3-11-06: The Stephen Heller Legal De...

Author Message   Pat Vesely Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Pat_vesely Post Number: 97 Registered: 02-2006 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 7 (A keeper?) Posted on Saturday, March 11, 2006 - 7:22 pm:        NEW -- Please help Stephen Heller: Subject: The Stephen Heller Legal Defense Fund www.hellerlegaldefensefund.com Hello everyone, this is Michele Gregory, Stephen Heller's wife. Once again, Stephen and I thank you for all of your help and support. Your encouragement and kind words have been invaluable to us in this very difficult and frightening time. As you know, Stephen has been charged with some very serious crimes for allegedly blowing the whistle on Diebold Election Systems. He has pleaded innocent to all charges. He needed the very best legal defense, but criminal defense attorneys are very expensive. So far, starting in August of 2004, we have covered Stephen's legal bills with our personal savings and by taking a second mortgage on our house. Our savings are now gone, and our credit is strained. And so, with the help of some friends, I have started the Stephen Heller Legal Defense Fund and corresponding website. www.hellerlegaldefensefund.com Please visit the site. It has details on Stephen's case, news, press articles, blog posts, and information about the defense fund, including detailed information on how it is run and how you can donate, should you wish to. Whether or not you are able to donate, please pass the website around to everyone you know. Stephen's lawyer has said that public awareness of his situation will be beneficial to his defense. Thank you all for all you have done, are doing, and will do. Stephen and I are in your debt; you have our gratitude. With love, Michele Gregory, proud and loving wife of Stephen Heller * * * * * Should you wish to donate with a check, please make the check out to "The Stephen Heller Legal Defense Fund" and mail it to: The Stephen Heller Legal Defense Fund c/o Michele D. Gregory, Fund Administrator 17216 Saticoy St., Box 234 Van Nuys, CA 91406-2103 The fund itself is a non-interest bearing, FDIC insured checking account opened on March 7, 2006 at the First Federal Bank of California, Encino branch. Stephen's name is not on the account and he does not have access to the money. Monies can only be used for payments to Stephen's attorneys, and the account has been set up after advice from attorneys and with full transparency. From BBV Admin: YOU ARE URGED TO COPY THIS POST SEND IT TO YOUR LISTS, POST IT ON BLOGS, AND INFORM AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE Paper ballots are the 'Currency of Democracy'. They've been helping to curb election fraud since 139 BCE!   Joycelynn Straight Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Fairelections Post Number: 6 Registered: 12-2005 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 1 (A keeper?) Posted on Saturday, March 11, 2006 - 8:46 pm:        Thanks for posting this. We donated what we could. Hope others will, also.   Bev Harris Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 3810 Registered: 12-2004 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 3 (A keeper?) Posted on Saturday, March 11, 2006 - 9:34 pm:        Thank you, Pat Vesely. Black Box Voting has committed $10,000 to the Stephen Heller Legal Defense Fund. I have spoken to his wife and to Stephen about this. I urge those who are in a position to do so to make the most generous contribution you can. Please do two things right now to roll back the inappropriate encroachment of punitive government actions against citizens and public officials who have made difficult ethical decisions to fight for your civil rights. 1. First and foremost, please give to the Stephen Heller fund. He was faced with the ethical dilemma from hell. What do you do when a presidential primary is just weeks away, and you are assigned a word processing assignment that has you looking at evidence that the secretary of state is being lied to by the voting machine company counting millions of votes? What do you do when those lies explode into thousands of disenfranchised voters? Nothing? In times like these, the citizenry depends on honesty and courage like Stephen Heller has shown. If you want citizens of courage like Heller successfully threatened and ultimately silenced, do nothing. If you believe that he went to the front lines for YOUR rights, please give what you can. http://www.hellerlegaldefensefund.com Next Give to Heller's fund first, because that is the most difficult thing to do, and the thing that may cause us to procrastinate. 2. And then, please join the important VoteTrustUSA.org initiative to fight for Ion Sancho. This involves simply clicking a link and sending an important letter to Florida officials. Here is the Ion Sancho support link: http://votetrustusa.org/supportsancho.html * * * * * Stand together and fight, folks, or let them pick us off one by one. "If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival..." -- Sir Winston Churchill   Bev Harris Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 3811 Registered: 12-2004 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 1 (A keeper?) Posted on Saturday, March 11, 2006 - 9:38 pm:        ROBERT C. KOEHLER For release 3/9/06 WHISTLING DIEBOLD By Robert C. Koehler Tribune Media Services They ain't gonna kiss you just because you're a whistleblower. No matter that you exposed wrongdoing and struck a blow for fair elections. The larger good isn't always obvious to the powers that be. So Steve Heller, a Los Angeles-based actor whose day job is doing temporary office work, faces three felony charges, all of which are a stretch: felony access to computer data, commercial burglary and receiving stolen property. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office says he's a thief, an Internet criminal, and that's that. And, oh yeah, he violated attorney-client confidentiality, and cost a big law firm a million dollars in lost business. Serious stuff. And if the DA's office has its way, this is all the judge and jury will look at: the law in its narrowest sense, as though ethical issues aren't sometimes murky and enormously complicated. Indeed, this is the story of a 44-year-old man who had a problem in practical ethics fall into his lap a little over two years ago, when he was temping in the word-processing center of Jones Day, a major Los Angeles law firm. Among the firm's clients was Diebold Election Systems, the largest manufacturer of electronic voting machines and voting machine software in the U.S. - and probably the most controversial. Diebold machines are notoriously hackable and unreliable, and the company itself is as secretive as it is politically connected. The company is in the forefront of the spread of unverifiable ("trust us") electronic voting across the country, a phenomenon that many computer experts and fair-election advocates find utterly terrifying. "In connection with his duties on Jan. 29, 2004, suspect Heller was given an assignment to work on a Jones Day document regarding Diebold voting machines," Heller's arrest warrant attests. "After completing that assignment, suspect Heller, without authorization, accessed and printed 107 Jones Day documents concerning their representation of Diebold." What the arrest warrant leaves out is that, in 2004, Diebold machines were going to be used in a number of California counties in the March primary and the November general elections, and the machines' questionable reliability was in the news a lot. And indeed, Diebold machines did malfunction in the March elections. But they didn't malfunction in November because by then they had been decertified by California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley - thanks in large part to Heller's actions. The documents Heller, the temp word processor, happened upon and subsequently printed out revealed a potential crime in progress. Here's where the ethics become urgent. He could either ignore what he saw or, at considerable personal risk and with nothing to gain except clarity of conscience, take action. He took action. He gave the documents to election-reform advocates, who got them into the hands of the media and state officials. Because he did, data concerning Diebold's use of uncertified software, which was supposed to remain private, became public knowledge. "In one memo," the Los Angeles Weekly wrote, "the law firm warned Diebold, before the March primary, that its use of uncertified vote-counting software in Alameda County, starting in 2002, violated California election law and broke its $12.7 million contract." And election-reform advocate Peter Soby wrote on Huffington Post: "So in a nutshell, Diebold was defrauding the state government and taxpayers of California, and disenfranchising the voters of California. And the documents prove it." More can be found at: http://www.hellerlegaldefensefund.com/   Charles Pickard Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Boe3258 Post Number: 5 Registered: 12-2004 Best of Black Box? N/A Votes: 0 (A keeper?) Posted on Saturday, March 11, 2006 - 9:42 pm:        I ran across this page and thought someone might be able to use the information contained here.It deals with juries and the real power they have as a final say as to the laws governing "we the people". I hope it helps anyone that has to go to criminal court. http://www.caught.net/juror.htm   John Washburn Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Johnwashburn Post Number: 47 Registered: 02-2006 Best of Black Box? N/A Votes: 0 (A keeper?) Posted on Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 8:23 pm:        Voir dire, in violation of Sparf & Hansen vs US, will be used to screen out just those jurors Sparf states will always be present in a jury; those citizens impressed into jury service who know they have the obligation to judge the Law, the application thereof in the case and finally the facts of the case. Sparf & Hansen in a nutshell is: The [presiding trial] judge, by instructing the jury that they were bound to accept the law as given to them by the court, denied [the jury] right to decide the law. The US Supreme Court 1895 found: It is our deep and settled conviction, confirmed by a re-examination of the authorities under the responsibility of taking part in the consideration and decision of the capital case now before the court, that the jury, upon the general issue of guilty or not guilty in a criminal case, have the right, as well as the power, to decide, according to their own judgment and consciences, all questions, whether of law or of fact, involved in that issue. The court disagreed with Sparf & Hansen that the Judge's failure to instruct the jury of this power and responsibility was not a violation of the 6th amendment guarantee of a trial by jury because: ... judges who are wholly or chiefly occupied in the administration of criminal justice are apt, not only to grow severe in their sentences, but to decide questions of law too unfavorably to the accused. The jury having the undoubted and uncontrollable power to determine for themselves the law as well as the fact by a general verdict of acquittal, a denial by the court of their right to exercise this power will be apt to excite in [the Jurors] a spirit of jealousy and contradiction and to prevent [the Jurors] from giving due consideration and weight to the instructions [of the Judge] In other words general citizens on juries would always know of their solemn and Constitutionaly protected power to judge all matters in a trial; of both Law and fact. So much so that if a Judge were to instruct Jurors otherwise, the Jurors would be so preocupied with the usurpation by the Judge the Jurors would not listen to the appropriate instructions of the Judge. Voir dire is now used by judges who are wholly or chiefly occupied in the administration of criminal justice to screen out those citizens the 1895 supreme court said would always be part of jury; Citizens who would jelously and zealously check the encroachment by such Judges on the Power of the Jury. Currently, no defense attourney is going to throw his career away to fight this fight on behalf of a client. the defense attourney only deals with the client once. He must deal with the Judge for the rest of his days before the bar; long after the Heller case is nothing more than a memory.

The public must be able to see and authenticate these four essential steps for an election to be public, democratic, and valid: (1) Who can vote (voter list); (2) Who did vote (3) The original count; (4) Chain of custody.