A Certain Cachet

     I am not ashamed of my 162 felony convictions--because they are bogus.
     I am going to start wearing a button on my blouse that says, "I have 162 felony convictions--and I'm innocent.  Something is wrong with our justice system!"
     No one would go out of his way to choose this status, but I've detected a certain cachet to the label, "felon."  Believe it or not, there are some exceptional people in this group and we bond as easily as the members of other grief support groups.
     I have new friends:  fellow felons and felon-sympathizers.  When I say, I'm a felon! they emerge from their fringe positions in our hierarchy and introduce themselves.  We sit and chat--there's an immediate rapport.  I have always enjoyed the company of a wide range of people.
     Our justice system has a vested interest in enlarging this coterie of felons by enforcing mandatory minimum sentences (12 years for carrying marijuana across state lines, for instance) and by "catching" people like me.
     I went to a smoke shop on University Avenue right after my sentencing, bought a pack of cigarettes.  (I wish I could smoke them all--I need an escape!  Alas, you can't escape your fate.)
     The very friendly guy behind the counter had a shaved head, metal earring, muscle tee.
     "Have you ever been to jail--or prison?" I asked.  (Lots of people say yes.)
     "Why do you ask?" he answered.
     "I'm going to prison!" I told him.
     "Wow, really?" he raised his eyebrows and looked me up and down.  "You don't look like the type."  I detected something like respect in his tone of voice.
     "The type is expanding," I said.  "You have to start thinking of people like me as criminals."
      "That's for sure.  What'd you do?" he asked.  "Drunk driving?"
      "No.  I did my job.  Nothing wrong.  It's a white-collar thing."
      "Wow, cool," he said.  "The country's crazy."
      "Yeah."
      "I'm sorry," he said, speaking as one who knows.  "You're going to be in good company, anyway."
      "We'll see."
   

Tallow Plums

     Look what I found along the edge of the woods!  Lots of soft plum-like fruits dangling from low bushes and strewn over the grass--tallow plums (Ximenia americana).  They have big seeds, and slightly astringent flesh, and are also known as hog plums or yellow plums.    
     I had to consult my field guides to identify them.
     See the very best wild foods guru Green Deane's site "Eat the Weeds" and look up tallow plums.
     I cooked them in water, strained them through a sieve, and added honey from my beehives.  Makes a delicious juice.  High in the nutritive fatty acids:  linoleic, linolenic and arachidonic.
     There is so much wild food in Florida we could live, if we had to, without Publix.
   

Chanterelles

     This is the season to search for chanterelles.
     They're little orange  mushrooms poking out from under the leaves and basket grass under under big trees.
     It's pretty hard to mix them up with anything poisonous, but you should ask someone who knows about mushrooms to go into the field with you to identify them, just in case.
     See:  http://www.thesurvivalgardener.com/identify-chanterelle-mushrooms/ 
     False chanterelles taste bitter, whereas the real thing is delicately sweet.  High in protein, low in fat, high in fiber, with lots of trace minerals.  Fresh, free, forageable.
     I was picking up some new egg cartons from the barn when I spotted them under a Live Oak.
     Toss them over medium heat in a spot of butter and eat plain, on toast, or with eggs.
   

Math Problem

     Here's what the government's prosecutor claimed at my sentencing:  that I had been "overpaid" by Medicare a sum that was greater than the total amount I had ever been paid in the first place, from 2004 to when I closed my clinic in 2013.
     And that now I should be required to repay this "overpayment" in full--and then some.
     All the figures were up on the overhead projector screen.  It just didn't add up.
     Who did the math?
     Was anyone wincing?
     Every person there had a higher degree.
     Six weeks in the courtroom.
     You know, we all just wanted to go get some lunch.  
     And I suppose the calculator in the courthouse went berserk.  Thick walls.
   
     
   

Sledgehammer

     Who has 162 felony convictions?  Anyone?
     Come on.  When you hear that, you've got to be thinking:  something's wrong.
     (Somebody wanted to kill a cricket with 162 slugs of a sledgehammer.)
     (Actually, it was 210 slugs, but some of them missed the mark.)
     I love this country, but we get a lot wrong, we sure do.
     I can't explain it, but I feel lighter.
     Must be my cricket-slugged-spirit heading into outer space.

     

There Is Fiction in the Space Between

     We're always dichotomizing the world:  good guys, bad guys.
     At a time when everyone was eulogizing Nelson Mandela, someone on the other side of the aisle reported that he'd been a monster:  he had innocent people murdered, he ordered gasoline-filled tires to be put around their necks before setting them on fire.
     Everyone you know belongs to one of your myths, the ones you mostly keep to yourself, the ones in which you're a hero.      

     Tracy Chapman's song, "Telling Stories" conveys a pitiful truth, that we hardly ever connect with one another, and that all our statements are fictions of one sort or another,  not certainties.  There is a theory in psychology that all our thoughts arise spontaneously from the unconscious, and our egos decide whether or not to own them.  Our egos are so egoistic that they assimilate these thoughts and defend them as if they were created by them, not dredged from the vast underground river dubbed by Carl Jung as the collective unconscious.  I
     The stories we tell come from that murky, watery place too.  We tell them as though they're based in the material world, but our minds have been usurped by other forces
     "There is fiction in the space between you and me," I say to the prosecutors, the whistleblower, the jury, the judge.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vHsPaUP4MM

At Last. Convicted and Sentenced: a Post-Mortem

     Where to begin?
     Finally, I have permission from my lawyers to write in my blog again.  Here's my question.
     What do you do when:
          a) You're falsely accused by a whistleblower, who is followed like dogs in heat by the government's agents;
          b) You're misrepresented in court by that same government, whose powers and finances are huge;
          c) You're convicted by a jury of your "peers," but the convictions and exonerations of 210 charges are not internally consistent, revealing general confusion about the case itself;
          d) The judge, who is very smart and likable and has done his best to sort out the information he's dispensed (hundreds of bankers' boxes of data; zip drives of  more data, too much to assimilate) also gets it wrong;
          e)  People who know nothing about you or the case, and have never even met you, make the decision that you're guilty and treat you on social media and anywhere else they find an audience like roadkill?
     What do I do?
     I file appeals of the verdict and the sentences.  More paperwork.
     And I take the long view.  Every day the sun comes up.  When it's wet the milkweed, sunflowers, citrus trees and pagoda plants are content, so I am, too.
     The unassailable fact of death for every one of us at the end of the line makes this path of mine nothing but a path.  I accept this path.  I even look forward to the next bend in the road.
     
          

Convicted

     I was convicted of 162 charges, acquitted of 35, on Monday, May 2, 2016 at 4:30 pm.
     The trial lasted 5 weeks.
     The jury of 16, gleaned from 200-plus contestants, was pared down to 12 for the decision.
     One juror posted snoring icons on her Facebook page during the trial, demonstrating her (and the others'?) level of interest.
     I admit, it was not "interesting."
     Some jurors closed their eyes and appeared to doze off for short stretches, which I'm told is common during long, complicated trials like mine.
     I wrote lots of post-it notes to my two lawyers (one on each side, like on TV) day after day, witness after witness, hoping it would assist them.  I don't think it did.
     There are lots of factors that go into a verdict, factors that have more to do with the jurors living inside the webworks of their own personal histories, splaying the thousand crisscrossed strands of past injustices at the hands of people who look and act like me, than the particulars of my case.
     "It's not about truth and justice," a prominent lawyer told me.  "This isn't Perry Mason."
     I haven't read the newspaper report, but if you want to, here is the link.
     http://www.gainesville.com/article/20160503/ARTICLES/160509923

12 (Angry?) Men (and Women)

     12 Angry Men is one of the best films of the 20th century.
     Every one of the actors went on to achieve stardom fame.
     What makes the film superb is its replication of the average American jury, character by character, based on personality types.
     I had the rare opportunity to catalogue, mostly by guessing, the personality types of a typical jury, because I watched my own jury over a five-week trial which ended on Monday May 2, 2016.
     Five weeks is a long time to study the faces of one's jurors, to hope they call upon their better selves, to hear their laughter, to see them grimace and twitch before re-fabricating their poker faces, and to watch them move in and out of consciousness, sometimes dozing under the blue-hued fluorescent lights of our stark, retro-Gainesville icebox of a federal courthouse.
     What matters most to people, the film emphasizes, is their own lives, what they do for work or fun.  Persuading them to abandon their personal passions long enough to come to a thoughtful verdict is a mighty task.
     It takes a Henry Fonda to make us think beyond the pablum we assimilate day after day via media hype, inherited opinions, and free-floating prejudices.
     Henry Fonda was Juror #8, a thoughtful architect who wasn't sure if the defendant was guilty or not, but simply wanted to talk about it.  His fellow jurors, if they were thinking about it at all, wanted to convict the "killer" (they were sure he was guilty) and get the heck out of there.
     Most juries don't have a Henry Fonda in their group.  It takes a ton of courage to stand up to eleven other people.  It takes guts to dig in one's heels, to force people around you to contemplate a thing, and to hang onto dignity and aplomb in the process.
     I think my jury was absent a Henry Fonda:  his character type is too rare.
     But what I found fascinating was how otherwise my own jurors correlated to the ones in this film version of Reginald Rose's television play.  Down to the last juror, I matched their countenances to the characters in 12 Angry Men.  Sidney Lumet's casting choices were right on.   Here were my jurors, one through twelve, right off the screen.
     #1 was the German watchmaker, played by George Voskovic, an immigrant who might have pushed for what's great about America's courts, that we're (supposedly) innocent until proven guilty, but went with the flow:  easier.
     #2 was the high school football coach, John Fiedler.   The moral compass, honest and credible, he fell prey to the jury's affection and coddled it, instead of serving, Aeneas-like, as the guide.
     #3 An an elderly man named McCardle, played by Joseph Sweeney.  He was open to persuasion, which is good when the persuasion has its basis in rectitude.
     #4 A garage owner, Ed Begley, who might as well have slept through the proceedings.
     #5 A businessman and the twisted father of an estranged son, played by Lee Cobb.  A force to contend with, he would have sent a kid (his son's age) to the electric chair to keep from feeling the pain of his own son's rejection.
     #6 A smiley, indifferent salesman, Jack Warden, with fewer regrets than a pickpocket.
     #7 The meek, balding, unpretentious bank clerk, John Fiedler, wide-eyed, sincere, but stomped on so many times in his adolescence he habitually traded his conciliation for a spot of kindness.
     #8 The stockbroker, E.G. Marshall, whose business acumen might have pointed out the special interests at work below the surface, and saved the kid.  Again, no fight in him, at least not for the other guy.
     #9 An advertising executive, indecisive, played by Robert Webber;  the imitation of authority, without the oomph.
    #10 A house painter, who might have taken the lead because he was tough, but didn't because he was tired, Edward Binns.
    #11 A man who rose up from the slums and called people out on their baser instincts, early to join the rebel (Fonda) team, but not the first.  Fighting Stockholm Syndrome ("I will not believe my oppressors!") is hard inner work.  Played by Jack Klugman.
    #12 This should have been Henry Fonda, right?  It should have been the self-employed guy who stood up to the soup-pot of humanity, stirring up suspicions, bringing to the surface those tiny wedges of onion and cayenne that are the other jurors' submerged intellects.  It's the person who could have reminded them of the most important instruction the judge gives:  to look for reasonable doubt.
     No such luck in my case.  I love this country anyway, because it keeps the idea of a perfect world alive, but the perfect juror comes out of Hollywood.  Thanks anyway, Henry, for telling us how it should have gone.