From the March 2008 Idaho Observer:

Thank you so much for publishing my article (January, 2008, From Behind the Razorwire). It has netted me an amazing result (possible Miracle) by which I have learned you have a very wide circulation. Since then, there has been a potential breakthrough in our justice system that offers us a chance to strike back at our persecutors.

Peggy Hettrick, 37, was stabbed in the back and sexually mutilated on Feb. 11, 1987. Her body was left in a vacant lot in Fort Collins, CO. Within hours, detectives focused on Tim Masters, a 15-year-old high school student who lived in a mobile home next to the vacant lot. However, it wasn’t until 1998 that police arrested him, relying solely on a forensic psychologist’s interpretation of Masters’ drawings and writings. A jury convicted him in 1999 and both the Colorado Court of Appeals and State Supreme Court upheld the verdict. On post-conviction it was learned that key evidence was intentionally withheld from his trial attorneys by police and prosecutors. Additionally, DNA found on the victim completely excluded Masters as the source. Masters was exonerated Jan. 28, 2008.

Here again is yet another example of Colorado being, in all likelihood, the most if not one of the most corrupt police states in America. Masters, however, is hopefully the beginning of the end as he has successfully put a crack in the state’s wall of corruption and opened the eyes of the public. However, if we don’t all band together in support to expose our persecutors, a case like Masters’ is all but forgotten within days of being a major, front page expose’ of the malicious persecution industry.

When they persecute us, they know everything there is to know about us--whatever is available in our public record (education, jobs, criminal record, credit history, etc...) and they go around getting personal information from people who know us. They use that info to conduct their railroad job. They are masters at discovering how to exploit our weaknesses as defendants and sidestep our strengths. It seems only fair that we know everything there is to know about them—our public persecutor "plaintiffs."

Just recently, Sunday Feb. 10th, there was an article in The Denver Post about how they had 94 suspects in the Master’s case, one of whom confessed to (2) near identical crimes in the same location and at the same time as the Hettrick homicide. This guy was never even questioned until Master’s was set free, yet they knew about him and the evidence was right before their very eyes the entire decade that Masters was incarcerated, fighting for his life.

In the same paper, there is an article by attorney Thomas K. Carberry who, motivated by the Masters case, speaks out on how the U.S. has the very worst criminal justice system in the civilized world. He talks about how in Colorado and around the country, the judiciary will go to great lengths to obtain convictions and even greater lengths to uphold them upon appeal.

My own case is much the same as Masters’ in that there was such a rush to judgment in a murder/robbery case that the persecutors overlooked the obvious. They believed the actual perpetrator’s story even though he failed a polygraph (which the persecutors said was inconclusive) and performed no investigation whatsoever. When an investigation was finally conducted (while I was in custody), all evidence pointed right back to the persecutors’ chief witness as the real murderer; even their own State’s expert testified that I could not possibly have been the culprit. The persecutors knew, however, that I had no clout or visible means to defend myself or hire competent counsel. So, they sent me for a ride on the Reading to get their conviction and, as a cover for their malicious persecution of a provably innocent man, I was sentenced to life plus 16 years in 1991.

The Masters case shows that a problem existed; my case proves that the problem is ongoing. Other life sentences are being served by provably innocent men and women in prisons all over the nation as persecutors zealously defend wrongful convictions of capital crimes. Let the Masters case be our lesson: When a reversed wrongful conviction makes the headlines, let’s come out of the woodwork and band together—friends and family of the accused and supporters of true justice—by publishing articles such as Mr. Carberry’s, dropping letters on as many public officials as possible, Googling every single name involved in a wrongful conviction and expose the dirty, malicious persecutors and let the court of public opinion begin reversing this shameful and ruthless trend. Afterall, it is the malicious persecutors themselves who, by law, should be prosecuted.

Note: Swendra, a provably innocent man, has a parole hearing date scheduled—for August, 2049. It is likely that whomever would be granting or denying Swendra’s parole has not yet graduated from high school. (DWH)