This Blog Is Not a Pen-Pal Ad... Now Quit Asking!

Not a full year goes by without someone in authority, here at the prison, finding or intercepting some piece of paper that makes them think they've caught me red-handed in the subversive act of writing a blog. Each time this happens, I'm called into someone's office, passed a printout of some Pariah's Syntax posts, and accusingly asked, "What can you tell me about this?" Repeating that I am exercising my First Amendment right to write gets old.

Last week, the Crossroads Correctional Center mail room opened an envelope containing some poems I submitted to a literary journal. I've sent out submissions exactly like this for years. The cover letter that accompanied these poems, as does every cover letter I've ever sent with a manuscript,, mentioned this blog alongside the highlights of my publishing history. Never mind that I've received a hard copy through the mail of every Pariah's Syntax post ever written, or that I've been mailing out typewritten originals of them to be transcribed for four years now — suddenly the mail room staff is suspicious. My poetry submission was forwarded to the censorship committee to determine if this blog violates policy. Had anyone checked my file, they might've been saved the trouble.

The origin of this nonsense goes back to the summer of 2007, when the State of Missouri lost lawsuits against a number of women prisoners. The State had claimed these women were conducting business (which is against the law for prisoners in many states) by receiving money from male pen pals in exchange for photos and the occasional sexy letter. That the court ruled in the women's favor should be no surprise. If getting gifts from a paramour were deemed illegal, everyone currently in a relationship would have to line up for his or her day in court.

The State, however, got to flout the court's ruling by employing a tidy workaround. Then-Governor Matt Blunt (he of the R-rated movie ban) issued one of his infamous executive orders, this time prohibiting state prisoners from soliciting pen pals, particularly online. The logic of this was presumably that prisoners, having little or no opportunity to meet new friends on the outside, would no longer be able to so easily seek out "victims" (people) to "take advantage of" (correspond with). Blunt's order put Department of Corrections administrators on high alert for anything that could be liberally construed as a pen-pal ad. This included web pages and sites that existed to raise public awareness of prisoners' legal struggles.

I came under scrutiny when the Crossroads administration learned about the Free Byron Case site maintained by my friends and family. For several days, as the site was reviewed by the powers that be, the threat of a conduct violation loomed over my head. Ultimately, I was cleared of any wrongdoing and foolishly told to avoid any direct involvement with running that site — as if I could just use a computer in my cell to log into the host's FTP site and start posting updates. Granted, I did have a MySpace profile back then; The Pitch's Peter Rugg wrote an insipid little puff piece about it. Shortly thereafter, for kind-of-but-not-really going counter to a policy that didn't technically exist, I was issued a conduct violation and kicked out of Crossroads's Good Conduct Wing. It was not the first time I'd been found guilty under shaky accusations.

Blunt's executive order had been a stopgap measure. Departmental policy was soon officially amended to include a prohibition against placing ads for pen pals, even though identical attempts in other states have been challenged and ruled unconstitutional by those states' Supreme Courts. But who knows, the Supreme Court of Missouri may interpret the Constitution differently. This state has achieved wide renown for its backwardness.

In January of 2008, DOC's Constituent Services Representative sent me a letter that said posting my writings to the web would not violate Departmental policy, provided I do not try to solicit pen pals in the process. You would think official correspondence on the Department's letterhead — a copy of which remains in my file — would settle the issue. I certainly did, otherwise I wouldn't have sought approval. This latest inquisition, prompted by the "discovery" from my cover letter that my writing has an online presence, proves that the prison's bureaucracy lacks anything like a collective memory. It also speaks to the open hostility toward the idea that its captives' voices might slip beyond these walls and be heard.

Publicity and the Current State of the Case

When I wrote in my to-do list that I wanted to appear on the radio, doing an interview about my case and the Skeptical Juror book wasn't what I had in mind. Nevertheless, when the invitation came to talk about these topics live on Sharon Lockhart's call-in program, on KKFI, my mother and I accepted. It was the first interview I'd considered granting since the 2002 fiasco that was the Pitch's "Cemetery Plot" story.

As it turned out, those forty minutes of my Saturday afternoon couldn't have been much better spent, nor friendlier to our cause. Ms. Lockhart was fascinated and appalled by the facts presented in the book (as is almost everyone who's read it), and asked all the questions an attentive reader would: Where is Kelly Moffett today? What is being done now to reverse Byron's conviction? Will the discoveries made by J. Bennett Allen in the book be used to get a new trial? Astute questions, all.

I hung up the phone at the end of the interview and took a deep breath. Talking about the case has never stopped being a draining experience. But this was totally worth it. I plugged the Free Byron Case site (and even this blog), and funds appeared soon thereafter, donated to help with legal expenses. The book also landed in the hands of a few more people, some at the station itself. Later I realized the experience even allowed me to cross an item off my list. To Sharon Lockhart I owe one huge debt of gratitude.

It's certain that interest in the case is spreading. The Skeptical Juror and the Trial of Byron Case has a lot to do with that. The Kansas City Star columnist Mary Sanchez requested a copy of the book, and other news sources have given signs of flirting with the idea of making stories of it, proving that local media is paying attention. More exciting, though, is that two prestigious law firms (one of them nationally renowned) have sought out their own copies for what should be self-evident reasons. All this is just at the time of this writing. Can I be blamed for my enthusiasm?

We're only four months into 2010, yet already there's conspicuous promise for me and my cause. As the months progress I'm confident that more and more goodness will come. Spirits are higher than ever for everyone involved with the fight for my freedom. At the risk of sounding like an overenthusiastic corporate executive, I think we're close to the tipping point — the critical moment when we see concrete results and gain wide public recognition. Right now, in other words, things are looking good. Really, really good.

Shedding Light on Pitch Darkness (or, You Dirty Pitch)

[This post originally appeared on my MySpace blog, which no longer exists. The date of the original posting has been lost.]

On 21 May, at 6:00 AM, a short, crude write-up about my MySpace presence appeared on pitch.com, the online version of a free Kansas City weekly. Of its perhaps five hundred words, slightly more than half are the author's own. The rest are quotes, either from this blog or from the Pitch's original article about my case (a sensationalist front-page piece ominously titled "Cemetery Plot," which appeared in the paper five years ago). The author's half, such as it is, consists of hastily-drawn conclusions and trite observations unbecoming a man who presumably boasts the title "journalist." Still, it raised some eyebrows.

The author, one Peter Rugg, first met my mother at a recent benefit for the Midwestern Innocence Project, where they spoke for a time about my case. Mr. Rugg wanted information too detailed for my mother to outline, so she handed him a flier and directed him to FreeByronCase.com to do his homework. A few days later, he sent her an e-mail requesting she call him. He wanted to discuss a short piece he was planning for the paper. She immediately left a message on his voicemail including her home and mobile telephone numbers. The next week, the piece appeared on the paper's website.

This marks at least the fourth occasion on which the Pitch has in some way referenced me or my case in the last five years. At least the prior three had the benefit of being somewhat researched. Besides falling back on that 2002 story as a source, Mr. Rugg further phoned it in (or, to be more accurate, didn't) by utterly neglecting to contact any of the people he accuses of associating with a sociopath. Evidently, crafting a well-informed piece wasn't high on his list of priorities. He even blatantly mistook the context of two of the three quotes lifted from my blog entries.

Truth be told, there are numerous details of Mr. Rugg's piece with which I take issue. Some are small and petty, such as his reference to "a chicken carcass impaled on the hood of [my] car." Others are far more substantial: I do not identify with a majority of my fellow inmates quite simply because a majority of my fellow inmates are (it may surprise him to know) murderers, child molesters, rapists, kidnappers, and, yes, sociopaths. I'm curious to know how well Mr. Rugg might adjust to the social scene of a maximum-security institution, given similar circumstances. Without knowing the man, or so much as speaking to him (might as well return the disfavor, after all), I am going to guess he wouldn't exactly turn into a social butterfly.

Due to the unexpected criticism that the piece drew, the Pitch's editor, Eric Barton, has asked whether my mother would consent to a podcast interview. She has agreed under the condition she be allowed to bring her own recording device as something of a safeguard against misrepresentation.

The question, then, is this: is the Pitch finally attempting to right its previous journalistic wrongs by presenting another view of the story, or is this just another ruse by a second-rate tabloid? We'll soon know for sure.