Which leaves us with a question. If I did not hurt
my wife, if I was not at any time violent, if I never even
threatened violence, then why would she smash up our kitchen, call
the police, and say I did it? Why would she deliberately lie, have me
arrested, file for a restraining order, file for divorce, and then
never speak to me again? Why? Even if the marriage had been merely
a means for her to get to America and earn money, such actions
seem rather severe. Surely I must have done something to
her to produce this magnitude of vengeance. If I didn’t hit her,
what could possibly explain what happened?
There are two things. In the first place, I don’t
think my wife could have known how big a deal this would become
and I don’t think she could possibly have known how completely the
system itself would break down. All she needed was a piece of
paper saying she left our marriage because I was abusive. That’s
all she needed to give Immigration to retain her American
residency. I don’t believe she intended to cut her hand when she
broke the kitchen window, but when she did cut her hand by
accident, when blood was on the kitchen floor, she started
something she couldn’t stop. At that point, the police by their
own rules were required to arrest me. She had no say in the
matter. And I know now that if she had tried to stop it, they
would have threatened her. They would have told her, just as I saw
at a trial in another case, that if she didn’t go along with
prosecuting me, then she herself could be subject to a criminal
charge. Any such criminal charge probably would have resulted in
her deportation.
So after she got this ball rolling, it was too big
to stop. If she tried to stop it, it would roll over her too, as
it had rolled over me.
The second part of the explanation about my wife’s
actions has purely to do with her religion. Islam warns about
lying and giving false testimony (which she did do). But it
is very clear that those who attack, question, or disrespect
Mohammed or his book must be severely punished. The Quran says
that Allah will do the punishing, but Khadija felt a need to help.
She must have believed that if she didn’t turn completely against
me, she would not get into heaven. So, the bigger the “statement”
she could make, the better. She attacked me the day after America
began bombing Afghanistan. I think she felt miserable for living
with the “enemy.”
In a non-religious context, you could say that my
wife suffered a psychotic episode with delusions of persecution.
These were not deliberately provoked by me, but the incident
occurred when she was under tremendous duress just weeks after
9/11. Things had become too much for her and she stopped seeing me
as a person. She must have seen me as a great demon. I think it
was a total rupture from reality. Or at least a partial rupture,
coupled with her desire to cover up her fraudulent marriage. She
wanted to stay in America and shut me up. Shut me up about Islam,
yes, but more importantly about how she had robbed me.
Which brings up another question. Imagine that a
stowaway on a ship (as Khadija was a stowaway in our marriage) hides
next to the boiler room by sheer accident. As the journey begins,
it starts getting hot next to the boiler room, and over time it
gets more and more intolerable. Finally, made delusional by the
heat, the stowaway finds some tools and uses them to poke a hole
in the hull of the boat, so that water pours into the boiler room
and extinguishes the fire. But as the water rushes in, it begins
to sink the entire ship. Lies lead to bigger lies. Then the boat
goes down, and in the chaos and panic the stowaway climbs onto one
of the lifeboats and claims to be a regular passenger. Naturally
nobody asks any questions. Who would dare? So the stowaway
survives. Just as Khadija supposedly survived an abusive man. The
stowaway is rescued, taken, as a “survivor,” to the original
destination, and even given money for pain and suffering. Aside
from the sunken boat and some casualties, everything has worked
out beautifully. The stowaway has succeeded.
The question arises: should the shipping company
be punished for not having good enough security to prevent the
stowaway from getting on the ship in the first place? Whatever
happened, am I to blame because I loved her, trusted her, and
married her? Did I get what I deserve?
By the same token, if a devout Muslim knowingly
marries a non-believer, is it right for her later to persecute him
for his non-belief? Is it right for her to make a scene about his
differing opinions and set about to punish him? That is exactly
what she did when she broke the window and falsely accused me.
That was not defense. It was outright persecution.
No matter what my wife did or did not do, no
matter what she intended (which I feel certain was to be a fake
wife for two years and then get American residency after dropping
her decoy husband), the system itself, the system of justice fell
flat on its face.
Allow me to take you through a quick inventory.
(The SF Call archive has a fuller account, starting from June of
2002. You can check it yourself.)
The police were called by a woman who claimed
falsely to be the victim of her husband’s temper. She claimed he
had thrown her around the kitchen and into a window, causing her
to sustain an injury. The police were given a totally counterfeit
story. The police arrived, quickly surveyed the scene, decided
what had occurred, and proceeded to shape the case, selecting only
the evidence that supported their perception. They immediately
aborted an objective investigation in favor of assembling a case
that would stick in court. Unfortunately their hunch, their guess
was wrong. They produced a totally botched case with falsehood by
omission. It’s not what they said; it’s what they left out. Among
the things they did while trampling justice, they made a mockery
of the Miranda law. They reshaped my brief interview to make it
friendlier to their verdict, by taking out all my accusations
against my wife. They conducted the case in miniature, by
selecting nearly no evidence at all other than taking a picture of
my wife’s injured hand. They interviewed her, but they failed to
talk at all about how she had a black belt in Taekwando and how
she could move tremendously toward gaining American residency by
making a false police report. They never questioned her actions or
motives. They never explored what she would have to gain if it was
a bogus report. They didn’t touch on any potential guilt on her
part and didn’t get within even a light year of asking about other
people who may have helped her do what she had done.
The police were made total fools of.
I think their being duped is understandable and
forgivable. People make mistakes. It’s like a store that
mistakenly accepts a counterfeit $100 bill. It was designed
to fool them. They are not looking for it. It worked. Her
counterfeit incident passed.
What is not forgivable is the stonewalling
of the San Francisco police. When I kept insisting they go back
and look at the case more carefully, they put me off, making it
clear that a “shithead” like me wasn’t going to tell them
anything about how to do or not do their job. I encountered a
depth of arrogance that astonished me. And when I pushed further,
I was given advice that would have amounted to my hanging myself
if I had followed it (look in the SF Call archives beginning at
August 30, 2002 for my chapter on this,
“Men in Black and Blue”). The police badly
blundered, but rather then show any degree of integrity and
accountability, they showed an awesome disregard for honest
investigation, due process, the presumption of innocence, and my
civil rights. I gather this is just regular business as usual for
them. I have discovered the police have a huge reputation for
shoddy, dishonest work.
I was learning my wife not only shoved me into a
pit; she shoved me into a pit of snakes. Who could have known? Not
me. I had no idea the system itself was so diseased.
Then the case should have been cleaned up by the
District Attorney’s office and the Public Defender’s Office. When
the case was given to them by the police, surely they should have
cleaned things up. Surely!
Not so. The District Attorney’s Office was on a
“no tolerance” crusade, so I was collateral damage. They were so
busy proving how tough they could be for the newspapers, the TV
stations, and local politicians that they couldn’t be bothered by
whom was getting trampled by their excessive zeal. I was a bone
they would not let go of! They would prosecute me to the full
extent of their powers; they would have “so-called” expert
witnesses come in to tell a jury that mine was a typical case of
domestic abuse leading to violence. “Experts” who had no special
academic training. Experts who were police officers working for
the police to assist in obtaining convictions with no record of
ever assisting the defense. The D.A. also had laws on the books
that were so tight and so technical that every third person on any
given day would be guilty of them. For example, when I restrained
my wife by holding her arm, that was defined as battery.
Punishable by six months in county jail. The “expert” witness
would also be on hand to tell a jury that my wife was lying about
lying in case she decided to retract (and tell the truth). The
D.A. was also schooled and versed in coercing “victims” to
participate in the prosecution or face serious consequences. It
was a basketball game. Slam dunk. Truth be damned.
What about the lawyer appointed to defend me?
(Please refer to “Wall to Wall Law,”
beginning in the September 23, 2002 SF Call). Public defenders are
faced with liars and deniers all day long, so my lawyer decided I
was one more liar although the circumstances were more exotic than
most cases he’d seen. He cut corners. By misrepresenting laws, he
arranged a package deal where I’d plead to a lesser charge and
avoid almost-certain conviction -- conviction because in a trial,
he said, it would be my wife’s word against mine and he felt sure
the jury would side with the woman. I tried to tell him: no, it is
not her against me; it is what really happened against her
fabrications. Truth was on my side, and hopefully in a courtroom
that still counts for something. But he didn’t really have the
time for me to be innocent. His caseload was too full, so he was
happy because he had obtained a better deal for me than most
guilty men get.
I was shoehorned into a deal I didn’t want. But I
assumed, because I had pleaded “no contest” to the charge of
dissuading my wife from calling the police (which hadn’t really
happened) and because all the other charges were dropped, that all
presumptions that I had hurt or pushed my wife into a window would
be eliminated. I soon found (too late) that everyone, everywhere
assumed that because I made any plea at all, this was proof
I had been violent to my wife. The police. Friends of Khadija’s.
Lawyers. The Commissioner in Civil Court. Everyone! And I was told
over and over that it was my fault that I was presumed guilty,
because I had accepted a plea bargain. That proved it. If I wasn’t
guilty, why would I plead to anything? (See SF Call archive for a
fuller answer).
Then came the year of torture where lawyers,
counselors, and my probation officer repeatedly threatened to have
me spend up to a year in jail if I didn’t admit I was violent. I
never buckled. But I began to realize the entire system was
dishonest, abusive, and corrupted. People in the system with
little corners of power become fond of playing sadistic power
games over the men they control. It gets really sick. And all the
while they pointed their fingers at me as if I had asked for their
cruel torments.
Be that as it may.
I also discovered one reason the system has broken
down so badly is that it has become brilliant at suppressing,
stifling, and smothering anyone who would stand up and make a
complaint against it. It’s one thing for me to choke and suffer
and endure its ignorance but quite another for me to dare stain
anyone's reputation. How dare I! I’m talking about the entire system,
all the players from the cop on the beat to the judge on the
bench.
If judges are sexist or hopelessly prejudiced
against a party, it is for the judges themselves to decide if they
are competent or not. They are the ones who decide to recuse
themselves or not. These are the court rules.
A victim of the police who wants to file a lawsuit
against the city must first have the city itself review the
complaint. The city allows only a narrow time frame for complaints
to be filed, and it excludes whole categories from being
considered. For example, it can consider an individual violation
of the police rules by a police officer but it does not recognize
complaints against police policies. Same with the Office of
Citizen Complaints that is empowered to “police the police.” I
found from personal experience that the OCC eliminates 80% of
complaints against police by accepting a simple denial by the
police officers in question and not doing any further
investigation or inquiry. I learned that many times the police
don’t even bother showing up to make their anticipated denial. The
inspector practically shouted at me that they could not simply
take my word. I told him, yes but that’s all my case was ever
about! My wife’s word! And my wife lied!
With police officers, none of this counts.
I tell myself, if the shoe were on the other foot
and the police had to drop any case where the suspect denied it,
we could trim the entire police force down to ten people sitting
by telephones.
The courts are an entirely different matter. The
courts are extremely old, tradition-bound, rule-gridlocked, blind,
deaf, and dumb dinosaurs. The essence of a free country inhabited
by people who live freely is that government -- the courts
included -- must be, as Lincoln said, “of the people, by the
people and for the people.” Our courts are not. I found the courts
to be made up of highly paid lawyers, run by highly paid lawyers,
and administering laws written by lawyers for highly paid lawyers
whose clients were told to rely on their lawyers and shut up. In
Civil Court I represented myself, so I was dismissed out of hand.
I was told that, if I was legally representing myself, I had to
adhere to the same standard that lawyers spend years of time in
law school mastering, and I was eliminated. The law is a
specialized system with a specialized language, a specialized,
highly technical protocol, and highly complex rules. The courts
are ruled and run by an elite for an elite, and both make
absolutely obscene profits monopolizing the law for themselves. It
is a monopoly. And I discovered that lawyers will defend
one another and their special little world before they will defend
you. Just hope your interests don’t conflict with theirs! It is a
system that is completely unsuited to deal with the complex
and diverse social situations it gets handed. It is a dinosaur
that handles matters by stomping on the perceived “bad guys”
according to roomfuls of legal books. It is a form of
institutional psychosis that has long perpetuated the deep
inequities and prejudices of our society. By complex means, it
allows police to be occupation armies. I can’t even begin to deal
with this huge subject, but I will propose a little thing for you
to consider. If law-and-order is not reflective of the sickness of
a society but of individuals who have gone wrong, then why are such a disproportionate number of poor
people and people of color defendants? All day long in the
courthouse you see light-skinned judges and you see dark-skinned
defendants.
Of course there are good judges and superb
judgments (Gideon for one and Miranda for another) but these are
summer birds in a snowdrift. The entire empire of justice is
blind, deaf, and dumb. The more the courts attempt to control
social behavior, the more they just step on people’s homes, lives,
and communities. It’s not that the police and the courts don’t
have a right to try to make society a safer, better place. They
just do not have the right to make such a god-awful mess of it as
they do.
And it’s not that my wife didn’t have the moral
right to fool me, get to America, and make a better life for
herself. She did. But she didn’t have the right to use my love to
defraud me out of some $60,000, ruin my peace of mind, and demolish my
hard-earned reputation. She didn’t have the right to hurt all the
other people she hurt in her wake. Mary Jones, my sister, my
mother, and so many others. This stowaway didn’t just make the
trip. She sank the boat. She didn’t have the right to violently
shut me up because I said I don’t believe her leader spoke to God
and I don’t believe the book he produced is the absolute
unquestioned truth for all people. That is not domestic violence.
That is not a crime. Not here anyway.
But I have discovered that people in general
suffer from television consciousness. In the land of television,
you can be sure that, by the final commercial break, the good guy
will win, the liar will be exposed, and justice will be done. In
the universe of television, pretty words cast an illusion. And if
things look good on paper, don’t worry, you did your job. Let
truth and the people you’ve hurt be damned. You got paid. Don’t
worry. Walk on.
Nothing is going to stop you.
