by
William Norman Grigg

Recently by William Norman Grigg: If
Cops Can’t Taze a Pregnant Mother, the Terrorists Will Win

In Oklahoma’s
Delaware County, Sheriff’s deputies were too busy figuratively raping
motorists in the village
of Bernice to supervise guards who were literally raping inmates
in the county jail. As a result, the County Commission has put the
screws to the entire county in the form of an 18 percent sales tax
increase in order to pay the victims a $13.5 million settlement.

Bernice,
which has a population of about 600, is bisected by Highway 85A.
For the past quarter-century, the town has been one of the most
notorious speed traps in the Midwest. Until recently, the town didn’t
have a police department; instead, it contracted with the Delaware
County Commission, paying $5500 a month to rent sheriff’s deputies
to write speeding tickets and other citations.

A recent investigation
conducted by Oklahoma State Auditor and Inspector Gary A. Jones
discovered that since 1977, the municipal government had never published
its ordinances as required by state law – which meant that its schedule
of fines and court fees was invalid: The trustees never published
the ordinances, as required by state law.

“Any ordinances
(other than those pertaining to the appropriation of money) that
are not published within 15 days of their passage are not in force,”
notes the audit.
As a result, “the municipal court should not have collected
fines of more than $50. The court has over-collected approximately
$106,308 in fines through the end of June 2011”; in addition,
the court also “over-collected” nearly $8,000 in court
costs. The auditor directed the Bernice Town Board to reimburse
those who had been subjected to illegal fines (in one instance,
a motorist was given a ticket for $545). More importantly, from
the perspective of those higher up in the tax-feeding chain, the
auditor slammed the Town Board for withholding a cut of ticket revenue
and court fees from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation and
state Council on Law Enforcement Education and Training.

In response
to the audit, David E. Jones, the bar-certified sophist retained
as Bernice’s town attorney, weaved a seamless web of persiflage,
insisting that even though the cabal that employs him “did
not follow the strict technical requires for publication [of the
traffic ordinance], the public clearly had constructive notice of
the existence of the Bernice Penal Code….”

Jones’s claim,
rendered in less opaque language, was that the town’s status as
a well-known speed trap constituted legal “notice” of
the practice. Buttressed with this spurious and self-serving assessment,
the town’s trustees voted on May 14 not to grant refunds to victims
of the illegal ticket scheme, thereby laying permanent claim to
more than $100,000 in illegally collected revenue.

Like nearly
all official business conducted in Bernice, the May 14 vote took
place in a meeting that was closed to the public, a practice typical
of the cabal’s serial violations of the Open Meeting Act. The audit
described habitual violations of that statute, each of which is
a crime punishable by a year in the county jail and a fine of up
to $500.

Until recently,
the Town Board – which conducts nearly all significant business
in “executive session” – had
forbidden citizens to participate in monthly town meetings.
Subsequent to the audit, that policy was modified to permit three
minutes to citizens who wish to speak, which is not to say that
the Board will allow anything that is said to have any measurable
effect on its decisions.

“The
atmosphere in a Town Board Meeting is meant to intimidate and silence
people,” commented Bernice resident Steve Miller, who lives
with his 72-year-old mother in Bernice, in an interview with Pro
Libertate. “When you go to a town meeting in Grove, which isn’t
far from here, there are no policemen, no security cameras. There
is a U.S. flag, an Oklahoma State Flag, microphones set up for each
Council member and for the citizens who wish to participate. Here
in Bernice, however, there are always armed and uniformed officers
present, security cameras – and no mike for public comments. It’s
like going into a jail – or walking into a den of thieves.”

Miller, a consulting
engineer by profession, is the civic-minded resident whose petition
drive resulted in the state audit. His involvement grew out of the
harassment suffered by his mother, Mary Zapf.

Starting in
May 2010, Miller and his mother noticed that Delaware County Sheriff’s
Deputies “began patrolling our property daily,” Miller
recalled to Pro Libertate. “Our property is surrounded by three
public streets, and I saw these deputies slowly driving by constantly.
I started taking their pictures and even got one of them to talk
to me briefly. I asked him why they were keeping our property under
surveillance; his reply was, `Because the mayor told me to.’”

With Miller’s
help, Mrs. Zapf was doing some construction and renovation on their
property. This included modifying a driveway that had been used
as a short-cut by motorists seeking to avoid a nearby intersection.

On May 4 of
that year, Mayor Bill Raven visited Zapf to tell her that there
was an unspecified “problem” with her landscaping project,
and to ask her to “hold off until the town could get some things
together.” Mrs. Zapf offered to have the mayor discuss the
renovation with the contractor, who was on-site; Raven declined
that invitation, insisting that he didn’t want to start a “fight.”

The following
day, Raven and the Town Board decided to take “emergency”
action to deal with supposed “zoning violations” on Zapf’s
property. That matter, in typical fashion, was discussed in “executive
session” during the May 10 Board Meeting. When it emerged from
its secretive huddle the Board informed Zapf that no action would
be taken, because she had agreed to “hold off” on further
construction.

After waiting
for nearly a month to hear from the mayor and the board, Mrs. Zapf
sent them a letter announcing that she intended to resume work on
her property. The improvements were finished on June 4^th.
Five days later, the Town Board sued her for “trespassing”
by allowing alterations on her own driveway.

“The material
basis of their claim was that they had an easement on the driveway
because at some unspecified point in the past they had plowed it
during the wintertime,” Miller observes. “We went through
one of the biggest snowstorms in Oklahoma history a few years ago,
and they never sent a plow.”

Shortly after
being informed of the town’s lawsuit against her, Mrs. Zapf visited
the town clerk’s office to request the agendas for the upcoming
meetings of the Bernice trustees and the Zoning Board – matters
in which she had an obvious and urgent interest. Town Clerk Connie
King, ever the dutiful public servant, reacted to this eminently
reasonable request by slamming the door in Mrs. Zapf’s face. That
prompted the long-suffering widow to exclaim that the clerk was
being a “stupid witch” – an epithet several orders of
magnitude milder than what might normally be employed in a situation
of that kind.

On the basis
of that remark, Mrs. Zapf received a citation on July 20 for “disturbing
the peace.” Although the only “witness” to Zapf’s
supposed offense was the officious personage on the other side the
door she had slammed, a police report was filed – two months after
the incident – by two deputies who were not present when it occurred.
The fine listed on the summons was $195 – an amount well in excess
of the $85 prescribed in the fine and bond schedule.

“I knew
the trespass lawsuit was a malicious attempt by the mayor to seize
land, as there were no town residents … listed as plaintiffs,”
Miller
explained in his letter to the state auditor. “The harassment
by the deputy sheriffs was an abuse of power by the mayor, and an
attempt to intimidate and coerce my mother into a submissive position.
The disturbing the peace accusation was false and intended to scare
her away from obtaining public records. The police summons was another
attempt by the town to intimidate a citizen. The fine was not only
unfounded, it seemed excessive, so I began my own investigation.”

With the analytical
discipline of a trained engineer, Miller examined the city’s penal
codes and Delaware County Records to find out if this grotesque
over-charge was a vindictive anomaly, or part of a larger pattern.
What he discovered – and the independent state audit confirmed –
was that the town had been in violation of state statutes “for
approximately 25 years.”

Publication
of the audit was greeted by the Bernice Town Board with what one
participant in a rare public meeting described as “smirks and
laughs.” By that time, however, the Delaware County Commission
had cancelled its contract to provide deputy sheriffs for traffic
enforcement. This was done not because of developments in Bernice,
but rather because of “potential liability issues” arising
from a
$13.5 million settlement reached with victims of sexual abuse by
deputies in the County Jail.

Complaints
from female inmates at the Delaware County Jail began to accumulate
in March 2008, many of them involving a part-time transport deputy
named Bill Sanders, Sr. Sanders, recalled the Tulsa World,
“would often take female inmates to `appointments’ without
reporting his departing mileage and time…. It was during many of
these transports that inmates say they were assaulted by Sanders
and forced to perform sex acts.”

Key elements
of the accusations were confirmed by a former county dispatcher,
who also described how the
former jail administrator, Lonnie Hunter, would “shake
boxes of cigarettes at the inmates to encourage them to flash their
breasts at him.” (Two dispatchers eventually
filed sexual harassment lawsuits of their own.) Some of the
inmates testified that both Sanders and Hunter would exchange cigarettes
and other coveted goods for sex. When confronted with a particularly
intransigent inmate, Sanders would simply assault her in the serene
confidence that he would never be held accountable.

“Now you
said you wouldn’t tell, and even if you did nobody would believe
you, because you’re just a drug addict,” he told one victim
during a trip to the emergency room. “Who are you compared
to me?”

Sanders – who
died at age 63 of “natural causes” in November 2008, just
after being fired and just before the lawsuit was filed – was a
part-time deputy who had no formal training and no personnel file
on record. When deposed for the lawsuit, Hunter, Sanders’s supervisor,
insisted that he was not responsible for the crimes committed against
helpless inmates: “My responsibility is to the last locked
door. After that, it’s up to the transport officer.”

The OSBI gave
Sheriff Jay Blackfox a detailed report describing the sexual abuse
suffered by more than a dozen women by staff under his authority.
In his deposition, Sheriff Blackfox insisted that he wasn’t “aware”
of what was happening in his jail, because he had only read “part”
of the OSBI’s report owing to his busy schedule.

Blackfox was
dismissed by County Commission at roughly the same time the Commission
ended its traffic enforcement contract with Bernice. This left the
Bernice Town Council with the perceived need to hire a police chief
and create its own police force to patrol a town with a population
of fewer than 600 people. It settled on a “gypsy cop”
named Daniel
Travis Lowe, who had just been fired from his job as police
chief of Burden, Kansas – another town of roughly 600 people.

At the time
he was hired by Bernice, Lowe was
still subject to a “diversion program” growing out of
a domestic violence incident involving his ex-wife, who was Burden’s
Town Clerk.

The terms of
that agreement specified that the charge would be dismissed if Lowe
refrain from criminal behavior for one year. Unfortunately, this
refers only to unlicensed criminal behavior; becoming chief
enforcer for Bernice’s ruling clique wouldn’t qualify. News of Lowe’s
background provoked understandable controversy, which led to another
Town Meeting where the Board – acting in “executive session,”
of course – ratified its decision.

“There
is something oddly appropriate about the selection of this guy to
be the chief of police,” Steve Miller commented to Pro Libertate.
“This is entirely typical of the way things operate in this
county.” In fact, the institutionalized sexual abuse and related
corruption that has festered in Delaware County is hardly
atypical of Oklahoma as a whole.

Over the past
eight years, tax
victims in three Oklahoma counties have been forced to pay more
than $24 million to settle lawsuits arising from the routine sexual
abuse of female inmates. Two former sheriffs — Melvin
Holly of Latimer County, and Mike Burgess of Custer County –
have been given prison terms of 25 and 79 years, respectively, for
sexual assaults on incarcerated women.

Holly told
one of his victims, a 19-year-old girl, that if she ever disclosed
what happened she would “end up dead somewhere, floating face-down
in a river.”

Burgess used
his position on the Custer County Drug Court to create what
was described as a “sex slave ring.” He told one woman
who rebuffed his advances that if she didn’t submit to him she would
“not ever be able to see her children until after they had
grown up.” Another woman who resisted was placed in lockdown,
denied her medications, and forced to eat food that induced rectal
bleeding.

Sales and
property taxes were increased to pay the settlements arising from
lawsuits filed by the victims. Next January, residents of Delaware
County will suffer an 18 percent sales tax increase; all purchases
will be taxed at 9.3 percent for seventeen years. The $13.5 million
settlement is an amount three
times larger than the county budget – and more than the construction
price of the jail where the sexual assaults occurred.

County
Tax Assessor Leon Hurt, whose name is one of God’s little Dickensian
jokes, points out that most of the people with whom he deals “are
barely making it on
their own income. For them to see this extra impact … could
be the last straw.”

Oklahoma is
a state in which piety has curdled into punitive sanctimony, which
explains why it has some
of the most stupid and vicious drug laws in the English-speaking
world – and, in per
capita terms, the
largest female prison populations on the planet. Thanks to the
wise and perceptive people in the state legislature, however, residents
can take comfort in this thought: If their mother,
sister, or daughter commits
a trivial drug offense in Oklahoma, she may be caged by the
government and be pitilessly molested or even raped by her jailers,
but at
least she won’t be forced to wear a burqa.

Reprinted
with permission from Pro
Libertate.

May
24, 2012

William
Norman Grigg [send him mail]
publishes the Pro
Libertate blog and hosts the Pro
Libertate radio program.

Copyright
© 2012 William Norman Grigg

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