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Young Earth Creationist Kent Hovind on trial again!


mirele

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Phone with recorder allowed in?

What the court officials don't see, and if you don't post It on the Internet under your real name later....

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Hovind made the front page of today's paper. He has been cleared of all charges.

http://www.pnj.com/story/news/crime/201 ... /27591891/

That's not entirely true. I was in the courtroom on Monday and have read all the legal docs that have come out. This is what happened:

* Back in March, Kent was found guilty of count 3 (criminal contempt of court) while his codefendant Paul Hansen was found guilty of counts 5 and 6 (also criminal contempt of court, but for two different things). However, the jury hung on the two mail fraud and one conspiracy to commit mail fraud counts.

* Over the past couple of weeks, in preparation for the trial that was supposed to start on Monday, the government, Kent's lawyer, Thomas Keith, and Paul Hansen (Kent's codefendant who was repping himself with assistance from backup counsel Chris Klotz) had been exchanging motions in limine. Basically the defense wanted certain things which had been admitted at the first trial excluded from the second trial. The judge granted some and denied others.

* Last week, Keith submitted a motion to dismiss the three remaining counts. Hansen, assisted by Klotz, joined in the request.

* On Friday (yeah, we're talking May 15) the government asked for the trial to be pushed back one week so it could answer the motion. Judge Rodgers denied that motion.

* The government came back with a motion to dismiss the charges without prejudice (meaning, they can be filed again). The government can, as a matter of right, dismiss charges up until the moment trial begins. In response, the judge cancelled jury selection and the trial. (I knew this when I got on the plane Sunday. I decided to go ahead and come to Pensacola even though there's no trial because I desperately needed a vacation that was somewhere Not Arizona.)

* In court on Monday, the judge heard from the prosecution, defense attorneys and Paul Hansen. She then said she would issue a couple of orders that day. I went down to Pensacola Beach to help a filmmaker who is doing a documentary on the Hovind case and the people surrounding it (the Free Kent Hovind movement, attorneys, family, etc.). He got me to sit for a couple of interviews and I helped prep him with questions for Chris Klotz, who graciously came down and sat for an interview.

* In the middle of all this in Pensacola Beach, the judge's orders came down from PACER (the court document repository). Counts 1, 2 and 4 were dismissed without prejudice--no surprise there. However, the other document was a response to a Rule 29 motion for acquittal that Keith had filed for Hovind back in March--and it had been granted. So Hovind was acquitted notwithstanding the jury's judgment of guilty.

* Here's why the judge did what she did: After the jury found Hovind guilty, it then had to go ahead and determine which of the judge's orders Hovind had violated. Was it the 2007 order that initially forfeited his property or the 2012 order that removed liens Paul Hansen had put on the property and entered an injunction against various Hovind entities to stop filing liens and notices in the county records? The jury selected the 2007 order, and that was the basis of the judge's decision to enter a verdict of acquittal. If you look at the 2007 order, all it does is take the Hovinds' property as forfeiture for a $430,400 fine. It does not tell Kent Hovind he cannot do some things. So the judge correctly overturned the guilty verdict and entered an acquittal. Had the jury checked both the 2007 and 2012 orders or just the 2012 order, the guilty verdict might have stood (but I can think of an argument to make against the 2012 order as well--not sure it would be successful, but heck, attorneys are trained to argue both sides of the case).

* Yesterday the judge entered a formal order acquitting Hovind. However, he's not getting out of prison right away. He isn't scheduled for release on to supervised probation until August 10 and then he has to serve three years of that. His followers, the Hovindicators, are feeling their oats and trying to harass the U.S. Marshals and Bureau of Prisons into letting him out sooner. They're saying he should be allowed out on six months house arrest. This is allowed for some inmates, but I was under the impression that when Kent was at the Berlin, NH prison, it was decided he didn't need the six months re-entry program.

* So here's where it stands: the government can refile charges 1, 2 and 4 as they were dismissed without prejudice. Paul Hansen is still scheduled for sentencing on June 12 on counts 5 and 6 (although if I had the measure of Chris Klotz, he's probably prepping a motion right now to get those convictions overturned as well).

* As for Kent, barring some change, he is still in federal custody until around August 10, and then he goes on supervised probation. Probably, as part of his probation, he will be required to stay in the Pensacola area (as in "no evangelizing around the USA") and will be required to work a regular job with a W-2. Since Kent is a sovereign citizen and has not filed a tax return since 1973 (by his own admission), I fully expect him to argue about income tax and Social Security withholding from his job. If he's stupid about it and insists on not paying, that could send him back to prison. And of course, the government could refile those charges against him. Also, while he was in prison, the IRS, in a civil action, got a $3 million judgment against Hovind and his wife, Jo, and he's got to start paying that back as well.

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Here's a quick recap of Monday court I wrote for a group of people who are more interested in Kent as a sovereign citizen (which is also my interest).

Basically, we are to expect two orders from Judge Rodgers today. The first will be for the prosecution's dismissal of the case. The second will be on Hovind's Rule 29 motion (document 154, response from prosecution document 157 and my site has the latter doc). The other thing which came out was that Judge Rodgers had been planning to deny Hovind's motion to dismiss (document 180), which Keith presented and was apparently based on some research by the United States Justice Foundation. I think she was unimpressed by the Pendergraft citation (bottom of page 3 of that motion).

There were a number of Hovindicators in the courtroom. Maybe a dozen or 15. Mostly men. Three adult women. Two teenage boys. There were a couple of women with children, but they were not in the court. Instead, they were outside in the large esplanade (with trees! and benches!) in the middle of Palafox St. One guy told me he came down from North Carolina, and of course there were the two from Pennsylvania. There was one woman who sat next to me, but I guess she was warned I had cooties or something because she ended up sitting behind me. She was told she could not read her Bible in court. Thanks to the almighty power of the press pass, I was unmolested by the many U.S. Marshals in court. (I counted at one point at least four, not including Kent and Paul's jailer). I think I was the only non-Hovindicator, non-lawyer, non-courtroom personnel in the room.

Obligatory Sovereign Citizen content: When it came time for Paul Hansen to respond to the government's motion to dismiss, he walked up to the podium (or shuffled, he was in leg chains). He challenged Tiffany Eggers' (prosecutor) ability to operate in the court and handed her a piece of paper. Later he asked the judge to have Eggers put it on the record whether Eggers' law license works at this location. Judge Rodgers said, "I won't allow it and I won't order it." I'm thinking, had this thing gone to trial, this would have been the fate of Hansen's sovereign citizen jurisdictional arguments.

I also did a sit-down dialogue on camera Monday with a fanatical Hovind supporter who is all about praising God for what happened here. (I see good lawyering, myself.) According to the camera and sound guys doing the tech stuff, it went really well from their end. And, as I said, I was present for the filmmaker's interview with Chris Klotz, who was Hansen's backup counsel. The guy is very good at what he does; he worked with the Innocence Project to get the state of Mississippi to dismiss charges against a guy who was accused of a crime spree in 1994. He's also involved in representing inmates who were housed at the Escambia County Jail when it blew up on April 30, 2014 due to a gas leak. Two inmates were killed, one officer was paralyzed, and another 172 people were injured. The jail was completely totaled. (This was a serious cluster**** and I'd direct your attention to this article which lays it all out: http://inweekly.net/wordpress/?p=21114)

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  • 4 years later...

aaaaaand he's back...in court. 

Make's perfect sense, in a wing-nut, tin-foil-hat, bat-shit crazy, Sovereign Citizen kinda way. 

Also, Kent Hovind and his wife of 40 years divorced after he got out of prison, and he married Mary Tocco, an anti vax wing nut, in short order. 

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