Tyranny Fighters: The Julian Heicklen Chronicles

By Garry Reed

Between September, 2009 and June, 2012 Julian Heicklen and his Tyranny Fighters were, confronted, harassed, attacked, arrested, jailed and more by the very law enforcers charged with protecting their rights. Their "crime" was peacefully giving jury rights pamphlets to people on public property. Now their stories of courage and inspiration – reported by Garry Reed as the events unfolded and posted in his Libertarian News Examiner online feature in over 70 news and commentary articles – have been collected in a single volume. All of the original articles are here, amplified with additional introductory notes by the author and by never before published background material from activist emails, reader comments, social media sites and reports from major media news articles. Also included is a special bonus chapter, Julian's Jailhouse Journal, the uncut, uncensored, unedited, deeply disturbing and bitingly witty account of his confinement in New York City's notorious Rikers Island jail.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329141940

Book preview

Tyranny Fighters: The Julian Heicklen Chronicles

Tyranny Fighters

The Julian Heicklen Chronicles

Garry Reed

Including Julian's Jailhouse Journal

Uncut, uncensored, unedited, deeply disturbing and bitingly witty

Note

This is not a biography of Julian Heicklen or anyone else.

It's not a history. It's not a life story. It's not a memoire or a profile.

This is a chronicle of a courageous, determined libertarian rights activist and the people who were most inspired to join him as fellow Tyranny Fighters as reported in my online news and opinion feature The Libertarian News Examiner and based on first hand, news media, live witness, and on professional and citizen journalist accounts.

The story is told chronologically, as it happened, from the time of Julian's first appearance in front of the Manhattan federal courthouse in October 2009 at age 77 until his final act of rebellion in June 2012 at age 80.

With the exception of expunging references to hyperlinks and correcting typos, grammar, punctuation and other minor irregularities all articles have been reprinted exactly as they originally appeared.

If you want to see the original articles, maybe with or without original formatting, graphics, videos and/or slideshow, you can always type the exact headline wrapped in quotes into a search engine and see if www.examiner.com comes up with it. If so, you've found it. If not, sorry.

Tyranny Fighters

The Julian Heicklen Chronicles

Garry Reed

Including Julian's Jailhouse Journal

Uncut, uncensored, unedited, deeply disturbing and bitingly witty

Published by Reed Enterprises

2015

Cover Photo by James Cox, former FIJAFL State Coordinator

The photo of Julian Heicklen holding his Jury Info sign and leaflets is a video capture from a Fully Informed Jury Association of Florida (FIJAFL) video titled Julian Heicklen Talks About Jury Nullification Federal Courthouse West Palm Beach Florida 12-10-10. In the video Julian is being interviewed by James Cox.

Copyright © 2015 by Garry Reed

This copyright will not be enforced by any coercive big government entity. It will be enforced by your conscience. If you republish or repost any of this content anywhere please do so for non-commercial purposes only, include the author's name, the name of this book as its source, and www.freecannon.com. Otherwise contact the author. Thank you.

First Printing: 2015

ISBN 978-1-329-10879-0

Reed Enterprises

Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas

www.freecannon.com.com

Dedication

To Mary – Wife, Lover, Girlfriend, Best Friend, Sweetheart Extraordinaire – the only Lady who ever would have put up with me for this long.

I use these words to dedicate every book I have ever written or ever will write to my wonderful lady. If I write 50 books I will dedicate 50 books to her. That may not be consistent with tradition but I don't care.

Other books by Garry Reed

Selected Salvos from the Loose Cannon Libertarian

Selected Salvos 2 from the Loose Cannon Libertarian

Available in paperback, epub and Kindle at Amazon.com

Contents

Acknowledgementi

Forewordii

Introductioniv

Articles1

Epilogue172

Bonus Chapter: Julian's Jailhouse Journal174

Author Profile192

Acknowledgement

There's no doubt that Julian Heicklen was the inspiration for the Tyranny Fighters. At its height the organization had roughly 1,000 members.

But it really wasn't an organization. In the spirit of voluntaryism Tyranny Fighters described itself as a group that fights outrages perpetrated by all the U.S. and state governments (federal, state, county, and municipality). The group has no fixed rules of policy. There is no constitution, bylaws, or rules. It has no officers, no elections, standing committees, nor specific agenda. There are no dues and no formal memberships. Everyone does his or her own thing for freedom and justice. Tyranny Fighters is a networking operation. The goal is to return the country to constitutional government.

Many people stepped forward to help fight tyranny in many different roles. Some joined Julian on the pavement handing out fliers or acting as witnesses or recording the abuses of mindless law enforcers and receiving abuse from their hands just as Julian often did.

Many others attended rallies and protests, participated in call floods, spoke out on social media and in articles and letters to the editor, donated their legal abilities, their money, and offered gestures of empathy and moral support.

As prominent Tyranny Fighter George Donnelly said in a video interview, If our generation doesn't stand up and make a difference now how much worse is it gong to be for the next one?

Everyone who served in any capacity as a Tyranny Fighter, whether large or small, whether openly or anonymously or only in spirit during the time of Julian's activist pushback against the outrages perpetrated by all the U.S. and state governments can look their children in the eye with pride and say, I did what I could. I pushed back.

Foreword

Dr. Julian Heicklen's efforts to educate people about their jury rights in particular and their First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly in general have been repeatedly lauded by libertarians, Constitutionalists and every true freedom-loving person in America.

But he has also garnered rare plaudits from the mainstream media.

Perhaps the best of these came from this blog by Scott Horton at Harper's Magazine, posted February 28, 2011 and titled The Obstinate Dr. Heicklen.

After describing Julian's battles with the legal establishment and giving an intelligent and accurate summary of jury nullification Horton described Dr. Heicklen this way:

Julian Heicklen's conduct is remarkably like that of the seventeenth century pamphleteers whose obstinate insistence on rights and fair process belongs to the animating background of the American Revolution. Consider the case of John Lilburne, for instance, who was repeatedly arrested and tried for distributing pamphlets articulating a vision of natural rights and whose stout defiance of prosecutors and judges led directly to the notion of the right of confrontation and the exclusion of secret evidence. Consciously or not, Heicklen even embraces their tactics – like Lilburne and early dissenters, he kept his silence in response to questioning from the bench. Heicklen is just the sort of defendant that jurors in days gone by would have recognized as a victim of persecution and would have acquitted. And the federal prosecutors, no doubt aware of this fact, are eager to keep his case before a judge who shares their belief that jurors must be kept ignorant of the existence of the doctrine of jury nullification.

Scott Horton's Harper's article was written in response to a New York Times article Jury Nullification Advocate Is Indicted by Benjamin Weiser, published February 25, 2011.

This is a straight news story without opinionizing but it did include some background on Julian:

He said his activism on nullification dated back to just after he retired in the early 1990s, when he openly smoked marijuana in State College, Pa., to get arrested as a protest against marijuana laws. For this, he was arrested about five times. Mr. Heicklen has said that he otherwise does not smoke marijuana.

Around the same time, he learned about a group called the Fully Informed Jury Association, which urges jurors to nullify laws with which they disagree. Mr. Heicklen, of Teaneck, N.J., said he distributed the group's materials as well as his own.

Mr. Heicklen, a Cornell graduate, taught for more than 20 years at Penn State, where he was a faculty member known for his innovative methods, former colleagues said.

Mr. Heicklen would bring Penn State dancers, actors and cheerleaders into one course to illustrate molecular vibration and to celebrate scientific discovery. People talked about this course for years, Robert Bernheim, a retired professor, recalled.

Barbara J. Garrison, who heads the Penn State chemistry department, called Mr. Heicklen an enormously creative scientist who really liked to think outside the box and sometimes that meant that he ran counter to the establishment.

About his earlier marijuana arrests, Ms. Garrison said, He had his own way of doing it, but he was really fighting for people who were in jail that he didn't think belonged in jail.

A New York Post article published on December 30, 2010 wasn't as supportive. After identifying Julian as a pro-pot libertarian activist which had nothing to do with his jury rights activism the first sentence of writer Bruce Golding's article following the headline Libertarian activist defies judge's order was What was he smoking when he wrote this? implying that Julian was just a pothead.

Still, in a long commentary on jury nullification in The Daily Beast (Can Juries Ignore 'Immoral' Laws by Nullifying Them? – December 29, 2011) Mansfield Frazier noted Heicklen's arrest has garnered national attention and is sparking a debate the feds probably are wishing would not take place.

And Julian certainly agreed. The Economist article Free speech and jury nullification by J.F. dated November 30, 2011 first described how The State had used an undercover agent posing as a juror in an attempt to entrap Julian and then gave Julian the last word:

Had prosecutors ignored Mr. Heicklen he would likely have been just one more crank with a cause. Instead he is starting to look like a hero. As Mr. Heicklen noted earlier this year, when it comes to jury nullification – a potentially awesome power about which most people know nothing – bad publicity is better than no publicity.

(All quotes used under the Fair Use Doctrine.)

Introduction

Even as my Libertarian News Examiner column went live on October 16, 2009 with my first news item I was not only trawling online for as many readers as I could reach but also for good libertarian news sources.

On October 21, 2009 Len Flynn, then newsletter editor at the New Jersey Libertarian Party, alerted me to one of their party activists who had gone online in the sense of putting his convictions and his body on the line for free speech rights.

His name was Dr. Julian Heicklen and he had brazenly walked into the heart of the Homeland Security beast.

I launched into research mode, doing due diligence for credibility, corroboration, background, bio, photos, videos, witnesses and then contacted Julian himself who added me to his email list for his first of many-to-come Progress Reports.

By the time I was ready to write my first Julian Heicklen article a second Progress Report arrived in my inbox. Julian's second trip to NYC's federal courthouse became my 12th Libertarian News Examiner article overall and the first of many more about Julian to come.

By their very nature newspaper-style reports like these Julian Heicklen articles carry repetitive information. Since days or weeks – as well as many other articles on many other subjects – may pass between posting articles about Julian, readers need to be reminded of context and new readers coming online need to be introduced to both context and background.

Because of this I won't offer details of Julian's life and times here. You'll discover them as you read, just as I discovered them as I researched and wrote more and more about this remarkable man.

Every one of my original Examiner articles was accompanied by a minimum of one photo. Whenever possible I included a slideshow of photos or embedded a video or both. I also included links in the text to pertinent references throughout my articles.

Being a volatile medium there's no telling how many of these online articles or links remain intact. Many of the earlier articles have already suffered some formatting contortions, some reference URLs have become linked to black holes and most embedded videos have simply disappeared.

Of necessity, in transitioning from online to paper and ePub formats, all links and references to links have been removed. But for those who may care to dig deeper into all of this, and maybe learn a little more about Julian, his closest supporters and fellow victims, and the life and times of these Tyranny Fighters it is still possible to track down most of my articles online simply by typing the exact headline into a browser.

Good luck with that.

1

It begins...

On Sunday, September 20, 2009, 1:57 PM, Ron Moore posted this deceptively benign message on the Manhattan Libertarian Party's Meetup page along with the following comment:

Jury Nullification is an interesting important topic. The MLP has some history here. I'm glad to see someone active on this.

Below is the text of Julian's message about his intention to distribute pamphlets for the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA).

FW: Jury Nullification

New York Libertarian Party Meetup Group

September 20, 2009

Hi All:

I am Julian Heicklen, a longtime civil rights activist with ACLU, the Libertarian Party, FIJA, and other organizations.

Starting on October 19, 2009, on every Monday from 11:45 AM until 1:15 PM, I will distribute the American Jury Institute document A Primer for Prospective Jurors, along with the handout in bold type below, in front of the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York at the Courthouse at 500 Pearl Street in Manhattan, NY. I have chosen Mondays, because that is the day on which jury selection occurs in the District Court.

I am prepared to do this alone. However it would be helpful if others would join me. The more people we have the more impact will be made. We could have a simultaneous demonstration with signs and could extend the activity to the Criminal Court of Manhattan located nearby.

One person is a nut. Ten people is an organization. One hundred people is a movement. One thousand people is an army that cannot be ignored. Mike Benoit is organizing a similar event in the San Diego, CA area.

If you wish to find out more about me, just type my name into Google. You will get about 14,000 hits. The first or second hit will be to my web page. If you go to my web page and scroll down, you will find out about my many activities over the last 60 years.

Yours in freedom—Julian

THE JUDGE WILL INSTRUCT THE JURY THAT IT MUST UPHOLD THE LAW AS HE GIVES