Six Shooter Junction – The story is like one of those heroic WPA murals you see on Post Office Walls, except a yellow tape runs through it and everyone arrives wearing badass buttons astride shiny hand-built, custom thunder machines from a big two-hearted river that say po-tay-toe, po-tay-toe, po-tay-toe before THEY SCREAM!
Consider the set and setting, a grim looking courthouse with a towering set of steps worthy of a medieval scaffold from which they toss down bloody severed heads, or an Aztec pyramid where sacrifices are made to the Sun, the heart ripped from the chest with a keenly whetted obsidian knife, still pumping for the viewing pleasure of the crowd below.
Paul Looney stepped up to the mic to give the small throng of bikers gathered for the one-year anniversary of the Twin Peaks massacre of 9, wounding of seven and the arrest on a fill-in-the-blank affidavit with no specifics as to the allegation of engaging in organized criminal activity; what’s more, there was no proper charging instrument for the offense that put 177 people behind bars – some of them for weeks – on a $1 million bond.
He had three major points to make.
1) When the police become a highly militarized presence in the community, commanded and controlled like armies, using Army equipment, “…We become the enemy,” he concluded.
It is his hope that the blowback from what happened at Twin Peaks will result within 5 years in a demilitarization of domestic civil police forces.
2) “They’re up to their ass in really good lawyers,” he announced. Over the past months, he and his legal assistant Roxanne Avery have been able to attract 20 top-notch lawyers to represent those charged on the vague charges for “less than what they would earn for a day’s fees, if not pro bono.”
The prosecution is not sitting anywhere near as pretty as they were a year ago, he explained. He and his colleagues have learned that the officer who signed the affidavits of warrantless arrest for 177 persons had no personal knowledge to that which he swore before a Magistrate.
He alleged that Prosecutor Michael Jarrett handed the documents to him to sign, sight unseeen.
3) During the past year, not one biker has violated conditions of bond, something that McLennan County authorities depend on when they string out criminal dockets for “three-four years.” When a defendant violates his bond in any of a myriad of ways, he is put back in jail and forced to plead guilty to get out of jail. “They keep them coming back over and over and over.”
His conclusion is that his clients are really good people who have chosen a life-style that some feel threatens them. Let them feel the way they wish, said Looney.
“We’re going to win.”