Derek's Trial: Day 1
What Happened, When to Come
Jury selection was today, Monday 7/13/26 and the courtroom was closed to the public for it.
Here is what Derek told me afterward. He said several people he thought might have been sympathetic to his reasons were struck. But he also said the jury that was finally seated struck him as fair-minded — not stacked against him.
The Schedule
Court begins at 8:30 a.m. each day.
Tuesday 7/14: The prosecution presents its case. It may run into Wednesday morning.
Wednesday 7/15, after lunch, through Thursday 7/16: Derek presents his defense.
Thursday afternoon: The jury may begin deliberating.
Friday 7/17: If the jury is still out, this is the day the verdict comes back.
Wednesday and Thursday are the days that matter most. Come for whatever hours you can — an hour is not nothing.
And don’t write off Friday. If it’s still going, that’s the day a man finds out what happens to the rest of his life. Nobody should hear that in an empty room.
The Charges
Derek faces two sets of charges.
The first is the property damage — spray painting and taping letters to the outside of a police station and a news station. He is paying restitution for it.
The second is trafficking. After his arrest, law enforcement searched his home. The Commonwealth alleges the drugs they found exceeded the statutory threshold that separates possession from trafficking. That threshold is doing the work here: cross a number, and the law presumes an intent to sell. As far as anything made public shows, no sale has been alleged — no buyer, no transaction, no witness.
That’s the part worth sitting with. A jury may be asked to convict a man of selling drugs on the strength of a weight.
Why He Did It — Which Is Not the Same as Whether He Was Right
I understand the urge to reach for the tea in the harbor, or for a FLOCK camera pulled down off its pole. I’ve felt it. But those comparisons make Derek’s act sound bigger than it was.
He didn’t destroy a company’s cargo. He didn’t disable a surveillance network. He put words on the outside of two buildings — a police station and a news station — and he is paying to have them cleaned. The paint stopped nothing. It prevented nothing. Its entire purpose was to be read.
That’s not a Tea Party. That’s closer to a man nailing a paper to a door.
And by the winter of 2020, every other door was shut.
We wrote our legislators. Almost all of them ignored us. We tried to make the case in public and found that platforms were removing posts, banning accounts, and deleting people outright — and in 2024 Mark Zuckerberg wrote to the House Judiciary Committee that senior officials in the federal government had pressured Meta to suppress content, and that he regretted not pushing back harder.
Legacy media reported the official line and treated everything else as a hazard.
The official line, however, did not hold up to any scrutiny. The six-foot rule — the one that emptied classrooms and closed businesses — turned out to rest on… nothing. Dr. Fauci told Congress he was not aware of studies supporting it. Hospitals received a 20% Medicare add-on payment for COVID-19 admissions under the CARES Act, a financial thumb on the scale of how cases were coded. Some treatment protocols were later abandoned because they were seriously hurting people. Early treatment was abandoned even though there were Nobel Prize winning drugs available that were effective. And when the federal government tried to impose a vaccine mandate through OSHA, the Supreme Court struck it down — the government had reached past its authority, and the highest court in the country said so out loud.
So many of us were shut out that we started a weekly meeting of liberty friends in December of 2020. It’s still going. That’s where I met Derek.
When every ordinary door is closed, some people knock harder. I am not telling you Derek chose correctly. I’m telling you what the choice looked like from inside it.
I know Derek. He’s a master electrician — he’s done work at our house, always on time, always professional. He is a gentle man and an outspoken one, and those two things live together in him more comfortably than they do in most people. But that isn’t why I’m asking you to come.
Derek and JoAnn when they operated a vegan bar.
A courtroom gallery is not a jury box. Sitting in that room is not a vote. It is not a signature on his choices. You can think he went too far and still believe he deserves a trial where somebody who isn’t paid to be there is watching.
That’s the whole ask. Not agreement. Attendance.
Because the alternative is a man, alone, in front of the state, in a room where nobody is looking.
Dates, Location, Times:
Sit anywhere in the gallery. No signs, no shirts, nothing that gives anyone a reason to clear the room. Just people.
Where: Fayette Circuit Court, Courtroom D, 2nd floor — 120 N. Limestone at Main. (There are two building, #120 is on the right as you face the buildings.)
When: Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, 8:30 a.m. Possibly Friday.
Parking:
Barr Street garage, beside the District Courthouse. An underground tunnel connects to 120 N. Limestone. Regular LexPark rates.
Metered street parking nearby, two-hour limit.
Library lot across the street — two hours free, validate your ticket inside the library.
Movements that only stand by their tidy members don’t stand by anyone for long. I’ll see you there.