Lawless America: Bill Windsor Incarcerated
by Mary W Maxwell, PhD, LLB
Bill Windsor is a 66 year-old man from Atlanta, Georgia, who started a Youtube series entitled “Lawless America,” intending to make a grassroots documentary about our corrupt courts.
I have followed the series closely. I can relate to Bill because he seems a lot like me, an individual citizen who worries about “the law.” Now he is reportedly in prison for his trouble, in Texas. This is a real shock.
I learned of Bill’s October 29, 2014 arrest from the website JoeyIsALittleKid.blogspot.com.au, which is run by a very energetic detractor of Bill. (A commenter on his blog asks, “Are there 92 inmates waiting to ‘date’ Bill?”)
Imprisonment is actually a nicer fate for Bill than what I had imagined. Since July 24, 2013, Bill had failed to add any items to his website, LawlessAmerica.com. I figured he might be dead, or mind-controlled, as he had made an unassailable case against the current justice system in America, especially the family courts.
(Yes, you heard me. I said I feared for his life because he spoke out against unfairness in America. Zheesh! What a world.)
Bill Windsor does not help particular litigants to pursue appeals. He only presents cases to us, by interviewing citizens who tell their story. You can watch them all at Bill’s Youtube channel, Lawless America.
They are stunning: a cross-section of Americans who have been outrageously deprived of due process or fairness. One person whom Windsor interviewed is a Montana senior citizen who showed how her life got ruined when her employer accused her of embezzlement.
The Crystal Cox Involvement
Another person in Montana, a lady named Crystal Cox, sought Windsor out, to get relief on a matter of cyber-stalking. She said that a man, whom I will name XX, had threatened her, and that the court refused to issue a restraining order for her protection. Bill made a point of standing up for her, as her case involved “free speech rights.”
I now have a vague suspicion that she did not come into Bill’s life the way all, or most, of the others interviewees did. She may have been a trouble-making plant from the beginning, for the purpose of undoing Windsor’s excellent work. (I don’t know, and I apologize if I’m wrong.) As I said, she complained that XX threatened her. It is too complicated to go into here; a court has held her liable to pay megabucks to some plaintiffs.
Anyway, the aforementioned fellow, XX, subsequently sent Bill some threatening emails. Worse, according to Bill (whose honesty and equanimity I admire), XX admitted to having shot at Bill’s car on the highway, but the bullet missed! Reasonably enough, Bill then proceeded to ask the court of Montana for a protective order.
I think Bill requested protection in order to prove a point, more than to avoid danger, as he had no real need to stay in far-off Montana. Still, the court mishandled his request, and he showed this to us all in a very clear Youtube video, last year.
Not surprisingly (if this whole fracas be a set-up of some sort), the famous XX then went to court, pleading that Bill is harassing him! So XX asked for, and was granted, a protection order. You can read the Montana Supreme Court’s June 10, 2014 decision on that matter at: www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2677872/boushie-v-windsor.
The decision mention’s Windsor’s “extraordinary abuse of the state judicial system by repeatedly filing frivolous, malicious and vexatious lawsuits . . . .” By the way, Bill has long since proffered the suggestion that any decision to dismiss a case for vexatiousness should be made by a jury. Sounds sensible to me. (You sometimes hear of a total screwball going to court and wasting taxpayers’ money, but those cases could be staged, could they not?)
We don’t know what happened during the four months that followed, until Bill’s ‘booking’ took place on October 29, 2014, at 3.18 am. (Love those wee-hours arrivals at jail.) He is now inside, apparently waiting to be tried. The charge against him is ‘disobeying a court order,’ which seems to be a felony.
The Gag-Order Situation Today
It is significant that Bill Windsor, who has a big mouth and a lot of self-confidence, has not posted anything at his site for well over a year. It’s not his style to keep his friends waiting. By ‘friends’ I mean the thousand or more people who star in his Youtube video describing their own plight, plus onlookers like myself. A possible explanation is that Bill is under a gag order.
To repeat, I am not sure of things that have happened to Bill since July 24, 2013; I am making guesses. Yesterday I read a pertinent article, “Gagged by the Government,” by Alfredo Lopez, at Counterpunch.org. Lopez describes how a court ordered him (Lopez, not Bill), to stay mum about his group, MayFirst/PeopleLink. After the three months expired, Lopez was able to speak to us about the gag order. He said:
“It was so bizarre, illogical and foreign to my normal experience … [I have taken] for granted as a right. Not being able to talk about something was among the most surreal experiences I’ve had in nearly 50 years as an activist …. I know there are many activists who are under such gag orders but I don’t who they are. Many of these orders are issued as a federal National Security Letter… I know people who have been gagged for years and had to press hard to have the order lifted long after the relevant investigation was over. [Why?] About 300,000 such letters have been issued over the last ten years.”
Free Speech Needs To Be Valued In and Of Itself
Please, Everybody, take heed. If an average of 30,000 individuals per year have their First Amendment rights limited, this means that judges are participating in some sort of plan, doesn’t it? What could be so harmful to the nation for a citizen to discuss his case? All court cases are public. After all, it is always Society that is the ultimate law enforcer and judge.
I might not have been so touchy on this subject, except that this month, December 2014, I was alerted that governments everywhere, including Australia, have recently passed new laws to limit free speech. That looks to me like a coordinated plan, or so I argue in my article entitled “Globalizing the Cancellation of Free Speech” (at Gumshoenews.com).
One would have to be pretty thick to believe that such laws came about (in Japan, South Africa, Oz) because we have terrorists in the streets. I reckon these laws are attempts to protect guilty government personnel from exposure. And they may have precisely that effect. Quel game!
And where be the law profession? Do you hear its voice protecting you in these matters? No. (And what did the ACLU do, in reaction to the US Senate Report on Torture? Did it call for arrest of the criminals? Nope. It called for a special prosecutor to be appointed, a delaying tactic. God help us.)
There’s no point waiting for the law professors and judges or law-student-activists (are there any?) to come to the fore. This is a civil society matter. Free speech is the bedrock of the republic and depends on anyone out there who cares. You’ve got to talk up these fundamental values and not let them fall under the bus of “national security against terrorists.”
Moreover, you have to put your safety on the line! If we are in danger of losing free speech, you have to act now while you still can. To the young, who might not even know how we used to be ultra-vigilant in regard to infringements of constitutional rights, I say that the enterprise of guarding them is wonderful. It’s sexy. You would enjoy participating in it!
To the older set, I say remember Sherman Skolnick, the people’s best friend in the law line? Bill Windsor is of similar integrity and panache. I cannot imagine him deserving to be behind bars. And he might come out without his IQ intact. Seriously. This whole development is frightening. And, as Lopez said of his gag order, it is surreal.
In sum, would you please stick up for Bill Windsor, O Americans? He sticks up for you!
-- Mary W Maxwell, PhD, LLB’s forthcoming book is “Fraud Upon the Court: Reclaiming the Law, Joyfully” (Trine Day Press). She can be reached at her website ProsecutionForTreason.com. Her article on global free-speech problems is linked below.
