By the way, for anyone seeking to verify any of this, the cause number in question for my suit against Kalispell is DV 03-572, Eleventh Judicial District of Montana, Glick v. City of Kalispell, et al.
Shortly after setting up in Goldendale, [*] (now [*]), then my girlfriend and business partner, informed me that a letter had been received at the Kalispell address from Clerk of Court, Peg Allison. I believe this letter was dated January 4, 2004, though I have never actually seen a copy of the letter (despite requests to have a copy mailed to me, [*] never did). The essence of the letter was that the default judgment filed for would not be granted because service had not been “properly performed” upon the defendants of the cause.
As an aside, it is not the position of a court clerk to make this determination. The party being defaulted against needs to file an objection to the motion for default judgment in order for the court to consider such a defense. The clerk of court, nor the court itself, can lawfully presume to assert the defense of a party in a legal action. Since the parties in question had been lawfully served with a copy of the motion for default judgment, it was the parties’ obligation to raise this defense. Allison’s raising this obstruction violated due process. But this issue is minor compared to the innumerable unlawful acts Allison has taken against me through capacity of her office over the years.
At any rate, as I previously attested, I called Allison and asked for clarification. I had worked as a paralegal previously in California for two years and I knew I had performed service properly, so I needed to know what she was claiming was not done properly. Initially, Allison insisted that there were no proof of services in the file to validate that service had been performed. As one will note in my flashback posts, I knew this not to be true because I had personally filed the three proofs of service in the file.
When I told Allison this and offered to have copies forwarded to her from my Kalispell files though, she completely changed her story. When confronted with evidence that disproved her position, Allison then insisted that she had been thinking of another case and that the problem with my case was that there was no summons issued in the cause.
Again, one reading my flashback posts will note that there had been summonses issued – three summonses had been issued on October 30, 2003, when I filed the initial petition, though the clerk had actually refused to issue additional summonses on November 18, 2003, when I filed the actual complaint and added six new defendants. So though there might have been grounds to say the additional defendants had not been properly served (though this was the fault of direct obstruction from the court clerk’s office), three valid summonses had been served at the outset of the cause. Therefore, at the very least, default judgment should have been issued against the initial three defendants: City of Kalispell, Kalispell Police Department and Kalispell City Attorney’s Office.
However, when I told this to Allison, she insisted that there was no record of a summons in the court file (Note: I have requested on numerous occasions for a copy of the docket to this cause to confirm or refute Allison’s claim, but Allison has ignored each of my requests). At the time of the phone call, I could not recall whether I had actually made a copy of the summons, and Allison played off this uncertainty. She insisted that since her office had not issued a summons, any service that had been performed would not be legal, and as such, no default could be granted.
Remember, I knew three summonses had been issued and knew that I had personally stapled a certified copy of the summons to the front of each copy of the petition that I had had [*] serve. Therefore, I knew that what Allison was saying was untrue. I could not be sure who had tampered with the court file, but it was obvious that, if I assumed Allison to be telling the truth, that someone had. And also remember, that at this point, I was not aware that the county court would aid and abet the city in unlawful conduct. So, at least at first, I had taken Allison at her word.
Without being able to recall initially whether I had made a copy of the summons, I reverted to statutory law that a sworn oath of someone conducting service was sufficient to establish that service had been performed. Therefore, I proposed to Allison that I would call [*] and have her attest to the service of the summons. Allison agreed and told me to have [*] call her.
Immediately after getting off the phone with Allison, I called [*] and asked her what she recalled from serving the initial petition. I asked her if she remembered serving a summons with each copy, and she said that, though she did not know exactly what a summons was, that she did remember a cover page being stapled onto the petition that was titled “Summons” that did not look like any of the rest of the filing (ie, the cover sheet was not printed off a computer like the rest of the petition was). This was sufficient to satisfy whether a summons had been served since I personally did know what a summons to me and that I had personally stapled those to the front of the petitions, this would satisfy the chain of evidence. That [*] was willing to attest that these documents had been attached to the documents she served and that she did in fact serve these upon the defendants should have been enough to satisfy the legal prerequisites. Had someone tampered with the court file and removed the summons, there were now myself and [*] to attest that not only was a summons issued, but it had in fact been served as well.
Unfortunately, this would require that the rules of law were being followed.
After speaking with me, [*] called Allison to inform Allison that she had served summonses upon the defendants on October 30, 2003. Unfortunately, Allison was actually the one working to obstruct the cause and instead of accepting [*]’s attestment (or alternatively requesting a signed affidavit for the court file), Allison instead chose to threaten [*] with perjury charges if she tried to testify that she had, in fact, served valid summons! The gist of what [*] later told me was that Allison told [*] that, as court clerk, she was the only one who could attest whether a valid summons had been issued or not and that if [*] tried to attest that there had been one issued, Allison was prepared to have perjury charges brought against [*]!
When [*] called me back, she was in tears. Allison had scared her into thinking, much like Garner had done with Mr. Berna previously, that if she tried to make an official statement about her service of the summons, that she would be arrested! I tried to tell [*] that Allison’s threat was meaningless, but to no avail. I tried to tell her that first of all, she would not be attesting to whether the summons were valid, I would, since the summonses had been issued to me; the only thing [*] would be attesting to would be whether she had served the summons that I had provided. Also I told her that even if [*] had been the one to attest to the summonses authenticity, she could not be charged with perjury unless she willfully made a statement she believed to be false under oath; if [*] believed the summons to be valid at the time she had made the service and attested to such, there could be no perjury charge! But [*] could not be dissuaded – she believed what Allison had told her and refused to sign an affidavit attesting to her service of the summons for fear of being arrested!
This, by the way, is another form of witness tampering, and is a felony under Montana law. Allison could not lawfully intimidate a witness to withhold her testimony or to attest to something she did not believe to be true. [*] believed that I had provided her certified copies of the summons because they were each embossed. She believed that the summons she served with valid and Allison’s threats and intimidations were specifically designed to tamper with [*] as a witness. It was at this point, when I heard what Allison had told [*] that I recognized that it was not some unknown person tampering with the court records either – it was Peg Allison herself. And that implied that agents of the county were willing to commit crimes themselves to cover up the official misconduct of the city and its agents, even though the entities were supposed to be separate under the law.
I spent the next couple of weeks trying to convince Allison to grant the default judgment. I confronted her over the fact that what she had done was felonious, that she was herself making herself a party to the action and that she could be named as a defendant herself. None of that mattered to her, and she refused to budge on the issue. And [*], intimidated by the threat of being arrested, would not forward me a copy of my file that I had left in her care to produce the copy of the summons I had by then recalled was there.
Finally, on January 28, 2004, I took the penultimate action that would lead to my arrest: I wrote a letter to Peg Allison informing her that if she did not immediately halt her unlawful obstruction of my cause and have the default judgment granted within thirty days of the letter, I would have no choice but to move my suit to the federal court pursuant to 18 USCA Section 1983, and adding herself, as well as the district court, the county attorney’s office and CFS as defendants for their separate actions in abducting [*]’s daughters, as defendant to the cause.
At that point in time, a letter could travel between Washington and Montana within five days. It was like clockwork. Which meant that Allison received my letter by February 2, 2003. On February 4, 2003, [*] re-entered the picture as she was subjected to another interview wherein she once again reasserted the allegation against me (which she had already done on December 9, 2003), but also added that when she had recanted her story, that I had forced he to sign a statement that I alone had prepared and that she had had nothing to do with! Further, she claimed that the reason she signed the statement, even though she had had nothing to do with it, was because [*] had told her she had to change her story!
As one might recall from my previous postings, I had asked [*] for a statement following her recantation of the allegation in October, 2003, the month after the official investigations had been closed. Initially, I had wanted [*] to do it on her own, but after a few days, [*] asked me to help her put the statement together. However, I did not do this with [*] alone – I asked Carrie Beth Mountjoy to sit in as a witness to confirm that what I typed in was what [*] told me to. Later, when interviewed about this, Carrie Beth confirmed that she had been present in the room, but [*] actually insisted that Carrie Beth was lying about it. Ironically enough, Carrie Beth had demonstrated in her interview that she was no longer a supporter of mine and that she had come to believe [*]’s story to be true. As such, clearly Carrie Beth was not trying to help my cause by lying for me – which means that the only person lying in this scenario was [*] herself.
Also I should reiterate that though I have said several times that [*] has lied about not only the initial allegation and the subsequent events thereafter, I do not completely blame [*] for this. [*] was under undue influence, first from her grandparents and later from CFS officials who had abducted her from her home. [*] was a young girl trapped in a circumstance that she honestly believed she could not get out of without cooperating with those who had authority over her. I have had the opportunity to read quite a few psychology articles on this subject and I believe that [*] was not entirely to blame for all that she did. I believe that, like so many other young people, she had been indoctrinated to believe in the purity of authority figures and would do whatever an authority figure pressured her to do, even if she knew that what she was doing was wrong. So though I make allusions to [*] lying, I do not mean in doing so to impugn her character beyond what the circumstances entailed.
Of course, that being said, it did not help matters that [*] had a long-standing propensity for lying in the first place. She had never been the most honest child even before this fiasco, so it was likely easier for her to tell lies as she was required to because that kind of behavior was already part and parcel of her character beforehand. In contrast, her younger sister, regardless of the amount of pressure placed upon her, to this day has refused to make a false allegation against me. Just goes to show the level of credibility that I am talking about when it comes to [*]’s independent integrity.
At any rate, the important factor about this second interview was that, like the one in December, it had been conducted not by a Kalispell police officer, but by a Columbia Falls officer named Brandy Arnoux. Arnoux, it turns out, is a known sympathizer with CFS and their less-than-lawful tactics used to abduct children from their home, and could be relied upon to ask the questions that Kori Taylor (CFS’s case worker) wanted asked. With Arnoux guiding the interview, [*] was asked about specific elements of the affidavit she had signed and provided [*] the chance to outright lay the accusation that she had been tampered with by both [*] and myself.
Of course, none of this was true, but it gave Kalispell the pretense to come after me with full barrels. It did not matter that [*]’s then-current story contradicted her original allegations, nor was there an effort to actually investigate what was being said. All the authorities wanted was an accusation on tape that they could act upon. And they did.
On Februrary 20, 2004, an information was filed in the Flathead court and a warrant issued for my arrest upon the charges of sexual assault and witness tampering. There was no grand jury indictment nor review, since in Montana that is not required to bring felony charges. I was provided no notification of the charge being filed nor an opportunity to respond to the filing, since again, under Montana law this is not required. And though typically a warrant is issued and delivered to law enforcement to have the individual arrested if he should be encountered by law enforcement, this warrant was faxed immediately to Goldendale, WA, where I was arrested that very same evening at my home there. The warrant was not even lawful in Washington since it was specifically worded to law enforcement of Montana, but still I was arrested. And I was not even Mirandized. And I remained incarcerated continuously thereafter.
A week following my arrest, [*] was also arrested on a witness tampering charge, though she was shortly thereafter released upon threat that if she aided me in any way, directly or indirectly, that if she had contact with me or provided me access to my business assets, that she would be re-arrested and remain incarcerated until I saw trial. Again, [*] folded under this threat like a house of wet cards. And others who were less than scrupulous took even further advantage by using [*] as an example, saying that anyone that helped me would suffer a similar fate – they would be arrested and face felony charges. And once the threats were made and with [*] proving that such a thing could be done, every iota of personal support I had simply vanished. I was locked away, my access to court completely severed, and with no resources to aid me in my fight against the corruption that had been leveled against me.
This ends this thread, as it wraps up what happened to me prior to my arrest. I will start a new thread to discuss what happened to me in Goldendale and throughout the process that ended with my extradition back to Montana. That should be a relatively short thread (for me) and hopefully I will be able to start the next thread detailing my treatment once I returned to Flathead County. Finally, I will try to detail what I experienced once I was actually committed to the Montana State Prison.
Essentially, this end of the story is in sight….
Ciao for now...
Ron Glick
Political Prisoner since 2004
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