The 'story' is that no good deed goes unpunished. Ari was one of the rescues I had. She came to me as a yearling filly, as a boarder, in California in the early 90’s.
Owner was a total flake, (think the 'Jack' character from Will & Grace, minus the likeable characteristics and multiplied by at least 5). Roddy Vilencia, whose oldest brother is [in]famous as the producer/director of a subsection of porn that stomps on live animals for the camera, (google 'Smush', Vilencia), so not exactly a healthy family, (Roddy was the youngest, mommy always told him he was 'special').
He'd ripped off the filly's sire's owner because she was born without the valuable spots, (he bred her mother back, got another solid colored filly & never paid for either breeding). So he owed the stallion owner a $600 breeding fee he never intended to pay and sent Ari out to me to hide her from the owner, (I was 2 1/2 hours away). I didn't know at the time that's why he sent her to me.
Anyway, I ended up buying her for $500 after a year of him screwing around on her board, because she was sweet, but had some serious conformation faults, (very low pasterns), and I knew she'd end up at slaughter because she'd break down under saddle.
There was much to-ing & fro-ing because I was strapped financially at the time after offloading my ex & was late on the payment. Mr Hysterical Narcissist called the sheriff, who told him that a sales contract was a civil matter, not a criminal one and to take it to small claims court if it didn't get paid off. I paid him, so he never pursued the small claims, (about $25 to file at the time in CA).
I hauled her around and kept her safe for 11 years. Never broke her to saddle because of her legs, never could find a placement for her where I was convinced she'd be safe. Spent more than $15K over 11 years caring for & hauling her around with me.
When we moved up here, she needed to earn her keep. So I contacted the stallion owner, paid Roddy's $600 debt & got the certificate so I could register her with the APHA and her foals would be eligible for registration, making them at least worth enough to pay for feeding her.
Here's the part where I actually did something I shouldn't have. It was 11 years later, Roddy wasn't at his old address near LA to sign off for the registration (because he was the original owner). I had spent years in LA hospitals during the AIDS crisis and Roddy wasn't exactly a disciplined personality, (think Drumph), when I couldn't reach him, I assumed he'd contracted something we can’t cure yet and died. An awful lot of people had. So I PhotoShopped his signature to get the registration cleared. It happens. (it usually happens for horses worth 5, 6 or 7 figures, not three, but that’s neither here nor there). The registry never considers it a criminal action, they never pursue it. The times they do find out about it, they just refuse to register the horse and discipline the member in house.
Roddy had run across the farm's web site, saw that I had some pretty darned nice stock, (and that I still had Ari), assumed I had a lot more money than I did and decided to see if he could extort some of it from me. So he called Lincoln County, all hysterical, made up a breathless story and accused me of stealing the mare.
Claimed that the $500 mare that he'd never paid for was now miraculously worth $50,000, (never having been raced or shown), and that I had been playing hide & seek for a decade just to keep him from 'finding' her. Lincoln County also saw an opportunity to squeeze some money out of me, so they pursued charges they had no standing to file.
An 11 year old allegation of the breach of a $500 contract, (from another state) is not a criminal offense. PhotoShopping his signature would have been, if the APHA association, (based & incorporated in Texas), had wanted to file charges. They were the ones with standing. But they didn't. And they refused to cooperate with the 'investigation'. They made Lincoln County subpoena all the records.
Lincoln County had Roddy and two uniformed officers who were eager to lie on the stand and I couldn't find the receipt for the money order from 11 years & three moves ago. So I pleaded guilty to a felony I didn't commit and they didn't have standing to pursue.
I WON the Abuse of Process case against him, (the civil form of extortion). He’d offered to call the whole thing off & go away for $100K, so I sued him for the attempted extortion. I won the case with a unanimous jury, (lol he'd come up & testified. Made a yuuuuuge impression on the rural jury).
But Roddy, true to form, refused to pay the judgement. He stiffed his attorney, (a sleaze, who frankly deserved it), for $60K in legal fees, and me by declaring bankruptcy.
He lied through his teeth to the bankruptcy judge, too. Hid a ton of stuff with his mommy. But it was the fall of 2008, he filed on the leading edge of the flood of bankruptcies from the mortgage meltdown, so they didn't have the time or resources to pursue him for bankruptcy fraud, (although they did make him work for it harder than he would have if I hadn't sent them a ton of documentation).
This is actually how I stumbled into the discovery of Lincoln County’s real, systemic, crimes. Took me another year to put the pieces together, but I eventually did.
Juicy Stuff! (fake, it’s pretty dry, too, it’s just important).
SB 1145 was passed in Oregon in 1997. It was based on an idea equivalent to Reagan’s closing so many of the California’s mental health facilities: Move the management of low end criminals back to their communities. It even did Reagan one better by funding the change, checking in twice yearly and making adjustments to the Grant-in-Aid funding that was supposed to cover local treatment and supervision of those on felony probation.
The problem is that grifters gonna grift, and dishonest, authoritarian people aren’t likely to change their stripes if they don’t absolutely have to. And Lincoln County’s ‘criminal justice’ system was already pretty rotten, (see Gerry Spence's The Smoking Gun, (book). The Grant-in-Aid money essentially became a perverse incentive.
From a dishonest grifters’ point of view, the state was paying for felony probation, while leaving misdemeanor probation on the county’s dime. They figured that local jobs in the criminal ‘justice’ system could be expanded and subsidized by Oregon taxpayers more easily than any other revenue stream, so they started faking felony cases to plead out, (making them immune from review or oversight so they were essentially invisible).
Lincoln County has consistently had among the highest per capita rate of felony filings in the state. Now, I’ve lived from coast to coast and border to border in the US and I’ve been a nurse since 1989. I’ve seen some stuff. And I don’t believe that we have substantially more drunks & druggies than the rest of the state. But when I ran across an article outlining the state’s underwriting of felony probation, everything clicked into place.
It hadn’t made any damned sense when they charged me for Ari, they had pursued it full bore in a way that seemed seriously disproportionate. I mean, yeah, I get that it get can be boring out in the boonies, excitement can be hard to come by, but the way they went after me was practiced, polished. And it had always struck me as odd.
But now I suddenly knew why they had gone after me so hard. It’s their ‘business model’. They made three years worth of felony probation money from the state, plus my monthly ‘supervision fee’, plus $6K in trumped up ‘restitution’ from that little exercise. And all they had to do was lie through their teeth, file charges they didn’t have standing to file and threaten to testi-lie to extort a guilty plea out of me. Easy peasy.
Multiply that by the hundreds of cases they’ve fabricated over the past decade & more. Quite a racket, eh?
The upshot is that Lincoln County, Oregon has been defrauding the state of Oregon and its taxpayers by inflating, (via purposeful manufacture of cases) its felony probation rate for at least a decade. Before Ferguson, Mo. was documented in their version of predatory government this assertion would have been a laughable conspiracy theory. But then came Ferguson and their bad habits, out in front of the nation and the world.
From what I’ve seen over my years here, I estimate that upwards of 30% of routine felonies filed in Lincoln County, (not the real, actual crimes, just the piddly stuff), are either fatally flawed or just flat made up.
Seems like it would be impossible to cover something that big, doesn’t it? Not if the system’s set up right. And Oregon’s is.
Oregon moved from judicial hearings to support criminal charges to the grand jury system based on ‘judicial efficiency’. The flaw in this is that prosecutors going in front of a judge knew they were facing a trained professional with both expertise & authority. Grand juries are almost invariably naive about how the criminal justice is supposed to work, and they naturally assume that prosecutors are the good guys in the equation, not realizing the pressures, (and temptations) of political careers, statistics and frustration over not being able to get all the really bad actors that deserve to be gotten.
It’s easy for them to fall into false equivalents and rationalizations. The idea that it’s ok if some innocent people get nailed because either, ‘they’ve done something that we just didn’t catch them at’, or because they’ve missed some real bad guys, so it all balances out in the wash.
Temptation to cross the line & weight the scale is greater when someone knows that they’re unlikely to be caught. Manipulation of grand juries is pretty easy when they trust you. And plea bargains, (well over 90% of all charges are resolved with pleas), they just close the door on getting caught because they’re not eligible for appeal or review.
Yeah, I suppose I’ve kind of buried the lede, here, but I had to drag you through the first part for the rest to make sense as to how I discovered it.