I didn’t set out to write a blog entry today. The truth of the matter is that I’m tired of spending my time writing about some tawdry criminals, including at least some members of a corrupt neighborhood watch in northeast Seattle and their speculator friends, using criminal harassment and tech hacks to turn over properties and vanquish renters from the neighborhood. This post is a note I finally began to add to Your TV doesn’t have to be smart to be hacked (part 2), but it should probably stand on its own with my apologies for failing to come through with a few promised entries.

I did recently send information that I believe is useful evidence to the City of Seattle. I hoped that it might do the trick and that I might be able to spend the holidays without being harassed in my home but nothing has happened yet and now it’s New Year’s Day and I am still forced to live as though I am in prison. I’m not waiting much longer.

With the holidays, there is the familiar pattern of the north and south mobbing houses coordinating with the nasty neighborhood watch lady across the street and her partner to ensure that someone is always around to mind me, or perhaps to mind the harassment and to ensure that the means of harassment are not exposed to potential witnesses. There is the familiar pattern of minders coming and going to ensure coverage during the intervals when I regularly watch television or stream public radio on my computer.

When I come outside to garden, someone usually emerges to make noise to my south, on my north, or across the street–this seems to be the particular forte of the nasty neighborhood watch lady across the way though she hides the behavior these days a bit more carefully than in the past and often has a tormented look on her face as she goes in and out of her house, slamming doors, checking whatever it is she keeps moving around in her car and incessantly clicking her key fob and repositioning her vehicle. The south mobbing owner and the partner of the nasty neighborhood watch lady have an approach which is less obsessive, more commonly hiding themselves and saying “Move on” in low tones from the garage or the decked walkway. There’s the babbling mobbing sound that comes up when I shower on the north side of the house, whenever the refrigerator cycles, or when I don’t keep enough silicone pot covers at the kitchen side door that faces the venting fan on the north side of the south mobbing house, and the verbal abuse that crops up on my side of the tall hedge that separates me from the north mobbing house whenever I open the front door and go out to the deck to grill some salmon or feed the birds. And then there’s the nightly harassment delivered to the north and west windows of my bedroom that barely seems to stop during the night as of late—cacophony, dins, and other abuse that seeps in around the layers of acoustic board at the windows and travels like infrasound through my pillow. Note that this summary is limited to the common harassments that I face at home every day and every night. On these wet holiday nights, when at least the south and north mobbing house owners and the nasty neighborhood watch lady appear to be out of town, the harassment may be completely autonomous.

Down the street, a developer tarries on breaking ground on a lot next door to the small shack of an elderly man who may have finally died based on the presence of junk removers earlier this week. The development of that lot has now been delayed for several years during which time the City of Seattle apparently filed suit against the developer owner for cutting into the foot of the hill and into the properties on sides north and west. And then while the caretakers for the elderly man felt that his property line was threatened to the point that they surveyed and marked its boundaries. I have wondered whether the elderly man’s property would be torn down and subsumed into the developer-owned lot before ground was finally broken on the project there. On the other side of the elderly man’s home is the residence of one of the neighborhood watch, a retired therapist who attempted to help his fellow neighborhood watch captains by writing letters vilifying me and some other tenants to our landlords and in the courts. That house was recently put to sale and may have been sold or taken off market for winter. I haven’t bothered to look on Zillow.com to see the latest houses to be flipped.

Ω

One of the factors that influences how the mobbing victim is treated is the stigma associated with mental illness. This I have not addressed. The stigma of mental illness affects anyone to whom this defect is attributed, even if the attribution is false. This stigma also attaches to those to whom mental illness is falsely attributed by corrupt neighborhood watch groups, real estate scammers and other criminals trying to cover up their crimes by “smearing” their victims. Especially early on in the harassment into my home those who were attempting to harass me out of it frequently referred to what they were doing as “clearing-by-smearing,” in other words, using defamation to “clear” a legal resident from her home.

When I’ve said that attorneys may condemn their clients out of ignorance, that was an understatement. I left it at that in part because unless there is some federal intercession, I remain reliant on the help of City of Seattle attorneys to finally recognize the long-standing crime that has been committed by the neighborhood watch in my neighborhood and to move to prosecute it so I can at least spend the rest of my life as I haven’t been able to spend the last years. Sadly, I have to be afraid of offending people who have wrongly prosecuted me and whose actions have allowed me to be criminally harassed even inside my own home for years now.

But I’m well past the point of being tired of waiting as the neighbors on three sides of me continue to harass me day-in and day-out, to make good their crime. So I will tell you, your attorney may be more interested in watching out for his own interests than in mustering any real defense of his client. This may be especially true when she is of a gender different than his own, one subject to a long history of discriminatory bias focused on feminine embodiment. A client who is thought to be mentally ill cannot testify on her own behalf—in at least Seattle Municipal Court, the matter is offloaded from the regular court docket to “Mental Health Court.” Moreover, attorneys like the one I was unfortunate enough to retain thinking that our contractual relationship would ensure adequate representation may find it easier to wash their hands of a client who is being stigmatized by challenging her competency after her retainer is spent, and then begging off of the case and leaving her without any representation at all. Attorneys are subject to the same prejudices and biases as the rest of us and, in my limited experience, when you’re being called crazy to cover up a crime, many attorneys have neither the interest in nor the gumption to do what’s required to put the matter straight. This is particularly so in the face of commonly held gender bias that diminishes regard for the perception and judgment of women (not to mention the comparatively dim assessment of other human qualities that women share).

In my experience, most attorneys don’t want anything to do with mental illness, real or not. They don’t want to risk representing someone who might be mentally ill. So if you’re in a bullying situation where people are ganging up on you and actively lying to the police about who is harassing whom, and if you’re being harassed using technology, the chances that you will be believed by an attorney appear to be slim, especially if the attorney lacks interest in learning or took your case under the presumption that you are delusional and won’t press for a trial. Maybe you assured your prospective attorney that you had no history of mental illness and that the claims that you are mentally ill are part of a pattern of harassment and a cover-up, even a case of the “Martha Mitchell effect” (Mobbing and the Martha Mitchell effect: When defamation in the neighborhood violates due process in the courtroom (part 1)). If so, it probably didn’t matter. I’m no attorney but it seems to me that it is not only highly condescending but unethical for an attorney to accept a client with the undisclosed presumption that she is mentally ill and can be made to settle.

In the end, the mobbers’ scam may not only ensure that you are unable to exercise your constitutional rights by testifying for yourself at trial or having access to trial at all. The mobbers’ scam can make it hard to secure representation from an attorney who regards you as a legally competent individual. Being the victim of a crazy crime makes you look crazy.

None of this is rational. When the lies of criminals are not simply believed by police but become pivotal in how charges are brought and in the proceedings of any court, justice loses its meaning. In the absence of consideration of the merits of the case based on investigation and evidence, the result is nothing more than a matter of political power or, perhaps worse, a matter of incompetence or neglect. And when the attorneys who claim to offer defense take the money of the victims of cyberharassment and mobbing while rejecting their word, when they fail to acknowledge that criminals make false accusations against their victims,  or when they don’t consider that the reason their client is being “smeared” as delusional might well be to cover up a crime, the victim is not well represented. The rules that allow attorneys to challenge competency play fast and loose with our constitutional rights. Not only that, they reveal that competence is not simply a legal construction but one that is political and subject to abuse.

Nevertheless, I’ve never been a conspiracy theorist. I must admit I am an idealist who believes in the fundamental goodness of government. I believed that good people would be unwilling to allow another human being to be harassed out of her home, or to be harassed inside her home as I have been—not for one more day. It is because I had this faith in others that I have tried to make sure that good people who pass through my neighborhood know that in this neighborhood, something is terribly wrong. It’s disheartening that it does not seem to have done any good. If we truly live in a civil society, crimes like mobbing, whether they are committed out of hate or out of greed, must be exposed and prosecuted. Because what happened to me is unlikely to have occurred in a vacuum. Down to the sociopathic games it includes and its technical underpinnings, this is probably a known dirty trick or scam. For these reasons, the role of the City of Seattle in allowing this civil and human rights crime to continue, in my home and neighborhood at the hands of a corrupt neighborhood watch group in northeast Seattle, is difficult to take.