“Although the spots in our picture are geometrical figures, geometry can obviously say nothing about their actual form and position. But the network is purely geometrical, and all its properties can be given a priori.
Laws, like the law of causation, etc., treat of the network, not of what the network described.”
–Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.35
“And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know—but besides this they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible divine right to that most dreaded, and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers”
–John Adams
19 CVS 001709
STATE of NORTH CAROLINA in the GENERAL (SPECIAL?) COURT of JUSTICE
COUNTY of NEW HANOVER SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION
(CITY of WILMINGTON)
WILLIAM DAWSON GAGE, FREE WILMINGTON RESEARCH GROUP, LLC, PEOPLE OF NORTH CAROLINA on Relation of (the Honorable) BRITTANY LEIGHANN PARISH, FOLK NATION 720 GANGSTER DISCIPLES
Plaintiffs
vs.
BENJAMIN RANDALL DAVID,
OFFICE OF THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY FOR THE
6TH PROSECUTORIAL DISTRICT
Defendants
Plaintiffs William Dawson Gage, Brittany Leighann Parish, and Naomi Meares Lanier (qua-member-and-organizer, Free Wilmington Research Group, LLC) complain of the defendants as follows:
PREAMBLE
This is an action seeking the revelation, opening for inspection, and permission for publication of documentary materials produced in the transaction of “public business” pursuant to North Carolina General Statutes Chapter 132; it is furthermore also a demand for the self-same documentary materials, in whatever medium, inclusive of human memory, on behalf of the sovereign People of North Carolina according to the general principles of public justice and the recognized prerogatives of public knowledge by common-law right; it is likewise an action pursuant to Article I, Section 21 of the Constitution of North Carolina which guarantees to every citizen of North Carolina and to the People as a whole that they, when “restrained of [their] liberty [are] entitled to an inquiry into the lawfulness thereof, and to remove the restraint if unlawful, and that remedy shall not be denied, nor delayed.”
PARTIES
2) Plaintiff William Dawson Gage is a poet, journalist, and political dissident residing in the City of Wilmington in the County of New Hanover in the State of North Carolina. He is registered to vote at 513 Orange Street, Wilmington, NC 28401-4609 and is affiliated with the North Carolina Democratic Party.
3) Plaintiff Free Wilmington Research Group is a Limited Liability Corporation registered with the Secretary of State (Elaine Marshall) in October 2017; its offices are located at 513 and 515 Orange Street, Wilmington, NC and its world-wide-web address is www.freewilmington.org. Its organizer is Naomi Meares Lanier of 1205 Lord Thomas Road in King’s Grant in New Hanover County; its members include Mrs. Lanier, Mr. Gage, Devon Scott […] Charlotte Oden […][…]among several others, all of whom reside in the County of New Hanover. Its articles of incorporation set forth that the corporation and its material as well as immaterial assets are the collective property of the several members, and give its members the right to maintain offices at the Orange Street headquarters.
4) Plaintiff Brittany Leighann Parish is an attorney-at-law/member of the North Carolina State Bar, and serves as Assistant Public Defender in the Office of the Public Defender in the County of New Hanover, which is the 5th public defender district and which is headquartered at 320 Chestnut Street; she is registered to vote in the County of New Hanover. She formerly served as a magistrate in the County of New Hanover.
5) Plaintiff Folk Nation 720 Gangster Disciples are a transindividual corporate body-politic, a social constellation and a going concern, and for the purposes of this action they will appear in the aggregated natural personality of the 24 natural persons, all black, all male, who since November 2017 have been restrained of their liberty of political association and of religious association within the corporate geographical limits of the City of Wilmington according to the “permanent injunction” sought and obtained against them by defendant (in this action, that is) Benjamin Randall David. The so-called Anti-Gang injunction remains in effect in Wilmington and has been used as the basis for finding members of Folk Nation 720 Gangster Disciples in contempt of court. At the time the injunction went into effect the News media in the County of New Hanover reported that the plaintiffs (in the Anti-Gang, injunction, that is) included the Office of the District Attorney in New Hanover County (but not the part of those offices in Pender County) as well as the the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office, the Wilmington Police Department, and (in parallel with WPD) the City Attorney for the City of Wilmington. The complaint, however, does not list as plaintiffs (in the Anti-Gang injunction, that is) any of these latter offices, but rather names “STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA on Relation of Benjamin R. David, Attorney of the Fifth Prosecutorial District”.
6) Defendant Benjamin Randall David is an attorney-at-law and member of the North Carolina State Bar; he is the elected District Attorney for the 6th (formerly 5th?) Prosecutorial District responsible for prosecutions in the counties of New Hanover and Pender, whose courthouses are in Wilmington and Burgaw, respectively. He has served in this capacity for more than a decade. He is registered to vote in the County of New Hanover and is affiliated with the North Carolina Democratic Party.
JURISDICTION AND VENUE
7) This is an action seeking the disclosure and publication of documentary materials, inclusive of human memory, under North Carolina law. This court has jurisdiction over this action pursuant to N.C. Gen. Stat. 1-75.1(a)&(b)&(c)&(d) in that this action involves natural persons, a domestic corporation, and the Offices of a governmental body or board as understood per NCGS 132; which latter might or might not be accurately described also as a “domestic corporation”, but for the purposes of this action the named defendants are to be taken to be coextensive with, the same as, and Identical to the “STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA on Relation of Benjamin Randall David” who are given as the plaintiffs in the so-called Anti-Gang injunction which is recorded with the Clerk of Superior Court in the County of New Hanover as 17CVS4184.
8) This action is likewise and also a demand according to the general principles of common-law right respecting the publication of governmental documents, which demand is for the self-same materials, inclusive of human memory, which this actions requests pursuant to NCGS 132 (“Public Records Law”) but which might also be understood as falling within the scope of the public domain according to said principles of common-law right.
9) This action is lastly and most importantly in quest for a remedy for the restraint upon the liberty of the plaintiffs entailed in their deprivation of the presently secret documentary materials, which in their absence deprive plaintiffs of their rights as civil and criminal defendants to the due process of law; this is to say that insofar as these documentary materials, inclusive of human memory, remain undisclosed to the several plaintiffs, it is impossible for them to make any effective legal defense in either civil nor criminal proceedings against them; the due process of law entails the obtainment of the documentary record pertaining to whatever case, and this is thwarted, frustrated, and substantially infringed upon when the powers of the State are used to block rightful efforts, inquiries, and motions for “discovery”. In light of the fact that the common-law conventions with respect to “discovery” have proven in the experience of the several plaintiffs to be inadequate and ineffective in illuminating the secret chambers and the hidden words and actions of the Prosecutorial power and its collaborators within the coercive apparatuses of the multiplied State, it is self-evidently necessary that a three-fold action such as this one be visited upon this axis or united front of prosecutor/police/Sheriff,. Taking their premises from an inversion of the terms in which the Anti-Gang Injunction and other “civil” injunctions visited upon the plaintiffs, plaintiffs are seeking hereby to compel that information which statute, constitutional right, and common-law right so plainly give to them, be disclosed unto the public that they may defend themselves in civil and criminal proceedings against the State which has targeted them in such wanton and extraordinary fashion.
10) Venue is proper in this County under NCGS 1-82, and also in light of the geographic and jurisdictional profile of the plaintiffs and defendant both as given in the above section on the parties in this action.
FACTS AND NORMS/ VALUES AND FORMS
11) In November of 2017 there took place two sets of legal proceedings in the General Court of Justice of the State of North Carolina which casual observation might consider to be separate and unrelated but which in fact were in every meaningful sense pieces of the same schematic puzzle, components of a single design. Indeed, it might be said that the unifying field effect of the auspices and connected theater of the Superior Court Division of the General Court of justice render all proceedings, civil and criminal, as integrated instances or integuments of the State of North Carolina. This is no more than a recognition of the unity of the State of North Carolina as plaintiff in all criminal proceedings in the General Court of Justice in all 100 counties of North Carolina. The peculiar innovation that plaintiffs here attribute to the defendants Benjamin David and his prosecutorial offices is the debut and entry of the State, hitherto limited in its role as plaintiff to the realm of criminal law, the province of “public offenses”, into the realm of “civil” proceedings as a plaintiff against citizens of North Carolina.
12) This abrogation of the formerly well-defined and ages-old distinction between civil and criminal law in the matter of the Anti-Gang injunction has its parallel, its secret sympathy and synergy and logical corollary, in the (actions) against plaintiff William Dawson Gage pursuant to NCGS 50B. Though it has rarely if ever been discussed in such terms as an “abrogation” between civil and criminal law, those members of the legal profession in North Carolina familiar with 50B will understand what plaintiff Mr. Gage along with his co-plaintiffs hereby contend when it is stated that insofar as 50B creates and authorizes and establishes, no exactly ex nihilo nor deus ex machina but “custodes ex machina”i a notion of a public wrong which is the “violation” of a 50B injunction. This assertion of a novel and legal-philosophically unexplained public right of arrest, incarceration, indictment, and punishment is premised on such “violations” of 50B injunctions being construed as a “public wrong”.
13) Members of the legal profession and the political class who have arrayed themselves in favor and in defense of the soundness of the hybrid criminality/civility of actions pursuant to NCGS 50B in many cases might offer justifications of the law with reference to two of its dimensions or functions which it is worth evoking here.
The first of these is the supposed necessity of a legal remedy, which is to say a public right of coercive action by “law enforcement”, which is to say of that Sate which retains a rightful monopoly on the use of force in contravention of property rights, over and against rights pertaining to family law, and that force which is used to deprive lawbreakers of their liberty to arrest their criminal actions and punish them through the due process of law. To wit, there is said to be a specific category of crime which is “domestic violence” which is distinguished from other violent crime in its implications in the complex tangle of family law, property rights, and criminal sexuality. The State has grounded its novel powers pursuant to NCGS 50B on the alleged public right to intervene in (not to say “interfere”, exactly) what had previously been understood as the privileged space of the “domestic”; to borrow phraseology from Marx and Engels, 50B makes profane what used to be sacred, secularizes that sphere which was once protected by a well-nigh religious aura which should also be grasped in terms of this nexus of family law, property rights, and criminal sexuality. In light of these latter three aspects of the law having proven, so we are told, insufficient to comprehend the plight of “victims of domestic violence”, the novel mechanism of the “domestic violence protective order” was contrived in order to give to the coercive State a basis for the protection of this specific class of victim and for the prosecution and punishment (in the wake of such a hybrid injunction as a 50B order) of the perpetrators of this special class of crime.
14) It is impossible to say how these designs and this statute proliferated from the time of its passage; one might speak generally about the paradigm in the practice of criminal law that goes by the name of “domestic violence”, but this still would not explain the specific and anomalous nature of 50B. Plaintiff William Dawson Gage, for his part, brings his own contribution to this action in the midst of his being the subject to criminal prosecution for violations—alleged, “violations”, so-called—of two different but nevertheless connected and related 50B orders in 2 different counties of North Carolina. The enforcement, if that is the right word, has however transcended the jurisdictional limits of geographic space as well as confounded the categories of speech/vs/writing, communication v. correspondence v. contact; these orders have also exposed paradoxes and well-nigh occult properties in the operation of such notions as “direct v. indirect contact”, and also such as “trying to contact”. This action aims to compel the revelation of documentary materials that would clarify the history of prosecutorial jurisprudence with respect to these and related ideas that bear upon the adjudication of the various proceedings against the plaintiffs William Dawson Gage and Folk Nation 720 Gangster Disciples. In so aiming, plaintiffs will attempt to demonstrate that the conduct of official secrecy on behalf of the People is an overreach and abuse of State power by the several institutions of coercive force, that outside of wartime conditions and the waging of war against enemies of North Carolina and/or the United States, that there can be no justification of official secrecy of any kind whatsoever, and that this illegitimate character pervades the Offices of the District Attorney in the County of New Hanover, which serves not only as the attorneys representing the State of North Carolina as plaintiff in criminal proceedings but also as an informal plenipotentiary command center for the coordination of “law enforcement” in these its jurisdictions. The practice of official secrecy by the elected District Attorney, the elected Sheriff, and the appointed Chief of the Wilmington Police Department is indeed the signature, definitive strategy and tactic of “law enforcement” and their prosecutorial enablers in the era of the defendant Benjamin David. Plaintiffs with this action argue that these practices of an essentially military or paramilitary secrecy by the State on Relation of Benjamin R. David are an unlawful restraint upon the liberty not only of the named plaintiffs William Dawson Gage and Folk Nation 720 Gangster Disciples, but that such secrecy and its basically unconstitutional wartime nature is a restraint upon the liberty of the sovereign people of North Carolina. The establishment of the absolute right of the sovereign people of that State which presently is a black-box fortress against them is thus the overarching objective of this three-fold action, which is however in its immediate aims directed at a very specific set of documentary materials which will be described below.
THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY AND THE STATE
DO NOT HAVE AN ATTORNEY-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP
15) The documentary records, inclusive of human memory, that pertain to the civil and criminal proceedings against the named plaintiffs William Dawson Gage and Folk Nation 720 Gangster Disciples are the “target” of this three-fold action. The logic of this action’s three-fold character might not be immediately discernible even to the trained legal mind, so let it therefore be explained/elucidated as clearly as may be.
16) Firstly, this action seeks an injunction compelling the disclosure and publication of documentary materials produced in the transaction of “public business” by the elected District Attorney, named defendant Benjamin Randall David: plaintiffs firstly contend that the materials falling within the parameters to be given below DO NOT fall within the categories of “exemption” from disclosure found in NCGS 132. Anticipating objections to this assertion, plaintiffs contend as follows:
17) NCGS 132 provides that documentary materials pertaining to an “attorney-client” relationship are not subject to disclosure upon request. To properly interpret this provision in the context of this action, however, this dimension of NCGS 132 must be apprehended in light of two other categories of exemption which clarify the nature of the Offices of the District Attorney here named as defendant. These two categories of exemption do not modify or subtract anything from the law’s definition of “public business”, but rather provide for an exemption for activities which are to nevertheless remain within the definition of “public business”. These two additional categories that will allow us to interpret the “attorney-client” exemption are those of “law enforcement investigations” and “trial preparation”.
18) The concept of “law enforcement investigations” is included as a category of exemption from disclosure in NCGS 132 on account of the need, so it is said, for operational secrecy in the course of criminal procedure prior to the moment when warrants are issued and arrests made and the matter is brought out into the open. In so asserting this prerogative of legitimate(d) secrecy the several institutions/organs/organizations of “law enforcement” impose a military metaphor upon the entirety of criminal procedure, and this is evident in such phrases/ideas as “the war on drugs”. But leaving aside the justifications one might give for the “law enforcement investigations” exemption, we can proceed to drawing lines around and imposing conceptual restrictions on the proper application of this concept.
19) “Law enforcement investigations” can be understood as EITHER a series or sequence of individual criminal proceedings, but they might also be taken to form a single unified domain of police activity. However, in either of these conceptual frames it is necessary to say what IS NOT an investigation, and therefore to designate that which MAY NOT be kept secret. “Investigations” must have a beginning, and they must have an end; “investigations” have an inside, and everything outside of that IS NOT part of the investigation.
20) The limits of investigations can be described in terms of time and mapped in terms of space. In temporal terms, and in spacial terms also, the Offices of the District Attorney named here as defendant are the terminus, and thus the outer limit, of “law enforcement investigations”. Which is to say that once documentary materials, inclusive of human memory, pass from the custody of law enforcement organizations into the hands of the Office of the District Attorney, they are no longer strictly speaking “law enforcement investigations”, since the elected District Attorney and his/her subordinate Assistants are not vested with investigatory powers. To repeat, the prosecutorial power of the attorneys for the State and the investigatory powers of “law enforcement” must be kept apart, if only for the sake of conceptual clarity, but also, plaintiffs contend, for the purpose of establishing the rightful scope of “public business” subject to disclosure per NCGS 132.
21) If we understand “law enforcement investigations” as having a beginning and an end in time as well as space, one way of delineating where these limits lie would be to posit a shared seam or boundary between “investigations”, on the one hand, and “trial preparation”, on the other. For instance, a police officer may conduct an “interview” with a certain potential witness, make an audio recording of this conversation, and then file it with his handwritten notes and a typed statement of a narrative leading up to the obtainment of an arrest warrant. Once the warrant for arrest has been issued by a magistrate the proceeding becomes a “case” recognized as such by the NC AWARE database, and documents pertaining to the case begin compiling under a unique case number recorded by the Clerk of Superior Court. At the point a criminal proceeding is thus brought into the public record, so to speak, the prerogative of secrecy in investigation loses its raison d’etre, since the defendant who previously needed to be kept in the dark has been served with a warrant. Prior to physical arrest of a defendant the NC AWARE database permits magistrates to know in advance that a certain warrant is to be issued, and there have been several instances where this chink in the armor of police operational activity has been exploited by magistrates to warn criminal defendants of impending arrest. This interval between issuance of a warrant and its serving upon a suspect is the temporal and logical boundary when a suspect becomes a criminal defendant, and it is also therefore the moment when “law enforcement investigation” comes to an end, at least insofar as this concept is used as a category of exemption from disclosure per NCGS 132.
22) In temporal terms therefore the plaintiffs here contend that “law enforcement investigations” are no longer exempt from disclosure per NCGS 132 from the moment a warrant for arrest is served upon a criminal defendant, and this for the good reason that the prerogative of official secrecy for clandestine police operations expires at the time the target of these operations becomes aware. Thus do cases pass from the hands of law enforcement into the custody of the Clerk of Superior Court and from there are transmitted in two directions, one upstairs to the Offices of the District Attorney, and one beyond the walls of the courthouse into the hands of a defense attorney. Of course, separately from the documentary materials in paper or digitized electronic format held by the Clerk of Court, law enforcement maintain their own case files, but after warrant for arrest has been served “investigation” has been brought to a close. What comes after is not altogether certain, but for the sake of this argument, let us proceed to that second crucial category of exemption from disclosure in the NCGS 132, which is “trial preparation”.
23) “Trial preparation”, as elucidated above, might be said to begin at the moment “law enforcement investigation” ends, but there are other limits or parameters that might be used to narrow down this concept. For instance, “trial preparation” must be distinguished from the trial itself, for the transcriptions/shorthand/reportage of the attendant Clerk in the courtroom is all unambiguously public in character.; the means for obtaining this documentary record is not typically an action or request per NCGS 132, but if such a request were filed with the Clerk of Superior Court such courtroom records would surely fall within the ambit of the law as “public business”. Thus when the state consults with and rehearses testimony with its witnesses, the sessions can be held in secret, and such material that are produced incidentally in the course of such “practice testimony” and the human memory of these events in privy chambers clearly fall within the exemption from disclosure for “trial preparation”. By isolating the practice and rehearsal of witnesses with the counsel for the State as the specifically sensitive material that the “trial preparation” exemption in NCGS 132 is designed to give a limited and temporary prerogative of secrecy, it thus becomes discernible that other types of documentary materials, inclusive of human memory, produced by the Office of the District Attorney in the course of prosecution do not, in the same way as “witness rehearsal/consultation/practice” fit the parameters for exemption from disclosure per NCGS 132.
24) At this point in the argument, the general ambitions of this three-fold action, which first part is a request for documents pertaining to “public business” per NCGS 132, can be distilled into a single unimpeachable example from the personal experience of the plaintiff William Dawson Gage. Quite apart from any arguments about the non-applicability of NCGS 132 to the Offices of the District Attorney is the County of New Hanover, these offices under the leadership of Benjamin David follow or adhere to a set of purportedly “ethical guidelines”, given, it is said, by the authorities of the North Carolina Bar Association/NC State Bar/Association of District Attorneys. These guidelines prohibit the District Attorney from talking to or communicating with (actively, that is, speaking or writing) criminal defendants. In the experience of the plaintiff William Dawson Gage this embargo on the Offices of the District Attorney has been extended beyond the rightful domain of the Bar Association, for it was said to apply not only to the attorneys for the State but also for the secretaries in their offices and the class of subordinates to the elected DA known as Victim/Witness Legal Assistants (alternatively Victim-Witness assistants, or VWAs). The duties and responsibilities of this cohort within the Offices of the District Attorney will be discussed below. Before that, plaintiffs refer to the precedent of plaintiff William Dawson Gage as “intern” in the Offices of the District Attorney as the correct point of reference and comparison in comprehending this action.
25) It is impossible to say what the immediate and medium-term repercussions of plaintiff’s “internship” would have been during the brief duration in Fall of 2014 when plaintiff was given free reign to investigate and inquire within the offices of the District Attorney, but in the fullness of time, if four and one half years be that, has revealed that the purpose of this internship was in fact to pry open, once and for all, the black box of Ben David’s Offices. Once a precedent is set in the jurisprudence of NCGS 132 it cannot be rescinded, and so it goes with the introduction of the State-level manual for Victim/Witness Legal Assistants, which was deposited in hard paper copy (and this was the only copy; there is no other) in the Office of First Assistant District Attorney Lilian Salcines Bright. Whether it remains “on file” is a fascinating question, and this action begins its effect and significance with the asking of this question, “Where is Dawson’s VWA introduction, and will you all concur that this one document, if nothing else, which is solely (if it still exists) in the custody of the Offices named here as defendant and which was produced in the transaction of “public business” and in every conceivable sense falls within the ambit of NCGS 132’s provisions for disclosure upon request. Plaintiffs therefore request that the introduction to the VWA manual written by plaintiff be disclosed, released, and made available for copying pursuant to NCGS 132.
26) To conclude this section, plaintiffs shall now anticipate one last objection to the contention that everything in the DA’s office save for “witness rehearsal materials” is subject to disclosure upon request per NCGS 132. This would be the argument, not altogether implausible really, that District Attorneys and the clandestine wings/precincts/provinces/dominions/theaters/chambers/organs/organizations/units/programs/initiatives/operations/games of “law enforcement” fit the definition of an “attorney-client relationship”. THIS IS NOT SO.
27) The State which is the plaintiff in all criminal proceedings cannot be confused or conflated with the State which is the secretive apparatus of infinite police. The State who is the plaintiff in criminal proceedings is in fact an avatar of the Sovereign People of North Carolina, and is a legal fiction giving force to their general will that “public offenses” which is to say criminal as distinguished from civil wrong-doing, be prosecuted and punished according to the due process of law. The State so understood, therefore, does not have this peculiar characteristic often attributed thereto, which is the possession of “interests” which must be balanced against the interests of persons and people, the individual and collective dimensions of that Right which is the immutable Constitution of North Carolina. It is the deepest conviction and most earnest contention of the several plaintiffs, inclusive of the Sovereign People of North Carolina as such, that with the visitation of this three-fold action upon the named defendants there will take place a monumental transformation in our understanding and practice of the law in this ancient common-law jurisdiction. The interpretation of the 4th amendment to the Constitution of the United States and of Article I, Section 20 of the Constitution of North Carolina must not be interpreted in flexible fashion, there is no place in constitutional law for “innovations” and “new developments” with respect to this supposedly complicated “balancing of interests” between the State and the People. This is because we must understand the individual and collective levels of human action as different aspects of a single indivisible reality which must, upon any worthy analysis, admit of interpretations with comprehend this manifold nature. This reconciliation of the micro- and macrocosmic, of the individual and folk-national interpretation of constitutional rights and their inviolability is analogous or homologous to the reconciliations of the natural sciences (as yet incomplete) or any other attempt to reconcile (which is not to “synthesize”) the apparently contradictory structures within the realm of philosophical thought. The application of such a dialectical method as this one is aimed at the attainment of total light and absolute liberty, which in other words is known as “720 degrees of knowledge”. The perspectival configuration that hitherto gave legal theorists of the State the illusion (or delusion) that the State has “interests” which are to be balanced against the “interests” of the sovereign people, this category-error or hubristic hallucination is thus revealed and falsified. The individual and folk-national dimensions of constitutional rights cannot be held to contradict one another; there is no antinomy between the rights of different sectors or segments or even fragments of the One body-politic. The contemplation of common-law and constitutional and statutory dimensions of law leads to schizophrenia in the absence of the unifying garment of that common-law which is the Common language of this our ancient jurisdiction.
28) The claims, contentions, and implications of propositions 1-27 are hereby associated and together proceed to the next phase of this free-form sequential complaint, where plaintiffs will give a partial specification of the documentary materials, inclusive of human memory, which this action seeks to obtain.
NCGS 132 REQUESTS CAN BE SPECIFIED WITH BOOLEAN SEARCH TERMS, ETC.
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29) Having pre-emptively met with their arguments above several possible objections to the effect that the Offices of the named defendant Benjamin David do not fall within the ambit of public records law, plaintiffs give the following “search parameters” as a partial description of the documentary materials the disclosure of which are the objectives of this three-fold action.
A) Electronic mail for BOTH email addresses used by the named defendant Benjamin David, which are “benjamin.r.david@nccourts.org” AND “benjamindavid5@gmail.com” which includes the words/strings “Gage”, “Folk”, “Nation”, “720”, “Gangster”, “Gang”, “Disciples”, “Crip”, “Blood”, “MS-13”, “Governor”, “Harper”, “Peterson”, “Carter”, “Jewell”, “Zapple”, “Poole”, “WHQR”, “Democratic”, “Republican”, “Boseman”, “Barfield”, “Woody”, “Goolsby” and (why not?) “Dawson”. These search terms should not be “case sensitive” but include, where appropriate, plural forms and typographical variations.
B) Login credentials for the “Google Account” associated with the email “benjaminrdavid5@gmail.com”; plaintiffs contend on this front that the “location history”, “search history”, “Docs”, “Hangouts” (formerly “Gchat”) and “Maps” usage-history all fall clearly within the NCGS 132 definition of the “the transaction of public business”, insofar as the named defendant Benjamin Randall David, as the elected district attorney, is always and everywhere transacting Public Business, and is not entitled to any privilege nor prerogative of privacy/secrecy/obscurity/occultism but is rather subject to the most ruthless and merciless investigative transparency on the occasion of such a three-fold action as this. Thus do plaintiffs complain of the defendants, who will be responsible for the fulfillment of this lawful, official, and altogether urgent request for the disclosure and publication of documentary materials pertaining to the civil and criminal proceedings against we the plaintiffs, who are united and undaunted in their determination that light be shone upon the shadowy domain of the Offices of the District Attorney in the County of New Hanover.
i“From the hand of the guardians”