They will tell you right to your face that they defend their legal aid clients just as much as they do their paying clients. Before my first lawyer even looked at the disclosure or any evidence against me, he told me;
"Plead guilty [Tortured], and I will try to get you the best deal I can." I told him;
"You're fired." So he quietly left with his nose held high in the air. I didn't now where to go, who to call, or who I could trust. I sat there in jail, week after week, and pondered my complete lack of options. So I began asking around. A couple guys recommend this one lawyer named TIM STONEHOUSE. They say he's the shit. So I call him up and describe my situation and he agrees to take my case. Loud and larger than life, Tim reassures me he's handled this sort of thing before.
"No big deal. It's all too common place nowadays" he tells me.
But he asks why he should believe me. I told him I had no idea. This is before the DNA evidence results were released which proved the alleged sexual assault never took place. At that time there was no way I could prove I didn't do this. But I told him about the DNA evidence that would eventually clear my name, and he believed me. I felt lucky as hell that this guy took the time to see me. That day alone I was one of dozens of men to see the lawyer god.
A few months later, the DNA test results come in proving I didn't molest my step daughter. I ask Tim when I can expect to get out of there now that I have proof of my innocence. He tells me;
"Well, it isn't that easy because she is still alive to claim it still happened. The crown will just say that just because there is no evidence, it doesn't mean it didn't happen." Seems to me like a lawyer worth his salt would have gone to court on my behalf to point out the obvious that DNA evidence results like this was proof that a crime DIDN'T happen. But anyways, Stonehouse then tells me that we can use this DNA test result to go to a bail hearing. He insists he go to that alone and that I should call him the night after to find out how it went. That night I call, and he tells me the crown approached him and said;
"We will strongly oppose any sort of bail because we were contacted by [Tortured's] cell partner, and he has notified us that [Tortured] has threatened to kill his step daughter as soon as he is released."
I was floored. I assured him that I would never say or do such a thing and that this was a complete lie. I demanded he bring whoever made this accusation to the stand to repeat it so that they would purger themselves. The bail hearing was put off for another month and this time I demanded I be there for it. When that day finally arrived, I sat and watched my attorney bring up the matter in court. Before he even finishes his introduction, the crown prosecution interrupts him and says;
"..yes, we investigated the allegation, it turns out it was nothing, so...moving on." -Moving on? What the hell do they mean "moving on"?! Was this some failed attempt to have my bail denied or was it all just a ruse to waste time? Whatever the case, the end result remains the same. I was the one stuck in jail for a good while longer sweating this out, wondering if I'll ever get bail and get out of there. To give you an idea of the kind of daily beatings, mind torture, and much more abuse I've had to endure while in Remand , refer to the previous blog entry "Remand AKA Capital of Hell". No big deal. Moving on he says. What a jerk!
On December 21,2011, I was granted $5000.00 no cash bail, but for no fucking reason they arbitrarily refused to release me. 36 long days later, after the holidays, some new guard screwed up and let me out of my cell to use the phone. By this time, I was absolutely rip shit livid. I called my lawyer to give him a piece of my mind;
"I believe you're screwing me around. I've been given bail and yet you still can't secure my release? If you can't handle a bail hearing then I certainly don't trust you to represent me at trial." I also informed him I would be lodging a complaint with the law society of alberta. The next day he calls me and says he's secured my release for the following Thursday, and on that day I finally get out of there.
My first act after re-joining the pretend civilized society was to request a new lawyer from legal aid. I filed that complaint to the law society of Alberta and with legal aid. My complaint was quickly shot down and legal aid refused my request to change counsel. They tried to convince me Stonehouse did nothing wrong and that he was working hard on my case. Except, in a year's time, he did nothing to prepare for trial. I have court documents showing Tim and other attorneys were trying to get him removed from the case. I appealed the decision with legal aid, then the regional committee, then finally with the Northern committee. We would go back and forth for five months on this appeal shit. One day we were in court and Tim Stonehouse stands before the judge and says;
"Your honour, I'm completely taken aback by this. I had no idea whatsoever there was a problem between my client and I. In fact, I was here today ready to proceed with trial." I guess he apparently forgot about all the times he requested to be removed from my case. And the other attorneys who submitted similar requests on his behalf. He also conveniently forgot he hadn't prepared anything for trial that day or any other, and all the times he lied on the phone to the appeal committees. He begged the judge to remove him from the record so a new lawyer could be appointed. The crown was choked. The judge slammed his fist on the table and said this was an outrage!. The judge's actual words were;
"Your honour, I'm completely taken aback by this. I had no idea whatsoever there was a problem between my client and I. In fact, I was here today ready to proceed with trial." I guess he apparently forgot about all the times he requested to be removed from my case. And the other attorneys who submitted similar requests on his behalf. He also conveniently forgot he hadn't prepared anything for trial that day or any other, and all the times he lied on the phone to the appeal committees. He begged the judge to remove him from the record so a new lawyer could be appointed. The crown was choked. The judge slammed his fist on the table and said this was an outrage!. The judge's actual words were;
"You're dicking the system over!"
Eventually, my request for a new lawyer is approved and a new legal aid lawyer, Danielle Boisvert, took over. Throughout all of this, the crown prosecution was trying to pull my bail for no other reason than he felt I shouldn't be on the street (more on that later). My trial was rescheduled to give my new lawyer time to review my case. Additionally, a pretrial was scheduled to get all the facts on the record beforehand. Also, the format was switched from a judge alone, to a judge and jury format.
My pretrial started and from the word go, Angel's (my accusers) story was different once again. They only managed to record her testimony, as nearby construction caused such a noise disturbance that they agreed to resume the pretrial in another city 3 days later. As a precaution to ensure I didn't skip out on my trial, they make you check into jail three days leading up to your court date. So this postponement meant I had to spend an additional 3 days in jail, which obviously totally sucked. During that weekend, I called Angel's mother's best friend (whom we'll call Beth), who also happened to be a friend of mine. For the record, Angel once accused Beth's son of raping her too, but Angel later admitted to lying about that. Beth informs me that the police were now looking for Angel. Apparently, Angel phoned up another town's police department and told them she would be unable to appear in court due to a "prior engagement". They asked Angel to wait a moment while they put her on hold and transfered her to the appropriate police department. When the RCMP took her off hold, Angel had already hung up.
So the pretrial resumes a few days later and Angel is a no show. Her mother is there representing her. The crown acknowledges that Angel called into the police to cancel and so the trial was remanded for three more days. They didn't want to pay to have me transported back to jail, so I was kicked out of the back door wearing shoes without shoelaces and forced to walk home which was a mere one town away. A warrant was issued for Angels arrest, and she was picked up pretty quickly. Her mother bailed her out for $100.00. In front of yet another judge, the crown prosecution lies to the judge and tells him Angel had some sort of mental health appointment which is why she missed the last court day. MY lawyer wasn't available that day, so she sent one of her flunkies instead. The judge explains that because they can't facilitate the cross-examination on that day they need to postpone the pretrial again to a time when everybody was available. That wouldn't be for an additional seven months!
On December 5th, 2012, under cross examination, my step daughter admits she never had a mental health appointment, and she was actually out drunk and high partying with her friends while we were in court wondering where she was. Then, under oath, five times she denied ever calling the cops to try to get out of having to appear before court that day. Yet there was a 911 tape that proved she did just that. Once again, Angel's recollection of events on the night of the alleged rape were also completely different. My lawyer at the time was very upset that this was not being dropped. Email correspondence (which we are preparing to publish), revealed;
"According to the crown prosecution, this is going to trial because [Tortured's] previous attorney, (Tim Stonehouse), said that [Tortured] admitted everything to him and he was just waiting for the DNA test results to come out before sentencing."...! I couldn't believe what I was hearing. All the while that slimy bastard Stonehouse was supposedly working on my side, it turns out he was conspiring with the other side against me behind my back! My lawyer Danielle told me I should file a complaint with the law society, which I did. That complaint would eventually be thwarted by somebody whose job I can only assume, is to protect lawyers from having complaints filed against them. In the end, I had to drop that complaint because I was told if I kept perusing it, Tim Stonehouse would have been entitled to a full copy of my current file. At that time, it had been a full year since he had represented me and I didn't want to turn over that information to an angry, crooked lawyer who had already been caught conspiring against me with my accuser's attorney. In order to guarantee the crown prosecution wouldn't get a copy of my current file, I had to drop the complaint. This all transpired 10 months before my acquittal. This is why corrupt lawyers never get taken to task. Your tax dollars at work.
So just a recap, at this point I've been through 4 lawyers. The first was fired right away for telling me to plead guilty for a crime I didn't commit and throw myself at the mercy of the court, and the second, (Stonehouse) stayed on my case for a year before it became apparent he was either lazy or incompetent (or both) and was clearly serving the crown's interests instead of mine. The third lawyer, Danielle Boisvert I actually respected and admired. She was like a bulldog in lipstick. I appreciated her abilities and her zeal, but it got to a point that I dreaded meeting with her. She was VERY outspoken and aggressive. I also got the feeling her attention was becoming increasingly divided between my case and her paying clients, which is somewhat understandable. Who would you work harder for-the legal aid case, or the guy who gave you $50,000.00? For two and a half years of legal aid services, my bill came to $7,333.49. That includes trial. Most quality bail hearings in Canada are on average, 3-5 thousand dollars if you're a cash paying client. If you have money, you don't go to jail. Everybody I ever met in jail was a legal aid client, just rotting away. Anyways, Danielle floored both myself and my supporters when we asked her why she wasn't preparing for my pretrial. Danielle simply replied;
"I don't think Angel is going to show up". Well you can guess what happened. On December 5th, 2012, Danielle was so confident Angel wouldn't show that she actually came to court without my file! But Angel did show up that day, so Danielle had to go get my file while we all waited. Still, I was impressed by the way she still managed to bring a lot of lies to the surface and lay the ground work for my official trial in which I would ultimately be acquitted. She would have been terrific if she just respected her role a lot more. However, Danielle was just too domineering. I wasn't allowed to disagree with her, nor was I allowed to question her. In fact, she once said to me;
"Listen, you're the band and I'm the mystro. I'm the lead singer and you're the choir. LOL". She must have meant it, because I disagreed with her once over not calling my court appointed mental health evaluator (who determined I was not insane or bi-polar) as a witness and she quit over it. I was shocked! I did a bit of crumbling and sucking up to try to get her to change her mind to no avail. That brings me to my last lawyer. This individual was in a class all her own. She takes my file and assures me if I had any issues, just contact her. I told her that my last attorney filed a complaint on my behalf against the police for harassing me. I informed her I was a marked man, and she would need to keep a good eye on me. Less than a week later, I called to notify her there were some issues surfacing (refer to "Tortured Vs Seal Team 6"). She claims she understood, yet over a week went by and she never responded to me. In the end, the police claimed they came to my house because my girlfriend was being abused. It was all a lie and a piss poor excuse they concocted to justify kicking in my door to harass and re-arrest me. They could see for themselves that my girlfriend was not being abused in any way (which is probably why she refused their persistent requests for her to testify that I HAD abused her). After that night, I spend the subsequent two and a half months in jail before getting bailed out by my girlfriend's daughter. I've been on house arrest ever since. My fourth lawyer would eventually quit on me as well, after I refused to sign a plea bargain which required me to plead guilty to trumped up charges and once again throw myself at the mercy of the court.
I've learned a lot about how our so called justice system works. It's not really about justice. It's actually about expropriating every cent a man can lay his hands on, thus rendering him incapable of continuing his fight, and then getting him to sign a plea deal which would see him entered into the rape and violence statistics and ultimately put behind bars. The worst part about it though, is how they all work together to crush your soul and break your will throughout this entire process. They count on financially depleting you and exhausting all the fight you have in you by the time this is all over, so you lack the means and the will to throw yourself back into it to try to hold any of these bastards accountable. It's ALL about money and finding examples of "bad men" for ideologues and carrerists to point their fingers at. There is no thought about justice, or truth, or morality, or even basic human decency. My current lawyer seems to be doing a pretty good job so far, and he may even restore my faith in his profession. But that would still mean roughly 4 out of 5 lawyers are either lazy, incompetent, or just plain out to screw you. Some things I just cannot talk about yet as there is an extensive lawsuit being launched. Some issues with the last attorney are under complaint and are still being reviewed. Trust me, there is much more yet, and it gets even more corrupt and even more bizarre. Someday if/when I ever get clear of all this, I hope to be able to tell you about it. The problem is, most people don't realize the system is like this until it's got it's claws wrapped around their own balls, and by then it's too late. People (especially men) need to start learning about what things are really like, and they need to fucking CARE! Because this shit is literally laying waste to entire families, and driving innocent men to suicide. I hope this blog inspires people to get informed and involved in real substantive change.
Thanks for reading. More to come.
-Tortured
