is now being held in Santa Clara County Jail, in Northern
California, after being arrested on Christmas Eve on “secret charges.”
We can only term the charges “secret” because
the Santa Clara County Prosecutor’s office has consistently refused to honor
its legal responsibility to release the records containing the factual
circumstances surrounding Crittenden’s arrest. The California Public Records
Act, clarified by the court case known as “Kusar” mandates the release of these
records.
Crittenden, who has launched an internet
campaign against corruption in Santa Clara County was previously arrested in
Santa Clara County for making online statements about public officials which
were deemed to be “harassment.”
An internal affairs complaint was filed on
February 11 with the Prosecutor’s office concerning the refusal of Assistant
District Attorney David Angel to comply with the records disclosure law, which
is in place in order to guard against “secret arrests.” This IA complaint
appears to have gone the way of the public’s rights to know—into the garbage
can. No action has been taken on the complaint.
The recipient of the complaint, a Lt. Jorge
Perez, who states he is an investigator with the DA’s office, has refused to
even release the name of the individual who has been assigned to investigate
the complaint concerning ADA David Angel’s refusal to comply with the law.
Recently, there was an attempt to have
Crittenden declared incompetent to stand trial. If an individual is so deemed,
he may be incarcerated indefinitely without ever having his day in court.
Sniffing this rat, Crittenden refused to attend the psychiatric evaluation
which the court had set up for him.
In a bizarre, Kafkaesque effort, a “doctor”
–who never saw or evaluated Cary Andrew Crittenden–trotted himself into court.
In a declaration that would have made any surrealist proud, Dr. Burke, the
“doc-in the pocket” of the court, intoned that in his professional opinion,
Crittenden, a man he had never seen, was “incompetent to stand trial.”
The fact that Burke had never evaluated
Crittenden did not escape the attention of the court, however. Crittenden was
ordered into another evaluation, and the subsequent medical professional
reportedly determined that Crittenden was indeed competent.
The propensity for courts now to order
activists and dissidents into psychiatric evaluation is something that deserves
special attention. A person adjudicated incompetent by a court may, in fact,
never get a trial. He can be locked up indefinitely on minor and potentially
bogus charges and also be court- ordered to be forcibly medicated with
anti- psychotics, which constitute a chemical strait jacket.
If you think that the cases involving Lahrman
and Crittenden are the exception, you may rest assured that, for cases
involving guardianship activists, this is standard court operating procedure.
Rosanna Miller, who was attempting to protect her father’s interests while he
was under guardianship, was arrested in 2014 for failure to pay court costs.
The Ohio Supreme Court, however, had issued a memo stating that an individual
cannot be arrested for failure to pay court costs.
Questions were raised about the possibility
that the Bellafontaine judge, Ann Beck, was involved in a number of financial
improprieties. Beck then quickly released Miller from custody. Barbara Stone, a
NY attorney whose mother, Helen, was under a questionable guardianship in
Florida, was arrested and charged with “custody interference”—which mandates a
potential sentence of five years in prison—for allegedly taking her mother to
lunch.
If I Can’t Get You, I’ll Get Your Kid
The psychiatric incarceration of John Rohrer
raises further questions about motives to detain this young man, and detain him
possibly indefinitely. Rohrer, who apparently wandered into the wrong
house while under the influence of a hallucinogen, has now been detained over
ten years, the last six and a half years as an in-patient in a state
psychiatric facility. The case has been fraught with illegal maneuvers by the
prosecutors and judge, including denying him his right multiple times to
hearings to determine whether he meets the state’s definition of being
“mentally ill.” In fact, Rohrer has never been deemed incompetent. Rohrer is
now being held at Appalachian Behavioral Healthcare, a State psychiatric
hospital, where he was forcibly drugged for years.
It should be noted that the Ohio Supreme Court
has determined that a judge may not order forced drugging unless he makes a
finding that the individual lacks capacity to consent. The forced drugging must
also be in the patient’s “best interests” and there must not be any
alternatives deemed to be as effective as the drugging. In the Rohrer case,
Judge Corzine made none of these findings, and in fact stated on the record
that Rohrer appeared “pretty lucid today.”
Nevertheless, Corzine ordered the forced
drugging of John Rohrer.
According to reports, during a brief 2007
exposure to Risperdal, Rohrer, who was at that time 27 years old, suffered a
cardiac event, but this did not stop it from being chosen as the primary drug
to forcibly inject.
Medical and legal malpractice complaints were
filed November 24, 2014 in the Ohio Court of Claims and November 28, 2014 in
the Franklin County Common Pleas Court by the attorney for John Rohrer. The
complaint states that Rohrer was forcibly injected with Risperdal for more than
3 ½ years although the drug is known to cause irreversible brain damage. In
addition, the complaint states that Rohrer’s rights to a fair hearing have been
repeatedly violated.
The activist in the Rohrer case is actually his
mother. Attorney and talk show host Katherine Hine founded the advocacy group
Stop Child Abuse Now in Oklahoma and advised a group of foster mothers who were
outraged at the involvement of judges and lawyers in the murder of 2 year old
Ryan Luke in 1995. She is the Executive Director of the Ross County Network for
Children in Ohio, an organization with a strong history of conflict with the
Ross County Prosecutors, surrounding two child murderers that the County had
not wanted prosecuted back in the 1990’s.
Hine is now with WJLA radio hosting a two
weekly broadcasts—one exposing illegalities of forced psychiatry and another
exposing the consequences of the lack of judicial accountability. She also is a
contributor to The Columbus Free Press.
The Ross County Prosecutor’s office has made it
clear that they despise her. Now, they are the ones making sure John Rohrer
stays locked up.
Hine has faced three disciplinary
actions. She writes, “My first discipline was in Oklahoma in like
1981 or 1982 when my soon to be ex grabbed by children in violation of an
Oklahoma custody order giving their temporary custody to me.” According to
Hine, “He claimed he wasn’t served.” She reports that “I got a private
reprimand – where you go into an office and they yell at you about 15
minutes. Told me what a disgrace to the profession I was and how
ashamed they all were of being in the bar association with me.”
She was subsequently reprimanded by the
Oklahoma Bar in 1997 for communicating with a judge concerning a matter
involving a suspected case of child abuse, in which she did not represent a party. In fact, Hine had signed a letter along with
seven other individuals who were concerned that the judge had authorized
supervised visitation of a child with a sexual predator and that the
supervision stipulation was being ignored. In other words, the child was
allowed to be alone with the predator. There was another attempt at discipline
when she was accused of ghost writing for a pro se litigant, but Hine invoked
confidentiality and the complaint evaporated.
Concerning the lengthy incarceration of her
son, Katherine Hine has this to say: “These people are like the Cosa Nostra.
They launch intergenerational vendettas and will go after your family.”
According to Hine, John Rohrer is no longer
allowed online. He had previously set up websites with his music and poetry but
the public awareness of his situation had launched protests among his readers
and as a result, he is now barred by the hospital from going onto the internet.
Recent articles have discussed the increasing
incidence of suspension and disciplinary actions taken against attorneys who
are attempting to protect the rights of individuals. If the current trend continues,
we may see anyone standing up for the rights of another individual escorted
into jail end, from there, potentially into a rubber room.
Janet C. Phelan, investigative journalist and
human rights defender that has traveled pretty extensively over the
Asian region, an author of a tell-all book EXILE, exclusively for the online
magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
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