What if....lawyers and judges didn't make a dime or at least paid min wages? Sound outrageous? How much did they get paid to sign the most important document in U.S. history, the Constitution? All that brain power for free... That was back when they all really cared for the people and not themselves. Since then look at how much they pay themselves for making ammendments to that very same piece of paper. So much for puplic service huh?
Imagine the media uproar if the Bush Administration had been secretly running guns to Canada to further a political agenda. But in the service of a Black Democrat, we instead see a wondrous blind spot to the deaths of many Mexicans and a Border Patrol Agent, in a program meant to stir up public sentiment with those same deaths against U.S. gun stores and freedoms. In Watergate, nobody died. But that operation targeted Democrats. So now we see Terrence Smith and company on the Diane Rehm show dismissing the “Fast and Furious” operation the same way that Nixon dismissed the CREEP Watergate operation.
Is our public defender system as broken as Michigan’s?
This morning, NPR Morning Edition ran a piece discussing the abject failure of the Michigan public defender system in representing the poor.
See http://www.npr.org/2012/06/14/154849477/michigan-finally-eyeing-changes-to-lawyers-for-poor
In Michigan, public defenders are often the lowest bidders, paid by the case, not the workload. So they have reason to urge their poor clients to plead guilty as fast as possible, doing as little work as possible, so they can run as many through the system as fast as possible, and thus make a decent living. Individual case loads can run as high as 400 per year, leaving no time to investigate or prepare a case.
As a result, an innocent person like Mr. Edward Carter can spend as much as 35 years in jail for a crime of violence committed while he was in custody on other charges. An ACLU lawyer suing the State calls it “assembly line justice”, just another way of saying “railroad”. Even the Republican Governor and a County Prosecutor acknowledge that the system is broken.
Can you see DA Tim Harris acknowledging the same thing about the railroad running through the Tulsa County Mental Health Court? I think that a certain warm place would freeze over and warm back up again first. It’s much too handy for disposing of people he can’t successfully prosecute in a criminal court.
So how do public defenders get paid here? Obviously not enough to inform their captive clients of all their rights. Or to mount a zealous defense, or to demand a rigorous and even-handed investigation by police,. Or to object to hearsay, to patently false statements filed by the Court, to bogus evidentiary standards, to the lack of cross examination of accusers, and to the corrupt practice of allowing the jailers and their effective subcontractors to be the only “witnesses”.
No, in order to support such things, they would first have to have a sense of shame about their failure to uphold the Constitution. In this neck of the woods, you can’t even depend on getting that from a Federal Judge or District Attorney.
A good description of the Tulsa Public Defender’s Office and Mental Health Court.
Abstract from: Gottstein, James B., INVOLUNTARY COMMITMENT AND FORCED PSYCHIATRIC DRUGGING IN THE TRIAL COURTS: RIGHTS VIOLATIONS, Alaska Law Review, 2008, Vol 25:51-105, available at: http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/alr/vol25/iss1/3
"A commonly-held belief is that locking up and forcibly drugging people diagnosed with mental illness is in their best interests as well as society’s as a whole. The truth is far different. Rather than protecting the public from harm, public safety is decreased. Rather than helping psychiatric respondents, many are greatly harmed. The evidence on this is clear. Constitutional, statutory, and judge-made law, if followed, would protect psychiatric respondents from being erroneously deprived of their freedom and right to decline psychiatric drugs. However, lawyers representing psychiatric respondents, and judges hearing these cases uncritically reflect society’s beliefs and do not engage in legitimate legal processes when conducting involuntarily commitment and forced drugging proceedings. By abandoning their core principle of zealous advocacy, lawyers representing psychiatric respondents interpose little, if any, defense and are not discovering and presenting to judges the evidence of the harm to their clients. By abandoning their core principle of being faithful to the law, judges have become instruments of oppression, rather than protectors of the rights of the downtrodden. While this Article focuses on Alaska, similar processes may be found in other United States’ jurisdictions, with only the details differing."
This is an example of the kind of in-depth article challenging bigotry that not a few local judges and lawyers would rather feed to their dogs than read for homework. Perhaps after barbecuing it and posting the video on YouTube.
Not even the Oklahoma Supreme Court knows all the law.
On the Oklahoma State Court Network web page http://www.oscn.net/applications/oscn/DeliverDocument.asp?CiteID=84204, it states that Title 43A-5-401 is “repealed”, i.e.:
Oklahoma Statutes Citationized Title 43A. Mental Health Chapter 1 - Mental Health Law of 1986 Section 5-401 - Repealed by Laws 1997, HB 2024, c. 387, § 11, eff. November 1, 1997
But on the Legislature’s web site, in the listing of Title 43A, it states instead:
§43A-5-401. Repealed by Laws 1997, c. 387, § 11, eff. Nov. 1, 1997. NOTE: Subsequent to repeal, § 5-401 was amended by Laws 1997, c. 195, § 3 to read as follows:
Where I come from “subsequent” means after. I even have a dictionary or three that agree with me. Isn’t it comforting to know that the Oklahoma Supreme Court can take it upon itself to repeal laws without first declaring them unconstitutional or notifying the Legislature? Especially regarding the due process for involuntary commitment to a mental institution.
But then, why should the Supreme Court bother to get it right? It's not like the Supreme Court is willing to supervise the District Courts to assure that people with mental illnesses get the same level of due process as all others. I know because I made a complaint to the Supreme Court Justice in charge of our local District Court, and never got a response.
Reading a lawyer’s brief demanding that a case be dismissed reveals the same integrity as Jane Fonda’s orgasm in “Klute”. Too often the lawyer cherry-picks alleged facts out of context and puts them together out of order to create a prejudice that looks plausible if one didn’t know any better. Regardless of the facts, the lawyer routinely and automatically denies evidence and argument presented to allege that “no case has been stated”, “no claim has been made”, “no grounds for relief has been shown”, “no law has been cited”, yada, yada, yada. Apparently the legal definitions for such ordinary English words as “case, stated, claim, made, grounds, cited and relief” are so elevated and abstruse as to be as invisible to ordinary eyes as the Emperor’s new clothes.
Nor is rank prejudice out of bounds. One recent brief chided the complainant for citing foreign medical journals. The term “foreign” is used as a pejorative, in the same character as a man refusing a suitor for his daughter because the suitor has a single drop of black blood. Conveniently failing to mention that most of the journals and articles cited in the case were American, and nearly all from pubmed.gov, the database of U.S. National Library of Medicine. I cannot vouch for and do not care if all the authors of those articles are white.
One can, for example, cite and apply over thirty legal precedents, many if not most from the U.S. Supreme Court, and they will be utterly invisible even to a U.S. District Attorney. As were medical x-rays and scans of dying bone in a previous case. Why if one didn’t know how honorable they all are, one might begin to think that lawyers lie, defame and slander for a living. And perhaps have their tongues surgically split in order to pass the bar.
Would they want to spend an eternity with you and your God?
In his science fiction novel, Hidden Empire, Orson Scott Card cites a historical work on Christianity, Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries. Basically, early Christians proved their worth during the two major plagues that brought down the Roman Empire. The plagues killed about one third of the Empire’s population each time. The Roman Pagans largely isolated those who caught the diseases and left them to their fate. So many of the sick died not just of the plague, but of thirst and starvation in their own fecal matter even if they managed to survive.
The Christians, less afraid of death, nursed not only their own survivors back to health, but strangers as well, including Pagans. So a much lower percentage of Christians who caught the plague died, including those grateful Pagans they nursed back to health. The Christians thereby won respect for their good works and gained new members for their religion. Thus began modern health care.
But are Christians like that today, now that the need for public health care is widely accepted? We have all seen examples of Christians who preach love and forgiveness, but only for themselves. Unlike their Christ, who made friends of publicans and prostitutes, they consign to hell any who disagree with them, for any reason. They are the experts of the righteous jeer. They cut anyone might contaminate their perfection out of their lives. Their idea of “help” is more like a punitive stay in the local loony bin, where other Christians just like them can wield guilt like a horsewhip.
In the absence of any universal viral plague to test the mettle of today’s Christians, the question may well be, “Based upon the way that you treat them, would they want to spend an eternity with you and your God?”
Recent research has found that the bell curve has less to do with human performance and achievement than people thought. http://www.npr.org/2012/05/03/151860154/put-away-the-bell-curve-most-of-us-arent-average Instead of the bell curve normal distribution, a power distribution often applies, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2011.01239.x/full http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution which puts just a few people making most of the progress, production, and awards, while the rest of us tail off into relative obscurity below the average. In an e-mail response to a query about the distribution of criminal acts by individuals, one of the authors cited by NPR, Professor Herman Aguinis at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, noted that his research found that most of the errors are committed by just a few people as well.
In other words, a minority of repeat offenders account for the majority of crime and violence. This is nothing new; it has been known for decades. As previously noted here, research over more than 30 years has demonstrated that of the mentally ill people who commit crime and violence, a small minority of repeat offenders account for a majority of the attacks on others. http://www.amazon.com/Clinical-Prediction-Violent-Behavior-Master/dp/1568214898/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336239285&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.com/Violence-Mental-Disorder-Developments-Assessment/dp/0226534065/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336239375&sr=1-2
Yet mental health law, like Oklahoma’s Title 43A, is mostly predicated on the popular but false assumption that people with mental illness are dangerous and unpredictable. Every time a drug-using person with mental illness commits some horribly violent and senseless crime, everyone with mental illness is tarred by it. Journalists, editors (even at the Tulsa World, oh my) and politicians rush demonstrate their alleged civic and humanitarian responsibility and declare that we just have to get more controls on those with psychiatric disabilities. They argue that it is worth it to deprive and destroy the civil rights and liberties of an entire minority if it can save just one life. That people with mental illnesses or psychiatric diagnoses should be confined and medicated upon even the mere perception of imagined threat. In other words, stop them before they kill again. One hears that even Black Americans have been familiar with this phenomenon.
Which the State is only too glad to support, as noted here before. Anyone dragooned into one of the State’s mental facilities can find that every statement he or she makes will be parsed, and even badgered, by the facility’s mental health professionals for the most negative interpretation that will justify a commitment to that facility. That no positive or exculpatory statement will be recognized or recorded. That all previous contacts with psychiatric counseling and management will be denied out of existence, even in court papers. It’s a rigged game.
Medical-legal literature cataloged by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, i.e., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16061769 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22152446 has shown that people with mental illnesses are victims of crime and violence more than 11 times those in the general population.
So I went looking to see what I could find out about how Officers in the Tulsa Police Department are trained to deal with people who have mental illnesses. While the content of their training programs is not publicly transparent, one can learn things about their approach. Despite the excessive vulnerability of those with psychiatric disabilities, in Oklahoma and many other places, if a person in a dispute or complaint appears to a police officer, or states, that he or she has a mental illness, the only question is how to get this person confined and medicated without incurring a lawsuit for excessive force.
Law enforcement agencies from the Federal level https://www.bja.gov/ProgramDetails.aspx?Program_ID=66 to the State-Federal level, http://www.nationalreentryresourcecenter.org/announcements/law-enforcement-responses-to-people-with-mental-illnesses-customizing-responses-to-jurisdictions-needs-and-characteristics http://consensusproject.org/downloads/le-essentialelements.pdf http://www.consensusproject.org/downloads/le-trgstrategies.pdf to the State-Local level, http://www.ok.gov/cleet/CLEET_Training/index.html all treat people with mental illnesses as the perpetrators of crime, violence and disturbance, never the victim.
In fact, if you enter such terms as “mentally ill victim” into their search engines, you will get either “0 results”, or documents regarding victims of people with mental illness. A search on the Oklahoma Dept. of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services web site also depicts people with mental illnesses as perpetrators, with only one exception, “alleged victims” among the “consumers” already committed to its institutions. The only other possible victims it acknowledges are vulnerable adults being abused by their caregivers.
So, despite sound research to the contrary, as far as the law enforcement and mental health community in Oklahoma and elsewhere are concerned, a person with a mental illness can never have a valid complaint against any other person who does not appear or admit to being mentally ill. This short-circuits any investigation into the testimony of anyone with a mental illness in its tracks. Providing normal investigative services, such as merely interviewing neighbors, can and will be dispensed on account of a psychiatric disability. Due diligence is not officially required. If there’s a problem and one of the disputants has a mental illness, just round em up and head em out.
We’ve see this before – in the enforcement of Jim Crow by Sheriffs in the Old South. Dragging people with mental illness off to the local loony bin isn’t that far removed in moral and legal philosophy from returning runaway slaves to the plantation, for involuntary “treatment”. I’ve met good people from the Tulsa Police Department. But for every one of those, TPD has a cynical slacker who practices jeering at any complaint a civilian might bring. As it now stands, you can put any of them through the existing mandatory 4 to 4.5 hours of academy training and 2 whole hours per year in continuing education in dealing with mental health issues, and it looks like all you’ll get is a trained bigot with a badge.
I was doing some Internet research to see if Oklahoma newspapers had as much to say about psychiatric hospitals as the Houston Chronicle and the Baltimore Sun:
Instead, I ran across an article written by Tulsa World Editor Janet Pearson last year, “Is Tulsa's safety net in jeopardy?” As I recall the tenor of the article bewailed the State cuts in budgets and beds for psychiatric hospitals and services here, like involuntary commitment. But expressed relief that at least there was something to keep those mentally ill people from killing again. The first part reminds me of the society woman in “The Help” who got the law passed that required everyone to have a toilet for the help.
The second part reminds of those who used to say, “Why if we don’t keep them under control, they’ll rise up and kill us in our beds!” Of course, that was Southern plantation owners talking about their slaves before the War of Northern Aggression, as some of them still like to call it. But hey, if something is too chauvinistic, bigoted, racist, insensitive or patronizing to say about black people, you don’t have to throw a good line away. Just recycle it for people with mental illnesses. There won’t be a single yellow journalist or lawyer who will stand up for them.
Legal Notice to Mr. Kevin Bethune, LPC, OK license #2828 RE: Appeal of NDOK 11-CV-92-TCK-PJC to 10th Circuit Court, 12-5029
Sir,
You are being served with the Appellant/Petitioner’s Opening Brief at your last known address:
7353 E 50th Street South, Tulsa OK 74145
The previous service to this address returned “NOT DELIVERABLE AS ADDRESSED, UNABLE TO FORWARD”. This is the third address during this lawsuit that has returned this way, the first a work address and the second a home address. You know that you have been sued, but never disclose or leave a forwarding address. If you wish to know the contents of this brief, and for some legitimate reason cannot accept it at the 50th street address, you can obtain a copy from Holden & Carr Attorneys, First Place, 15 East 5th St, Suite 3900, Tulsa OK 74103, or from any other Defendant or Defendant’s lawyer, or by writing to me at my address, which you know from Court documents.
I was wondering – do you by any chance counsel people on personal responsibility?
Please be informed that I intend to write to the Oklahoma State Department of Health, Professional Counselor Licensing, about these matters. I have comments about the “Third Party Statement” you swore out to the Tulsa Police Department on August 3, 2010. They regard selective exclusion of my exculpatory statements to COPES about a dispute with my landlady (such as my determination to stay within the bounds of lease, as interpreted by HUD, and law), bogus “risk factors”, the lack of sworn statements from the accusers you quoted about statements falsely attributed to me, the lack of any questioning of other witnesses (such as my easily available neighbors) to establish the truthfulness of those making allegations against me and the tenor of my comments about them, the lack of any investigation of alternative solutions to the dispute (such as helping me finish moving out of a bad situation into my new apartment), the absence of references to my medical doctors of long-standing, and the misuse of your reports of hearsay as fact by the Mental Health Court and the District Attorney’s Office due to the apparent weight of your position with COPES. In other words, a complete lack of context which would support any other conclusion than involuntary commitment in the mental institution to which you effectively recommended candidates for confinement. An institution of the State with which your employer appears to have had a working arrangement that justified your employer's existence.
For the rest of us it would work the other way. But a lawyer can lay down with fleas and get up with dogs. Or as someone else said, go in a revolving door behind you and come out ahead.
Don't you wish that someone would put an end to those "Credit Card Services" scam phone calls. The scam behind the scam must be selling those robocalling machines. Since the scam has been going on for at least a decade, and not even the phone message has changed, the slackers who buy those robocallers, in the hope that they can hook another sucker into divulging credit card information, must not be very bright.
I got a text message on my TracFone cell, time stamped THU 5:10 pm 04/05/12, alleging to be from AT&T at 1-732-604-1359. It says:
AT&T MSG: As part of AT&T’s loyalty program You may register for a FREE Apple Ipad3 Go To AppleOffers.com To CLAIM yours today!
Well, TracFone is not part of AT&T, as of the time of this writing the web site doesn’t exist, and the number does not have any listing in the reverse phone lookup of YellowPages.com. Be warned. Calling the text message number would do two things: 1) Let the scammers know that they found a live cell number, and 2) Give them a chance at your financial information.
I’d call the TPD about it, but wouldn’t expect more than a 50% chance they would do anything about it.
Many people if not most are willing to approve or do some morally repugnant or evil thing to some innocent person who never hurt them, in the name of some favorite principle. For example, the Tuskegee Experiment, where poor black men with syphilis in Tuskegee, Alabama, were offered “free health care” but left untreated so the Doctor(s) involved could study the progression of the disease. Then there was the Eugenic Sterilization Law of North Carolina, where poor women, especially blacks, were sterilized after the second birth out of wedlock, as means to restrict the numbers of both welfare babies and black children.
There is our own military’s concept of “acceptable collateral damage” in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. During the war in Viet Nam, a woman where I lived stated that it was good to kill Vietnamese babies because they would just grow up to kill our soldiers. The U.S. Calvary did just that with Native American babies at Wounded Knee. The Irish Sisters of the Magdalene Order enslaved about 30,000 young girls who were raped, illegitimate, orphaned, pregnant out of wedlock, or just simple-minded, in chastisement for their “sins”. The girls’ families often agreed.
The last place I worked in Stillwater, a couple of coworkers would get together and mutter imprecations about homosexuals until the air turned black and blue. I don’t think they could tell the difference between homosexuals and child molesters. There are any number of liberals who want to throw in jail anyone who disagrees with their gun control politics. There are court decisions all the way up to the Supreme Court that left innocent people languishing in jails or on death row because of some technical objection to accepting new evidence and letting them go.
And the list goes on.
What if there was some way to tell if a woman was at a higher than normal risk of birthing a child with either Down’s Syndrome or a child likely to die of SIDS. Now suppose that Oklahoma passes a law stating that this woman can be denounced by her doctor and forced by court order to have her tubes tied until she agrees to abort any unborn child that could be shown to be likely to experience either Down’s or SIDS. In other words, until she proves that she is in no danger of having and raising that kind of child, and thus “inflicting” it on the rest of society. The old Spartans, after all, were said to kill any baby that wasn’t perfect. The White Power skinheads might like it, but I think that most decent people on both the right and the left would agree that such a law would be evil and morally repugnant.
I say that there’s not much moral difference between that kind of law and the Oklahoma Mental Health Code, by which anyone with a mental illness can be denounced, even by just hearsay, and sent off to the local loony bin, without any full and impartial investigation by local authorities. And kept there until that person can prove the negative, that he or she is not a danger, to mental health “professionals” who have nothing but their own prejudices and self-interest to decide who is and is not a danger.
The standard for committing people with mental illnesses into mental health jails in this State, and perhaps many others, is the confirming opinions of “two licensed professionals” that the person with a mental illness needs treatment. No trial or jury in most cases, just “experts” in deciding whether or not a person will be a danger to himself or others. Apparently in Tulsa County, the idea of a jury trial is kept from the prospective inmate, even by the Public Defender’s Office, just to avoid taking the time and trouble of a jury trial for this kind of person. After all, people with mental illnesses rarely have the energy or focus or resources to dispute the matter, and even vampires come off better in the movies.
Many people are perfectly happy with this arrangement, secure in the knowledge that they are not “that kind of person” and that this will never happen to them. They cannot imagine that they will ever have to face jail on the opinions of two licensed professionals. Or that applying this standard to an unpopular minority is any kind of slippery slope that will some day blow back on them.
But what about terrorism? Most people are more afraid of terrorists even than those with mental illnesses. What if everyone had to face the scrutiny of licensed experts to decide whether or not they could be terrorists, and, like the mentally ill, incarceration until they could prove to those same experts that they are not a danger to themselves (suicide bombers) or society. If you think that’s a good idea, as many in the Republican legislature might during the current silly season, you may not have thought it all the way through.
Oh, Grandma got strip searched at the airport. She fit the profile to a tee. She said something suspicious to the agent. Jus be glad that it weren’t you or me.
Because that’s just what “mental health evaluations” are, profiling. If in the last 200 years, for example, we had weeded out every leader who had a history of major depression, we would have lost Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. We might be doing Nazi salutes and still have slavery.
No one can predict just what someone will do in the future, if anything. Even the recent research into the relationship between mental illness and violent behavior can only produce relative certainties for the extreme violent and non-violent tails of the bell curve. Everything in between is a gray area, where no prediction has any statistical validity. You can only say that people with certain factors, like being abused as children or major depression, are more likely that those that don’t to be violent. But not that they are destined to that fate, and unable to escape or overcome it. As FBI Special Agent John Douglas said near the end of his book, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit, there is no psychological that can predict violence. Only past violence can predict future violence. See also http://www.physorg.com/news152819983.html
Locking people up for what an expert or bigot is afraid or says they might do in the future is not mental health or public safety. It looks, walks and quacks just like a jail for those who are deemed to be undesirable, but cannot be convicted of any crime in a regular court of law. And in the history of Psychiatry, this kind of profiling is less accurate than flipping a coin, condemning as many as two harmless and innocent people to incarceration out of every three who are profiled.
And if you think that this kind of profiling is such a good idea, tell me again why you don’t want to do it to Black Americans. What did you say? It’s immoral, bigoted and wrong? Oh. I’m so glad you cleared that up for me.
I recently, last night severed my employment with a local food delivery shop here in Tulsa; Burger Express Delivery. I could no longer live with myself and fall asleep in peace. Working at Burger Express is by far the most stressful job in all of Tulsa, and not so much because the deliveries are hard, or the customers and their issues, but more so that they have to deal with the owner on a daily basis, He is the self proclaimed genius of the burger and american meal delivery outfit. From the outside looking in, it takes a trained eye to notice the things that are different here, versus other establishments. The cigarette burns on the side of the counter, the roaches and other insects that hide behind and under his appliances and station. The raw meat being stored on top of the lettuce, or the non washing of lettuce, potatoes, bell peppers, onions, and other veggies. The fact that the owner would rather give people loans to fund their weed selling enterprises, than to upgrade his horribly dilapidated equipment that he continually recieves notices from the health department to replace. The square sided sink, the freezers not being 3" off the ground, the store not having any fire extinguishing system, the vent hoods having so much grease that even a functioning fire system could not contain. The hot water being so hot that it burned your fingers, so to conserve money he lowered the water temp to luke warm, until the health dept said other wise. We have a functioning thermostat, but it has never been used, a poker used to poke holes in boxes that the owner uses to pick his nose with. The fact that he wears the same clothes for days on end, and only changes when people start to notice the smell. Where the only customers that really matter are sexy females and people who take it up the bum and dont complain. Everyone else is just his personal peon in his self fulfilling game or arrogance. He calls his african american clients the n-word with out regard to the person he called it to. When a customer calls him out on something, he defers blame to his drivers, blaming us, leaving us to deal with the end result of what ever he may have said. My last night included nearly having to shoot 3 pitbulls and the owner ordering me to turn around and try to deliver the order again.
I hate that I cant report his fraudulent activites on credit cards. I thinks that his customers credit cards are available to be used when he wants to, like mini expense accounts. His classic is ordering food from a compititor, such as Mary Janes Pizza, and giving their driver a $50 tip for "inside" info, then telling people how he doesnt give a shit about the $50, since the card was stolen anyways. I hate that he acts like is perfect, and apparently almighty, that no one is above him, not even the Oklahoma State Tax Commission. He owes over $36000 and is fraudulently billing his customers to pay for it.
I hate that he buys his restaurant food form Sam's Club, then tells people that his product is from some exculsive retailer like Merritt's Bakery for our cakes, or how he created the "LandFill" burger when in fact he stole it off the food network.
Burger Express is such a joke, go look at the facilities where your "delicious" food is made, watch how it is handled. Go there after 11pm and stay to enjoy the racism show. Bring your credit card, and he will remind you that you were there with a courtesy re-billing several months later, just to remind you that we are still in business. Where if you need a refund on your credit card, you are better off calling your bank and reporting your card lost/stolen. Where if you are seriously short on change you should walk in, because those prices are different than the published menu prices. Where if you are black, the prices quoted still dont add up to the given total. Where 8oz of chicken is a small and 14oz of chicken is a large and exactly twice as much product as a small strip, where ordering a soda and paying with a credit card is guaranteed to cost you at least $25. Where even after a security system is installed, we get broken into 4 times in 2 weeks, and no one knows who did it because the camera is facing his employees and his till box. Where he comes in and empties the till, leaving no change for any potential walk in customers. Where leaving in the middle of an incredibly busy day to go enjoy himself is the norm. Where selectively taking orders and giving super lousy double, triples, quads and 5=packs specifically so the drivers will lose money.
I applaud you, Stuart Otis and Burger Express, not only have you been able to build a business into what it is in only 4 short years, yet are able to destroy it in a few swipes of a credit card. Your time will come, Stu. Then people will get wise. You will get caught up; and when you do, you will end up serving time in that exact place your worst dreams come from. Non-segregated cells at the local federal prison.
Have fun guys, treat your delivery drivers well and avoid burger express.
Just be glad that our medical institutions don’t work like our justice system. Otherwise, trying to get a broken bone set by a surgeon would be like getting justice for yourself in court. The surgeon would refuse to set it unless you could tell him where it was broken – precisely. If you couldn’t, he would dismiss your complaint of agonizing pain as frivolous. And if you had words to say about that, and those who broke your bone, who might be his friends or colleagues, he would dismiss your case as frivolous and malicious – with prejudice. A lot more of us would be walking around, if we could, with bent and missing limbs.
Perhaps the Babylonian King Hammurabi, said to be the inventor of written law, should have included in his Code an oath for judges, as Hippocrates’ did for physicians – “First, do no harm.”
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Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
That was back when they all really cared for the people and not themselves. Since then look at how much they pay themselves for making ammendments to that very same piece of paper. So much for puplic service huh?
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
Re: Are You Pissed Off? Tell us about it.
This morning, NPR Morning Edition ran a piece discussing the abject failure of the Michigan public defender system in representing the poor.
See http://www.npr.org/2012/06/14/154849477/michigan-finally-eyeing-changes-to-lawyers-for-poor
In Michigan, public defenders are often the lowest bidders, paid by the case, not the workload. So they have reason to urge their poor clients to plead guilty as fast as possible, doing as little work as possible, so they can run as many through the system as fast as possible, and thus make a decent living. Individual case loads can run as high as 400 per year, leaving no time to investigate or prepare a case.
As a result, an innocent person like Mr. Edward Carter can spend as much as 35 years in jail for a crime of violence committed while he was in custody on other charges. An ACLU lawyer suing the State calls it “assembly line justice”, just another way of saying “railroad”. Even the Republican Governor and a County Prosecutor acknowledge that the system is broken.
Can you see DA Tim Harris acknowledging the same thing about the railroad running through the Tulsa County Mental Health Court? I think that a certain warm place would freeze over and warm back up again first. It’s much too handy for disposing of people he can’t successfully prosecute in a criminal court.
So how do public defenders get paid here? Obviously not enough to inform their captive clients of all their rights. Or to mount a zealous defense, or to demand a rigorous and even-handed investigation by police,. Or to object to hearsay, to patently false statements filed by the Court, to bogus evidentiary standards, to the lack of cross examination of accusers, and to the corrupt practice of allowing the jailers and their effective subcontractors to be the only “witnesses”.
No, in order to support such things, they would first have to have a sense of shame about their failure to uphold the Constitution. In this neck of the woods, you can’t even depend on getting that from a Federal Judge or District Attorney.
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Abstract from: Gottstein, James B., INVOLUNTARY COMMITMENT AND FORCED PSYCHIATRIC DRUGGING IN THE TRIAL COURTS: RIGHTS VIOLATIONS, Alaska Law Review, 2008, Vol 25:51-105,
available at: http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/alr/vol25/iss1/3
"A commonly-held belief is that locking up and forcibly drugging people diagnosed with mental illness is in their best interests as well as society’s as a whole. The truth is far different. Rather than protecting the public from harm, public safety is decreased. Rather than helping psychiatric respondents, many are greatly harmed. The evidence on this is clear. Constitutional, statutory, and judge-made law, if followed, would protect psychiatric respondents from being erroneously deprived of their freedom and right to decline psychiatric drugs. However, lawyers representing psychiatric respondents, and judges hearing these cases uncritically reflect society’s beliefs and do not engage in legitimate legal processes when conducting involuntarily commitment and forced drugging proceedings. By abandoning their core principle of zealous advocacy, lawyers representing psychiatric respondents interpose little, if any, defense and are not discovering and presenting to judges the evidence of the harm to their clients. By abandoning their core principle of being faithful to the law, judges have become instruments of oppression, rather than protectors of the rights of the downtrodden. While this Article focuses on Alaska, similar processes may be found in other United States’ jurisdictions, with only the details differing."
This is an example of the kind of in-depth article challenging bigotry that not a few local judges and lawyers would rather feed to their dogs than read for homework. Perhaps after barbecuing it and posting the video on YouTube.
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On the Oklahoma State Court Network web page http://www.oscn.net/applications/oscn/DeliverDocument.asp?CiteID=84204,
it states that Title 43A-5-401 is “repealed”, i.e.:
Oklahoma Statutes Citationized
Title 43A. Mental Health
Chapter 1 - Mental Health Law of 1986
Section 5-401 - Repealed by Laws 1997, HB 2024, c. 387, § 11, eff. November 1, 1997
But on the Legislature’s web site, in the listing of Title 43A, it states instead:
§43A-5-401. Repealed by Laws 1997, c. 387, § 11, eff. Nov.
1, 1997.
NOTE: Subsequent to repeal, § 5-401 was amended by Laws
1997, c. 195, § 3 to read as follows:
Where I come from “subsequent” means after. I even have a dictionary or three that agree with me. Isn’t it comforting to know that the Oklahoma Supreme Court can take it upon itself to repeal laws without first declaring them unconstitutional or notifying the Legislature? Especially regarding the due process for involuntary commitment to a mental institution.
But then, why should the Supreme Court bother to get it right? It's not like the Supreme Court is willing to supervise the District Courts to assure that people with mental illnesses get the same level of due process as all others. I know because I made a complaint to the Supreme Court Justice in charge of our local District Court, and never got a response.
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Reading a lawyer’s brief demanding that a case be dismissed reveals the same integrity as Jane Fonda’s orgasm in “Klute”. Too often the lawyer cherry-picks alleged facts out of context and puts them together out of order to create a prejudice that looks plausible if one didn’t know any better. Regardless of the facts, the lawyer routinely and automatically denies evidence and argument presented to allege that “no case has been stated”, “no claim has been made”, “no grounds for relief has been shown”, “no law has been cited”, yada, yada, yada. Apparently the legal definitions for such ordinary English words as “case, stated, claim, made, grounds, cited and relief” are so elevated and abstruse as to be as invisible to ordinary eyes as the Emperor’s new clothes.
Nor is rank prejudice out of bounds. One recent brief chided the complainant for citing foreign medical journals. The term “foreign” is used as a pejorative, in the same character as a man refusing a suitor for his daughter because the suitor has a single drop of black blood. Conveniently failing to mention that most of the journals and articles cited in the case were American, and nearly all from pubmed.gov, the database of U.S. National Library of Medicine. I cannot vouch for and do not care if all the authors of those articles are white.
One can, for example, cite and apply over thirty legal precedents, many if not most from the U.S. Supreme Court, and they will be utterly invisible even to a U.S. District Attorney. As were medical x-rays and scans of dying bone in a previous case. Why if one didn’t know how honorable they all are, one might begin to think that lawyers lie, defame and slander for a living. And perhaps have their tongues surgically split in order to pass the bar.
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In his science fiction novel, Hidden Empire, Orson Scott Card cites a historical work on Christianity, Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries. Basically, early Christians proved their worth during the two major plagues that brought down the Roman Empire. The plagues killed about one third of the Empire’s population each time. The Roman Pagans largely isolated those who caught the diseases and left them to their fate. So many of the sick died not just of the plague, but of thirst and starvation in their own fecal matter even if they managed to survive.
The Christians, less afraid of death, nursed not only their own survivors back to health, but strangers as well, including Pagans. So a much lower percentage of Christians who caught the plague died, including those grateful Pagans they nursed back to health. The Christians thereby won respect for their good works and gained new members for their religion. Thus began modern health care.
But are Christians like that today, now that the need for public health care is widely accepted? We have all seen examples of Christians who preach love and forgiveness, but only for themselves. Unlike their Christ, who made friends of publicans and prostitutes, they consign to hell any who disagree with them, for any reason. They are the experts of the righteous jeer. They cut anyone might contaminate their perfection out of their lives. Their idea of “help” is more like a punitive stay in the local loony bin, where other Christians just like them can wield guilt like a horsewhip.
In the absence of any universal viral plague to test the mettle of today’s Christians, the question may well be, “Based upon the way that you treat them, would they want to spend an eternity with you and your God?”
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Recent research has found that the bell curve has less to do with human performance and achievement than people thought.
http://www.npr.org/2012/05/03/151860154/put-away-the-bell-curve-most-of-us-arent-average
Instead of the bell curve normal distribution, a power distribution often applies,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2011.01239.x/full
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
which puts just a few people making most of the progress, production, and awards, while the rest of us tail off into relative obscurity below the average. In an e-mail response to a query about the distribution of criminal acts by individuals, one of the authors cited by NPR, Professor Herman Aguinis at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, noted that his research found that most of the errors are committed by just a few people as well.
In other words, a minority of repeat offenders account for the majority of crime and violence. This is nothing new; it has been known for decades. As previously noted here, research over more than 30 years has demonstrated that of the mentally ill people who commit crime and violence, a small minority of repeat offenders account for a majority of the attacks on others.
http://www.amazon.com/Clinical-Prediction-Violent-Behavior-Master/dp/1568214898/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336239285&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Violence-Mental-Disorder-Developments-Assessment/dp/0226534065/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336239375&sr=1-2
Yet mental health law, like Oklahoma’s Title 43A, is mostly predicated on the popular but false assumption that people with mental illness are dangerous and unpredictable. Every time a drug-using person with mental illness commits some horribly violent and senseless crime, everyone with mental illness is tarred by it. Journalists, editors (even at the Tulsa World, oh my) and politicians rush demonstrate their alleged civic and humanitarian responsibility and declare that we just have to get more controls on those with psychiatric disabilities. They argue that it is worth it to deprive and destroy the civil rights and liberties of an entire minority if it can save just one life. That people with mental illnesses or psychiatric diagnoses should be confined and medicated upon even the mere perception of imagined threat. In other words, stop them before they kill again. One hears that even Black Americans have been familiar with this phenomenon.
Which the State is only too glad to support, as noted here before. Anyone dragooned into one of the State’s mental facilities can find that every statement he or she makes will be parsed, and even badgered, by the facility’s mental health professionals for the most negative interpretation that will justify a commitment to that facility. That no positive or exculpatory statement will be recognized or recorded. That all previous contacts with psychiatric counseling and management will be denied out of existence, even in court papers. It’s a rigged game.
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Medical-legal literature cataloged by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, i.e.,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16061769
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22152446
has shown that people with mental illnesses are victims of crime and violence more than 11 times those in the general population.
So I went looking to see what I could find out about how Officers in the Tulsa Police Department are trained to deal with people who have mental illnesses. While the content of their training programs is not publicly transparent, one can learn things about their approach. Despite the excessive vulnerability of those with psychiatric disabilities, in Oklahoma and many other places, if a person in a dispute or complaint appears to a police officer, or states, that he or she has a mental illness, the only question is how to get this person confined and medicated without incurring a lawsuit for excessive force.
Law enforcement agencies from the Federal level
https://www.bja.gov/ProgramDetails.aspx?Program_ID=66
to the State-Federal level,
http://www.nationalreentryresourcecenter.org/announcements/law-enforcement-responses-to-people-with-mental-illnesses-customizing-responses-to-jurisdictions-needs-and-characteristics
http://consensusproject.org/downloads/le-essentialelements.pdf
http://www.consensusproject.org/downloads/le-trgstrategies.pdf
to the State-Local level,
http://www.ok.gov/cleet/CLEET_Training/index.html
all treat people with mental illnesses as the perpetrators of crime, violence and disturbance, never the victim.
In fact, if you enter such terms as “mentally ill victim” into their search engines, you will get either “0 results”, or documents regarding victims of people with mental illness. A search on the Oklahoma Dept. of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services web site also depicts people with mental illnesses as perpetrators, with only one exception, “alleged victims” among the “consumers” already committed to its institutions. The only other possible victims it acknowledges are vulnerable adults being abused by their caregivers.
So, despite sound research to the contrary, as far as the law enforcement and mental health community in Oklahoma and elsewhere are concerned, a person with a mental illness can never have a valid complaint against any other person who does not appear or admit to being mentally ill. This short-circuits any investigation into the testimony of anyone with a mental illness in its tracks. Providing normal investigative services, such as merely interviewing neighbors, can and will be dispensed on account of a psychiatric disability. Due diligence is not officially required. If there’s a problem and one of the disputants has a mental illness, just round em up and head em out.
We’ve see this before – in the enforcement of Jim Crow by Sheriffs in the Old South. Dragging people with mental illness off to the local loony bin isn’t that far removed in moral and legal philosophy from returning runaway slaves to the plantation, for involuntary “treatment”. I’ve met good people from the Tulsa Police Department. But for every one of those, TPD has a cynical slacker who practices jeering at any complaint a civilian might bring. As it now stands, you can put any of them through the existing mandatory 4 to 4.5 hours of academy training and 2 whole hours per year in continuing education in dealing with mental health issues, and it looks like all you’ll get is a trained bigot with a badge.
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Only bigots have the right to feel threatened.
The rest of us are paranoid.
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I was doing some Internet research to see if Oklahoma newspapers had as much to say about psychiatric hospitals as the Houston Chronicle and the Baltimore Sun:
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1991_808229/profitable-addictions-law-targets-psychiatric-care.html
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1991_808783/profitable-addictions-they-are-totally-ruthless-do.html
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1991_810311/profitable-addictions-no-quick-fix-solutions.html
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1991_811418/profitable-addictions-state-s-legal-battle-against.html
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1991_812417/profitable-addictions-patients-from-canada-dumped.html
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1991_814690/profitable-addictions-state-to-expand-probe-of-hos.html
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1991_819833/profitable-addictions-ex-workers-say-hospitals-fak.html
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1992_1052024/profitable-addictions-abuses-in-mental-health-prog.html
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1992-04-29/news/1992120043_1_psychiatric-hospitals-mental-health-military-hospitals
Instead, I ran across an article written by Tulsa World Editor Janet Pearson last year, “Is Tulsa's safety net in jeopardy?” As I recall the tenor of the article bewailed the State cuts in budgets and beds for psychiatric hospitals and services here, like involuntary commitment. But expressed relief that at least there was something to keep those mentally ill people from killing again. The first part reminds me of the society woman in “The Help” who got the law passed that required everyone to have a toilet for the help.
The second part reminds of those who used to say, “Why if we don’t keep them under control, they’ll rise up and kill us in our beds!” Of course, that was Southern plantation owners talking about their slaves before the War of Northern Aggression, as some of them still like to call it. But hey, if something is too chauvinistic, bigoted, racist, insensitive or patronizing to say about black people, you don’t have to throw a good line away. Just recycle it for people with mental illnesses. There won’t be a single yellow journalist or lawyer who will stand up for them.
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RE: Appeal of NDOK 11-CV-92-TCK-PJC to 10th Circuit Court, 12-5029
Sir,
You are being served with the Appellant/Petitioner’s Opening Brief at your last known address:
7353 E 50th Street South, Tulsa OK 74145
The previous service to this address returned “NOT DELIVERABLE AS ADDRESSED, UNABLE TO FORWARD”. This is the third address during this lawsuit that has returned this way, the first a work address and the second a home address. You know that you have been sued, but never disclose or leave a forwarding address. If you wish to know the contents of this brief, and for some legitimate reason cannot accept it at the 50th street address, you can obtain a copy from Holden & Carr Attorneys, First Place, 15 East 5th St, Suite 3900, Tulsa OK 74103, or from any other Defendant or Defendant’s lawyer, or by writing to me at my address, which you know from Court documents.
I was wondering – do you by any chance counsel people on personal responsibility?
Please be informed that I intend to write to the Oklahoma State Department of Health, Professional Counselor Licensing, about these matters. I have comments about the “Third Party Statement” you swore out to the Tulsa Police Department on August 3, 2010. They regard selective exclusion of my exculpatory statements to COPES about a dispute with my landlady (such as my determination to stay within the bounds of lease, as interpreted by HUD, and law), bogus “risk factors”, the lack of sworn statements from the accusers you quoted about statements falsely attributed to me, the lack of any questioning of other witnesses (such as my easily available neighbors) to establish the truthfulness of those making allegations against me and the tenor of my comments about them, the lack of any investigation of alternative solutions to the dispute (such as helping me finish moving out of a bad situation into my new apartment), the absence of references to my medical doctors of long-standing, and the misuse of your reports of hearsay as fact by the Mental Health Court and the District Attorney’s Office due to the apparent weight of your position with COPES. In other words, a complete lack of context which would support any other conclusion than involuntary commitment in the mental institution to which you effectively recommended candidates for confinement. An institution of the State with which your employer appears to have had a working arrangement that justified your employer's existence.
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I got a text message on my TracFone cell, time stamped THU 5:10 pm 04/05/12, alleging to be from AT&T at 1-732-604-1359. It says:
AT&T MSG:
As part of AT&T’s loyalty program
You may register for a FREE Apple Ipad3
Go To AppleOffers.com
To CLAIM yours today!
Well, TracFone is not part of AT&T, as of the time of this writing the web site doesn’t exist, and the number does not have any listing in the reverse phone lookup of YellowPages.com. Be warned. Calling the text message number would do two things: 1) Let the scammers know that they found a live cell number, and 2) Give them a chance at your financial information.
I’d call the TPD about it, but wouldn’t expect more than a 50% chance they would do anything about it.
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There is our own military’s concept of “acceptable collateral damage” in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. During the war in Viet Nam, a woman where I lived stated that it was good to kill Vietnamese babies because they would just grow up to kill our soldiers. The U.S. Calvary did just that with Native American babies at Wounded Knee. The Irish Sisters of the Magdalene Order enslaved about 30,000 young girls who were raped, illegitimate, orphaned, pregnant out of wedlock, or just simple-minded, in chastisement for their “sins”. The girls’ families often agreed.
The last place I worked in Stillwater, a couple of coworkers would get together and mutter imprecations about homosexuals until the air turned black and blue. I don’t think they could tell the difference between homosexuals and child molesters. There are any number of liberals who want to throw in jail anyone who disagrees with their gun control politics. There are court decisions all the way up to the Supreme Court that left innocent people languishing in jails or on death row because of some technical objection to accepting new evidence and letting them go.
And the list goes on.
What if there was some way to tell if a woman was at a higher than normal risk of birthing a child with either Down’s Syndrome or a child likely to die of SIDS. Now suppose that Oklahoma passes a law stating that this woman can be denounced by her doctor and forced by court order to have her tubes tied until she agrees to abort any unborn child that could be shown to be likely to experience either Down’s or SIDS. In other words, until she proves that she is in no danger of having and raising that kind of child, and thus “inflicting” it on the rest of society. The old Spartans, after all, were said to kill any baby that wasn’t perfect. The White Power skinheads might like it, but I think that most decent people on both the right and the left would agree that such a law would be evil and morally repugnant.
I say that there’s not much moral difference between that kind of law and the Oklahoma Mental Health Code, by which anyone with a mental illness can be denounced, even by just hearsay, and sent off to the local loony bin, without any full and impartial investigation by local authorities. And kept there until that person can prove the negative, that he or she is not a danger, to mental health “professionals” who have nothing but their own prejudices and self-interest to decide who is and is not a danger.
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Many people are perfectly happy with this arrangement, secure in the knowledge that they are not “that kind of person” and that this will never happen to them. They cannot imagine that they will ever have to face jail on the opinions of two licensed professionals. Or that applying this standard to an unpopular minority is any kind of slippery slope that will some day blow back on them.
But what about terrorism? Most people are more afraid of terrorists even than those with mental illnesses. What if everyone had to face the scrutiny of licensed experts to decide whether or not they could be terrorists, and, like the mentally ill, incarceration until they could prove to those same experts that they are not a danger to themselves (suicide bombers) or society. If you think that’s a good idea, as many in the Republican legislature might during the current silly season, you may not have thought it all the way through.
Oh, Grandma got strip searched at the airport.
She fit the profile to a tee.
She said something suspicious to the agent.
Jus be glad that it weren’t you or me.
Because that’s just what “mental health evaluations” are, profiling. If in the last 200 years, for example, we had weeded out every leader who had a history of major depression, we would have lost Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. We might be doing Nazi salutes and still have slavery.
No one can predict just what someone will do in the future, if anything. Even the recent research into the relationship between mental illness and violent behavior can only produce relative certainties for the extreme violent and non-violent tails of the bell curve. Everything in between is a gray area, where no prediction has any statistical validity. You can only say that people with certain factors, like being abused as children or major depression, are more likely that those that don’t to be violent. But not that they are destined to that fate, and unable to escape or overcome it. As FBI Special Agent John Douglas said near the end of his book, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit, there is no psychological that can predict violence. Only past violence can predict future violence. See also http://www.physorg.com/news152819983.html
Locking people up for what an expert or bigot is afraid or says they might do in the future is not mental health or public safety. It looks, walks and quacks just like a jail for those who are deemed to be undesirable, but cannot be convicted of any crime in a regular court of law. And in the history of Psychiatry, this kind of profiling is less accurate than flipping a coin, condemning as many as two harmless and innocent people to incarceration out of every three who are profiled.
And if you think that this kind of profiling is such a good idea, tell me again why you don’t want to do it to Black Americans. What did you say? It’s immoral, bigoted and wrong? Oh. I’m so glad you cleared that up for me.
Oh, Grandma got strip searched at the airport …
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I hate that I cant report his fraudulent activites on credit cards. I thinks that his customers credit cards are available to be used when he wants to, like mini expense accounts. His classic is ordering food from a compititor, such as Mary Janes Pizza, and giving their driver a $50 tip for "inside" info, then telling people how he doesnt give a shit about the $50, since the card was stolen anyways. I hate that he acts like is perfect, and apparently almighty, that no one is above him, not even the Oklahoma State Tax Commission. He owes over $36000 and is fraudulently billing his customers to pay for it.
I hate that he buys his restaurant food form Sam's Club, then tells people that his product is from some exculsive retailer like Merritt's Bakery for our cakes, or how he created the "LandFill" burger when in fact he stole it off the food network.
Burger Express is such a joke, go look at the facilities where your "delicious" food is made, watch how it is handled. Go there after 11pm and stay to enjoy the racism show. Bring your credit card, and he will remind you that you were there with a courtesy re-billing several months later, just to remind you that we are still in business. Where if you need a refund on your credit card, you are better off calling your bank and reporting your card lost/stolen. Where if you are seriously short on change you should walk in, because those prices are different than the published menu prices. Where if you are black, the prices quoted still dont add up to the given total. Where 8oz of chicken is a small and 14oz of chicken is a large and exactly twice as much product as a small strip, where ordering a soda and paying with a credit card is guaranteed to cost you at least $25. Where even after a security system is installed, we get broken into 4 times in 2 weeks, and no one knows who did it because the camera is facing his employees and his till box. Where he comes in and empties the till, leaving no change for any potential walk in customers. Where leaving in the middle of an incredibly busy day to go enjoy himself is the norm. Where selectively taking orders and giving super lousy double, triples, quads and 5=packs specifically so the drivers will lose money.
I applaud you, Stuart Otis and Burger Express, not only have you been able to build a business into what it is in only 4 short years, yet are able to destroy it in a few swipes of a credit card. Your time will come, Stu. Then people will get wise. You will get caught up; and when you do, you will end up serving time in that exact place your worst dreams come from. Non-segregated cells at the local federal prison.
Have fun guys, treat your delivery drivers well and avoid burger express.
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Perhaps the Babylonian King Hammurabi, said to be the inventor of written law, should have included in his Code an oath for judges, as Hippocrates’ did for physicians – “First, do no harm.”