Derek's Trial: Verdict
Oops -- September 10th is THURSDAY not Wed!
Derek was charged with 2 counts of felony criminal mischief and 5 misdemeanors for the spray painting, and 3 counts of felony trafficking of marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms and LSD.
He was found guilty on the felony mischief and guilty of possession of the drugs, rather than trafficking. It was clear that he was not trafficking. Praise the Lord the jury understood that because the prosecution pushed hard on trafficking and that could have meant decades in jail.
The jury makes sentencing recommendations, then the judge does the actual sentencing at a later date. The jury recommended 1 year in prison for felony possession of LSD, 3 years for one of the buildings spray painted (because of the dollar amount of cleaning), and 1 year for the other building, along with restitution of $8,000. The sentences were to run consecutively so that would be 5 years in prison.
Judge Travis will sentence Derek on THURSDAY, September 10th at 9 am. Please join us. This is the day Derek asks for the strongest support.
Thank you to everyone who came to witness for Derek, you are appreciated!
Derek expected to be convicted on the vandalism. He never denied that conduct. What he wanted was the chance to say why he did it.
The prosecution asked whether he’d taken any steps before he ever picked up a spray can, and I don’t think they expected the answer. He had gone to protests — I saw him there. He wrote letters. He made phone calls. He walked into the media companies during business hours and asked to be heard. He tried every ordinary channel available to a citizen who believes the official account of something is wrong, and was turned away at each one.
Much of what Derek was saying then has since moved from forbidden to factual. For healthy people under 70, the infection fatality rate turned out to be comparable to a bad flu season; the mortality burden fell overwhelmingly on the oldest Americans and those with 4+ co-morbidities.
Prolonged school closures did serious and lasting damage to children — that is now close to consensus among the same institutions that once treated the suggestion as dangerous. The evidence on community masking, presented at the time as settled, never was.
You didn’t hear any of that during Covid. You heard it afterward, and some of it is still coming out, because, back then, the legacy media was following the official line without doing any of its own investigation.
Location & Parking for September 10th Sentencing:
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. I paid the max one day (no validation) and it was only $10.
Sit anywhere in the gallery. No signs, no shirts, nothing that gives anyone a reason to clear the room. Just people.
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.