Dear Professor Smith,
My name is Dawson Gage, and I am a poet & journalist, and I would like to introduce myself with an anecdote.
In the fall of 2020, leading up to the election of that year, I cut off a GPS ankle monitor imposed by the Department of Public Safety and proceeded to flee the State of North Carolina. I spent one night at a hotel in Chapel Hill, one night somewhere in the Commonwealth of Virginia, then arrived in the District of Columbia, where I thought I might be safe from persecution and able to seek the justice which had been denied me in my home State.
While the DA’s offices in New Hanover, Guilford, Orange, and Alamance Counties (as well as their Sheriff’s offices and constituent police departments), along with the Governor’s Office, the United States Marshals, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarded me as a “fugitive from justice”, I’ll tell you what I did when I got to Washington, DC. I bought a small printer, printed out an application for a USPS PO Box, went to a post office near the White House, showed them my only form of government ID (which was an almost-expired student ID from UNC-Chapel Hill) and rented a post office box. Then I went back to the apartment I had rented on 11th Street NW and proceeded to order some $2500 worth of books from the UNC School of Government and sent them to that PO Box in Washington. By the time they arrived, I had been arrested (kidnapped) by US Marshals the morning after the 2020 election, only to be released that day by the DC Judge because there were no “Governor’s Papers”.
Eventually they Marshals came again, this time with (falsified) “Governor’s papers”, so I was taken back into the jurisdiction of our State by (what I describe as) unlawful violent force. And so my trove of law books from the SOG was left in a basement apartment in a townhouse near Capitol Hill, only to be left out front, along with my Selectric typewriter, laser printer, guitar, laptops, phones, wallet, and clothes. But my heroic parents drove from Wilmington to Washington while I sat in jail in New Hanover County, and retrieved my possessions, including this bizarre collection of “bench books” and “indictment forms” and learned treatises, which had been soaked by the rain but not ruined. The books are in a storage unit, and some of them still have residue of “tear gas” on them from the later incident where a SWAT team came to arrest me at my home for charges of 50B DVPO violation out of Orange County.
This is meant to give you an idea of what it’s like to try to “study law the old-fashioned way” in 21st century North Carolina: it is a life and death struggle, and the State regards you as its enemy; however, if you’ll excuse me, it beats paying tuition and attending classes at the UNC School of Law, or the UNC School of Government.
Since that unlawful “false extradition” in December 2020 I have not been allowed to leave North Carolina, and I am currently on “house arrest with electronic monitoring” at my parents’ home in Wilmington, wondering whether to flee the State again, or indeed the country. But what I find is that you can take the boy out of North Carolina, but you can’t take North Carolina law out of the boy. Thus do I preface my question by giving you some idea of where I’m coming from, and of the larger significance of this story.
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So now let me proceed to my question, which is quite concrete. It concerns the duties of the Clerk of Superior Court, and if you don’t know the answer yourself, perhaps you could consult one of your colleagues or point me in the right direction. It concerns “retention of courtroom audio recordings”.
This morning I submitted ten (10!) separate forms for “Request for Duplicate Copy of Verbatim Audio Court Records (Non-Confidential)” (That’s form “AOC-G-100”) to the Clerk of Superior Court here in New Hanover County. These were mostly for hearings in civil district court for Chapter 50B and 50C proceedings, though one case was my “public records lawsuit” against former District Attorney Ben David. I had been meaning to do this for a long time, years in fact, and had been counting on the availability of these records. The long delay in requesting them was beyond my control, the consequence of my long pretrial incarceration and “forensic commitment” under NCGS 15A-1001.
But what I was told, professor, was that the policy in New Hanover County is to keep the “courtroom audio” for only 3 years, or even just two. Six of the ten hearings I requested took place more than three years ago. So I am being told that the records which I would need for an appeal, or for use in pending proceedings, or in an action for character defamation, or for “interference with civil rights” under NCGS 99D-1, that they have been destroyed. I say “no”: that is NOT OK.
But what does “North Carolina law” say to do here? I would like to be able to petition for the Removal of Clerk of Superior Court Jan Kennedy, who is guilty of sundry other misconduct, per NCGS 7A-105. How can someone who has been in jail and lost their “appeal of right” petition for writ of certiorari if there is no longer any record of the proceedings in open court? Does this not violate Article I, Sec. 18, as well as (for instance) Chapter 132? If such audio is a “public record”, can we really say that they are allowed to “destroy public records”. It does not seem right.
So what sayeth you? I appreciate whatever attention you can give to my unusual requests. You can learn more about me from my websites, or you could even go ask your SOG colleague Cheryl Howell what happened at the start of June 2019, when she called the Orange County Sheriff’s on me (all is forgiven). On that note I will leave you to it.
Regards,
Dawson Gage
-- ========================= William Dawson Gage. 高大文 513 Orange Street Wilmington, North Carolina 28401-4609 United States of America ========================= 1-910-322-5853 dawson@orangestreetlawschool.org | dawsongage@gmail.com @gageagainst ———————————---------- freestyleking.info | orangestreetlawschool.org | soundcloud.com/dawson-gage youtube.com/@dawsongage ———————————————— "There were four things which the Master taught: letters, ethics, devotion of soul, and truthfulness." --Analects of Confucius