Chuck Turner's blog

At last, I thought as Terri and I walked into Boston's Moakley Federal Court House. A year and eleven months had passed since I had been arrested at City Hall. It seemed like a lifetime. The hounding by the press; the constant assassinations of my character; the rallies to defend my innocence; the struggle with Feeney for fair treatment; the endless struggles with US Attorney Sullivan and his sidekick John McNeil as they tried to hide the Big Lie; and the painstaking process engaged in by my legal team, Barry Wilson, Kazi Toure, and John Pavlos, to sort through the discovery: boxes and boxes and boxes of materials and cds mainly relating to the case against my codefendant, the Senator (later separated).  During the last two years I had in reality three full time jobs: trying to defend my sanity; trying to stay out of jail; and most important trying to represent and serve the constituents who had reelected me despite the charges.  

 

As we rode the elevator up to the Court Room 14, I felt a wave of relief. Win or lose, this drama would soon be over. Hopefully, I would be able to resume life as a human being and end my life as a character in a political drama. Leaving Terri in the front row of the audience, I walked to my legal team's table, feeling confident that we had done everything we could do to win. If all goes well, this nightmare should be over in a relative twinkling of the eye--a couple of weeks. After saying hello to Barry, Kazi, and John I eased into my seat and prepared to hear Judge Woodlock lay out the rules that the jurors were to follow.

This is the 8th installment in the eight part series called Anatomy of a FrameUP which describes my two and a half year struggle with the Justice Department, which led to my being a convicted felon, now in the 5th month of my 36 month sentence at the USP Hazelton work camp, Bruceton Mills, West Virginia. 

I am a political prisoner. I am in prison not because I committed a crime but because Michael Sullivan, a former Massachusetts U.S. Attorney, decided to target me for entrapment because of my political views and actions as an elected official. I have admitted that a major share of the responsibility for being convicted is mine. If I had followed Terri's instructions and given whatever Wilburn handed me on the afternoon of August 3, 2007 to her, it would have been difficult for Sullivan to make it look like I was extorting money from Wilburn.  If  Terri had been able to record it as a contribution, it is very unlikely that the FBI agents would have even visited me on the morning of the Senator's arrest. As I said in Installment 3, in life and especially in politics, it's the details that count.