Pettis County Judicial Corruption

Blast Zone No. 25814 - 7 Comments
Set Up On:
Category: Corrections - Jail Staff
Current Jail Address:
333 S Lamine
Sedalia, Missouri 65301

The 'Good Ol Boy System' has been in place here in Pettis County for generations. Sherriff Starkey was a known member of one of the Aryn brotherhoods. He left present sheriff Kevin Bond to carry on the legal traditions here.


The county jail is being run in a manner that holds people in a stall pattern in a make-shift torture chamber that drives it's occupants insane.


Ninety percent of all convictions here are the results of plea bargains. The outrageous sentences that are agreed upon here are the results of people who will agree to anything just to get out of this environment.


Every day is the same. Food is scarce but better than other places. Asking for any type of outside assistance is not forbidden but is frowned upon by staff. Outside assistance is anything you need that must come from outside your cell. Heaven forbid you do not accept their non-assistance, or have knowledge of any federal law concerning housing inmates.Upon questioning their methods, I've been isolated from others, put in dangerous environments because staff told several inmates that I was the reason their privileges were being removed; cussed out by staff for writing grievances on things like no law library, no adequate medical services.


Examples:

A. Dark red, gritty blood in my stool.

Answer: "That is normal and not worth the doctor's time."


B. My right leg is swollen twice the size of my left, swollen and painful, preventing much walking.

*Answer: "That was normal. Everyone has limbs bigger than the other."


C.) I asked for aspirin for a week because of infected tooth.

*Answer: Make a formal request to the doctor.


D.) My cell flooded and I asked for a week for a mop to clean it up.

*Answer: Denied


E.) My sink stopped working and I was out of drinking water for two weeks.

*Answer: They did nothing until my neighbors sink wouldn't stop working and 4 guards rushed to fix his sink the hour it broke.


There are no medically trained professionals on site except Wednesday morning when a country doctor (supposed veterinarian) comes with his nurse. Medication is passed out by untrained guards and they have given wrong medications countless times and not been able to answer ordinary questions for people taking medications.


These are only a few isolated instances that I've conveyed due to time restraints and communication barriers. Every inmate can give you countess examples of their rights being violated

.

I'm a combat veteran suffering from PTSD and they are happily doing anything to keep me in harm's way, even a guard assaulting me coming out of the video court room. Six months and not one of my multiple grievances have been answered to any degree except. "we'll pass it on''. Even when I want to press charges, I am denied my right to press charges against the correctional officer who assaulted me even though or probably because there were witnesses and the assault was caught on the surveillance camera footage.


The court system itself is a farce. Judge Kauffman maintains his office while suffering from Alzheimer's. He can recite the statutes necessary to ensure that the court record is lawful and accurate, but meanwhile, he is looking for lost buttons from his jacket. I watched as he spent 5 minutes looking for the buttons off his jacket, on the floor, in his pockets. He looked everywhere to no avail, all the while reciting the statutes to send a man to prison. I asked my public attorney at the time as to how this was possible. She broke out in uncontrollable laughter saying, " I know!! " Three times I asked her and commented on the judges condition; each time she was overcome with laughter until I finally got angry and snapped, 'This isn't funny, this is my life you're playing with'. That brought her out of her laughter, not the reality of my life in the balance.


The public defender's office works in tandem with the prosecutor's office ensuring that the public defenders do as little as legally possible. The judge asks two questions for a convicted person to answer upon sentencing:


1.) Did your lawyer do everything you asked them to do?

2.) Did your lawyer do anything you did not want them to do?

The answers are:

a) yes (because we are to ignorant of the law to know what to ask and to tell them to do)

b) no (because they will only do what you ask them to do)


Examples:

1.)A gentleman asked his public defender to file a prepared motion signifying that his attorney was using his ignorance of the law as a means of not offering him adequate counsel. The public defender refused to file the motion and the judge refused to force him to do so even though it was unlawful not to file the motion.

2.)My own public defender was telling me to be nice to the judge because it was not prudent to not do so. I told her if the judge is a problem, we will just file for a change of judge. she said, "oh, do you want to change the judge? ". I said " no, but I'd like for you to at least offer it!" I asked about veterans court, mental health court and drug treatment court. She said that " we don't have to offer any of those even though they are available." I asked her for her opinion on how the prosecutor was using his authority and she said he has the power to do as he wishes and she is in complete agreement with the way he is using it. I asked if she wanted to be a prosecutor and she smiled and nodded yes.


These are only a couple examples of the court's transgression. It is ridiculous how untethered they are from the moral right, from the judges all the way down to the uneducated guards.u


A.)They denied a bondsman to come and bail me out simply because 'they don't like me'.


B.)They are now refusing to hand out sheets because they said too many sheets are being torn up. Therefore, people are lying on plastic padded mats with nothing but a wool blanket.


C.)I haven't had a pillow since I have been here for 6 months.


D.)The law library is equipped with 2 books from the mid-90's and a computer from the 90's running windows '95, and the software is 2005 statutes. Nothing newer.


E.)After I waived my preliminary hearing, the prosecutor did the following acts that are against Missouri State Statues:


1.) Added charges

2.) Amended charges

3. Enhanced charges


This institution is destroying people's lives from the inside, victims whose voices cannot be heard beyond the concrete and steel that is holding them captive.


The legals authorities in Pettis County, Missouri, are not changing unless they are exposed and stopped. These are the crimes, this is the real war on crime.


-written by current inmate at the Pettis County Jail; Pretrial detainee; non-violent offender

*This article is no where near everything that has gone on illegally in the county. We have much more to share!

Thank you for choosing us to tell this man's story. Please share my response with him. You might want to have his lawyer or investigator pass it to him via legal mail or legal visit. Since he made statements relevant to conditions of confinement, those statements could be relevant at sentencing, so his lawyers would want copies of anything he says publicly and he has a right to those copies.


When I was pre-violation detainee over three years ago the guards rejected anything containing anything about CopBlaster.com as inflammatory or a security risk, but when my lawyers thought the AUSA might use this site against me they had the right to give me copies of anything related to it.


Please convey my best wishes to your jail bird buddy and spread the word that inmates can be heard.

I have repeatedly seen guards disable sinks for days at a time as a punishment for the inmate. They usually do it as a punishment for allegations of water abuse (flooding, throwing water, etc.). They also have special "dry" cells with no running water and the bathroom is a hole in the floor. They put people in these things to get back at them for challenging their authority and to make an example so that other inmates will not challenge their authority. An intelligent inmate that knows their rights is their worst nightmare...

I also argued ineffectiveness at sentencing for failing to object orally to supervised release conditions later ruled unconstitutional in another case and as a result were removed from mine. The judge ruled that under the Strickland Test the court may not consider whether counsel's behavior fell below what is expected of a reasonably competent lawyer unless prejudice can be shown. The judge ruled that he could not think of any objection that the lawyer could have made that could possibly have been capable of persuading him to sentence me any differently, so prejudice was not shown.


The last thing a judge will do is admit being wrong, so convincing a judge that a better lawyer would have made him realize he was wrong is next to impossible....

In prison I filed a pro-se motion to set aside my underlying conviction on the grounds that my lawyer was ineffective for failing to file a motion to arrest judgment after I pled guilty. I filed because in prison I found out that the charging document I pled to did not contain all the elements necessary to charge a violation of the statute and therefore did not charge an offense against the United States.


The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments and decided that case law governing challenges to guilty pleas require that had counsel acted differently the defendant would not have pled guilty. Since I argued that I would still have pled guilty, but would have moved to have the case thrown out via Rule 34 after jeopardy was attached they upheld the conviction....

When I was in the special housing unit (SHU) a.k.a. "the hole" at USP Victorville it was impossible to see the doctor. I was only seen by medical after being beaten by guards and that was only because of a bloody cut on my scalp. When they asked the SHU staff to take me to a follow up a couple weeks later they just said I refused without asking me.


A couple months later I had a horrible tooth ache for over a week but they would not take me to the dentist despite considerable swelling. Then I went back go general population where I was able to just walk down to dental and get a root canal. When the dentist saw me in the waiting room he had me moved to the front of the line because of how big my jaw had gotten...

At CCJ, the law library is limited to an ancient Windows XP computer that only has copies of immigration statutes. Most CCJ inmates are federal detainees being held pursuant to a contract with the United States Marshals. A lot of them are ICE detainees accused of being illegal aliens. ICE holds are usually civil holds for things like overstaying a visa or being discovered in the country without proper papers, but even though they are not accused of crimes they are treated like criminals. It really opened my eyes on immigration.


The rest of the law library consists of plenty of state law books, but the federal section was limited to two torn up copies of the sentencing guidelines, so there is basically no federal law library even though most inmates are federal....

That sounds like it could be any jail in America. I have been a pre-trial detainee in just two here in Oregon since 2012. The Multnomah County Detention Center (MCDC) and Columbia County Jail (CCJ). I spent more time in each of those places as a pre-trial or pre-violation detainee than I spent in federal prisons (FCI Sheridan and USP Victorville) combined. I am basing my feedback on those personal experiences.


Are you sure that the surveillance cameras even record? I ask because when I was assaulted by guards at MCDC I kept waiting for the video to clear me only to find out that the cameras in the housing units are for observation purposes only and do not record. As a result I had to wait for a biomechanics expert to do a forensic analysis to prove I was telling the truth....

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