No Fool For a Client

What first began as a completely impossible uphill battle against the system is starting to come around for this untrained amateur attorney taking on the State of New Hampshire. Facing 6 felony counts and up to 30 years in prison, I fought back against a lying county attorney, a disorganized drug task force and a judge that gave the prosecutor far more credit than me.

Since the Motion to Dismiss and the resulting hearing on that motion, so much happened that changed the whole landscape of the case. I lost the motion to dismiss (I will be filing a motion to reconsider soon), but it appears there was a mistake on my part in explaining the facts. I put a sentence in an important pleading that insinuated the first cold text from Drug Task Force Officers came the night they first saw me on the side of the road. The reality was that text came weeks later, not the same night these guys saw me stuck in a snowbank.

At any rate, I won a motion to suppress by submission. The County Attorney admitted with no argument that I never had my rights read to me and that he did not intend to use anything from the day of my arrest as evidence. So he tapped out on that one. I also filed a Motion to Recuse, which was summarily denied, but that will actually work out in my favor.

Next, I filed a motion to compel discovery. I wanted the policies, procedures and training materials regarding the targeting of controlled buy subjects by the Drug Task Force. I also wanted the same materials regarding avoiding entrapment. I have to give all the credit to my standby counsel for suggesting that I ask specifically for "policies and procedures."

It just so happened there was a disastrous raid organized by the state Drug Task Force around 7 years ago that left a police chief dead and a number of other officers wounded. The aftermath of that raid featured a review board put together to examine what went wrong.

The review committee determined that the DTF “is significantly lacking” in proper policies and procedures pertaining to their daily operations, while also lacking proper equipment and tactical training for officers to do their jobs. Further, the review committee concluded, “clear, written policies” are absent, leading to team members who “are granted license to develop their own methods of operation, which exposes the entire organization to unacceptable levels of inconsistency, and therefore risk and liability.”

I included this article in one of my pleadings after being told by the county attorney that he reached out to the DTF and found out they had no such policies and procedures. Well isn't that wonderful? So 7 years have gone by since this organization was first told to develop adequate policies and procedures, and they still have none regarding targeting people for controlled buys and avoiding entrapment? Sounds like a recipe for more than a few lawsuits.

So the bottom line is even when people die and get seriously injured due to this unit's disorganization and lack of training, the state's drug task force can't really figure out how to change for the better. They are still making the same mistakes. Still suffering from the same symptoms of failing leadership.

The motion to compel isn't in the decided column yet, but it should be very soon.

Next came one of the most pathetic flurry of motions I've ever seen. The county attorney sought to exclude: all communications between himself and I; all mention of a prior DTF case where he represented the Town of Gilford as a co-defendant with the DTF; all mention of the raid described above and the resulting review of the DTF; and all mention of the government leaks which compromised the investigation from the jump.

He even sought a motion to continue the trial because his main witness needed more time for paternity leave.

What this attorney does not realize is that it doesn't really matter when this trial is. He's followed a pattern I actually predicted he would follow. Everyone I ever investigated who got caught in lies and cover ups did the same thing. Character is consistent across the board when it comes to attorneys like Livernois. All of them tend to fight too hard for all the wrong reasons when they get cases that have serious weaknesses. I've painted him into a corner on purpose, and he'll destroy himself fighting his way out of it. Since he knows he has no shot at getting a guilty plea out of a jury if they hear all the facts, he's going to try to exclude all the ones that make him look bad. It's just the kind of thing attorneys do that make people hate all attorneys equally.

He'll hang on the "I'm just doing my job" excuse but step all over the honest application of the law while doing it.

I came into this process spitting mad and trying to explain my whole case at the arraignment. Since then I made quite a few adjustments to my attitude and my approach. I'm ready to empanel a jury and move forward, but the prosecutor is now trying to delay things and hide the truth.

I'm the last person anyone should try to hide the truth from. I know just where to find it. I know from experience that the truth always shines through in the end. I'll continue to fight to expose the truth while they perpetrate their lies, and we'll let a jury decide. Stay tuned.     

MOTION TO DISMISS HEARING FULL AUDIO

Listen to the first major hearing on the case here, and please weigh in with your thoughts in the comment section:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/g9v7nlrb1kyqdjl/richfirsthearingbelknap.wma

Read the full motion to dismiss documentation below:

Defendant's Motion to Dismiss Indictments Filed by Belknap County Attorney Andrew Livernois from Rich Bergeron

Where are Your Taxes Going? The Cost of Arresting the Wrong Guy

Imagine you are stranded on the side of a busy road, just far enough off the shoulder to not be in the way of any traffic. First, a police officer stops and talks to you. You have help coming but he keeps insisting you get a wrecker. You tell him you can't afford that. The next people who stop say they'd love to help but they don't have any chains. They have a nice truck though, and they claim to be loggers after you tell them that's what you do. They look the part, beards and flannel jackets, so it makes sense.

So, this all happened to me last winter. I gave these two fellow "loggers" business cards and tell them if they ever need firewood customers in their area (outside my range) I would refer the outliers to them.

Finally the third time is the charm. One selfless hero in a lifted old POS truck comes along and parks right in the middle of the road after the police officer left me to deal with another incident. Only one impatient A-hole decides to lay on the horn but eventually drives around. The random stranger throws one end of a chain to me and it's around an anchor point on my vehicle in 2 minutes. He connects the other end to his truck and I drive right out of that ditch with ease. I give him a business card and get a random text a couple weeks later from a guy I think is him. It's not, and it turns out to be one of the guys who didn't have chains.

Next thing you know, despite having not a single criminal conviction on my record, I wind up being set up for 6 Special Felonies for allegedly selling less than a half pound of marijuana over 6 different occasions. Then I find out it's all been designed to infiltrate the operation of someone they think I will give up on a silver platter. I don't cooperate once they arrest me a month after the last transaction. Then I find out the real target has two leaks in law enforcement. One is in the Sheriff's Office and the other is right in the Drug Task Force itself. So, now I'm the target, framed as being a drug dealer who should spend over 20 years in prison for a set of crimes the government manufactured against me without doing any investigation into my background.

Your tax dollars paid for a massive investigation that produced zero results. You employed multiple law enforcement agents to waste their time on an investigation that was always doomed from the start due to pervasive leaks within their own ranks. You paid for these officers to purchase these "drugs," have them shipped to a lab and tested by paid professional experts, and put into evidence in the form of written statements confirming that it was pure Cannabis, a plant that is changing the face of medicine and legal in half the country as a recreational product.

Before this "investigation" even started, Officer Jared Beaulieu lied about my record in a sworn affidavit. You would think he would be up on perjury charges or at least be subject to my cross examination and be asked to explain how this lie made it onto the court's official paperwork presented at arraignment. Beaulieu insisted the record showed I had two convictions on my record, one in the state of New Hampshire that was ACTUALLY an acquittal for an assault that occurred because a former business partner stole my wood splitter.

The judge in the assault case ruled that I had the right to use "reasonable force" to retrieve stolen property. There are zero convictions on my criminal record. I have never spent more than an overnight stint in jail for youthful indiscretions that had NOTHING TO DO WITH DRUGS. It is entrapment all the way, and YOU will be paying for the trial in August if you let the madness continue. The reputations of the leakers and the officers who turned a blind eye to them will be raked across the coals. The system will be crucified, as it should be for building and sustaining and then capitalizing on a ridiculous amount of tainted, wasted evidence to prosecute meaningless crimes and ruin an honorable man who contributes positively to his community. Meanwhile people die every day of overdoses from much harder, much more dangerous drugs.

NH taxpayers need to stop paying for this madness and to tell the county attorney to stop wasting so many of his resources on prosecuting people that never should have been set up in the first place. Call Belknap County Attorney Andrew Livernois at 603-527-5440 or email him at: alivernois@belknapcounty.org and tell him to stop wasting your tax dollars on good people like me and start cleaning up the Opioid crisis.

DON'T LET THIS CROOKED NH DRUG TASK FORCE AGENT FOOL YOU INTO THINKING HE IS YOUR FRIEND

The officer you see above (bearded during undercover operations)  has no problem turning honest, hard working people into felons based on false information. He misrepresented my criminal record in my case to get his arrest warrant and never bothered to do any preliminary investigation to see if I was pre-disposed to sell marijuana. The judge on the case thought it was sufficient that Belknap County Attorney Andrew Livernois simply mentioned the fact that I really had no convictions whatsoever on my record at the arraignment. This was despite the fact that multiple agents of the NH Attorney General's office signed off on a warrant and an entire investigation that was based on statements containing false information that any one of them could have checked and verified for themselves. 

Everyone in the chain of command just took Beaulieu's word that I had multiple convictions instead of bare charges that were not in any way related to drugs of any kind. Beaulieu didn't even know how to use the computer system and check a criminal record, did no real preliminary investigation or surveillance to determine if I was any kind of drug dealer, and admitted to "cold" texting me to see if I would sell him marijuana. My final text to Beaulieu was "YOU ARE A FUCKING LIAR!" He offered no response or defense. 

This man's lies ruined my life after he pretended to befriend me and then his "real" friends in the NH DTF tried to turn me against someone capable of killing me if he was facing a lifetime in prison. I also discovered leaks in my case, and I was never the real target. Law enforcement officials from two different agencies were feeding the real target information. 

I did my best to highlight the major issues in my case, but the judge refused to acknowledge the real facts after my extremely detailed motion to dismiss sat on the docket after the hearing "under advisement" for over a month. The judge waited for the case to wind up being an indictment, even though I filed my motion days after my arraignment. My name has been relentlessly dragged through the mud based on lies that Officer Jared Beaulieu told to initiate this investigation. 

The judge also made not one mention in his order of my fear for my life and the fact that the County Attorney said he could meet with a lawyer right away if I had one but not with me if I was self represented. I could not meet with him, he said, until I made an appearance in the court. My concerns for meeting with him had nothing to do with wanting consideration on my case, it was an urgent request related to my safety, and Andrew Livernois did nothing but stonewall my efforts to report the leaks to other law enforcement agencies. He insisted he could meet with me after the arraignment, but that was too late. He'd already betrayed my trust ten times over by that time. 

I tried to seek the earliest possible relief through the best possible method to dispatch the case on the merits of my argument. It was actually a method the judge suggested to me in open court only to shoot it down later when he had the facts to support a full dismissal. The bottom line is I never should have been arraigned. The case is that flawed, and it all started with this irresponsible and reckless officer making the decision to set me up for six special felonies when he found me on the side of the road stuck in a snowbank and pretended to try to help. 

How about you help out with real crime, Jared? How about you help apprehend real criminals you actually investigate before you randomly find them down on their luck and coerce them into breaking the law to support a lost cause? How about you target the drugs that are killing people, not the ones getting approved in one state after another for recreational use?   

New Hampshire needs to stop devoting so much time, energy and money to cases like mine that are doomed from the start because some young, gung-ho cop makes a rookie mistake that ruins an honest man's life. Nothing is gained either here, not one iota of progress toward any stated mission of the NH Atorney General's Task Force. It's a waste, a fraud on the court, and a ridiculous game being played at the expense of my future. They want to put me in jail for up to 20+ years for allegedly selling less than a half pound of weed. This wouldn't be happening without me refusing to cooperate with the same law enforcement agency that decided it was a good idea to set me up and then immediately tried to fry me because I didn't cooperate. 

Somehow the State of New Hampshire's backward legal system cannot see the forest through the trees. They can't see how it is just outright wrong and fundamentally a violation of due process to put someone with no criminal record into this entrapment scheme when the whole investigation is compromised from the start by leaks supporting the target. Then when he does not want to cooperate with a compromised investigation, the book is thrown right at him. It defies logic, but the judge on this case seems to think this is the normal mode of operation for law enforcement and there is nothing that rises to the level of misconduct here. 

New Hampshire's judicial system will keep protecting liars like Jared Beaulieu and their illegitimate investigations until someone finally recognizes that putting innocent people through ordeals like mine simply cannot be tolerated in a free society based on fairness and justice. The effort to educate the masses starts here. Please like and share this post, and please leave comments, even if just to say, "keep fighting!"