Derek's Trial: Day 2 (Yesterday)
Recap of yesterday, What's on the agenda for today
The prosecution presented most of its case yesterday Tuesday 7/14. That will continue this morning, Wednesday 7/15, and it’s expected that Derek will begin his defense later this afternoon.
Yesterday was mostly uneventful, although quite interesting to see the prosecutors present their evidence. Having been to most of the status hearings, I’m impressed with the judge. Very even-handed, articulate, knows the law and appears fair-minded.
We’re all looking forward to Derek’s testimony and to the expert witnesses he’s bringing in. Thank you to everyone who has come to witness for Derek, you are appreciated!
The Schedule
Court begins at 8:30 a.m. each day.
Today Wed 7/15 before lunch: Prosecution finishes its case, probably by noon.
Wed 7/15 after lunch: Derek begins presenting his defense.
Thu 7/16: Derek finishes his defense. Depending on time of day, the jury may begin deliberating.
Fri 7/17: Depends on the jury.
Today and tomorrow, 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 the trial is still going, that’s the day Derek finds out what happens in his life for the foreseeable future. Nobody should hear that in an empty room.
Location & Parking
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.)
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.
Sit anywhere in the gallery. No signs, no shirts, nothing that gives anyone a reason to clear the room. Just people.
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.
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.