Injustice in Delaware

On September 10, 2012 Gordon Smith of Delaware is scheduled to face trial for terroristic threatening. If convicted of the Class A Misdemeanor he faces up to a year in prison. The trial comes on the heels of a long string of arrests, seven to be exact, all of them related to his former marriage and the child custody dispute that resulted from the divorce.

None of the arrests so far have resulted in a conviction. And like all the other arrests, this case hinges exclusively on the word of his ex-wife. There is no other evidence in existence that he made a threat, or ever did anything else illegal, other than her accusation, and she has already been caught lying to police about other incidents.

It is a scenario we see played out more and more commonly as cultural corruption, hubris and legal histrionics on behalf of female alleged victims continues to escalate in the United States Justice System.

What does it take to investigate a man seven times, on allegations of everything from sexually assaulting a woman to violating protective orders, to stalking by phone and in person, resulting in seven arrests, but failing to obtain even a single conviction?

One possibility is incompetent police and prosecutors, who despite running in to a dead end on a string of unsubstantiated allegations, continue to be oblivious to the possibility that the complainant is a pathological liar.

If you are more ideologically minded, or a career oriented prosecutor, you might dismiss that possibility and instead opt to interpret this as a just another example of patriarchal influence in a criminal justice system that, in its pro-male dominance bias, re-victimizes women after they have been raped, stalked, harassed or otherwise abused.

But of course there is no evidence to support that, either.

The problem isn’t patriarchy or incompetence or callous indifference to victims. The problem is a false accuser; a serial liar who has made one transparently bogus accusation after another with the soul aim of removing Gordon from the lives of his children. And in doing so she has been enabled and encouraged by members of the criminal justice system in the State of Delaware.

This article is the beginning in a series of that will focus on the case of a father and former husband who has been subjected to repeated arrests, false and possibly even retributive prosecution spanning a period of several years.

It is a complicated story, accentuated by a repeated allegations, arrests, questionable tactics by police and prosecutors, all overshadowed by a cloud of falsehoods manufactured by Tiffany Smith, Gordon’s former wife.

For the sake of clarity, I will be piecing this together for you, one article at a time, trying to bring clarity to what actually happened. If I manage to do this, it will be more than the State of Delaware has mustered, given they can’t go from police report to conviction without the truth getting in their way.

So far.

There are a few things already quite clear. This is a nightmare turned real for Mr. Smith, who, among other things, was arrested by the Delaware State Police for calling his ex-wife’s cell phone to make contact with his children, who were not old enough at the time to initiate contact with him (3 and 4 years old respectively), when there was no restraining order preventing him from doing so. He was arrested simply on the word of his former wife, who told police that she had asked him not to call.

Tiffany Marie Smith

To be direct, a mother in Delaware, or any other state for that matter, is not authorized to prevent a father seeking contact with his children. That is a function of state authority, and in this case there was none. Why the police chose to make an arrest at this point is still a mystery. Hopefully the suit Gordon Smith has filed against the state police will bring that decision into the light.

The charges against Mr. Smith are at first suspect because of the unusual amount of unproven charges. Mr. Smith’s seven arrests are based on nine accusations by the same person. This itself is alarming, but does not prove dishonesty by Ms. Smith, or malfeasance by state officials. The simple absence of a conviction, even if there had been a hundred arrests, would not prove anything except that the state was unable to bring a credible case against Mr. Smith. Again, in the minds of a lot of people that would turn the attention of authorities back to the person making the complaints, but apparently they are a little slow in Delaware.

Or a little malicious.

In order to demonstrate that something is fundamentally rotten here, we must, among other things, show proof that Ms. Smith knowingly submitted false allegations to the police.

We do have that proof on hand, and it comes directly from none other than Tiffany Smith herself, as well as the authorities who investigated her allegations. Some of that proof is indisputable, empirical; some of it circumstantial. What it amounts to, however, is a very clear picture of state officials that are cooperating with a known serial liar in order to punish someone who is standing up to the injustice they are dispensing.

Taco Bell Video

Gordon Smith is being assisted with his legal struggles by Catherine Gibson, founder of Family Law Advocates Initiating Reform (FLAIR). On August 9, 2010 Gibson reports that she and a process server went to the home of Tiffany Smith to serve a summons on Ms. Smith’s grandparents, related to one of the previous allegations. According to Gibson, Smith emerged from the home with a taser gun and threatened both her and the server.

Gibson reports that she left the home at that time, picked up Gordon at another location and proceeded to the Dover, Delaware State Police Office to report the incident and to file charges against Tiffany Smith.

Rather than proceed with an investigation into the alleged threats made by Ms. Smith, the police arrested Mr. Smith, whom Ms. Smith had phoned in on earlier, claiming that he was at the house with Gibson, watching the children, in violation of a protective order.

She had reported to police that Gibson and Mr. Smith were at the home at 12:40 pm that day. Gibson had actually had lunch with Mr. Smith that day at a Taco Bell restaurant located an estimated 30 minutes from Ms. Smiths home, and produced a receipt from that lunch that was time stamped 12:41 pm. A police investigator subsequently visited the Taco Bell and viewed the video surveillance footage, which confirmed that Gordon Smith and Catherine Gibson were both at the Taco Bell at the time Tiffany Smith alleged he was at her home in violation of a restraining order.

At this point, Gibson reports that she asked State Police Corporal Mineer, to whom she had given the receipt, when Tiffany Smith was going to be arrested for the false police report. Gibson says that the police present immediately “went into a huddle,” and when they came out of it, they had decided not to pursue the incident with the taser, or the false reporting, but rather were changing the charges against Mr. Smith to “breach of release” and release him without bond.

Gibson also asserts that the police refused to give them a copy of the report at that time.

The charges remained against Mr. Smith until the day before his trial was scheduled to begin the following January, when they were dropped without explanation.

Regarding the incident, Gibson said, “If we had not eaten at Taco Bell that day, Gordon would be In prison.”

During the lead up to the trial on that case, Gordon Smith met with Patricia Dailey-Lewis, family court prosecutor and Deputy Attorney General for the State of Delaware. Smith claims he wanted to present the proof he had of his presence at Taco Bell the day and time he was accused of violating a protective order. He wanted to request that the charges against him be dropped and that his former wife be prosecuted for filing a false police report against him.

Smith asserts that Daily-Lewis became agitated, changed the subject and verbally attacked him because he was in arrears on child support. According to Smith, she screamed at him, “I will see that she is never prosecuted!”

Gordon Smith also alleges that the prosecution currently underway is retributive, and being conducted by Kenneth Haltom, Deputy Attorney General for the State of Delaware Department of Justice. According to Smith, Haltom appeared amenable to discussing the current charges against him for “terroristic threatening” with police, to see if they could “sort something out,” but that conversation evaporated when Haltom discovered that Smith was suing the State Police over their mishandling of his arrest and the charges.

The case documentation supporting the assertions of Gordon Smith and Catherine Gibson can be found here.

More details on this story will be posted in the near future.