A Tale of Two Criminal Cases
What Judge Juan Merchan and Judge Lee Kuo Hua Share in Common
On July 4th many people in the United States will celebrate. What they will be celebrating, one can only wonder.
On July 11th of this year many of these same will either cheer or abjure Judge Juan Merchan’s expected decision regarding the sentencing of our nation’s 45th President who was convicted this past week of falsifying business records in the first degree. According to New York State’s penal code the crime of falsifying business records in the first degree is a Class E felony that occurs
“… when [a person] commits the crime of falsifying business records in the second degree, and when his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.”
New York Consolidated Laws, Penal Law - PEN § 175.10
A Class E felony includes — to one degree or another — criminal behavior such as conspiracy, reckless assault, vehicular assault, stalking, criminally negligent homicide, rape, cemetery desecration, arson, computer trespass, etc.
In essence a bookkeeper entered as a legal fee a payment to an attorney who had entered into a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) on behalf of the President. This legal fee included the money used to secure the NDA. The entry was somehow construed by the court as a falsification of business records. The intended crime that this book entry was pretended to conceal was election interference. It were, as if seeking to keep another from wantonly smearing one’s public image through a legally binding, voluntarily entered agreement with payment was somehow unlawful.
Also, keep in mind that this particular book entry was brought to the public’s attention already at the time that the President made his first successful run for the US presidency. At the time, the entry was dismissed as legally uninteresting both by the city of New York and our nation’s Federal Election Commission (FEC).
Not only this, but the 45th President of the United States — a very successful businessman in the city of New York, one of the most financially corrupt cities in the world — had never before been convicted of a criminal offense, and that this case is one of four criminal cases for which the President has been now indicted since he declared his third run for the Office of the President.
I bring this President’s conviction to your attention because I would like to compare it with another criminal case that has transpired over the past two years on the opposite side of the country in King County and the City of Seattle in the State of Washington. The State was, of course, named after our nation’s 1st President — George Washington.1
On December 30, 2021 I was assaulted in a local convenience store by an unknown thug described by the investigating police detective as a bully.
Although quickly identified by the store owner, his clerk and I, it took the Seattle Police Department more than five months to arrest and charge my assailant with 2nd Degree Assault. At his arraignment several weeks later, his bail was reduced by 1/3 whereupon he was able to purchase his way to freedom for about $2,000.
A month or so later in a video conference with the prosecuting attorney I asked that the case go to trial and was told that this would be unlikely. Whereupon I was also told that it could take up to a year before any further substantive action would be taken. During the same conference I was told that I would be consulted before a plea deal were agreed. It took the prosecution and defense one full year to come to agreement, but I was not consulted. Rather, I was informed after the fact.
Within weeks after my assailant was released I began karate training, and by October 15th I had received my first merit belt (yellow) having skipped the blue between the white and yellow belts. While in training I made repeated public records requests from the City of Seattle in an effort to learn more about my assailant. I discovered in so doing that he had twice before been charged with assault. In the first instance he did not appear before the court after his release from jail and the case was dropped by the State. In the second instance the City simply did not press charges. When I asked the city to explain why it had failed to press charges I was told in writing that the City was under no legal obligation to explain, and that it would not.
Within the two-year period before and after he assaulted me, my assailant had twelve recorded run-ins with the police. In eight of these run-ins he was either the accused or the charged party and arrested. In all of these eight cases there was violent speech and in several cases actual violence. In one case he assaulted someone with the body of a firearm and drew blood.
As the months past I repeatedly reminded the County’s Prosecutor’s Office of my new findings and encouraged the office to take action. Obtaining the public records was anything, but easy. The first record was retrieved within two weeks after the assault. It was the highly inaccurate report provided by the intake officer to his department. As a result, I provided my own report to the same officer, but never received an acknowledgment of his having received my report. In fact, I never heard from him again. Indeed, had I not been persistent with the Seattle Police Department, in general, I am certain that my assailant would never have been arrested, charged, and confined for several weeks before his arraignment in June 2022 — six months after I was assaulted.
To make a long story short I was still receiving public records about my assailant two years after I was assaulted, but the waiting period had grown from two weeks, to one month, to two months, to four months, and by then I was not receiving what I requested, and was paying for things that I had not requested. No matter, I was eventually able to determine that my assailant had been in trouble with the law since he was a teen when he was first convicted as a juvenile for involvement in a drive-by shooting, drug dealing, and theft. Important is that since these juvenile convictions he had been given a free pass by the State, county and city judicial system despite numerous encounters with the police for which he was arrested and charged for criminal activity.
As I had never been involved in a criminal proceedings — let alone having become the victim of one — I had much to learn. Unfortunately, this learning experience would transpire in the City of Seattle and “King” County in the State of Washington who has not had a Republican governor since 1985! 2
An entire year passed before I was informed that a plea deal had been reached between the “King” County Prosecutor’s Office and the public defendant assigned to my assailant. The plea deal was a bad joke.
The charge had been reduced from a 2nd to a 4th Degree Assault. Second and third degree assaults are felony charges whose penalties can be severe. Fourth degree assault is considered a gross misdemeanor, one level up from a misdemeanor. By the time the plea deal had been agreed I was now a green belt, and the owner of the store in which the assault took place had sold his store in order to avoid further such violence. The no-contact order was useless.
I had asked that the prosecution to have my assailant pay for my karate lessons in lieu of medical counseling to which I was entitled as the victim of a violent crime. The Prosecutor’s Office refused and demanded only out-of-pocket medical expenses such as taxi fairs to and from the hospital for which I had no receipts.
It also asked for a probation period of two-years, but without supervision, and it recommended a jail-time of one year, but suspended. In other words, the Prosecution and Defense had agreed that my assailant’s punishment should be to avoid contact with me and the store in which his crime was committed. No matter, that I no longer feared my assailant, and that the store was under new ownership, because its previous owner had “fled”.
It was now the summer of 2023. By November of the same year my assailant had had a full four months to decide whether he would admit to his guilt and be convicted of a non-felony criminal act, or allow the matter to proceed to trial. By this time, the City of Seattle and the County of “King” had put me on hold for some 23 months while my assailant roamed freely on the streets of the larger community. This is a long time to hold a grudge against a complete stranger whom you had met only twice: once directly, when he twice punched you in the face and fractured your ankle bone without cause; and once on camera at his arraignment when the judge reduced his bail, so that he could buy his way to freedom.
No, it was an incident that I had sooner wished forgotten than be compelled to remember in all of its gory detail so that I would one day have something to say, if called upon somewhere along the way to a final court decision and pronounced consequences.
The operation that I underwent for the repair of a hernia that formed while I was still on crutches waiting for my fractured left-fibula to heal was well behind me. My swollen jaw and swollen foot that took some nine months to fully heal was also no longer on my immediate radar. All that remained was a persistent, low-grade, pain in my left foot caused by an inflamed metatarsal bone near my middle toe. But, even this was not always there and has continued to improve with time. A foot is a fairly primitive, but complex, dense mass of bone and cartilage that requires all sorts of minor adjustments before everything can properly realign and good health be restored.
No, I knew very little about my assailant that was not a part of his public record. As a result, my opinion of his person was clearly biased in this regard. In contrast, I had learned much about the criminal legal system of “King” County and the City of Seattle. What is more, the insight that I received was from many angles, and my government’s near complete local dysfunction was clearly evident. No, my grudge was now much less against my assailant than it was against the system that maintained the seemingly endless tie between me and him who attacked me for no apparent reason that was not my age, racial features, and insistence on civil behavior and common courtesy — this, and, of course, that I was even attacked in the first place. Had my government been doing its job it is unlikely that I would ever have been attacked.
Before I was attacked, I had called my assailant out for pushing his way past me without so much as an “Excuse me” or some other form of apology. Rather he gave as his excuse, when I called him out, that I was not wearing a mask in his presence. When I saw that he would not listen to reason I abandoned my insistence, turned my back, and he went on his way in a rage — opening and slamming shut one refrigerator door after the next as he searched for his beer of choice while cursing me with every racial slur and vulgar epithet imaginable.
Being more than twice his age I was called a “white nigger boy”, and all that the store owner, who was busy at the counter, could remember was “nigga”, “nigga”. The list of epithets was actually quite long. The true assault came when he stood quietly behind me in line before his next action. Whereupon he knocked my own store item out of my right hand. When I turned around to address him for a second time, I was greeted with two punches to the face. The second one caused me to fall. Because my left foot was trapped under the surrounding shelving, it did not give way when the rest of my body fell. This is what caused the fracture, and it would have been good reason for the defense to claim a 3rd Degree Assault, because all of the damage was not by design.
No, the prosecution surely had something else in mind when it skipped down to a 4th Degree, non-felony charge. And yes, I had waited long enough.
December 30, 2023 would soon become the second anniversary of my assailant’s violation of my person, and still there was no outcome to a crime that had been fully taped, enjoyed a willing and eager witness, and whose criminal perpetrator had been clearly identified within several weeks after the crime by those directly involved. The police department’s more formal investigation had been, by this time, in the hands of the court since May of 2022.
A review of the local crime data posted on behalf of those whom this urban cabal is supposed to serve showed that for every three arrests made in 2021 there were only two individuals arrested thereby indicating that the same people were committing multiple crimes. From the same data posting it was ascertained that 25 percent of all arrests were related to crimes of assault. The next highest category was traffic violations coming in at 16 percent. Fortunately, I downloaded and preserved a copy of what was posted, for within a month after I sent a copy to the Prosecutor’s Office in order to urge the Office to action, the cabal had taken it down.
So, I sent still another email to the County's Prosecutor’s Office’s via the Office’s Victim Helper, who serves as a buffer between the Office and the victim so as not to disturb the tranquility of the Office as it goes about ripping off the taxpayer while pretending to protect the communities whom they are suppose to serve from harm. In the email I wrote,
“Would it be possible for me to make a court experience in an effort to express my concern about the court’s apparent neglect regarding the potential threat of my assailant to our community and the abusive effect that the repeated delays are having on my own respect for the State’s court system.”
Email sent on November 22, 2023 to Victim Advocate, Violent Crimes, Crime Survivor Services, City of Seattle In Partnership with Seattle Police Department.
Before the following month expired it was agreed by the presiding judge that my assailant had been given “ample” time to decide whether the plea deal offered to him by the State was to his satisfaction, and the entire matter changed hands, as the case entered into its newest phase — a pending trial. No, a trial was not what the State wanted, and a trial would never take place. It was just another ruse of the criminal system to make the victim feel that justice was being served, and to make the criminal feel that he was being provided with due process. Even though the “trial phase” had been entered, and a trial date declared, the defendant was permitted to opt for the agreed plea deal at any point up to the trial itself.
The first action taken upon the court after having set a trial date for January 9, 2024 was to agree to still another “continuance” — a formal procedural delay amounting to approximately a month’s worth of time during which the prosecution, defense, and judge juggle their busy schedules so as not to miss their surely more important regularly scheduled glass of red wine imported from the rogue State of California. During the proceedings of the State of Washington vs Deangelo [Majed] Arnett there were no fewer than 23 Orders of Continuance! This does not include the equally large number of less formal roll-overs in which the judge unilaterally decides to postpone the current day’s agenda until the following week. For each Order of Continuance both the defense and prosecuting attorneys must be present and both must agree to the continuance before it is ordered by the judge. I will leave it up to you to measure the waste.
According to the American Bar Association — the likely hosts of the better kept, regularly scheduled glasses of red wine — stated in a February 22, 2023 online publication that
“Plea bargaining has become the primary way to resolve criminal cases in the United States, with nearly 98% of convictions nationwide currently coming from guilty pleas.”
American Bar Association. “2023 Plea Bargain Task Force Report urges fairer, more transparent justice system”. Chicago, February 22. 2023. <https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2023/02/plea-bargain-task-force/>
On March 27, 2024 during the week of Easter — specifically on Holy Wednesday, the day on which Judas Iscariot is said to have betrayed Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane — my assailant formally agreed to the plea deal. I was not permitted to attend the hearing and was notified only after it occurred. Two more Orders of Continuance followed, and the Sentencing Hearing took place on April 10, 2024.
The Sentencing Hearing was originally scheduled for April 26, 2024, but the Defendant’s attorney asked that the hearing be delayed due to an issue of child care. I suspect that my assailant was in a state of shock when the attorney showed him a copy of my outline of my victim’s statement in which I asked the court for a minimum of six month’s jail time. Both the prosecution and the judge readily agreed to the delay. I dare say that both the prosecution and the judge were equally surprised by the outline and wanted time to review the statement and the numerous references to other court documents that I included in the outline.
At our next meeting I will introduce you to Lee Kuo Hua, an immigration attorney appointed to the bench by Governor Jay Inslee, the same who held the State of Washington under lockdown for more than two years in response to the Chinese WuFlu. What do Juan Merchan and Lee Kuo Hua share in common? They are both naturalized citizens — neither was born in the United States.
In liberty,
Roddy A. Stegemann, First Hill, Seattle. 98104
Author of Mount Cambitas - The Story of Real Money
King County was named after William Rufus King, our nation’s 13th Vice President. The name King was selected by the Washington Territory legislature in 1852, because the Vice President was a strong advocate for the formation of the territory.
In 1986 under the administration of Booth Gardner, a Democrat and graduate of the University of Washington Law School, the county’s name was changed from William Rufus King to Martin Luther King, Jr. in honor of the late civil rights advocate. Unfortunately, King, Jr.’s advocacy was completely ignored by the County of King, the City of Seattle, and much of the Western Washington during the so-called 2020 “Summer of Love” in which marauding groups of BLM and AntiFa activists vandalized much of the city, assumed control of an entire city district, and declared it a political autonomous zone. Many people were injured and several people even killed. And, all of this without appropriate criminal consequences by the State, County, or City.
John Spellman was elected Governor of the State of Washington in 1980 in the same year that Ronald Reagan was elected President. The last Republican Governor before John Spellman was Daniel J. Evans who served for three terms from 1965 until 1977.