This is one page of an email exchange between my former attorney William Johnson and Assistant Prosecutor Joseph Platania. There are a number of pages with the continued contact between the two, I am only posting this one at the moment since its the important message. This email is evidence of a Federal crime committed by two Charlottesville prosecutors. Essentially the prosecutors were stating that if I attempted to challenge the felony charge in court with a jury trial (my civil right as an American citizen) that they will file a felony count for each email message sent to Michelle Manweiler (the "victim", and an attorney) as punishment for exercising my right to trial.
Under the two Federal statutes that I listed in the last post, this could potentially land both prosecutors in prison for 10 years. In addition, since I can prove that Ms. Manweiler took a March 12th email and essentially split it up by putting April and May dates on page 2 and 3 of this email, this threat is made even more serious. They would have essentially given me two felony counts because they did not realize that Ms. Manweiler split up the email messages.
Ms. Manweiler likely committed this criminal act not only to increase the level of law enforcement response by making it look like more emails were sent than what was actually received by her, but by claiming the emails were sent in April and May instead of in March she also wanted to cover up how long she waited before going to police in June.
Its hard to claim that you took an email as a death threat and was in fear of your life, if you received this threat in March and didn't go to police until June. I can also prove that Ms. Manweiler created a false account in my name and was forwarding emails back and forth between her profile and the fake one, thus altering their contents. I can prove all this using copies of her emails provide to my attorney by the prosecution (though they only provided four emails and deliberately hid the rest in violation of an order of discovery).
The email reads as follows:
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Bill:
Since Mr. <Redacted> did not contest probable cause today, I plan on going forward on just the 1 felony charge. If that charge is contested in Circuit Court, I will review all e-mails with Det. Rudman and explore additional felony charges relating to written threats. I also will have the 2 misdemeanors re-filed. My opinion (and that of the victim) is that Mr. <Redacted> needs to be a felony so that he may never again possess a firearm. He also needs to leave the victim alone and never contact her again. That being said, I also feel that Mr. <Redacted> is in need of mental health treatment. I would like to set this case as soon as possible for a guilty plea to the one charge and get a quick sentencing date with a PSI report. Right now, I am leaning towards a recommendation of time served at the sentencing with strict terms and conditions of probation.
You have been an excellent advocate for Mr. <Redacted> thus far, and I anticipate we will speak soon about a fair resolution of these matters.
Best,
Joe Platania
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I blocked out the email addresses to prevent someone from messing with those addresses.
Platania makes the statement that they are making me a felon to keep me from owning a gun. Not only does he admit in court that I never threatened the victim with a gun, but you don't give someone a felony for that. In fact there was the option to have me sign over my right to own a gun in exchange for a misdemeanor - this was refused by the Manweilers. As one lawyer said to me "To give someone a felony to keep them from owning a gun is like going deer hunting with a grenade launcher, you will do far more damage than you intend".
Not to mention that I had no criminal record and that this charge is supposed to be a misdemeanor not a felony. The law enforcement did this because Ms. Manweiler has a rich father and was a UVA student. The fact is that there was never any guns involved in this case and Ms. Manweiler and I haven't been around each other since we graduated high school in 1999 (the preliminary hearing was the first time and she even admits this in her victim impact statement, which I will be publishing soon).
In addition, the police department lied to the public and tried to make this situation look like something it never was in the first place. I was arrested in Hampton right down the road from my apartment, where I was returning to after work. Not only do I have witnesses and the police report to back it up, but my mother has even spoken with the Hampton police officer who arrested me. After having me placed in the Hampton lockup, Detective Rudman (the investigating officer) and his partner left for C-ville. The plan was to have the Sheriffs department drive me to the bond hearing the next morning.
I was later awakened that evening in the lockup where I had fallen asleep in my cell, after being so exhausted from the huge amount of stress and fear I had felt since hearing that the police were looking for me, only to find out that Rudman was halfway up to C-ville when his supervisor called him up and told him to turn around and bring me to town himself. I arrived for the first time in C-ville around midnight/1 Am. The next day, the Charlottesvile police told the news media that I had been arrested in C-ville trying to confront Ms. Manweiler over a protective order she had taken out against me (an emergency PO that I didn't even know existed until Det. Rudman told me about it after my arrest in Hampton).
Hauling me up to C-ville under the cover of night and lying to the media was a deliberately attempt on the part of the police to make my case seem more threatening. The fact is I had never been to C-ville and I never bothered trying to even locate Ms. Manweiler there because I couldn't care less about where she lived there. This situation between us had been going on for seven months. I could have found her address in less than a week (still could if I cared), obviously I didn't care if I didn't try it in seven months.
The police report backs up the fact I was arrested in Hampton near my apartment, and I have more than enough evidence and witnesses to back it up. Ms. Manweiler even admits I didn't know her location in C-ville in her victim impact statement - though this is in contradiction to what she said at the protective order hearings, which was recorded on one of the protective order sheets and written down on my lawyer's personal notes (which I have copies) that he took at the protective order hearing.
My belief is that Ms. Manweiler knowingly allowed a fellow American citizen to be threatened out of their constitutional rights and into a felony that she tampered with the evidence to cause. Ms. Manweiler can never say later that she regretted her actions - I've been informed that all this time, she could have had me pardoned to give me back my life. She has not done this, and as a lawyer she knew she had this option. She could have given me my life back at any time, but she has refused. In addition members of law enforcement, who believed her and wanted to protect her, could lose their careers.
Copied from a more current post:
As promised, I've also included the prosecutor's email with his threat in writing. This was a straight up violation of my civil right to a fair trial - as a right isn't a right if I can be threatened by a government official with retaliation when lawfully exercising it. Platania's threat here can be better explained in non-legal speak as a simple analogy. Imagine I'm going to a polling place to vote, and Mr. Platania approaches me with baseball bat in hand. He informs me that if I attempt to exercise my right to vote, he'll crack open my head with the bat afterwards in retaliation. But yet it's supposedly not a violation of my right to vote, because I can still go inside the polling place to vote - I just have to accept I'm getting my head smashed in with a bat for doing so. That certainly sounds like being denied a civil right to anyone that isn't bootlicking trash or huffing paint as a hobby. Prosecutors do this every single day to people and get away with it - but getting away with it doesn't make it right.
A point of comedy is Platania saying my lawyer was an excellent advocate. You mean the guy who waited until the day before a hearing to look at evidence when he had a month, thus (by his own admission) being completely unprepared for the hearing? The guy who said the evidence was sufficient when he had never even seen it? The man who was too lazy to even show up to some hearings and was even screening calls to avoid talking to his client? Who couldn't stop gushing about Michelle Dickerman to my mother, made inappropriate comments about Dickerman, and even had locker room talks with the prosecutor over the phone about Michelle Dickerman? The guy who was ogling my sisters (one a minor at the time) as he spoke to my mother about the case? The guy who verbally abused both my mother and me? The guy Platania knew full well was working with the prosecution against his own client? The guy who allowed his client to be railroaded into a false felony charge, when he later even admitted after the sentencing hearing (on tape) that he knew his client never had any intentions to do the very thing the charge was based upon? That guy totally sounds like an excellent advocate, and not some absolute shitbag that essentially stole $15,000 that he demanded up front to take advantage of my family's desperation and then didn't even do the job he was hired to do.