Editor:
For more than two years, my wife and I have been threatened with being kicked out of our Cheatham County home that we built with our own hands. We are seniors in our middle sixties, living on Social Security. In June 2012, I was thrown in jail for nine days and was visited by three deputies within an hour after returning home from that imprisonment.
The latest outrage is I am now threatened with twenty more days in jail for failing to surrender intellectual property nobody will specify. Can you imagine being told you will go to jail if you don’t
surrender something but you are not told exactly what that something is? This is the work of judges who want me to go to jail “just because.” There is a court-ordered laundry list of unspecified items to be surrendered and a catch-all phrase “but not limited to.” What human being could comply with that?
Any judge’s order impossible to obey is invalid on its face and has no force of law.
This is the kind of legal lunacy run amok in Cheatham County and throughout Tennessee.
I wrote and directed a feature motion picture eight years ago. There has been a full-court press to steal that work from me ever since. I have been ordered to surrender songs without knowing what they are. Even if I knew what songs they were, I may or may not be the author or co-author. If I am the co-author, I have no sole right to surrender works co-authored by others. This is settled copyright law.
Why hold back? Kick this elderly couple out of Cheatham County. Our kind is clearly not welcome here. Show everybody what real tyranny looks like, when a man denied any trial is also twice denied the ability of his witnesses present to testify in court that he had done nothing wrong. I do not even have the right to be paid for the enormous labor I invested. Involuntary servitude was supposed to be outlawed with the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in 1865.
I have an official transcript with a judge stating it is “too late” for the truth. He stated he has no power to right the wrongs. Any judge declaring he cannot right wrongs is deliberately enforcing wrongs. That’s what your system of justice has become and a society mistreating its elders is doomed.
I have completed, and sent to Europe, a documentary motion picture detailing what hillbilly justice looks like in Tennessee where an all-out war on copyright has begun. Even my death cannot now stop the truth from being exposed. I have also become a citizen of the Commonwealth of Australia, by descent from my war-bride mother.
More than two thousand years ago, Sun Tzu warned never to put your enemy in a position from which he cannot retreat. My wife of nearly 43 years, and I, are now on “death ground.” Our backs are to the sea and our ship is burned. Having been stripped of our home and all of our human rights, we have nothing left to lose. Now, the unforgettable, international battle will begin in earnest.
Randy Starkey
Kingston Springs