Aug. 18, 2012 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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Welcome to the Political Cesspool, known worldwide as the South's foremost populous radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the political cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
Welcome back, everybody.
This is Bill Rowland, sitting in for the third hour for James Edwards.
And tonight we continue our fourth installment of the sad saga of Dr. Tom Sell, a dentist from St. Louis who was persecuted by the federal government over the period of eight years, imprisoned without a trial, and forced to take psychotropic drugs to make him, quote, sane, unquote, enough to stand trial.
And Dr. Sell's story is really about the abuse of the criminal justice system by a vindictive federal bureaucracy.
It's really what we're talking about here.
And why was Dr. Sell picked out to be a victim of this persecution?
Well, from what we've gained, what we know about Dr. Sell is that a very strong likelihood exists that politics played a role in the government prosecution, abuse, and persecution of Dr. Tom Sell.
And he's with us here now.
Dr. Sell, welcome back to the Political Cesspool.
Good evening, Bill.
How are you?
I'm doing very well.
Even better having you back in for this fourth installment.
The first three installments have been absolutely riveting.
I don't want to say entertainment, but absolutely riveting radio as far as your, you know, what you tell us about being in this prison, the prosecution you went through, 13 different jails over the time that you were incarcerated.
It just is mind-boggling to think about the ordeals you went through and then your wife going to prison for two years because the government went after her over the bogus charges, over the bogus, you know, charge that you had conspired to contract the murder of several FBI agents and I guess the good humor man and everybody else in St. Louis.
But in fact, we discussed this a little earlier.
We were taking some notes earlier this week, a couple of days ago, and we talked about your wife going to prison and how the government offered to make her a deal.
And that was, if I got it right, that if she would testify against you, all the charges against her would go away.
Well, yes, you're right, Bill.
It was certainly a travesty of justice and an abuse of the whole judicial system.
And the judges were just as much to blame as anybody.
And after my wife was held in the county jail, deprived of the children for six months, she finally broke down and agreed to their proffer.
And she was released from the county jail when she did that.
But after probably about two years of the government waiting for me to proclaim me competent to stand trial.
And of course, since I never took the medication, They deemed me incompetent to stand trial.
So what they did was they just hauled her back into court after the time was running out for them to sentence her and completely broke their word and sentenced her to do two years in prison term.
So they sent her for at least 18 months to a federal camp in Illinois.
So she didn't really gain anything by cooperating with the federal government.
And she had to serve at least 18 months and another three months in the halfway house afterwards.
Now, Dr. Sell, one thing we discussed with each other yesterday was the setup that actually led to the charges being brought against you for conspiring to murder an FBI agent or several FBI agents.
And I think there was a whole list of people who were on this alleged hit list.
And actually, someone just showed up at the prison one day to visit you out of nowhere.
And that is what led to the charges.
Is that correct?
Well, yes, at the county, the city jail of Jennings, where they had moved me for a week, I think, just in order to have this fella show up.
And we later learned that he had been charged with extortion against a labor union leader.
And he and his sister had, at least his sister had committed perjury in regards to charges against this president of the Iron Workers Union.
And this is the type of witnesses that they had planned to use against me.
Another witness had been in trouble with prescription drug narcotics charges.
And their witnesses were just totally bogus.
And, you know, I knew this.
I knew I didn't feel that their witnesses could stand up in court at all.
Eventually, I mean, I knew I was innocent, and then eventually I come to find out that their witnesses were all of definitely not impeccable character, and it just reinforced my conviction that I should go to trial.
But unfortunately, a trial was never to be because the judge must have postponed this trial a dozen times in the interest of justice.
And the months and eventually years just kept dragging on and on, even after I won in the Supreme Court.
Dr. Sell, This man who came to the jail, I think we sort of mapped out together how this may have come about.
And one thing that we mentioned in a previous installment, I think a week ago, is that the FBI had seized all of your patient files and was very aggressively going to your patients and interviewing them and talking to them.
And my suspicions were aroused that during this snipe hunt that they were on for anyone who would testify against you, they ran across this guy, they did a background on him, or they found out that he had charges pending or he had some sort of background or warrants or something that would allow them to put him in motion as someone to entrap you.
Dr. Sell, we've only got about 30 seconds left in this segment.
And once again, everyone, this is Bill Rowland.
I'm sitting in this third hour for James Edwards and continuing our absolutely fascinating interview with Dr. Tom Sell.
We'll be back right after these messages.
Stay with us.
You're listening to The Political Cesspool.
Don't go away.
The Political Cesspool Guys will be back right after these messages.
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And here's the host of the political cesspool, James Edwards.
Welcome back, everybody.
This is Bill Rowland covering the third hour, taking over the controls from James Edwards.
So we can continue our riveting, fascinating, disturbing, heartbreaking, shocking account of the arrest and imprisonment of Dr. Tom Sell.
If you've been listening to the other three installments, you'll know this story has so many twists and turns, so many shocking developments that it's almost unbelievable.
And what changed everything about Dr. Sell, who may have completely disappeared out of sight into the prison system, was that his case involving the fact that the government was trying to force him to take psychotropic drugs in order to stay on trial went all the way to the Supreme Court.
And that really makes Dr. Sell a hero in the battle to protect our constitutional rights.
Because what the government was doing was certainly reminiscent of the tactics and of the methods used in the Soviet Union.
Welcome back, Dr. Sell.
After the break, we were talking about the attempt by the FBI to send an informant to the jail where you were being held, Jennings.
And this informant was, I understand, wired.
And he had a brief conversation with you at the jail.
He appeared to be there just as a visitor.
He was a former patient with a very shady background, with a not so upright background.
And he came into the jail.
I mean, obviously, what he claimed or what the FBI claims was not taped on the wire.
Is that right?
Oh, yeah.
This was a totally unsubstantiated claim that I was trying to murder the FBI agents and have federal witnesses.
And bear with me on this.
It may seem a little bit complicated and convoluted, but I just want to give you an example of how the federal government would stoop to such low depths with such a snitch.
The person involved in this, the snitch, was a patient of mine.
And his older brother was married to a woman, and they had two small boys.
They got divorced.
This woman subsequently married another man who eventually was actually incarcerated with me at the Washington County jail at this very time that the murder indictments came down and were making actually was in the newspaper and everybody was talking about it at the Washington County Jail involving me.
He swore up and down, but it could never be proved, that he heard on a radio broadcast, news broadcast, that this snitch had been arrested for having a meth lab in a small town in Jefferson County on Highway 30.
Now, he was locked up for, he and his wife, his wife, held down these two small boys while he raped and sodomized them.
And that's why he was locked up in jail with me.
And so this would have been this snitch's nephew.
So he knew the family and the last name quite well.
And so he swore up and down that the nephew of these stepboys of his was arrested for having a meth amphetamine lab.
So I believe, but I can't prove it, that the FBI just put two and two together and used him to force him to be a snitch against me as leverage to get him out of the trouble he was in for having a meth lab.
Now, to reiterate, he was wired, and as you told me earlier, the conversation you had with him only lasted a few minutes, and it was very superficial conversation.
There was nothing discussed of any real consequence.
And certainly nothing was said on the tape or in the wire, from the wire about killing FBI agents.
And as I understand, the amount you were supposed to pay for the killing of all these FBI agents and federal witnesses was $250.
Well, that's quite a bargain, even in the third world.
I mean, if you're going to have somebody knocked off, the very idea that $250 would get it done seems ludicrous on the face of it.
That's what they said he said.
But it's not on the wire tape at all.
I mean, they've wired a guy for, obviously, on an expedition to get information and probably to try to entrap you in something.
This is all of these things about snitches and wires.
It's usually very often a case of entrapment where the person says something that they're prompted to say.
But in this case, it's not on the wire.
I guess he just went back to the FBI and said, oh, the wire wasn't on when he said he wanted to hire me for $250 to kill all these FBI agents and federal witnesses.
And the FBI actually ran with that nonsense.
They actually took this to court and secured an indictment?
Yeah, it wasn't even a legal wiretap of the phone we talked over at the jail because he had never signed to give authority for them to take his conversation with me.
But the judge allowed it in his evidence anyway.
What I was talking about was for Jane, for the dental assistant and for the FBI agent Anthony Box just to tell the truth.
He acted like it sounded like to me that he could get him to tell the truth, but What they were making it out to sound like was that instead of for me wanting them to tell the truth, I wanted them killed.
And I never said I wanted them killed.
I never said anything of the sort.
And it was all illegal and a fabrication of a stretch and a fabrication of their imaginations.
But see, the judges thought it was all implied and good to go.
So hearsay evidence is brought before the court based on the testimony of a person of, let's say, very little credibility in a courtroom.
I can't imagine any snitch being less credible than one saying, you know, I was on a wire, but our conversation was recorded, but he didn't say that.
He didn't say that on the recording, but he said it to me.
How can he say it to you if he has to talk over the phone and they didn't get the recording?
Was there ever any, did the judge bring this up?
Did the judge say, hey, where is it on the recording that he's saying he wants to hire this guy to kill FBI agents?
No, evidently not.
I suppose all this would have been left up to me and my defense at court to bring this up, which I would have had no problem showing a jury that I was not guilty.
But the judges just go along with what the government says in their indictments.
The judges are 100% in favor of the government and the prosecution.
At least the judges I was in that were in charge of my case and cases.
They rule even when there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever, even though there's no legality to a wiretap or anything, the judges still rule in favor of the government.
They overrule all the defense's objections and they sustain every one of the governments.
Dr. Sell, we got another break coming up.
I tell you, the time's flying by too fast.
This is absolutely fascinating.
This is Bill Rowland, the political cesspool, and we'll continue our discussion with Dr. Tom Sell after these messages.
Don't go away.
The Political Cesspool Guys will be back right after these messages.
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And welcome back to the political cesspool.
Bill Rowland sitting in the third hour for James Edwards, taking over the controls, taking over the cockpit of the political cesspool to continue our story, the saga of Dr. Tom Sell, an American political prisoner.
And let me explain a little something to the audience.
This story that Dr. Sell tells is about the process and the prosecution of people who otherwise shouldn't be in the system.
It's about a vindictive government that has great animosity, distrust, and malice against American citizens.
This is the kind of government you have now.
It's getting worse under Obama.
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But one day you're going to find out when someone you know, one of your relatives, one of your friends, is hauled off by the government and thrown in a prison and on bogus charges, on trumped up charges, on hate crime.
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It's time that Americans heard about a real case of someone who was put through this system, put through this hell, and to find out that it could happen to you.
Dr. Sell, we're back.
We were talking about your indictment on charges of conspiring to kill FBI agents.
The witness who had virtually no credibility, who came to the jail where you were incarcerated at the time, had a little talk with you, and then goes to the FBI and says, oh, yeah, he wants to contract to kill FBI agents.
Now, when exactly did your wife become a target of the FBI involving this indictment?
And as you said, she spent two years in prison, was finally broken down by the continuous, the aggressive prosecution of her and the government's attempt to get her to testify against you.
Did some time elapse between the time the charges were brought and your wife was actually a target of government prosecution?
Well, they arrested her in April of 1998, and then she was held for six months in the St. Genevieve County jail.
So she was, since she was working as the office manager in our dental practice, she followed along with me, and our case was enjoined for the indictments.
So they went after her right away as well.
Yeah, they were always using her as leverage because they had promised her lawyer that they would drop all the charges against her if I would plead guilty to one charge of mail fraud.
This was when I was out on bond between August of 97 and January of 98.
If I would plead guilty to one count of fraud, they would drop all the charges against her.
And this was the offer that was presented to myself and my attorney at my wife's lawyer's office.
And what was the advice of your attorney in this case?
I assume that if they knew you were innocent, that they would want to pursue the line of justice and get you acquitted.
I think my attorney wanted to work hand in hand with my wife's attorney, Art Margulis.
And, you know, this was fine with him.
And if not, then I think he wanted me to see his psychiatrist, Dr. Kloninger.
And at that time, I said I didn't want to see a psychiatrist for me as a defendant, of bringing a defense psychiatrist because I thought it would be bad for my reputation.
So I turned down that, too.
At that time, I turned that down.
So that's pretty much where it stood up until the time of the arrest when they arrested her.
I was in jail at the time in April of 98, and then I found out that she was in jail.
And so it was really a dark moment, a very depressing, sad, and dark moment, devastating mentally for me at the time, being incarcerated.
Did you have any contact with her during this time?
We wrote letters.
We could write letters.
But after she got out of jail, then I was allowed no contact with her whatsoever.
That's interesting.
Why was it that you were allowed to You were allowed to communicate with her when you were in prison, but when she got out, suddenly you were cut off from all communication at all.
I don't know, but when I tried to call her afterwards, a whole from the St. Genevieve County Jail, a whole bunch of goose cops came in and threw me in the hole for a couple months, claiming that I had called her on the phone and making up.
I didn't, you know, I called her on the phone.
She knew it was me and she just hung up.
But they claimed that I had screamed and yelled at her and intimidated her and everything.
I don't know.
But I knew that I wasn't going to go through that again, trying to call her and just to be thrown in solitary confinement and have all these false allegations made up about me.
So I could not call her.
I don't suppose they had a recording of that conversation either.
Just like it was a little bit of a message.
No, I'll tell you what.
When they go into court and make up these lies, they say, you know, we heard him talking the transmissions.
You know, we were in the van or wherever they were.
We could hear him talking.
And when the defense attorney asks, well, do you have a tape of this?
They'll say, no, our recording equipment wasn't working at the time.
When my lawyer would say, well, you know, how do we know you're not just making this up or something?
You know, then the judge will say, well, you know, they said their recording equipment wasn't working.
You're just, you know, we're going to take the word of these FBI agents.
You know, what's the problem?
And very conveniently, they're recording.
They're convenient for them.
They'll have tapes.
When it's not convenient for them, they'll just say our recording equipment wasn't working.
And this is what he said, which was a lie.
So you're denied all communication with your wife.
You're thrown into solitary for making, basically making a phone call.
I couldn't contact her.
But she made it so my children could write to me.
So I knew when I would get letters from our children, I knew that she wanted to communicate with me, but she was afraid.
I think very understandably so, if she spent two years in prison on trumped-up charges, she realized just how far the government could go when they were angry enough and vindictive enough to use her in a certain way that they were going to continue to do so.
And certainly, it seems that this process was designed to further break you down, to try to break your will.
I think that's pretty clear.
So once your wife is off in prison, I mean, what was your what was your mental process?
I know you were upset.
I know you must have been completely traumatized by this.
Did your, you know, how did you get through it?
Oh, prayed the rosary a lot and studied chemistry when I was in solitary confinement.
Wrote chemistry books to keep my mind active.
It's really bad when you're in solitary confinement 24-7, absolutely, you know, no contact with anybody and just getting food through a slot three times a day.
And, you know, you have to fight a lot of demons.
And it's very, very depressing, especially, you know, when you think about it.
If they'll make a mother do anything to be able to stay with her children, and if you go before a jury and your own wife is going to testify against you, who do you think the jury's going to believe?
Of course they're going to believe her because she knows you better than anybody.
So once they get the mother of your children to go against you, you're pretty well sunk.
Well, Dr. Sell, I can understand.
But again, what this demonstrates is the absolute malice and the cruelty of the government simply to pursue a prosecution at any cost.
I mean, it's a bloody mess as far as I'm concerned that they destroy families over such insignificant charges that are trumped up anyway.
You're listening to the political cesspool.
We'll be right back after these messages.
Stay tuned.
The political cesspool, guys.
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Welcome back.
To get on the Political Cesspool, call us on James's Dime, toll-free, at 1-866-986-6397.
And here's the host of the Political Cesspool, James Edwards.
Welcome back, everybody.
Bill Rowland, controlling, taking over, and mastering the last hour of the Political Cesspool radio program.
And I'm injecting a little levity into this installment, even though there's certainly nothing funny about the ordeal that the United States government put Dr. Tom Sell through in order to pursue a malicious prosecution against him for very little in terms of charges, very little damage done.
But they then accelerated their campaign to a bogus indictment on charges that he attempted to contract someone to kill FBI agents and federal witnesses.
Now, Dr. Sell, let me ask you really quickly, because we're in the last segment here, and we don't have enough time really to cover what we need to cover.
But what became of those charges that you conspired to kill an FBI agent or FBI agents?
How did that play out in terms of the charges?
Did they remain in effect until your final release, which, of course, we'll get to in a future installment?
Well, see, they used those charges to be able to hold me for a long period of time as a pre-trial detainee, whereas without the murder conspiracy charges, they probably wouldn't have been able to hold me as long with just mail fraud charges.
But eventually, on April 15th of 2005, they presented me before Judge Storr, and he dropped all the charges except one count of mail fraud, which only amounted to, at the most, maybe $20, $25 over,
you could argue a surface here and there on a few fillings was or was not performed.
And the murder charges were said to be crimes against the United States of America, whatever that means, and one count of that.
And so it all boiled down to two counts.
And I was released with, quote, time served, unquote, and sent for six months to do what they call, you know, halfway house time.
And I'll say this much, getting back to what we were discussing before, at the magistrate and the district level, it is a totally uneven playing field.
A defendant stands no chance whatsoever at the district and magistrate levels.
It's only at the higher levels of appeal and at the Supreme Court where a defendant stands a chance of being vindicated.
And it takes a long time, if ever, to get that far.
And if you want to roll the dice and go before a jury trial at the district level, then you take your chances and you're going to either be acquitted or you're going to be found guilty, in which case you're back at the mercy as far as sentencing goes with the district judge.
So going through the system like that, as you say, as a district and magistrate level, it's sort of like playing golf with Kim Il-Jung.
He's going to make a hole in one every time, and you're not even going to get to swing your club.
Again, crimes against the United States of America, that translates to crimes against the state, which is what sent Alexander Soljanitson into a gulag for 11 years.
It's the same basic operation that you're brought before a court on trumped-up charges for some reason, and then they pursue this prosecution until they have crushed you, essentially.
I mean, it doesn't, you know, you spent eight years in prison without ever going.
You never did go to trial.
I mean, never really did have your trial conducted in front of a jury.
No, there was no trial.
They just, every time it would come up for trial, the judge would postpone it.
And time was running out for the prosecution.
They only had so many days to bring you to trial.
But see, when you're in the mental, in a mental capacity there, then the time stops.
And every time it would get close, then either my lawyers would agree to a motion and see during the time between a motion is filed and when the judge rules on a motion, the clock stops.
While you're undergoing psychiatric observation, psychiatric treatment, or psychiatric evaluation, the time stops.
But even then, in the course of seven years, seven and a half years, there was still a few days that would slip in where the clock was ticking.
But eventually, after seven years, it became obvious to me that I was never going to get a trial.
And they were threatening to send me to a third psychiatric hospital in Minnesota.
And who knows how long I would have been locked up there versus you could start your halfway house right now, you'd be out of jail, and six months later you'd be back home.
I think that it was still hard for me to plead, and I got to plead no contest, so I never did plead guilty.
So that was the deal which I took, and there was no fines whatsoever.
I didn't have to pay one red cent in fines or restitution.
So you would think if I had stolen all this money, you would think there would be some restitution or at least some fines, and there was no fines.
I had been, they hired a third set of lawyers.
I had two defense lawyers, one for the mail fraud charges, one for the murder conspiracy charges, and then eventually the judge had to hire another defense attorney,
the head of the Missouri Defense Lawyers Association as another lawyer because they messed up real bad comes to find out on this mental force medication issue.
If you want me to go into that, I can right now.
I don't know how much time we have.
You can get started on it.
We can pick it up in the next one.
At the time that after the prison held its hearing and they wanted to force medicate me, then we appealed that to the magistrate court.
At the time of the magistrate hearing in probably 99, both my lawyers and the prosecuting attorney agreed that I was mentally disabled to stand trial.
They disagreed, though, on whether or not I should be forced medicated.
But since they both agreed that I was mentally incompetent to stand trial, the judge ruled, well, you're mentally incompetent to stand trial.
Well, see, I wanted to say something.
I wanted to speak and tell the judge in my words and present evidence that I wasn't mentally incompetent and that I was ready for trial and I wanted to go to trial.
The judge said, since both lawyers, defense and prosecution, agree that you're mentally incompetent, you can't say anything.
You know, you're going to be mentally incompetent.
Well, years later, in 1994 or 93, I'm at Springfield Prison and you know what a jailhouse lawyer is?
Absolutely.
Well, there was this jailhouse lawyer there that said he would help me with my case because I didn't really feel good about filing appeals pro se and all this.
And he looked up in the statutes regarding these incompetency hearings and he says it says right here, quote, the defendant has the right to speak for himself and to present evidence for himself, irregardless of what his attorneys say.
It's right here in plain language in the statute governing these hearings.
So he wrote that up.
He appealed directly to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
And lo and behold, we get back, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals immediately rules that that first magistrate, that the magistrate and the district court's ruling of me as being competent was all invalid because I never got to speak as the law says that I should have been able to.
And this really riled not only the judge, but my lawyers riled them the wrong way.
My lawyers fly down to Springfield.
They both asked me if I wanted them to quit.
Well, I didn't want them to quit.
I had no lawyers or no money to hire new lawyers.
I said, no, but you've known from the day one that I never agreed with you that I was mentally incompetent.
And here the Eighth Circuit Court agrees that I never got a fair trial, which is what I said at the time.
I didn't know the law, but I knew I sure wanted to tell the judge my side of the story.
And now the judge, both the magistrate, Judge Edelman, and the district judge Storr have been overruled.
You know, five years later, Dr. Sell, we're out of time.