H. Keith Henson
176 Henry St. #45
Brantford, ON N3S 5C8 Canada
519-770-0646
416-529-2789 (cell)
hkhenson@rogers.com

In Pro Per

RIVERSIDE SUPERIOUR COURT
APPEALS DIVISION

HILARY DEZOTELL, KEN HODEN, and BRUCE WAGONER
Plaintiff/Respondent, vsKEITH HENSON,
Defendant/Appellant )))))))))) Appellate No. 00338Case No.
HEC009673

REPLY TO MOTION TO DISMISS DEFENDANT H. KEITH HENSON'S NOTICE OF
APPEAL BASED ON THE DISENTITLEMENT DOCTRINE

DECLARATION OF H. KEITH HENSON

Late last week I finally reached one of the Appeal Division clerks. I now understand that the motion directed to the trial court was forwarded to the Appeal Division and that (unlike in the trial court) I am permitted to respond pro se. (My lawyer is winding up her practice due to a life threatening illness and could not help.) I have included Attachment A, a draft for my refugee hearing here in Canada for background to the court. This document is mostly links to sites on the World Wide Web. If the court wishes to explore the links, they will be available through http://www.operatingthetan.com/IandR.html or I can supply them on a diskette.

Plaintiff states:

"Plaintiffs move to dismiss Defendants' Notice of Appeal because California case law is clear that Henson, a fugitive from justice, has no right whatsoever to seek "assistance of a court in hearing his demands while he stands in an attitude of contempt to legal orders and processes of the courts of his state." Estate of Scott (1957) 150 Cal.App.2d 590, 310 P.2d 46."

In fact, there is precedent for courts to hear civil matters of people who are fugitives physically beyond the reach of other courts: Doe v. Superior Court , 222 Cal.App.3d 1406 [No. B048466. Second Dist., Div. One. Aug. 20, 1990.] JANE DOE, Petitioner, v. THE SUPERIOR COURT OF LOS ANGELES COUNTY, Respondent; ROMAN POLANSKI, Real Party in Interest.

"May a fugitive from justice appear through counsel when sued in a civil action based on conduct for which he was convicted in a criminal prosecution? We conclude that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution fn. 1 compels an [222 Cal.App.3d 1408] affirmative response to this question and therefore deny Jane Doe's petition for a peremptory writ of mandate."

There is also the U.S. Supreme Court decision DEGEN v. UNITED STATES, (1996) which is worth quoting at length:

"Petitioner Degen is outside the United States and cannot be extradited to face federal drug charges. When he filed an answer in a related civil action, contesting the Government's attempt to forfeit properties allegedly purchased with proceeds from his drug dealings, the District Court struck his claims and entered summary judgment against him, holding that he was not entitled to be heard in the forfeiture action because he remained outside the country, unamenable to criminal prosecution. The court's final order vested title to the properties in the United States, and the Court of Appeals affirmed.

Held:

A district court may not strike a claimant's filings in a forfeiture suit and grant summary judgment against him for failing to appear in a related criminal prosecution. Pp. 2-8.

(a) The Government contends that the District Court's inherent powers authorized it to strike Degen's claims under what has been labeled the "fugitive disentitlement doctrine." Principles of deference counsel restraint in resorting to the courts' inherent authority to protect their proceedings and judgments in the course of discharging their traditional responsibilities, see, e.g., Chambers v. NASCO, Inc., 501 U.S. 32, 44, and require its use to be a reasonable response to the problems and needs provoking it, Ortega-Rodriguez v. United States, 507 U.S. 234, 244. Pp. 3-5.

(b) No necessity justifies disentitlement here. Since the court's jurisdiction over the property is secure despite Degen's absence, there is no risk of delay or frustration in determining the merits of the Government's forfeiture claims or in enforcing the resulting judgment. The court has alternatives, other than the harsh sanction of disentitlement, to keep Degen from using liberal civil discovery rules to gain an improper advantage in the criminal prosecution, where discovery is more limited. Disentitlement also is too arbitrary a means of redressing the indignity visited upon the court by Degen's absence from the criminal proceedings and deterring flight from criminal prosecution by Degen and others. A court's dignity derives from the respect accorded its judgments. That respect is eroded, not enhanced, by excessive recourse to rules foreclosing consideration of claims on the merits."

Plaintiff states:

"On April 26, 2001, Defendant was convicted by a jury for violating California Penal Code § 422.6, for intimidating, threatening, and oppressing individuals on the basis of their religious beliefs."

Plaintiff neglects to add that the jury could not agree on the other two charges, 422 and 664/422 indicating that maters were not so determined in the criminal case that summary judgment was appropriate. They also left out the fact that 422.6 is a misdemeanor. Following public threats (on alt.religion.scientology) of death or injury in jail, defendant did remain in Canada after going there to picket. Given the history of Scientology's influence in the criminal case, which is in the previous case records of the appeal court, defendant was less than confident that he would emerge alive and uninjured from the Riverside jail.

Because this appeal depends on a case where appeal was not allowed, the application of the law to the original criminal case should at least be considered. I was convicted after a trial in which I was permitted no witnesses and no defense of 422.6 (a). (Section 422.6 (b) refers to property damage, which nobody alleged at any time.) Section 422.6 (c) states in part:

"However, no person shall be convicted of violating subdivision (a) based upon speech alone, except upon a showing that the speech itself threatened violence against a specific person or group of persons and that the defendant had the apparent ability to carry out the threat."

Picketing is considered speech protected by the US First Amendment, as is writing. I was arrested while picketing (my only arrest ever were while picketing the Church of Scientology), and the only real objection to my behavior, as was made clear to my wife by pickets at our home, was to my picketing and other speech and writing. Throughout my prosecution and conviction, pressure was brought to bear on my wife and me to stop picketing and writing. My only threats involved threats to picket, which, as my wife was told with regard to the "Church's" threats to picket, are not considered true threats within the meaning of the law. Despite this fact, the main accusation of the prosecution involved my jocular follow up to a posting about a joke ballistic ("Tom Cruise") missile that involved an estimate of error in trajectory. (As an engineer, I pointed that that "modern weapons are more accurate.") It boggles the imagination to consider my two-line comment a threat or that an individual of modest means "had the apparent ability to carry out" a "threat" requiring huge and costly strategic weapons controlled by a handful of national governments. What's more, I did not know by sight or any other way any of the individuals who were pressured into accusing me, until my trial. (Ken Hoden who I did know was added on the eve of trial.)

Early in the movie "Judgement at Nuremberg" (a dramatization of the third of the thirteen Nuremberg trials), Dr. Karl Wieck, Former Minister of Justice, was questioned by the prosecutor on the changes that came about in German courts (judges were on trial) as a result of National Socialism's coming to power. His reply:

"Judges became subject to something outside of objective justice."

And a bit later:

"The right to appeal was eliminated."

There is almost universal belief that my prosecution in Hemet was corrupted by the Scientology cult's extra-legal influence. This belief was partly fueled by former high-ranking members who were familiar with internal policies to influence the courts and the administration of justice. The court may consult hundreds of news stories in newspapers and on the Internet to verify that this perception is prevalent.

I hope the court considers in this in light of the last two sentences of the Supreme Court Degen decision quoted above.

To the extent that facts are stated in this reply, I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of California that the foregoing is true and correct, and that this declaration was executed on January 21, 2003 in Brantford, Ontario, Canada.

Respectfully submitted,

H. Keith Henson, pro se Dated January 21, 2003

Attachment A

Immigration and Refugee Board.

Background and timelines for H. Keith Henson

My late father, Lt. Col. Howard W. Henson, was in the US Army (G2 and Signal Corp). As a child our family moved as he was reassigned: New Jersey, Hawaii, Washington, DC, Japan, Washington again, and Arizona. I graduated from Prescott High School (Arizona) in 1960, two years after my father retired and the family moved there.

In 1969 I graduated from the University of Arizona (Tucson) with a BS in electrical engineering. While going to school I worked for a geophysics company doing fieldwork (magnetic, gravity, and induced polarization surveys). I also did instrument design and programming. After graduation I worked about two years for Burr-Brown Research (now part of Texas Instruments) as a design engineer. I then started a company, Analog Precision, Inc. that I sold in 1985. Since that time I have been a consultant for a variety of hardware and software companies.

I have been involved in grassroots public policy matters since I was one of the founders of the L5 Society in 1975. (L5 is one of the locations in space for the space colonies proposed by the late Princeton Professor Gerard K. O'Neill.) Jointly with either my wife at the time (Carolyn Meinel) or Eric Drexler of nanotechnology fame I wrote science or engineering papers for the Space Manufacturing Conferences held in 1975, 1977 and 1979.

"The L5 Society, which built a very active local chapter base, pushed the O'Neill space colony concepts for many years. The Society's greatest accomplishment, in retrospect, was in arousing enough opposition to stop the approval of the Moon Treaty by the US Congress. The treaty would have put a severe restraint on space development since it would set the precedent of preventing private ownership of space resources." [link]

I testified with L5's lobbyist/lawyer Leigh Ratiner before the US Congress opposing the Moon Treaty in 1980. In a 1982 article, Star Laws in Reason Magazine, Arel Lucas (my wife) and I contrasted the Moon Treaty's treatment of human rights with those in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).

My interest in space colonies as a "social movement" led me into memetics, the study of the replicating information patterns in human culture that lie behind social movements, religions, cults, fads and the like. Analog Magazine published my article "Memetics and the Modular Mind" in 1987. A similar article was "Memes, MetaMemes and Politics." (Or search Google)

From about 1989 on I was deeply concerned with freedom of speech and privacy issues on the growing Internet. There are about 100 postings I made during this time on the Usenet news groups misc.legal and comp.org.eff.talk. (EFF is the Electronic Frontier Foundation)

In January 1995, Scientology made their first attempt to destroy critical opposition on the Internet. This got my attention and over the next year I followed the news group they had targeted for destruction, alt.religion.scientology. On December 5, 1995 Lisa McPherson died as a result of medical malpractice at the hands of Scientology in Clearwater, Florida.

Scientology sued Grady Ward, a person I knew through the Internet, for copyright violation in March of 1996. Two weeks later, in response to an open letter to Judge Whyte questioning the wisdom of forbidding quoting NOTs 34, clearly a criminal instruction manual on the illegal practice of medicine, Scientology sued me for copyright violation.

In late 1997 and early 1998 Scientology attacked me in three civil cases and two trumped-up criminal cases. The criminal cases stemmed from a civil case (Barton) of picketing Scientology in Los Angeles. One of the civil cases was for picketing near Hemet, California, the other was to prevent me from being in Clearwater in Dec. 1997 for the Lisa McPherson picket and memorial. Costs for defending these cases exceeded $35,000 and exhausted my resources to defend the copyright case before Judge Whyte. After I lost (and was subject to $175,000 in damages, legal costs and fees) a Wall Street Journal editorial said this:

"Judge Whyte, in short, has turned copyright law on its head. The purpose of the law is to encourage free speech, giving authors and artists comfort in knowing that others cannot misappropriate their works for their own profit. The essence of the matter before him, as anyone not blinded by a Pecksniffian literalness can see, is that the plaintiffs are using the law to muzzle their critics. In addition, the judge is in the process of morphing an already dubious tort case into a criminal matter through the contempt power--a threat to freedom of speech well recognized in the First Amendment community."

I was forced to declare bankruptcy, which Scientology then used to subject me my wife, my daughter, my consulting clients and various other people such as Bob Minton to numerous debtor's examinations over the next several years.

Scientology agents invaded MediaGate where I was consulting in late 1998 or 1999 and distributed flyers attacking my character to the startled secretaries. They subjected three of my consulting clients, Kubik, MediaGate, and Microtech, to expensive depositions. Their agents plastered my neighbourhood with defamatory posters (I have about a dozen different examples), picketed my house, and had private investigators follow me when I was looking for more work. I believe they interfered with at least one prospective client. In one abusive deposition, their lawyer Samuel Rosen proposed to depose representatives of a company with whom I had only interviewed for a job.

On the last day of 1998 I filed a suit against the IRS for the illegal tax deal they gave Scientology arguing that the IRS cannot overrule Congress and the Supreme Court. The suit was dismissed for "lack of standing" a few months later and the appeal was unsuccessful. (In the Sklar appeal ruling, dated January 29, 2002 the same Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had a different opinion about Scientology's special tax status.

As Judge Silverman wrote in concurring with the opinion:

"[24] Accordingly, under both the tax code and Supreme Court precedent, the Sklars are not entitled to the charitable deduction they claimed. The Church of Scientology's closing agreement is irrelevant, not because the Sklars are not "similarly situated" to Scientologists, but because the closing agreement does not enter into the equation by which the deductibility of the Sklars' payments is determined. An IRS closing agreement cannot overrule Congress and the Supreme Court.

"[25] If the IRS does, in fact, give preferential treatment to members of the Church of Scientology -- allowing them a special right to claim deductions that are contrary to law and rightly disallowed to everybody else -- then the proper course of action is a lawsuit to put a stop to that policy.

The remedy is not to require the IRS to let others claim the improper deduction, too."

However, the suit Judge Silverman wanted to see has not been filed to the best of my knowledge.

Also, for 11 months starting in late 1998, Scientology perpetrated a denial of service (DOS) budgeted for at least half a million dollars (US) to inject forged postings of nonsense into the alt.religion.scientology news group in an attempt to drown out free speech. I was a minor player in the investigation--the fruits of which were eventually presented to the FBI. The FBI declined to investigate further, being forbidden to investigate organizations claiming to be religions before 9/11. Tory Bazazian (who subsequently left Scientology and become a major critic) was a participant-witness in the high budget DOS exercise. She has described her part in the operation, which was to obtain the accounts that were used to overload the new group with some 4 million forged postings.

On May 20, 2000, I read about an "accident" in which a 16-year-old, Ashlee Shaner, had been killed in a collision with construction machinery that was being used on the Scientology headquarters called "Gold Base" near Hemet, California. I later carefully read the accident report, which was in near perfect accord with my initial estimate of the cause. According to the Highway Patrol report, a paving crew had been "asked" by Scientology agents to work late the night before the all-important weekly "stats" ("production" statistics) are due. The machinery was being moved after dark across Gilman Springs Road with no precautions such as flagmen or flares to protect motorists.

I protested her death with a picket sign at this same paramilitary compound on May 26 and May 30 of 2000. There was a newspaper story about my picket. In between I attended (as a director) the annual conference and board meetings in Tucson put on by the National Space Society. (The L5 Society had merged with VonBraun's National Space Institute to form the NSS in 1987.) I was in a car, and I believe (from what happened) that Scientology private investigators followed me the 425 miles to Tucson and back.

There was fairly steady picketing from May through August of 2000 by Bruce and Kathy Pettycrew, Justin (no last name), Fred and David Rice, Barbara Graham, Brent Stone and me. I was not there on June 25 when a *second* preventable death occurred. This time Stacy Moxon Meyer, daughter of in house lawyer Kendrick Moxon, was electrocuted and burned beyond recognition. She most likely slipped and fell into the wires from a poorly placed ladder while entering a "hot" transformer vault (in the presence of the chief electrician) to inspect for rodents. (A ground squirrel had caused a power outage 3 weeks previously.) Scientology escaped taking responsibility for her death by blaming the victim for entering the transformer vault on her own initiative at the start of the working hours for that Sunday.

There is a detailed timeline from before the first picket to mid September. It is backed up by all the postings (over 500 pages) I made from the death of Ashlee Shaner to shortly after I was indicted in mid September.

This is a draft account of high questionable actions of the DA in the service of Scientology.

Draft in progress, not completed

PROOF OF SERVICE
STATE OF CALIFORNIA ss:
COUNTY OF RIVERSIDE

On January 21, 2003, I served the foregoing documents described as

REPLY TO MOTION TO DISMISS DEFENDANT H. KEITH HENSON'S NOTICE OF APPEAL BASED ON THE DISENTITLEMENT DOCTRINE

DECLARATION OF H. KEITH HENSON

on all parties in this action. (x) by Mail I placed the above referenced document in an envelope first class postage prepaid in the Canadian Mail addressed as follows:

DAVIS & WOJCIK A PROFESSIONAL LAW CORPORATION
ROBERT A. DAVIS, JR.
JOSEPH M. WOJCIK
1105 E. Florida Ave.
Hemet, CA 92542

LAW OFFICES OF ELLIOT J. ABELSON
ELLIOT J. ABELSON
8491 West Sunset Blvd., Suite 1100
Los Angeles, CA 90069-1911

Executed January 21, 2003 at Brantford Ontario.

The document was also posted on the news group alt.religion.scientology which is monitored full time by Scientology for their lawyers. I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the State of California that the above is true and correct.

H. Keith Henson
Declarant