My wee opening won't escape before I flee it.



as has been so aptly
demonstrated by the Ed Cummings case, if they choose to treat the suspect
as a terrorist and lock him/her up for six months with no bail, they won't
have much of a problem finding a judge willing to do this.

Sentencing took place on October 10 and Ed Cummings was sentenced to
seven months in federal prison. The seven month period ended 4 days later.

Okay, so he pled guilty to having a red box, and was sentenced to time served.

Bad enough that any of that happened in the first place.

Now comes the extra vile persecution part...

Three months later, Cummings was in court on violation of probation charges,
because of his guilty plea on the red box.

When Cummings was originally put on probation years ago, the probation
officer told him he thought the whole thing was a big waste of time.
The only thing he was accused of, after all, was taking batteries out
of a tone dialer that a cop was questioning him about. And the really
ironic part was that Cummings wasn't even the person who took the
batteries out - it was one of his friends. But he was not about to turn
a friend in for something so absurd. After all, this was a very minor
thing - he paid a fine of nearly $3,000 and was put on probation and that
was it.

When the Secret Service threw Cummings in prison for possession of a red
box in early 1995, they knew he could be screwed again when he finally
got out since being arrested is a probation violation.

And Special Agent Thomas Varney spent a great deal of effort to see that
this is exactly what happened. He made multiple trips to Easton and
convinced the local authorities to lock Cummings up as if he were the
most sadistic of killers.

On Friday, Cummings' probation officer did an aboutface and told the
court that he thought Cummings represented a very great dan


.