18 CRS 55703
STATE of NORTH CAROLINA
COUNTY of NEW HANOVER
in the GENERAL COURT of JUSTICE
SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION
STATE of NORTH CAROLINA
plaintiff
v.
WILLIAM DAWSON GAGE
defendant
PETITION for WRIT of HABEAS CORPUS & INQUIRY INTO RESTRAINT on LIBERTY
In the matter of the case of STATE of NORTH CAROLINA v. WILLIAM DAWSON
GAGE, recorded in the county of New Hanover as 18 CRS 55703, defendant with this document does solemnly petition for a writ of habeas corpus and for an inquiry into the restraint on his liberty imposed by the State of North Carolina; such inquiry being guaranteed by Article I, Sec. 21 of the Constitution of North Carolina, defendant objects and contests the State’s coercive application of the so-called electronic monitoring device, and asks the court for a remedy to terminate the unlawful surveillance and physical violence of this cruel and unusual device.
Defendant contends that the imposition of the GPS ankle monitor as a condition of his “supervised probation” according to the judgment in this case 18 CRS 55703 recorded 18 September 2019, which conditions were modified at the hearing of 30 September 2020, that this regime of “electronic monitoring” is unlawful, effecting an illegal search and seizure of his bodily person which is conducted by the agencies of the State of North Carolina. The State has not obtained either a search warrant or defendant’s consent to this invasive and inhumane restraint on liberty, which cannot be countenanced by the law of North Carolina or of the United States, both of which guarantee the defendant’s right to personal integrity and privacy free of governmental surveillance, the presumption of the law being that persons are free and innocent until proven guilty, and immune from search and seizure absent reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct. The State does not have the right to effect this type of search, and with this argument per constitutional right defendant petitions the court that the GPS ankle monitor be removed from his body immediately.
With respect to defendant’s challenge to the lawfulness of the electronic monitoring device, in support of this petition defendant refers the court to the precedent of Grady v. North Carolina, a case which originated in this jurisdiction, and which the Supreme Court of the United States decided unanimously: the court’s opinion in that case is the pertinent jurisprudence in adjudging the lawfulness of electronic monitoring. The State of North Carolina has not properly heeded or complied with the decision by the highest court in the land, and defendant asks the court to admit this disobedience, and to acknowledge the defendant’s right to live, to move, to travel, to exercise, to sleep, to work, and otherwise to act as a human being as contrasted with an animal or a machine.
The affixation of this piece of high technology to his ankle is a violent attack on defendant’s organism, and it causes all manner of strange pathologies and illnesses of physical and mental health. It is not necessary or proper to any conceivable interest, not the State’s, not the defendant’s, not even the alleged “victims’’” who are living inside the bubble of prohibited space drawn around their residences, from which defendant is excluded on pain of “probation violation”. It has no basis in law, no reasonable justification, and is premised on a paranoid delusion, which might also be a defamatory political tactic, that the defendant is liable and likely to commit acts of violence against the “victims” if the electronic monitoring regime were not in place. Defendant shows and presents to the court the record of his conduct, his authentic reputation, and his presumably innocent and pacific and non-violent ethic and personality all give the lie to the hallucinatory vision of the defendant that the State and its witnesses have propagated.
In the aforementioned decision of the SCOTUS the court considered the question of whether a GPS ankle monitor device constitutes a “search” as the word is understood in the context of the Fourth Amendment to the US constitution and paralleled in Article I, Sec. 20 of the North Carolina constitution, which both impose limits and barriers to state power, namely the power to coercively search a person, their “papers”, or their “effects” (the state constitution also forbids unreasonable search of “any place”.) The unanimous decision in favor of the appellant and against the State of North Carolina leads to the conclusion that the practice of electronic monitoring must be changed inorder to comply with the newly settled interpretation of the Fourth Amendment.
The electronic monitoring device is something which is supposedly sanctioned by its
appearance in several chapters of the North Carolina General Statutes, and the origins of the practice and its specific method of application have been constructed by acts of the General Assembly, which has been nearly unanimous in its support of electronic monitoring; the practice has become more common and widespread in the course of time. The statutes which appear to provide for the use of these devices by agencies of the State are all involved in the State’s exercise of police power, which is to say that the ankle monitor is only applied to those who are objects of the apparatus of criminal justice, and the State’s right to make this imposition is supposedly rooted in its right to punish criminal wrongdoing, or to administer and govern the operations of criminal procedure in the interests of the people, that is, “the good of the whole”.
The defendant Mr. Gage has been subjected to the practice of the GPS ankle monitor on multiple occasions since the spring of 2018, when the device was affixed to his body as a condition of his “pre-trial release” in the lead-up to a scheduled trial for misdemeanor violation of a domestic violence protective order. The State’s assertion of the right to impose conditions on the liberties of criminal defendants prior to trial is clearly in contradiction with the presumption of innocence which is embedded in our constitutional arrangements without being provided for explicitly, and this is how the Fourth Amendment should be understood in the matter of this petition: the search and seizure of defendant’s body, the observation and geographical mapping of his movements, the confinement to the parcel of real property at 6046 Leeward Lane, Wilmington from the hours of 7pm-6am, and the non-specific zones of exclusion drawn around the residences of “victim” Carter Elisabeth Jewell Hamerski and “victim” in defendant’s pending case in New Hanover County, Isabelle Anne Shepherd, all of these restraints on liberty have no basis in law, and defendant argues that the State cannot sustain or defend the application of the ankle monitor with reference to any lawful purpose whatsoever. It is not justified by the so-called pre-trial release laws in that the moral character of the defendant has never been persuasively disputed, and that properly construed his lifelong residency in the City of Wilmington and his reputation as an upstanding and distinguished citizen thereof make the use of the ankle monitor completely unjustified and unreasonable having no history of wrongdoing or dishonorable action in his life of 33 years. The court is stubbornly clinging to the delusional belief that the defendant’s “conviction” which eventuated in this probation sentence was anything other than a travesty of justice, a chorus of perjured testimony, a confusing shuffle of clerical misconduct, a sadistic and mean-spirited hate-session, a show trial in the manner of the era of Josef Stalin, a witch-trial of the type known centuries ago in Salem, and a constitutional catastrophe which sought to obliterate every conceivable right of the defendant, a sacrifice of liberty at the altar of the death-cult of 50B. The defendant was not able to exercise his right to appeal the verdict and judgment on any of the several good grounds for his sentence to be overturned and vacated. The illegal actions on the part of the alleged victim, the police detective, the attorney for the State, and the detention officers of the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office prior to this spectacle of politicized “justice” all make the finding of “guilty” in this case null and void, for no jury could properly absorb the magnitude of oppression and the horror-show of violated rights which the instrumentalities of the State perpetrated on the defendant in the many months between his arrest and the rigged and prejudicially orchestrated trial.
The defendant contends that absent a search warrant by a competent judge which persuasively and particularly describes an alleged criminal wrong the GPS ankle monitor effects an illegal search of his bodily person and an illegal seizure of his metaphysical presence and location with computerized capture and recording of his movement through time and space; the law of the United States and of North Carolina with respect to search and seizure precludes the State from conducting such an invasive and indecent search. The State does not make clear, indeed it quite deliberately obscures and conceals, exactly how and when and why the “intelligence” or “data” gathered by the ankle monitor are used by the agents of the state who have access to the monitoring software. According to Myron Irving, chief of criminal investigations for the Wilmington Police Department, who spoke with defendant outside Wilmington city hall in May 2018 when defendant was subject to the ankle monitor, the WPD has access to the data created by the ankle monitors employed by the so-called “pre-trial release coordinators” in the office of the county government known as “Adult Enhancement Services”. If this statement can be relied upon, the question must be asked as to whether such information-sharing and multiplication of surveillance and pluralities of State invigilation do not cross some line or change the calculus of lawfulness or its opposite: if the data from the ankle monitor are proliferated and spread to clandestine organs of the North Carolina police state, the defendant has every good reason to fear and protest the panopticon of disciplinary observation and spatial prohibitions, since he cannot possibly consent to such observation because the State does not disclose the true dimensions of the electronic monitoring regime.
The other objection, having addressed the non-applicability of electronic monitoring as provided for in the pre-trial release statutes, has the defendant objecting and disputing any justification or rationale for the use of the ankle monitor with reference to the “probation statutes” in chapter 15A of the General Statutes. The expansive and broad sanction of electronic monitoring as a condition of supervised probation cannot be construed to override the constitutional right of the defendant to immunity from unreasonable search and seizure, nor can the probation statute’s provisions for so-called “warrantless searches” be justified i . The probation statute cannot be interpreted as permitting a “general warrant” which Article I, Sec. 20 makes clear “shall not be granted”. The authority of probation officers to conduct such searches is nowhere provided for in the relevant sections of the North Carolina constitution, which does not say anything to the effect that convicted criminals can be deprived of inalienable and sacred constitutional rights. Though the constitution does say that “restraints on liberty” are among the several types of punishment to be applied to those guilty of criminal wrongdoing, this does not give a blanket mandate to the State to violate the rights of all citizens, guilty and innocent alike, and this requires a careful reading of the entire text of Article I, the Declaration of Rights. The State cannot persuasively or sincerely make the argument that the interests of the sovereign people, in whom political power is invested and manifested in an integrated and indivisible matrix of social and institutional life, are to target the helpless cohort of the population who are subject to this oppressive practice; the State cannot deprive the merely convicted of rights which the state constitution and US constitution grant to all citizens unconditionally and universally. Unlike the right to vote and hold elective office, which the constitution does construct in conditional terms which limit the franchise, the rights found in Article I are not subject to conditions, and they therefore cannot be taken away except as the constitution provides in its treatment of crime and its lawful punishment. The only argument the State might assert in favor of the lawfulness of electronic monitoring is that the defendant’s subjection to this technological restraint on liberty is justified as a punishment for the crime of “felony domestic violence protective order violation”, an offense which the General Assembly brought into existence through legislative fiat and dictate, and which the State has implemented through merciless application of the police power of the State to the detriment of the sovereign people, the statute aims to violently tear apart from one another, a violation and fragmentation of the body-politic. The defendant cannot be lawfully punished for the offense alleged and prosecuted as the case number 18 CRS 55703 because he was the victim of a loathsome and odious conspiracy which sought to deprive him of life and liberty and indeed to torture him through humiliations, courtroom indignities, defamation, unbelievably oppressive conditions of confinement and social isolation, unlawful prohibitions on his use of a computer and use of the Internet, prior restraints on his freedoms of speech and of the press, and subsequent punishment of his lawful expressions in defiance of this censorship, and this litany of unholy and manifold transgressions of the defendant’s fundamental human rights has been carefully excluded from the deliberations and decisions of the judges of the General Court of Justice, who in every instance gave their blessing to this diabolical plot which was being conducted from the 5th floor of the courthouse at 316 Princess Street, which also conscripted the clerical authority of the Clerk of Superior Court, whose assistants and deputies gave the appearance of documentary legality to a campaign of injustice by their unscrupulous and often unintelligible recording of the prosecution of this case which is attested in the documentary paper trail.
The indefinite detention at the Juvenile Center Rd confinement facility 9 long miles from the courthouse made the defendant into an image of madness and demoralized him to the point of despair, and the only hope left to him in his incarcerated condition was illegally thwarted and denied: the interdiction of the defendant’s US mail as well as un-postmarked “legal mail” was so comprehensive and conducted without informing the defendant, and this was only made more illegal and outrageous when we add the fact that the stolen/interdicted mail numbering no fewer than 26 envelopes was copied and transmitted to Detective Corporal Travis Williams of the WPD, who surely made this purloined information known to the DA’s office, whom he served in the capacity of official liaison to the police department. The illegal theft of mail obstructed justice and is plainly a crime under the law of the United States, which negates and cancels the legitimacy of the punishments the State has visited on the defendant in deliberate and knowing violation of state and federal law as well as international law and universal human rights.
Stating as he does here the uncontroverted and plainly discernible record of unlawful and contemptuous activities by the State, its operatives, its witnesses, and its attorneys, all to the end of perpetrating a conspiracy to destroy and outlaw and exile and otherwise oppress the defendant William Dawson Gage to silence his voice and block his political candidacy, this history of profane and malevolent conduct by the agents of the State make it utterly unlawful for the defendant to be punished with the GPS ankle monitor. Returning to and repeating the contention of law with which the petition begins, the GPS ankle monitor is an illegal search and seizure and a cruel and unusual punishment, and the judicial official(s) receiving this petition must therefore take notice and pay heed to these arguments according to their faculties of reason and conscience, and rectify this injustice by granting this most urgent and desperate petition, terminating the imposition of electronic monitoring and permitting the removal of this device from his body. The petition is brought to court in light of Article I, Sec. 21 of the Constitution of North Carolina, and defendant would thus beseech and request that the court allow him to produce himself for an immediate hearing, and declares his intention to repeat and emphasize the arguments in this petition in his oral presentations to the court. The proper remedy for this unlawful State surveillance and physical violence is that which the state constitution demands, “Any person restrained of his liberty is entitled to a remedy to inquire into the lawfulness thereof, and to remove the restraint if unlawful, and that remedy shall not be denied, nor delayed”. Thus contending, with all due gravity, the defendant petitions the court.
dawsongage.net/?p=969
pw: cruelandunusualpunishment18 CRS 55703
For submission to those judges/justices
of the General Court of Justice as can lawfully
issue such writ and order such remedy:
William Dawson Gage, defendant
513 Orange Street, Wilmington, NC 28401
9103225853 (cell) 9107692223 (office)
www.dawsongage.net
dawson@freewilmington.org
rocking the chairs
rolling our tongues
lending our ears
ringing the gongs
breaking the rules
one by one
so the law lays down
when the day is done
-Dawson Gage,
“@410 McCauley St.”
from Sing Your Way Out
dawsongage.net/?p=969
pw: cruelandunusualpunishment
i 15A-1343(b) lists as “regular conditions” of supervised probation that probationers must:
(13) Submit at reasonable times to warrantless searches by a probation officer of the probationer’s person and of the probationer’s vehicle and premises while the probationer is present, for purposes directly related to the probation supervision, but the probationer may not be required to submit to any other search that would otherwise be unlawful. Whenever the warrantless search consists of testing for the presence of illegal drugs, the probationer may also be required to reimburse the Department of Correction for the actual cost of drug screening and drug testing, if the results are positive.
(14) Submit to warrantless searches by a law enforcement officer of the probationer’s person and of the probationer’s vehicle, upon a reasonable suspicion that the probationer is engaged in criminal activity or is in possession of a firearm, explosive device, or other deadly weapon listed in G.S. 14-269 without written permission of the court.