Sue Maui Tyrants
For example, in 2006 I was a 61-year-old crime victim seeking justice and violating no law, but I quickly found myself in state prison where I was assaulted, tortured, denied care for a medical emergency, told was a criminal and have no rights, denied contact with an attorney, told I would be there for at least several months and generally treated like an enemy combatant. I was:
Deprived of liberty without due process;
Deprived of liberty without equal protection of the law;
Deprived of liberty without benefit of counsel;
Deprived of liberty without being provided a copy of the complaint against me;
Subjected to cruel and unusual punishment during this unjustified and unlawful deprivation of liberty;
Subjected to unnecessary and wanton infliction of injury and extreme pain and suffering;
Subjected to use of force maliciously, sadistically and far out of proportion to any need;
Denied medical care for a medical emergency during this deprivation of liberty;
Denied access to a mental health professional though repeatedly requested;
Punished severely for exhibiting symptoms of emotional distress caused by the stressful illegal imprisonment, abuse, humiliation and degradation.
In short, I was subjected to punishing conditions that have been judged toxic to the mental health of death row inmates, even though I had not been tried (and never would be). Because of prevailing de facto policies, which violate official policy and therefore violate the law, all these horrors could happen again tomorrow, then again and again. To me or anyone else.
On Maui behind the facade of aloha spirit, colorful leis and lovely hula hands lurks Maui's Injustice System. Also known as the Maui Railroad, it is an overgrown, repressive and violent bureaucracy. This so-called justice system -- comprised of the police department, the prosecutor's office, the Maui state courts and the state department of public safety (home of the prison guards, euphemistically known as ACOs or Adult Correctional Officers) – is a sewer of ignorance, arrogance, incompetence, abuse of power, brutality and widespread criminal behavior. There is no "aloha spirit" for locals -- the term is nothing but a marketing slogan and the spirit is only for visitors who can pay for the fraud.
Maui has sacrificed the long-time residents' quality of life and the aina itself (the land and environment) for the fool's gold of development and economic growth based entirely on the medium-high to high-end visitor industry. In the process it has shredded the Bill of Rights apparently in the belief that “justice” must be swift, even at the cost of often being wrong and cruel, so that uppity residents are never allowed to give the world the notion that all is not hunky-dory in “Paradise.”
The perverted dynamics of the prison-industrial complex ensure that all the agents of Maui's Injustice System have a vested interest in a large number of arrests and prosecutions. There is a built-in bias toward jailing people and keeping all prison beds full, including the third "bed", the one on the floors of all the "two-man" cells. Once you are arrested you feel the power of that bias and come to understand the word “railroad” as both noun and verb. When the Railroad targets you it is relentless like the Terminator or Yul Brenner's character in the Sci-Fi film Western World in which gunslinger robots go haywire and turn on humans.
Maui cops have a strong sense of gang identification and loyalty, and they retaliate brutally for any utterance taken as an insult to their gang. If a thrashing in broad daylight is too risky, they have lots of other methods of inflicting pain. They can lock you in a stifling hot squad car with all the windows rolled up, cuff you extra tight, twist the cuffs until your wrists bleed and their bones groan in agony, flex your wrist nearly to the breaking point or jam a thumb hard into the palm of your cuffed hand. Though I always listened, complied, and never resisted arrest, I have endured all these assaults – some more than once -- after I calmly made true statements critical of Maui cops.
If you protest or cry out in pain they will Taser you and charge you with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. They use Tasers to threaten and terrorize nonviolent suspects and persons of interest. They use false crack (surprise blindside) take-downs without warning or a declaration of arrest, often not because a person is dangerous but because an officer trainee is along and needs to be shown how it's done or the sergeant wants to show off to his new boy. Officers who are subjects of complaints are accustomed to complete exoneration by the Maui Police Commission, which routinely whitewashes nearly all police crimes and abuses. If you dare to file complaints with the commission you run the risk of being the target of a vendetta.
Maui cops often show hostility toward people exercising their First Amendment rights in perfectly legal ways. This may be a vestige of authoritarian old Hawaii or the luna system in the pre-ILWU days of plantation justice. Local commoners are long accustomed to repression, which suits the current economic lords well. Maui cops often lie illegally to intimidate people by pretending they have powers they don't really have. For example, they will demand, under threat of arrest, to see identification of a person sign waving if they or others don't like his sign, though there is no law requiring pedestrians or demonstrators to carry identification. They fraudulently claim such authority under the Patriot Act and hassle and detain people under this false pretense.
During one of these confrontations I told the cop who had threatened to arrest me that I'm on a public sidewalk and not violating any law. He replied that since I'm on county property and he is a county police officer and therefore owns the sidewalk, he can order me to leave. Now, can anyone seriously maintain that these are not among the most ignorant, arrogant, poorly trained cops in the nation?
Maui prosecutors are like prosecutors everywhere -- ambitious and egotistical. Some are also dishonest, ruthless, unprincipled and venal. They are uninterested in such minor matters as facts, truth, justice, fairness and constitutional rights. Nor are they concerned about the human wreckage they leave in their wake. They mostly want to fatten their resumes and have high win percentages. To succeed they do not hesitate to suborn perjury by cops and other witnesses. They slander people in court (they have complete immunity) and destroy the lives of innocent people and even crime victims without any qualms. They are the first in the line of rubber stampers on a railroad to a kangaroo court, then to prison. They also routinely violate the law requiring that crime victims be informed about the status of their cases.
Maui Judges are.... well, what can we say about judges who are not familiar with the landmark “Pentagon Papers” case (US Government vs. New York Times)? Even good high school journalism students know about it, as do most first-year law students. In that case the US Supreme Court ruled that prior restraint of speech or publication is unconstitutional.
Yet a Maui District Court judge granted a TRO forbidding me to publish an account of crimes that had been committed against me, and two other Maui judges concurred. I cited the precedent-setting case, but they were unfamiliar with it and ignored my argument. I violated the order and was jailed.
This is apparently the first time in American history that a person has been jailed for writing and distributing a book, a dark distinction that is emblematic of the repressive Maui Injustice System. I appealed the order itself to the state Intermediate Court of Appeals and won on First Amendment grounds in 2004. The cost to the taxpayers of this prolonged travesty was hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Yet a Maui District Court judge granted a TRO forbidding me to publish an account of crimes that had been committed against me, and two other Maui judges concurred. I cited the precedent-setting case, but they were unfamiliar with it and ignored my argument. I violated the order and was jailed.
This is apparently the first time in American history that a person has been jailed for writing and distributing a book, a dark distinction that is emblematic of the repressive Maui Injustice System. I appealed the order itself to the state Intermediate Court of Appeals and won on First Amendment grounds in 2004. The cost to the taxpayers of this prolonged travesty was hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And what can we say about judges who make no bones about believing cops implicitly, naively and stupidly, and who routinely and openly value police testimony more than that of others. There is not even a pretense of separation of powers – is this not the very definition of a police state?
In 2005 I was viciously assaulted by five cops for insulting the department. As they confronted me, harassed me and one of them threatened me with a stun gun for no good reason I said, “You guys are turning this island into a fascist police state.”
To the Maui cops' way of thinking this comment fully justified a thrashing. The beating caused a fractured vertebra, a concussion, at least one broken rib and, in subsequent week, because of injuries to the carotid artery, several transient ischemic attacks (TIAs or mini-strokes) that could have been lethal. The incident was whitewashed by the Police Commission.
In 2003-2004 I was repeatedly hauled into court on TRO petitions by the owners of the Alive and Well Health Fraud Store, who didn't like my signs and leaflets. They filed one TRO petition asking a judge to prohibit me from distributing the leaflets. It is denied. They filed another with a different judge and it is also denied, so the sore losers sue me for alleged defamation in yet another attempt at censorship. It too failed. A few months later, rather than reply to my interrogatories demanding evidence for their lying claims, they dropped the lawsuit with prejudice “in the interest of justice,” thus admitting that it was an abuse of legal process designed to do what the perjured TRO petitions could not – shut me up.
At one point in this long affair, while demonstrating and distributing leaflets quietly, respectfully and legally on a public sidewalk one of these same people harassed, threatened and assaulted me and stole my leaflets while his friends, a menacing little mob, encouraged him. When I attempted to defend myself from the threats, theft and assault the goon called the cops, lied about the incident and swore out a citizens arrest.
Police prejudged the case by flat refusing to listen to me or file and investigate my complaint. The responding officer later lied under oath to cover up his misconduct and failure to investigate. I was convicted in 2004 of harassment and fourth degree criminal property damage for breaking the thug's gold chain in response to the attack. By their actions the police, prosecutors and judge aided and abetted the violent violation of my First Amendment rights.
Police prejudged the case by flat refusing to listen to me or file and investigate my complaint. The responding officer later lied under oath to cover up his misconduct and failure to investigate. I was convicted in 2004 of harassment and fourth degree criminal property damage for breaking the thug's gold chain in response to the attack. By their actions the police, prosecutors and judge aided and abetted the violent violation of my First Amendment rights.
The judge's reasoning was like something out of Alice in Wonderland: by attempting to defend himself, I might have made the unruly mob angrier and precipitated a brawl in which someone might have been seriously injured. Never mind that I did successfully defend myself and no one was seriously hurt. In this twisted way the judge aided and abetted the thugs in violating my constitutional rights.
In 2003 these same people had me arrested by an ignorant cop who demanded to see my “permit to protest.” There is no such thing. The Maui Machine doesn't get this yet, but in America people do not have to ask the police for permission to express their opinions. Another cop told me I'd been arrested “because you have a big mouth, you talk back and because of your personality,” illustrating that police contempt for constitutional rights is unabashed and unlimited.
Links to all my blogs: www.KurtButlerblogs.blogspot.com
The critics say:
"Superb!" -- Dr. Victor Herbert in the New England Journal of Medicine.
"Excellent" -- National Council Against Health Fraud.
"Five Stars" -- Cooking Light.
"Thought provoking; a great book" -- American Journal of Health Promotion.
"Thought provoking; a great book" -- American Journal of Health Promotion.
Maui's future foretold: Barbarians In Paradise -- Terror Comes to Maui. This is a prophetic flash novel about a future police state and those who rebel against it. Available in paperback and ebook at Amazon.com.
