28 July 2022

Dear Mr. Coleman,

I hope this note finds you well. Though I remain “in custody” for another few weeks, I am in high spirits, and am happy to report to you, your son, and your partners that I’m in excellent physical and mental health. I just finished a 22-page letter to the mother of a young woman I hope to marry, whose family have displayed some of my poetry on the walls of their home for many years. I was delighted to hear you enjoyed my “communist love poem” for Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, and look forward to seeing your suggested correction to the grammar of the first four lines. I am currently in the midst of transcribing and preparing my 5th collection of poems, my largest and perhaps my best yet, tentatively titled Jurisdictions.

I began my career as a mature poet with “Evening Prayer Manifesto”, a long free-form poem about the devastating impact at UNC Chapel Hill of Eve Marie Carson. Early on I refer to “square-goggled straight-toothed juries of their so-called peers” and go on to end with a call to keep alive the revolutionary spirit of Eve Carson and save the University—and indeed the State of North Carolina itself—from encroaching evil. It is clear that the law has been a central concern in my literary art—my poetry and my journalism both—for many years, and that my own saga as civil and criminal defendant has brought me to an understanding of the law which is at odds with the mainstream of the N.C. Bar and the prevailing tendencies of the judiciary, but which I believe nevertheless to be the true embodiment of North Carolina law. While I did not graduate from UNC Chapel Hill and therefore did not have the option to attend the law school, my education was adequate to prepare me to read the law the old-fashioned way, enabled by 21st century technology and the wealth of law resources on the Internet. I have also earned from my own experiences and the singular ordeal of reading the law as a (political) prisoner. I also worked as a “special intern” in the offices of District Attorney Ben David in 2014.

I suppose I have said these things to your son and to Mr. Rainsford on one or another occasion, and I am grateful for the time they have taken to discuss the law with their client, but it has not been enough, not nearly enough, to adequately address the questions of law and of fact that are at issue here in my cases. I write to you in your capacity as eminence gris at your firm to plead for your interest in my cases and to ask that you prevail upon your son and Mr. Rainsford to have them devote the necessary energies and the critical intelligence required for my successful defense, I have made clear my willingness to take my cases to trial before a jury of 12 in Superior Court (though of the 15 counts of 50B-4.1(f) pending only one has been indicted.) Because these charges are predicated on a 50B DVPO, your colleagues have written and filed a “motion to set aside” per NCRCP Rule 60B(4) alleging the judgment to be void owing to defects/errors in the service/process and in the “notice of hearing”.

But I was told by both your son and Mr. Rainsford that if this motion were denied they believe my best option would be an “insanity defense”. I will forgive them for this, but as a matter of law the decision as to a plea is mine and mine alone, and I categorically and emphatically rule out a plea of “NGRI”, just as I under no circumstances will accept a plea agreement involving a guilty plea. What I do hope you can protect me from, Mr. Coleman, (and I hope this is just paranoia on my part but one cannot be too careful) is the ominous language of “incapacity to proceed” found in NCGS 15A-1001. Your son and Mr. Rainsford have both seized upon my long history of psychiatric treatment to deflect from my legitimate contentions of fact and law, and I worry that if I assert myself and challenge their views and opinions, that this will be adduced as evidence of my “mental illness or defect”. Another way of saying this would be to point out that they both have an “understanding of the proceedings” with respect to the facts as well as the law that is strikingly similar to my mother’s, or, for that matter, to the prosecutors, or the plaintiff-accusers.

I do not pretend that my iconoclastic notions with respect to the law are going to be easily accepted or adopted by the judges of the District Court Division, but I happen to know Mr. Coleman that you presided as a judge of the District Court Division in Hillsborough for many years, and so let me plead my cases to your personally; I will trust you to follow your own compass and bring to bear your wealth of experience which is what I lack, and ask that you discuss the matters at issue with your son and Mr. Rainsford. I have no choice but to put my trust in them and in you, but the surest sign of trust is candor (and another might be “to leave nothing out”.) Arguments in post-scripts.

Very truly yours,
Dawson Gage

p.s. As I said before, someone (Jason?) at your firm has prepared a Rule 60B(4) motion which is pending in the the district court; regrettably I have not seen this motion, nor have I ever seen the order and judgment at issue, the “permanent (1 year) 50B DVPO issued in Hillsborough on 12 December 2019. I had been served with the plaintiff’s “complaint and motion for DVPO” as well as an “ex parte DVPO” in the holding cell of the Wake Detention Center on the night of 11 October 2019 by an officer of [the] Wake County Sheriff’s. I was “in custody” in Wake County having been detained in the lobby of the N.C. D.O.J. on the basis of an anonymous psychiatric commitment order out of Carrboro (possibly in violation of the provisions of 122C, which law had been amended and expanded only 10 days earlier, but I digress.)

I had visited the D.O.J. to meet with Assistant A.G. Anna Davis, who I had spoken with on the phone two weeks prior; Ms. Davis was representing District Attorney Ben David in the NCGS 132 “public records lawsuit” I had composed in early May 2019 while on house arrest at my parents’ house. Ms. Davis had filed a “motion to dismiss” in late June, but I had not discovered the motion until I got an extra copy of the case file during my trial for 50B-4.1(f) on 18 September 2019. (I will leave the subject of my extraordinary 132-9 lawsuitf for another time but it can be viewed on my website at dawsongage.net/?p=512)

In any case I was detained by Capitol Police in the lobby of the N.C.D.O.J. on 11 October 2019 (the day plaintiff Ms. Ross obtained her initial ex parte 50B DVPO and filed for a permanent order) on the basis of an anonymous commitment order the Capitol Police pulled up in their computer. Though it is possible that my mother was the one who had the Carrboro P.D.’s “mobile crisis unit” attempt to (I use this word with care) kidnap me from my hotel room at the Hampton Inn that morning (apparently I checked out just in time to escape the police) it is also possible that it was the plaintiff Ms. Ross and her enablers among law enforcement who initiated this “anomalous commitment” without executing a proper “affidavit to petition for IVC” before a magistrate (which is filed by the Clerk’s in the Office of Special Proceedings.) This is a very key detail because of what happened…

When I was placed in the passenger seat of the Capital Police cruiser, I was told I’d be taken to a hospital in Raleigh. But the officer started fiddling with his phone, and soon he told me “change of plans—there’s an order for your arrest out of New Hanover County for probation violation, you’re going to the Wake Detention Center.” So that was how I ended up in Wake Detention the day that Ms. Ross filed her 50B papers, which gave the State an opportunity to serve me notwithstanding the defect(s) in the process, namely, that the plaintiff gave as the defendant’s address an unusual and completely inaccurate address in Carrboro. I noticed this in the holding cell in Wake, and remembered it later on, but not before the gears of the court in Hillsborough had grinded away my right to defend myself in the 50B action, that is, to the due process of law.

This narrative fugue may be somewhat disorderly but it reflects the structure of the events in question which involved many interlocking pieces of law and State power. What was the alleged “probation violation” that got me arrested and jailed and shipped back to New Hanover after an initial detention for “anonymous psychiatric commitment”? The timing of those events was uncanny: someone tries to commit me in Carrboro, I get detained in Raleigh, and seconds after I am placed in the police vehicle probation officer Kevin Bacher enters an OFA into NC AWARE for “probation violation”, this was at about 1pm, I would not find out about the alleged violation, until I appeared in “probation video-superior-court” from custody in New Hanover several days later, but the “violation” stemmed from an open letter to Assistant A.G. Anna Davis published on dawsongage.net (which still can be found at dawsongage.net/?p=850)

I know I have rambled, Mr. Coleman, but let me bring it together if I can. The cases I have pending in Orange County, as with my previous cases in other countries, raise the question of whether a judge has lawful authority to impose restrictions on speech and press that apply only to specific parties, and which create a system of prohibitions, the transgression of which may be treated and punished as violations of the criminal law, to be handled with the police power of the State, the detention power of the Sheriff’s, the prosecutorial power of the district attorneys, and judged by judges of the criminal division of the district and superior courts. TO repeat, do judges have lawful authority to “abridge” or “restrain” the freedoms of speech and press?

My answer to this is an emphatic and radical “NO”, but in North Carolina we see many, many cases (even if it’s just my own cases it’s substantial!) where judges, prosecutors, police, Sheriff’s, probation officers, and members of the public believe the answer is “YES”. My job here is to persuade you and your son and Mr. Rainsford that I am right and everyone else is wrong. But this gets us into an almost paradoxical inquiry as to the origins of judicial authority.

The courts of North Carolina have evolved over the centuries, but in the present incarnation the General Court of Justice is established by Article IV of the N.C. Constitution in the version ratified in 1972. IT might also be said that the judicial branch in particular is responsible for the implementation and maintenance of the system or ensemble of rights established by Article I. I draw your attention to Article IV, Sec. 13.2 which states that “no rule of procedure or practice shall abridge substantive rights or abrogate [or limit] the right of trial by jury.” It is incumbent upon the judiciary both to protect the people from violations of constitutional right by the executive power of police/Sheriff/DPS/etc as well as from statutory infringement and limitation of such rights by the General Assembly. This is a sine qua non of the lawful authority of judges.

Binding the civil and criminal laws together is the generalized notion of “wrong”, which in turn entails the general concept of a “remedy”. The basic principle that remedies must be matched with wrongs (or vice versa) is also at the heart of the lawful authority of judges. Without a wrong, a “remedy” is no remedy at all, but an arbitrary and unfounded exertion of State power. But it is also possible to imagine “remedies” (or types of “relief”) which have no legitimate or rational basis in any conceivable corollary wrong. I want to argue that individualized restrictions and prohibitions on speech and press are precisely such a “false remedy” that cannot be grounded in any wrong whatsoever, but are instead meant as flagrant and demonstrative exercises of tyrannical State power in violation of inalienable rights.

Let’s take this back to 50B. The problem begins with the definition of “domestic violence”, which places acts of violence which are already offenses under criminal law (common law even!) on the same level as anything which “places [the plaintiff] in fear of continued harassment which rises to such a level as to inflict substantial emotional distress.” This highly ambiguous and defective definition contains two additional terms which themselves are given deeply problematic and flawed definitions elsewhere in the NCGS. In the hands of a district court judge, in 95 cases out of a 100, the definitions aren’t even referenced or scrutinized with respect to the intercourse between plaintiff and defendant. The same goes with “harassment”, “dating relationship”, and other terms like “contact” which aren’t even defined in 50B or 14-277.3A.

As I tried to say earlier, I do not purport to be a lawyer, only a poet and journalist and a scholar of law. Much of what I say will not strike your son or Mr. Rainsford as exceptionally original, but their problem is their cynicism and complacency about these fundamental issues.

Let’s approach this from another angle. I submit that NCGS 50B-4.1 is facially unconstitutional per NC Constitution Article I, Sec. 6 (“the separation of powers clause”) and per Article I, Sec. 19. To discern this takes a careful reading, but follow me. Once upon a time, state legislatures in the U.S. had jurisdiction over the subject matter afforded to the district court division by 50B: namely, marriage and divorce. Only an act of the legislature could lawfully effect a divorce. I believe this was true in North Carolina for a time. This was one type of what is called “private legislation”, laws that apply specifically to certain people who are named. Since the Civil War and the ratification of the 14th amendment (which is echoed in Article I, Sec. 19 of N.C. constitution) “private legislation” has to be squared with the constitutional requirement that no state deny to any person “the equal protection of the laws”. ///

…So it would be unconstitutional for the General Assembly to enact a law prohibiting certain journalists or editors from publishing a newspaper or website, not because of the First Amendment or Article I, Sec. 14 (though of course it violates those, too) but because a restriction on the press that only applied to certain individuals violates the principle of equal protection. Or does it? My contention is that 50B also violates the principle of equal protection as such, and I point to the very language of the law itself: “protective order”, an order which affords an “extra protection” or “special protection” to a certain cohort of individuals—50B plaintiffs, allegedly the victims of “domestic violence”—which is obviously different from “equal protection”.

And earlier I spoke of “false remedies”, and declared restrictions on speech and press by a judge to be one such. I also spoke of the defective definitions of “domestic violence” and “harassment” which are exploited by plaintiffs and judges to encompass a wide variety of other-wise lawful and permissible conduct, in particular acts of speech and…

…press which would otherwise fall clearly within the ambit of constitutional right.
Other states construct their “protective order” and “stalking laws” in very different ways than North Carolina (and some states have a “crime” just called “harassment” which in North Carolina is contained in the overlapping powers/constructions of 50B, 14-277.3A, and 14-196.3). The construction is definitive in that it must form the bass of the laws’ misinterpretation by defense attorneys and prosecutors, judges and juries. But where the construction is so patently defective, the inevitable result is a firewall of judicial sophistry by the appellate courts, who attempt to uphold the defective statute through tortured interpretations which always find the State’s assertion of power to be rightful (an aggrandizement which is disingenuously effected in the name of the “victims”) I swear to you Mr. Coleman I have read (at least in part) every single appellate decision on 50B, 50C…

…14-277.3A, and 14-196.3. So I know whereof I speak when I say that my own cases push the limits of these laws into new territory, and are entirely fit for an ultimate ruling by the SCOTUS. But even more interesting are my novel arguments about the meaning of the state constitution, whose “Declaration of Rights” contains rights and freedoms not found in the federal constitution. That state constitution was born in Hillsborough, the origin of North Carolina law! So too was the Bill of Rights born in Hillsborough, where North Carolina delegates decided to withhold ratification of the new constitution unless there were added, “a bill of rights”, the most important in their minds being the freedoms of speech and press. So it will not be an insanity defense for me, Mr. Coleman, I’m not insane, and everything I did was protected by state and federal constitutions as well as international and natural law. If it comes to a trial in Hillsborough we are going to make…

…it a trial for the ages! I have seen the prosecutor speak in court and she does not impress nor intimidate me.
It is morning now and I’m tired of writing. I hope at least some of these musings and recollections of mine are intelligible. I will be speaking to Sam and to James as soon as I’m out of prison and jail, and we will work together as a team, educate each other, and discuss strategies for pre-trial motions. The existing Rule 60B(4) motion pending in civil court does not even begin to exhaust the range of rightful and applicable remedies found n Rule 60B, and if y’all do not want to explore those, I will do so myself with my typewriter and my law books. This will only be necessary if the pending motion is denied (though if it is well-written enough we could petition the Court of Appeals for writ of certiorari.) One way or another, I intend to prevail, just stick with me, and keep your minds open. Esse quam videri.