Chad Taylor Drops Out Of Senate Race

Chad Taylor, (D) District Attorney of Topeka Kansas and Senate Wannabe, not to be confused with Chad Taylor, guitarist in Live, has dropped out of the race for Senate in Kansas. This is good news, as this blogger will no longer be faced with the choice of voting for someone who actually tried to stop prosecuting domestic violence in Topeka and still has not filed charges in the death of Caleb Stewart, a baby who died in a Topeka daycare; or the choice of voting for republican Pat Roberts. It looks like the choice is now between Pat Roberts, and Independent Greg Orman.

Chad Taylor Thinks Kansas Wants Blood

Whoa! Not only has Chad Taylor forced this blogger to assist the senile and Republican Pat Roberts in another meaningless victory in the Kansas senate, he even makes incriminating statements about his career path while doing so! A recent poll about the upcoming senate race showed Chad Taylor leading incumbent Pat Roberts by five percentage points. About this, Taylor was heard to say, "This poll simply confirms what we're hearing as we visit with real Kansans throughout the state -- they are ready for new blood!" WIBW News

Blood? After the way he has managed the job of District Attorney, that's a very strange word for Chad Taylor to use publicly. His job performance in Topeka has been controversial, and there have been complaints, including outcry over his 2011 announcement that because of a budget cut, his office would no longer prosecute domestic violence. He was forced, by popular opinion, to change his mind. It seems that the people of Topeka Kansas were not ready for domestic violence to become legal again.

Something Kansans should think about, now that our Democrat candidate for the senate has made mention of "blood" is the place of children, particularly children of middle class parents. Along with the rest of the nation, Kansas has experienced more cases of violence against children over the past decade. Chad Taylor's attempted stance on domestic violence was disturbing enough, but it seems that only some children, primarily the children of the upper middle class and richer, are worth any of his precious time or prosecution dollars. There's a very strong chance that Chad Taylor's assumption that voting Kansans feel the same way he does about middle class children is wrong. Most Kansans care about children. If the media in Kansas gave better coverage to cases about children who die needlessly, Chad Taylor would have been forced to answer for his lack of attention to some of their cases, just as he was called out on his refusal to prosecute domestic violence cases. There is still one question Mr. Taylor has not answered: what about Caleb Stewart? Caleb died in February of 2013 at a daycare in Topeka while his parents were at work. His family is still waiting for answers and justice. Blood is a very incriminating sound bite for the senate hopeful.

Derrick Deacon Is Finally Free

Derrick Deacon just got released from prison in New York, after serving almost twenty-five years behind bars for a murder he did not commit. After new testimony and new evidence surfaced, Deacon was granted a new trial. It took a jury all of nine minutes to find Deacon "Not Guilty" with the new evidence. Congratulations to Derrick Deacon for standing up for himself all these years, but why did he get convicted in the first place? It seems that the district attorney's office in Kings county, New York, didn't have the balls to go after a gang member who shot a teenager during a robbery, so police arrested a homeless man, Deacon, instead. A young woman by the name of Colleen Campbell saw the actual killer, and told law enforcement. While she did not know the identity of the actual killer, she knew who Deacon was, and that he did not commit the murder. This should have been sufficient, in the absence of any other evidence, to rule Deacon out. but not so fast......gangs are dangerous and notorious for vengeance, and homeless people do not put up much of a fight when coerced and pushed around, and Kings County needed a conviction, right? A homeless man is much safer to victimize than a gang member, so the prosecutor saw to it that Deacon was arrested and prosecuted for the crime, instead of the guilty party. When Campbell didn't want to convict an innocent man, investigators and prosecutors threatened to have her children removed from her home!

"Deacon's case raises troubling questions about how he was convicted in the first place. The Village Voice reports that Deacon was convicted after investigators coerced a witness named Colleen Campbell, who knew he hadn't commited the crime.

At Deacon's retrial, Campbell said authorities had threatened to take her kids away if she testified that she knew Deacon wasn't the killer, according to the Village Voice. Another witness testified that Deacon did commit the shooting, which was enough to convict him."......Mike Krumboltz, Yahoo News.

Since when does testifying in court, or not testifying in court, or telling the truth, for that matter.....equal child abuse or child neglect? This stunt of threatening the children of witnesses in order to gain untruthful testimony seems to be a prosecutor's ace in the hole, these days! Is this the true role of Child Protective Services, assisting prosecutors in the attainment of wrongful convictions by threatening to hold hostage the children of witnesses? That might help explain why caseloads are bursting at the seams, and why Child Protective Services isn't always available to the child who actually needs them! Taxpayers are forced to pay them to enforce the whims of crooked court officials! Sad, but apparently true.

Twenty-five years of an innocent man's life.

 

Kansas Allowed Daycare To Kill A Baby

On February 27, five month old Caleb Stewart, of Scranton, Kansas, died at the home of his daycare provider, Tara Johnson. He died, somehow, while sleeping on a dog bed on the floor, but an actual cause of death has not been established by the coroner. Many complaints had already been filed against Tara Johnson with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, and Child Protective Services. The complaints ranged from dirty surroundings to lack of supervision of children and Tara's boyfriend (not an employee of the daycare or a licensed childcare provider) caring for the children while Tara shopped and ran other errands. Caleb's mother, Misty Durham, has been met with evasive answers and denials from everyone involved, from those at the home where her son died to Chad Taylor, the District Attorney, to whom the case has been assigned.

This seems to be the practice in Kansas inasmuch as regulating daycares, schools, and other institutions that have contact with children. There's a daycare in Frankfort, Kansas where the spouse of the proprietress cares for the children on a semi-regular basis, although he is not licensed to do so. Their adult children also consume alcohol and other drugs while the children are present. There's another daycare in the same town which allows it's charges to run about, unsupervised, between the pool and the library. Not only are these indiscretions an invitation to liability; they create a tragedy waiting to happen, yet nothing is done. Frankfort High continues to employ a guidance counselor who abandoned a female high school freshman alongside the highway four miles away from the school, all by herself, and when she got lost, he told no one. He looked for her a little bit by himself, but when it was time for him to go home, he went home for the day, not even bothering to tell the student's parents or make a police report. Child Protective Services have actually removed children from the homes of parents who treat their children that way, yet a teacher who does the same thing is allowed to continue. Is this because it is less dangerous for a child to get lost, wandering around four miles away from town, after being abandoned by a school employee, rather than a parent? Or is it because the only action Child Protective Services could take in a situation such as that would be to insure that the school employee is fired, with no removal of the child, and therefore no money to be made via an ongoing case or a questionable adoption pending the termination of parental rights? It seems, also, that the same possibility exists in the case of the daycare: a caucasion  baby who could be taken from his parents and put up for adoption, or sold to the highest bidder after parental rights had been terminated would be a prime target for Child Protective Services, but since most judges will not go along with removals of children from the homes of the parents over bad choices of daycares or schools, Child Protective Services ignores violations and crimes of daycare providers and teachers, focusing instead upon individual parents who make easier targets. Grim.

Sadly, Caleb's case did not get much attention from the media. The most complete information about it seems to be a piece from WIBW, written in May of this year. Caleb's case has gotten even less attention from law enforcement and the District Attorney, and now, almost eight months later, there have been no arrests, and Tara Johnson is still caring for children in her home! Apparently, no one who was in the home at the time of Caleb's death has agreed to a polygraph, and when concerned voters and taxpayers in Northeast Kansas call law enforcement and the District Attorney with questions about this case, both agencies respond by hanging up! What an amazing message to send to voters! The lead investigator in this case is Erin Thompson, who can be reached at 785-368-2242; and the district Attorney, Chad Taylor, can be reached at 785-233-8200.

 

 

Police Brutality

 

The District Attorney had a script for me. I rejected it, in favor of the Truth.

 

 

The Justice Community Wonders Why It's Not Getting Justice

In light of the recent shooting of a district attorney and spouse in Texas, this article was published on ABC News concerning the recent expressions of disrespect and violence toward law enforcement and prosecutors in the last year or so. Before I say any more, let me state that I do not condone violence, murder, or threats, and that I do not think that violence is an appropriate answer to the misunderstandings that have been mounting, for awhile, between the judicial community and the people they should serve. I think awareness and information are much better tools. That said, I also hope that the families of Mike and Cynthia McClelland will find peace.

Since the Declaration of Independance was drafted, the judicial process has been used, not only for seeking actual justice, but for more subtle means of "sending messages" to certain segments of the American population. The American public has seen, tolerated, and wholeheartedly accepted racist laws and policies, laws that have targeted the poor, sexist practices within the justice system, selective uses of prohibition laws to hound otherwise innocent people, and many, many more abuses of authority and justice. The reluctance of many courts to set aside or throw out guilty verdicts that are contradicted by forensic evidence that becomes available after trial dates is also disturbing. When the population at large begins to take note of criminals with more money and better lawyers experiencing favor in the courtroom, while poorer criminals, and sometimes innocent people, do not get proper legal counsel and are often found guilty of felonies, what do judges and cops expect everyone to think? Not that we haven't always had a certain amount of corruption within government agencies, we have; but since the dubious "election" of Bush Jr. in 2000, the judicial "war on the poor" seems to have become more fervent. Along with that, the economy has gotton less stable, and the number of citizens who have found themselves targeted by law enforcement for no reason and shafted by the courts with no recourse to competent legal counsel has increased. Also, has anyone noticed the number of misdemeanors that have turned into felony crimes lately? Not only does this put certain minorities in prison to serve longer sentences, it strips the targeted minorities of voting rights. Hence, the Fair Sentencing Act. When an entire population becomes legally disenfranchised, and everyday exchanges become criminal acts, the judicial and law enforcement communties should not be surprised at a certain amount of hostility.

Recently, I witnessed an exchange between two people, which; unfortunately, resulted in an arrest. While I witnessed most of the incident, I did not see a crime committed by either party. One of the "officers" involved insisted that I had seen a criminal act, and when I continued to tell him what actually happened, he became agitated and told me what my statement should be, informing me that I was about to "find out how powerful police in Marshall County, Kansas are" if I did not "cooperate". Verbatim quote, folks. He also threatened to go inside my house, wake up all my children, and take them away from me if I did not begin to make statements that coincided with the report he so much desired to write. Because I am stubborn and truthful, I stuck to my guns (no pun intended) and stuck to the truth. He got off his high horse when he ran out of threats, went back to the police station in his shiny police car, and wrote a statement that basically and unbasically isn't true. He even referred to yours truly as a "liar' several times. Lots of impartiality he expects from the court, I guess.

Later on, the district attorney, still lacking a written statement of events from yours truly, contacted me to tell me what I needed to say. I interrupted to her to remind her that the truth is more meaningful than her expectations of a guilty plea and the fines she was hoping to collect from the defendant. She became quite disturbed, and told me that she would contact social services and have them remove my children from my home if I did not "cooperate" with her..........! So; not only would I discover how "powerful" the police are when someone confuses them with the facts, I might also discover the consequences of refusing to read a "script" written by a crooked district attorney, rather than offering true testimony!

As it happens, I have been threatened by smarter, more powerful, and sexier individuals than this district attorney, so I promised her that I would be honest and never back away from what I know to be moral and honest. And social services has apparently been too busy with things that are real to come and visit me. But suppose I had taken the bait and drunk the koolaide? "We're gonna have your children taken away from you if you do not testify according to our script that we write for you in advance." "We're gonna take your children away if you don't say the right things to get your neighbor/friend/family members put in jail." That's a loaded threat. If this kind of crooked game is becoming commonplace across the country, it's no big surprise that prosecutors and law enforcement are having problems maintaining their own safety in their communities. Here's another example of the Marshall County Kansas district attorney's tactics, this time with a defendant. The woman was coerced into a guilty plea via threats to her children by the district attorney. According to the Marysville Advocate: "During court proceedings, Baynton’s motion claims, Kraushaar assured her she could file for a departure from the prescribed sentence for the crime she was pleading to, but after she entered her plea she said the attorney told her no departure would be allowed and that she must agree to consecutive maximum sentences. She also states that the state "repeatedly used the issue of the custody of the defendant's children to coerce her plea of guilty." The motion says her attorney "should have blocked this coercion and did not."


The defendant in the above case has already been granted a new public defender. If the court grants her motion to change her plea, that will indicate a lot of judicial and personal waste and aggravation just because the prosecuter is ungifted enough in courtroom strategy to threaten the children of witnesses and defendants whenever possible so as to avoid any real show of litigation skills, or as in this prosecutor's case, lack thereof. If law enforcement and prosecuting attorneys have actually turned a corner in legal strategies and decided that using the children of defendants, witnesses, and others involved in cases is the new forte in courtroom finesse, we can probably expect more anger turned toward the judicial and law enforcement communities.

Chance Hartner

May 28, 2010

"hey adkins how about i kill you if you get on my computer again"

......Excerpt from Facebook page of the youthful police officer who enjoys telling older women that they are going to "find out how powerful" he and police force are. In a lot of places, law enforcement is expected to be more mature and set a better example than this. It's also the kind of response law enforcement wants the rest of us to believe they don't want in their everyday lives. Why, then, do they exhibit it and force everyone else to live with it?