An Open Letter to Judge George A. O’Toole

by Mary W Maxwell, PhD, LLB     April 4, 2015

Dear Judge,

We have a lot in common. Both born in Massachusetts in 1947, both grabbed a Bachelor’s degree in 1969, and both – if I may deduce from your name — Irish Catholic.

That last bit says a lot that others will not pick up on. But I was deeply into ‘church’ in my formative years and I’ll bet you were, too. The metaphysics of the Trinity was as real as the hot fudge sundaes at Brigham’s.  Mary and Jesus were like neighbors. The training we received as to what was right and wrong got totally imprinted on our brain.

Judicial Notice

Now that you are in charge of the Marathon bombing court case, Judge O’Toole, I want to share some knowledge with you. I realize it is not your job to learn the subject matters on which you are ruling; you are only required to apply the law. But in the Tsarnaev case, there are extraneous factors that can come under your ‘judicial notice,’ to the benefit of us all.

So please let me drone on for a while about these factors. At first you may want to know “who I am” that I have something to contribute. I started out as an author of sociobiology books, in the 1980s, and then signed up for a PhD in politics, and later did a law degree, all of this while living in Australia. (I came here by marriage.)

Around 2005 I stumbled into the study of horrendous rulings in dear old America. Now I’m about to publish a book that describes, and advocates use of, the Writ of Error Coram Nobis. Its title is “Fraud Upon the Court.” I also authored the book “Prosecution for Treason.” I am definitely not an expert on the law. But I claim expertise on its misuse and disuse. And I adore the Constitution.

America’s Secret Officialdom, Many Cruel Persons

Judge, for starters there should be a rebuttable presumption of ‘prosecutorial foul play’ in any case of a Muslim doing naughties today. Starting with Sirhan Sirhan in 1968 – when you and I could have met at a dance – an Arab was picked to be the face of a naughty group.

We know Sirhan had zilch to do the shooting of RFK, right? And you should see how many other Arabs have been presented to us for hating. In my Treason book, I made a list of airport incidents, going back to 1972, each of which persuaded our subconscious that to be an Arab is quite simply to do a hijacking. French make love, Irish drink whiskey, Arabs hijack. “Everybody knows that.”

In one case, members of the “Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine” teamed up with something called the “Japanese Red Army” to kill 26 people at Lod Airport. Which of us knew then to smell a rat? I certainly didn’t.

I actually think all suicides, including those of kamikaze pilots, should be re-thought.  Living creatures do not readily give life away. If you watch an injured bird struggle to live, you’ll see that. The much-quoted phrase “the gunman then turned the gun on himself” is not to be believed. That caveat includes school shootings, starting with Dunblane, Scotland.

So, to our cute little Dzhohkar. There he was at age 20 having a ball at U Mass. Odd that he turned out to be a bomber. Oops, what am I saying – I don’t know that he “turned out to be a bomber.”

I do know that he said he did it. Oops, I mean I heard that his defense attorney told the court “He did it.” In the first few months he had pleaded innocent. We have a famous case here in Australia. Martin Bryant, supposedly mentally retarded, pleaded guilty to a mass murder that he plainly could not have committed. First, he pleaded innocent. Then after five months in solitary confinement he changed his plea. I wonder who arranged that and why.

Ray, DeSalvo, etc.

Consider the case of James Earl Ray, “well understood to be MLK’s assassin.” Ray’s defense attorney said “He pleads guilty.” But Ray then wrote to the judge a few days later to say he was coerced to plead guilty. Days later the judge, poor fellow, was found dead at his desk. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, perhaps.

Granted, that judge’s death may have been from natural causes, but Ray never did get a trial. Lyndon Barsten has written THE best book in the law library showing how Ray was set up to be MLK’s “assassin” years in advance. This included mind control and facial surgery. Is Barsten merely theorizing about conspiracy? No. He got his material, by Freedom of Information request, from the CIA’s and FBI’s files on James Earl Ray.

Then Ray had to be killed, almost age 70. I think it was because the real story was coming out.  How did they bump him off? Other prisoners stabbed him in the yard, in the liver, and he got Hepatitis. Cruel government.

Albert DeSalvo met a similar fate, but it was done with one stroke in the High Security area of the prison. Boston College professor of history Alan Rogers has pointed to DeSalvo’s innocence. I have also researched it and can say without any doubt that the Boston Strangler case was made for public consumption, with DeSalvo being set up for it. Just as Ray was set up for King’s death. Or as Atta was set up for 9-11. (Suspects are listed at whodidit.org.)

Judge, I assume you know that F Lee Bailey, the ‘defense attorney’ for Albert DeSalvo, made the brilliant move to have him tried only for a grocery theft and then told the jury, incidentally, that Albert had confessed to an inmate about the stranglings. Truly outrageous.

There really is no story that is too complicated, or too egregious, to be concocted and carried by the press. From thence, the believing of it by us masses is guaranteed. So-and-So shot 50 kids because he lost his girlfriend? Not a problem. We know how it is to feel rejected in love.

Still, Dzhokhar is cute, and not unlike my brother (a BC boy) at that age. By the way, Judge, I attended your 1972 Harvard Commencement. Not that I had intimations about law myself back then. I was there because it was Daddy’s 50^th  (yes, class of 1922). In 1978, I accompanied Dad to the Solzhenitsyn Commencement speech. And now we see what Solzhenitsyn saw in the Soviet Union, happening right here (US, and also Australia). Tragic.

Who Can Intervene?

Judge, please hear me out about the narrowness of law schools. Two years ago I interviewed a man who had written an excruciatingly careful study of the 9-11 phone calls: Elias Davidsson, Hijacking America’s Mind on 9-11.

I had bumped into Elias many times on the List-serve of the American Society of International Law. He was, and is, a fusspot, thank God. I tried to get him to post, on his website, jusgogens.org, my “Why NATO’s Bombing of Libya Is Illegal.”  Talk about pulling teeth. He did finally accept it, after I had proven that there was no possible slipups in the quotes of black-letter law.

So now I had a precious gift to offer to law journals, my interview with Fusspot Davidsson. I showed it to a professor whom I admire, at a law school that shall not be named. He simply said (because it was about 9-11), “Mary, no law journal will ever publish this.” Can you imagine!

(But it’s the same in medical journals. Total censorship.)

Among the evidence that Elias Davidsson dug up, for the 9-11 case, is the fact that Ed Ballinger, the dispatcher for United Airlines’s 16 daily flights from the East coast to the West coast, gave amazing sworn testimony to the 9-11 commission.

Ballinger said he sent a message to all his pilots when he heard there was trouble, that morning. He got “receipts” showing which RGS (remote ground station) had forwarded each call. In the case of the Let’s Roll flight, the RGS was not one near Shanksville, PA, but near Cleveland, Ohio.

As for Flight UA 175, which supposedly smashed into the South Tower, he found that the remote ground station that forwarded his message to that plane was not near New York City but near Champaign, Illinois.

But “No law journal will ever publish this, Mary.”

Muslimity

Permit me a word about the ideologues among the Muslims.  I lived in the United Arab Emirates from 1988 to 1993. If I ever met a mob like myself, it was those white clad (if male) or black clad (if female) peeps. I would be scratching to come up with any observation I made of their “peculiarity.” They are so normal.

Religious maniacs? They couldn’t hold a candle to me. I used to hold my dogma, liturgy, theology, etc. (we’re talking Emmanuel College here) as tightly as any member of the Koranic class. But can they be indoctrinated? Sure. Can they be offered entry to a real swell boys club if they will come along and be trained? Sure. All boys do that. ALL boys.

President Carter’s National Security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said in a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, that the US gave the Mujahadin their training. UK Speaker of the House Robin Cook (who carked it shortly thereafter, at age 59) said that al-Qaeda was Britain’s database. Recently a NATO general, Wesley Clark, admitted that the West provides ISIS’s funding.

With all that happening, and yet with the average person still taking in the stories about the Muslims “hating our freedoms,” how is Dzhokhar to get a fair trial? What I really mean is: how are we going to get fairness for the nation itself from this trial? How can it be an enlightening experience instead of becoming one more nail in our coffin?

Speaking of nails in the coffin, I note that a guy named Ibragim Todashev, a buddy of Tamerlan Tsarnaev from Chechnya, was killed in his home while giving a statement to the FBI. It is reported that the FBI man who killed him (“hit him over the head with a coffee table”) has been the subject of many complaints of brutality. I reckon that stuff is thrown in to make us all afraid.

I am indeed figuring that my day will come, and I will be jailed for saying things like “Let’s protect the Bill of Rights.” The president of France has just said that he will criminalize “conspiracy theory.”

There’s a guy in prison in Germany, Horst Mahler. Among the charges against him was that of Volksverhetzung for telling the court that the 9-11 event incident was a “concocted conspiracy” and that “it is not true that al-Qaeda had anything to do with it.” (Volksverhetzung means ‘incitement’)

Normally we think of an individual having a chance to prove something to be true if he insists on believing it, but this is not so when it comes to 9-11. Every chance, in every country, has been blocked, such that no litigant can put his evidence in the spotlight. In the US, the case of Gallop v Cheney would be the best example. In Denmark it is Neils Harrit’s libel suit. Such cases just get dismissed.

Please, Judge, you’ve got to ask the Big Question: Could the lads have been manipulated by someone? Someone from Tavistock, Langley, or Quantico? I do know that the London bombings, which seem a bit like the Boston one, had a kind of involvement with the Finsbury Mosque.  The shoe bomber (a total patsy) Richard Reid did his “praying” there, too.

If the boys were under someone’s direction, we are certainly looking at diminished responsibility. If they were mind-controlled we are also looking at the crime of assault – that is, with them as victim. The creation of “Manchurian candidates” is big business today. Even the mafia now uses the technique to get hit men on the cheap.

What Is the Judiciary’s Role in Strange Times?

Judge, wouldn’t it be well within your jurisdiction to say “Now here we have a case of a bombing of a public place, fairly like the 1980 bombing of the Bologna Railway station. The Italian courts have found that the guilty party was not Left Wing radicals as claimed. It was done by Gladio (child of NATO) to make Left Wingers look bad.”

Also we have an admission of guilt from the Italian state that, at the G-8 meeting in Genoa, in 2001, police made a fake stabbing of a policeman to justify whacking the protestors. Many were taken to jail and tortured, especially journalists. Fathom it! in Italy!

Mark Colvert has sued regarding that Genoa episode and expects a payout of $300,000. (In the aforementioned case of the FBI man wielding a coffee table, the family has sued for $30 million. I guess the taxpayer will be the one to cough up the cash if they win.)

I never had any trouble knowing what the role of a judge was, in times when there were many checks and balances in civil society and in government. His role was properly circumscribed. Nevertheless it was powerful because he had at his disposal all the riches of jurisprudence and legal principle.

Today we are in trouble. Why isn’t the law profession reacting? President Obama said he is allowed to kill a person who has not had a trial. Only one Congressman out of 535, Senator Rand Paul, even got antsy about it.

Here I think of Dzhokhar getting a hail of bullets while he was in the putative boat in Watertown (hasn’t anybody heard of subduing a suspect with Mace?). Today’s news is that there was an issue of “weapons discipline.”

I do not mean that you, Judge O’Toole, should have to be the savior of mankind. In your current circumstance you can’t do everything to correct the terrible loss of democracy that we are experiencing. But is there something you can do? I will now write up a fanciful “Instruction for the Jury” that you could possible use.

I know it would be hard to say something like this:

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury,

It is your solemn duty to see that justice is done. The accused is always innocent until proven guilty. There must be the act of the crime itself and the intention to commit the act. You have heard the evidence from the prosecution and listened to witnesses.

The defense gave a relatively short presentation. The fact that the defense started with an admission of guilt does not mean you must bring in a guilty verdict. It is your job to decide whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed the crimes with which he is charged. If you don’t think he is guilty beyond reasonable doubt, per each charge, he is entitled to an acquittal.

It is a famous case and you almost certainly read about it and have heard people talking about it. I want to remind you that it is unavoidable for you to use any knowledge you possess, in deciding the case, yet you must come to your verdict by considering all that has been put forth in this courtroom.

Now I want to do something unusual. I want to help you realize that since this is a case of “the people” versus an individual, we need to know how the people are represented by a government-employed prosecutor. In particular, I wish to point out say that the prosecutor and the government may not always have exactly the same interests as “the people.”

An example would be as follows. The number of car thefts in a given town could have multiplied rapidly. The prosecutor may feel that this fact is unbalancing her workload and thus she wants to make deals, plea-bargaining with those accused of car theft. While it is possible that this is also exactly what “the people” want, it could be that we are really looking at an institutional ‘interest’ of the prosecutor’s office.

I should also point out to you that it is one of the greatest strengths of the American constitution that we have a separation of powers. The legislative branch is separate from the executive branch. The judicial branch, of which I am a member, is separate from the executive branch.

Madame Prosecutor works ultimately for the president of the United States whose job it is to execute the law. My job is to adjudicate the law. Your job is to find guilt or innocence in this case. The defense is entitled to get from the prosecutor any information she is holding, especially if it is exculpatory.

When evaluating evidence, such as that of witnesses, it is your responsibility to determine the credibility of the witness. You can judge their honesty by whatever criteria you ordinarily use. For example, if the witness seems to hold a bias, you must take that into consideration. If he or she has said contradictory things, or physically impossible things, let that alert you about him or her.

Let us talk about “Terrorism”

This case of the bombing that occurred on April 15, 2013 at the finish line of the Boston marathon, has often been referred to as a “terrorist” incident. You members of the jury may be old enough to remember when there was virtually no terrorism occurring in the United States.

Then, beginning in the 1960s, there was an outbreak of serial killings, such as the so-called Boston strangler. In the 1970s we heard a lot about terrorist acts in Ireland and in the Middle East. The word terrorism, in ordinary parlance, means a type of violence that is committed unpredictably so that everyone fears it may happen at any time.

Congress has stipulated a federal crime of terrorism as one that “is calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct;” it must also violate other statutes, per 18 USC 2332.

By 1993 there was a bombing of the basement of the World Trade Center; by 1995 there was the destruction of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Although persons have been convicted — Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols in Oklahoma, and Messrs Salameh, Ayyad, Abouhalima, and Ajaj, in the WTC case, the community is not completely satisfied that all facts were considered.

In both cases there was involvement by the FBI and/or CIA, with the accused. Indeed, if we think back to the assassination of JFK, Americans were not told at the time, but they found out later, that Lee Harvey Oswald had been recruited by the CIA when he was in the Marines.

In the 1993 bombing of the WTC basement, the FBI has admitted that it was creating a sting operation. A man named Emah Salem, an ex-officer of the Egyptian Army, provided hours of conversation that he taped with his FBI comrade.

Salem feels remorse at the loss of life (there was also hundreds of millions of dollars of property damage). Salem points out that at the very least, since the FBI knew about the bombing in advance, it could have prevented it.

In the current case, the mother of the accused, Mrs Zubeidat Tsarnaev, has said to the media “I am 100% sure that this is a set-up. [My older son]  was consulted by the CIA for years.”

Dzohokhar’s aunt has said, on Youtube, that she called the FBI immediately when she heard her nephews were suspects, to tell them of this CIA business. She says “I’m suspicious that this was staged.”

I will read to you now a statement that state judges in California are required to make to the jurors:

“You must decide what the facts are. It is up to all of you, and you alone, to decide what happened, based only on the evidence that has been presented to you in this trial.

Do not let bias, sympathy, prejudice, or public opinion influence your decision. Bias includes, but is not limited to, bias for or against the witnesses, attorneys, defendant[s] or alleged victim[s], based on disability, gender, nationality, national origin, race or ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, [or] socioeconomic status….”

I also want to remind you, Jurors, of the role of government in this case. The FBI persons who gave testimony here did so as witnesses. They presented evidence in the same way other witnesses do. And to repeat, the prosecutor is bringing the case on behalf of society. The defense attorney’s represent the accused. The jury is the decider of the facts in the case.

There will be a later part of the case, known as sentencing, if you bring in a verdict of guilty. Your decision about guilt has to be based on the case as presented up to this point. You should not be attempting to calculate what may happen at sentencing. That would be wrong.

Quite simply you must find Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty if you believe, beyond reasonable doubt, that he did what he is accused of having done. He must not only have physically committed the act of killing and injuring, he must have had the intention of killing and injuring.

Try to picture his motive, his mind. Don’t think his admission of guilt closes the case for you. You are the trier-of-facts.

Years from now, the public may want to know what happened at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, and they will look partly to your judgment. Your judgment should be based, I repeat, on the evidence presented here, and on your evaluation of the credibility of witnesses.

Don’t be afraid or embarrassed to float any ideas in the jury room and don’t let yourself be controlled by anyone.

–Mary W Maxwell has published other articles about the Marathon bombing case. These are public domain:

“They Youtubed Their Way to a Guilty Verdict” (Jan 1, 2015)

“Letter to My Late Parents:  Marathon Bombing” (Jan 5, 2015)

“Australia Day, 2015. Terrorism Problem Solved. Thanks, Dr Lawrence Dunegan!” (Jan 25, 2015)

“Boston Marathon Trial: Absurdities on Tsarnaev’s Case” (March 15, 2015)

“Huge Compensation for Victims of 9-11, Marathon” (March 22, 2015).

Her website is maryWmaxwell.com