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A Witness Lies, the Court Shrugs and Veterans Are Outraged (with documents)
ADAM LIPTAK
David Hinkson's Case took a significant step today with the attached New York Times article.
Please share with friends. The FORWORD to Roland Hinkson's new book on the fraudulent conviction of his son David is attached.
We need to get the same coverage for Edgar Steele.
Wes HoytLaw Offices of Wesley W. Hoyt,
Mobile: (303) 819-7400,
Fax: (303) 531-2141,
Toll Free: (800) 220-4698
Elven J. Swisher wore a replica of a Purple Heart on the witness stand when he testified that the defendant had tried to hire him to kill three federal officials.
Asked about the medal, Mr. Swisher pulled a document from his pocket to show that he was entitled to it and many others for his service in combat in the Korean War.
Mr. Swisher said the defendant, David R. Hinkson, an armchair constitutionalist with eccentric views about the tax code, had asked him how many men he had killed. “Too many,” Mr. Swisher recalled saying.
All lies. Mr. Swisher had never seen combat, had killed no one and had served without distinction. The document was a forgery. Mr. Swisher has since been convicted of lying to federal officials, wearing fake medals and defrauding the Department of Veterans Affairs of benefits for combat injuries.
But the jury knew none of this, and with Mr. Swisher’s testimony it convicted Mr. Hinkson of soliciting three murders. He was sentenced to 33 years for those crimes, along with 10 years for tax evasion, and he is serving his sentence in the maximum-security prison in Florence, Colo.
When Mr. Swisher’s lies came to light, Mr. Hinkson challenged his convictions for soliciting the murders. The jury had believed him guilty of more than loose talk, he said, only because Mr. Swisher had falsely presented himself as a battle-hardened killer.
But the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled against him last year by a 7-to-4 vote.
Mr. Swisher’s lies, the majority said, were no big deal. There was no reason to think the jury would have come out differently had it known of “Swisher’s routine, rather than heroic, military history,” Judge Carlos T. Bea wrote.
That decision has outraged veterans.
William F. Mac Swain, the national president of the Korean War Veterans Association, told the appeals court in a brief filed after the decision that “its reasoning and language are a slap in the face to veterans and jurors alike.”
The majority opinion implied “that the average American no longer attaches any significance to a veteran’s wartime service,” Mr. Mac Swain continued.
In fact, he said, jurors are likely to believe those who have sacrificed to defend them and are likely to reject the testimony of those who have falsely claimed entitlement to honors for which others have bled and died.
That was not just speculation. One of the jurors at Mr. Hinkson’s trial, in Boise, Idaho, in 2005, later said he would have voted to acquit had he known the truth.
“I was surprised to hear that Mr. Swisher was allowed to tell such lies which created the misimpression that he would be a good ‘hit man’ candidate based on having been a decorated combat veteran,” the juror, Ben S. Casey, said in a sworn statement. “These lies discredit him as a witness and therefore discredit the rest of his testimony.”
Mr. Mac Swain’s brief was prepared by John W. Keker, a prominent San Francisco lawyer who earned a Purple Heart in Vietnam. In an interview, Mr. Keker said the majority’s “dismissive and even supercilious attitude” about military service “drove me out of my mind.”
“The idea that jurors wouldn’t be tremendously affected if they knew someone had lied about getting their war decorations was just astonishing,” Mr. Keker said.
After reading Mr. Keker’s brief, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski switched his vote. He said the brief and a recent Supreme Court decision had made him realize he had “underestimated the trust some jurors would have placed in Swisher if they thought he was a decorated combat veteran, and the likely backlash if they learned he was a fraud.”
But the tally the second time around, in July, was still 6 to 5 against Mr. Hinkson.
Dennis P. Riordan, one of Mr. Hinkson’s lawyers, said he was working on an appeal to the Supreme Court, where the justices have lately been quite engaged with the meaning of military service.
The decision Chief Judge Kozinski referred to, for instance, granted a new sentencing hearing to a death row inmate, George Porter Jr. In an unsigned unanimous opinion, the justices chastised Mr. Porter’s trial lawyer for failing to tell the jury about “Porter’s heroic military service in two of the most critical — and horrific — battles of the Korean War,” service for which he earned two Purple Hearts and other distinctions.
On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in another case about a Korean War veteran. It concerns David L. Henderson, who missed a filing deadline for veterans’ benefits because he was bedridden from the very disability for which he sought help.
At the argument in Mr. Hinkson’s case in the Ninth Circuit, there was much discussion of medals and their meaning.
Judge Harry Pregerson, who would end up in dissent, said he and his father had both earned Purple Hearts. “So I know what it’s about,” he said.
A lawyer for the government, on the other hand, argued that Mr. Swisher’s lies had been inconsequential.
Judge Pregerson asked the lawyer, John F. DePue, what he was wearing on his lapel. It turned out to be a Distinguished Service Medal.
“I honor you for your service,” Judge Pregerson said. “When I look at you, I say, ‘This guy’s got credibility standing there.’ ”
“You’re impressing us,” Judge Pregerson said, and then he seemed to refer to Mr. Swisher. “And if a guy is wearing a Purple Heart medal, that’s going to impress some people, too.”
A version of this article appeared in print on November 30, 2010, on page A21 of the New York edition.
FOREWORD
by wesley w. hoyt
The Presumption of Innocence is the fundamental right, at the foundation of all personal freedoms in America which embodies the concept “it is better to free ten guilty men than to convict one who is innocent.”
For the last 30 years, the government has been using various techniques to replace basic, God-given Constitutional rights, such as the Presumption-of-Innocence, with various legal devices, such as the “Presumption of Governmental Regularity and Correctness.” An example of how this device is used is that judges proclaim they will “always believe the government witness over the accused” (in situations where all other factors are equal). Judges who follow the Presumption of Government Regularity and Correctness consider only the government’s witness to be an accurate reporter of events and consider the citizen not believable; hence, the evisceration of the Presumption of Innocence.
There are case law rulings creating this abomination of justice, which is contrary to the U.S. Constitution. What should happen under our Constitution is, when only the word of a citizen is pitted against the testimony of a government witness, without corroborating evidence, the Presumption of Innocence REQUIRES that judges accept the word of the accused as true. But this new device allows the judge to base his decision on something other than fundamental constitutional principles to arbitrarily conclude that the government is right and the citizen wrong.
The Presumption of Governmental Regularity and Correctness is a malicious tool, created as an alternative to Constitutional law, fashioned by the New World Order (NWO) movement, to defeat the Constitutional rights of the individual in America. It is the chief technique that allows collaborating government and foreign private interests to transform this country into a police state.
Another technique used in transforming this nation from a free state into a police state, is the attack on the innocent; those “politically incorrect” people willing to speak out against tyranny and corruption. Against them the government uses false charges, manufactured by rogue government agents on behalf of the elite who deem themselves to be “politically correct;” i.e., the NWO movement.
“They,” these rogue agents and the prosecutors and judges who support them, deliberately attack innocent individuals who criticize the NWO movement simply because of differing views of how governmental authority should be administered, managed and applied.
The tie-that-binds these entities is a form of peer pressure mixed with legalized bribery that encourages government employees to stick together, causing judges, prosecutors and government agents to feel obligated to support each other, even if their conscience tells them that they are prosecuting an innocent person on false charges.
Legalized bribery comes in the form of “cash awards” for government employees from $10,000 to $25,000 per conviction to “recognize and reward” each official under 5 USC §§ 4502, 4503 & 4504 and 5 USC §4302 to enhance their “performance” or for so-called “superior accomplishment” or “a special act or service” or if the act “achieves a significant reduction in paperwork.” The criteria is so loose, any employee can be given a cash award for almost anything; consider the power this law gives the head of each agency to manipulate employees. In addition, the government employee can also receive “time off from duty without loss of pay” as a part of the reward for bringing down a politically incorrect person.
A politically incorrect person not only believes in the U.S. Constitution as the Supreme Law of the Land, but uses his freedom of speech to point out law violations by the government. Such was the case for David Hinkson who developed ionized minerals as a dietary supplement and started a business that went from zero to $4.0 million in sales in four years. Then he came under the scrutiny of Rogue agents at the IRS, FDA and FBI who were helped by cooperating private individuals all of whom wanted to put him in prison so they could steal his business.
Because of something called the “Crony System,” a member of the government invariably refuses to challenge another government employee who is attacking a politically incorrect person; this part of the Crony System operates like a conspiracy of silence.
Also, rogue agents are given wide latitude to vindictively pursue their own personal agenda, such as when an agent feels insulted by someone who challenges their authority, as happened in David Hinkson’s case. The rogue agents are allowed to pursue their own agenda because they are supposed to be the protectors of the judges and prosecutors who supervise them. These agents create a “bunker” mentality among the judges and prosecutors in a paranoid atmosphere with a pretense of constant danger. These rogue agents are in a symbiotic relationship with both judges and prosecutors that leaves the ordinary citizen “out of the loop” and creates conditions ripe for victimizing the innocent politically incorrect person.
The attacks by rogue agents are not limited to dissenters who make "politically incorrect" statements. Sometimes such agents are directed by NWO leaders to attack creative individuals, such as inventors who develop products that might compete with the private interests of big-pharma or the oil and gas industry or other industries that provide profit to the NWO bankers.
Once falsely charged with a crime, the innocent person’s prosecution will be supported by members of the Crony System, which ultimately relies upon the Presumption of Governmental Regularity and Correctness in order to bind these different techniques together to ensure a conviction. Convicting as many dissidents as possible not only silences the opposition, it provides funding to the American Prison Industry (API), another creation of the NWO bankers. The API depends upon Revenue Bonds for funding which have been sold in regional and world markets and must be repaid by taxes that support prisoners; the more prisoners, the more tax dollars to repay Revenue Bonds. In order to obtain a conviction, not only is the Presumption of Innocence is defeated, but evidence of other defenses a politically incorrect individual might have, such as alibi or self defense, are simply excluded by a cooperating activist judge, who is receiving some form of payoff.
In some cases, such as in the Hinkson case, the judge would not allow the jury to hear evidence crucial to his alibi defense which could have resulted in his acquittal. For example, when the government failed to produce David’s U.S. Passport, the judge also refused to order it produced which would have proved that David was in Ukraine and Russia when he supposedly was soliciting Elvin Joe Swisher to murder federal officials.
Also, the judge excluded from the jury’s consideration Swisher’s official military file which absolutely proved that Swisher was a liar as he had not received military awards or decorations, had not killed anyone in combat and had not served in Korea; in fact, Swisher was court-martialed for misconduct and busted from a Corporal to a PFC without ever having traveled to Korea or served in a conflict.
Failure to produce David’s Passport by the government and exclusion of Swisher’s military file by the trial judge, who lied from the bench when he ruled that the file contained information that supported Swisher’s service in Korea is nothing less than prosecutorial and judicial misconduct – however, there is no one to prosecute them.
When there is no physical evidence that a crime occurred, such as the accusation that David Hinkson tried to hire Swisher to murder federal officials, then the only evidence is “hearsay” from the lying mouth of a government witness such as Swisher upon which to base the conviction. The claim by Swisher was that the accused made these incriminating statements and there is no other way to rebut such testimony than to show that, the informant was lying about his other in-court statements, i.e., about faked military heroism and awards.
When Swisher bragged to the jury about his fake status as a decorated Korean combat veteran, he clothed himself with unassailable credibility because everybody loves and believes a war hero! He said that David wanted to hire him as a hit man because Swisher had killed “many” in combat. If the jury had learned that Swisher was lying about being a war hero, in combat and serving in Korea and never received any decorations, awards or medals, his credibility would have been stripped from him. Thus, the government was able to use two fraudulent stories to convict David of crimes he did not commit and which never happened. The first story was that Swisher was credible because he was the equivalent of a super-hero injured war veteran and the second was that David Hinkson tried to solicit him to murder federal officials. Take out the first lie with the military record and the second lie also fails.
The failure of the judge to allow David to show that Swisher was lying about his military record, which the government went to great pains to make the center piece of its case, denied David the chance to prove that he was not guilty, or at least prove there was reasonable doubt as to his guilt.
The judge applied the Presumption of Government Regularity and Correctness when he excluded Swisher’s military file from the evidence that could be considered by the jury by saying that if admitted, it would only “confuse” the jury. Applying that precedent to future cases, one can see that the government will convict every innocent person who is falsely accused until the Presumption of Governmental Regularity and Correctness has been overturned.
Bearing false witness was prohibited under Biblical law. In addition, the eternal Law of Witnesses requires that at least two witnesses must testify as to the same set of facts if the accused is charged with a hearsay crime (remember that in the trial of Christ, the Sanhedrin went looking for two witnesses who would testify to the same false charge and couldn’t find any liars to tell the same story, so finally, the Savior Himself had to supply the “crime” by stating that He was divine, which supposedly was blaspheme). Congress must pass a law to require at least two witnesses in the case of hearsay crimes.
Consider, if someone testifies: “You did it,” that there is no way to overcome such a statement because a mere denial, such as “No, I didn’t,” is merely what we commonly call “he said/she said.” Under the pre-1980 system the accused would win if it was just his word against the government witness, but under the present system, the government wins every time because the Presumption of Governmental Regularity and Correctness. In such a situation, the only choice for the accused is to prove that, for a variety of reasons, circumstances show that you didn’t do it. At that point it is up to a third party, such as a judge or a jury to “weigh” the evidence and decide who is believable and whether there is reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the defendant. That is why the Presumption of Government Regularity and Correctness is so damaging to the rights of the individual, because it virtually insures a conviction in every case.
Another technique used by the U.S. Department of Justice is to provide news releases with false accusations in order to demonize the accused by mounting community distain against him. This is a form of jury-tampering based on attempts by the government to mold the minds of prospective jurors against the accused. There is no mechanism to prevent the government, at the outset of the case, from leaking false information to the media which is damaging to the reputation of the accused because there is no one to prosecute the prosecutors.
Another technique is to hold the accused in jail, so that he cannot participate in his own defense. By presenting false accusations of additional criminal activity that never existed, which activity is fabricated specifically for the detention hearing, the accused is denied a bond and, thus, cannot get out of jail before trial. Typically, in order to be in a position to have the court deny bond in a murder for hire case, the government will falsely claim that the accused has a “list” of persons he is planning to kill. This makes the defendant appear to be very dangerous and thus, justifies holding him in pre-trial detention. Note: There is no mechanism for holding the government accountable or responsible for bringing false allegations against the accused at a bond hearing, so those false allegations which held the person in jail before trial are quickly forgotten; nonetheless, they served the purpose of holding the accused in detention and denied him the opportunity to participate in his own defense. Thus, by these techniques, the politically incorrect individual becomes a political prisoner of the U.S. Government.
The techniques described above are only a few of those used by the government against the politically incorrect; but all such techniques appear to have come from a KGB-style play book on how to destroy political dissenters.
Once convicted, the politically incorrect individual will likely serve a lengthy sentence and be forgotten in the Gulag of the American Prison Industry; and probably will die in prison for crimes he did not commit and which never occurred in the first place, such as in the David Hinkson case.
Over the years, "hearsay crimes" have foolishly been enacted by Congress with assurances from the Department of Justice that these laws would never be used to target innocent individuals (for instance, see minutes of the Congressional Hearings where members of the Congressional Committee were concerned that the new structuring law they were approving might be applied to them when they withdrew or deposited more than $10,000 in cash in two or more transactions on more than one day); when, in fact, they have become one of the primary weapons used by the DOJ to prosecute the politically incorrect.
Hearsay crimes, such as murder-for-hire, are enhanced by the government’s ability to make phony tapes and videos that imitate the voice of the accused appearing to threaten some ghastly deed; as in the case of Edgar Steele, a First Amendment lawyer who stood up for the rights of the politically incorrect. Steele also is from North Idaho and the fraudulent attacks on him emanate from the same office of the FBI as the David Hinkson case. This office has been known to liberally use the false testimony of government informants as the basis for prosecutions.
It is important to remember that government informants always have something very significant to gain by acting as a cooperating witness. In years passed, government informants were paid for their testimony and juries would not believe them because a paid witness has little or no credibility and the government was losing its cases. Today, informants are allowed to keep the “booty” stolen from the innocent politically incorrect individual as happened in both the Hinkson and Steele cases (Hinkson had $6,600 in cash stolen by government informant Marianna Raff and Steele had $45,000 in silver coins stolen by government informant Larry Fairfax). What is significant is that in both cases, the federal government did not prosecute their own informant for the theft crimes and discouraged the state of Idaho from doing so. In fact, the federal government wields great influence with its state law enforcement counterparts and easily can get them not to prosecute a government informant (see the case of John Connelly, Boston Mass. FBI chief), thus, that person is off “scot-free” for the theft which is payment for cooperation. (Note: the FBI insisted that Raff, the habitual offender, be set free from county jail to testify for the government even though she had committed multiple felonies.)
It is interesting to note that in David Hinkson’s case, the government's informant, Swisher, was later convicted of felonies including forgery, perjury and theft of approximately $200,000 of government property arising out of earlier fraudulent representations that he had made to the Veterans Administration. His false presentation to the VA in June 2004 allowed him to fraudulently obtain disability and medical benefits by presenting false testimony of heroism and forged military documents. Swisher used the exact same fraudulent statements six months later, in January 2005, to support the fictitious allegations in the murder-for-hire prosecution of David.
As Swisher’s reward, the Idaho Office of the U.S. Attorney protected Swisher from prosecution for his fraud on the VA until an honest prosecutor from Montana was assigned to the case by the U.S. Inspector General’s Office; otherwise, he never would have been caught. It took over two years to indict, prosecute and sentence Swisher to prison. Although David was innocent, he was sentenced to 43 years in prison (which means that David will be almost age 90 when he is eligible for parole, or die in prison) Swisher, for all his lies and fraud received less than a year in a country club prison.
In subsequent appellate proceedings, attorneys representing the government have admitted that Swisher lied to the Court and the jury in the Hinkson case, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals would not reverse David's conviction because that would have embarrassed one of their colleagues who acted as David’s trial judge, and it was more important to them to protect a colleague under the Crony System than to let an innocent man go free. David’s case now awaits Certiorari before the U.S. Supreme Court.
There are many political prisoners in America today because people are beginning to resist the grand socialist scheme developed by NWO groups. The chief power brokers of the world are in a NWO group of bankers known as the Bilderbergs, a non-government organization (NGO) manipulating various government agencies to achieve their devious purpose, which is to form a “One World Order” with their puppet as the dictator. Part of their agenda is to silence all opposition, especially those politically incorrect Americans who have the unmitigated temerity to criticize the NWO or say anything they feel any time they want.
The former U. S. Secretary of Agriculture under Dwight Eisenhower, Ezra Taft Benson, a man revered by many as a true prophet in our day, warned that such power groups would infiltrate our agencies (e.g., the CIA, FBI, FDA, IRS, DOJ and the Courts) with the intent to take away personal freedoms. In 1988 he testified of a secret combination that "seeks to overthrow the freedom of all lands, nations, and countries [that] is increasing its evil influence and control over America and the entire world.”
This book, A Cesspool of Judicial Corruption-The David Hinkson Story, provides an anatomy of the government’s investigation, indictment, trials, sentencing and appeal in the David Hinkson case and shows the connection between the malicious prosecution of David and the Bilderberg-NWO agenda. It gives the reader a blow-by-blow account of the secret combinations at work and the pragmatics of how it is possible, in a free society, for police state tactics to operate in tandem with what has been termed: the greatest experiment in personal liberty in the history of mankind, i.e., The United States of America under The U.S. Constitution.
Below is a list of how these secret New World Order forces have been and will continue to obliterate the U.S. Constitution unless they are stopped:
First, they influence Congress and state legislatures to adopt new laws which subvert personal freedom in the name of enhanced security; second, they bribe government workers to implement the new socialism and blind them to the fact that it will simply be more tyranny like Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Communist Russia; and third, the very ones who should be protecting and enforcing individual liberties, the judges, who have sold out to the NWO, are the ones who interpret and apply the new laws used to override the Constitutional rights of the individual. The judges then pretend that they cannot see the injustice and therefore claim they are simply enforcing these new rigid, wooden and inflexible rules as if it is the will of the people–all of which defies both common sense and our Constitutional rights and silences the politically incorrect.
Prior to becoming involved in the movement to “take America back” before it becomes Amerika, the question that each of us should answer is: "Is it worth becoming involved when my expression of opinion may be considered politically incorrect and I may become the target of false accusations?"
My hope for all who read this work is that they will protect themselves by banding together with like-minded individuals as a force for good, to overcome government corruption. May we band together with people who believe in the U.S. Constitution and who desire to expose those who enforce this twisted revision of our precious God-given form of government that our Founding Fathers shaped for us. Remember, “exposure is the only cure for corruption.”
It is also my hope that those with good intentions will speak up and demand, en masse, the repeal of laws that defile our freedoms; demand the elimination of false prosecutions; and demand the release of all political prisoners, such as David R. Hinkson and Edgar Steele. Otherwise, the evils of bearing false witness against those who exercise Freedom of Speech will be at our doors with machine guns at-the-ready just as they were at David Hinkson’s door on November 21, 2002, with no one left to stop it.
Wesley W. Hoyt, former prosecuting attorney
November 21st 2010 (Eight years later)
THE DAVID HINKSON STORY
resources/uploads/file/David-Hinkson-Story.doc
www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/us/30bar.html