I just got off the phone with Alex Newman, editor of the two-year-old Liberty Sentinel (www.libertysentinel.org) in Gainesville, FL who had a hair-raising tale of being detained for 72 hours in a county mental health facility after his newspaper began publishing stories about judicial corruption.
One of the first headline stories the paper published was about a woman who was facing life imprisonment for essentially practising law without a license. The story generated a flurry of phone calls and letters, Newman told me, but many of the allegations were so “out there, we originally didn’t pay as much attention to them as we should have.” But when the staff started looking deeper, they were suprised to discover that a lot of the stories were true.
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The small paper’s latest expose was on the failure of Florida judges to take mandatory loyalty oaths to the Florida and U.S. Constitutions since 2000. Florida Supreme Court Justice R. Fred Lewis announced last month that all senior judges will now be required to swear a loyalty oath at the beginning of each term and have it notarized as required by law. Failure to do so is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison, but the judges will not be punished, an irony not lost on Newman.
The paper also reported that the actual words of the oath were unlawfully changed without legislative approval.
About six weeks ago, Newman received an anonymous phone call in which the caller threatened to lock him up in a mental institution. This turned out to be a real threat. In May, after returning from a trip to visit his fiance in Sweden, Newman held a staff meeting to talk about expanded coverage of judicial corruption. Soon afterwards, Alachua County Sheriff’s deputies showed up at his home without a warrant and took him into custody under a Florida statute that allows for a 72-hour involuntary detention for a suspected mental condition. (http://www.topix.com/forum/city/clearwater-fl/TGLNQ7LO4249G3QFS)
Newman, who suspects a staff member ratted him our to authorities, befriended several Meridian staff members, who warned him what would happen if he took the psychotropic medication that was being prescribed for him. Patients also told them him there were “very bad things” going on in the facility.
When a magistrate arrived to declare him mentally incompetent, Newman warned him that kidnapping was a federal offense and carried a 25-year prison sentence. He was soon released, but it was a close call.
Afterwards, Newman says, he got a letter from a man who said the local state’s attorney had kidnapped his son and was trying to force him to implicate Newman on false charges he had stolen the man’s pickup truck. Newman says his phone calls to the man have not been returned, but after his own recent ordeal, he’s not ruling anything out.
