New Year, Old Injustice

New Year, Old Injustice

by Sandy Kile (Palisade, Minnesota)

Imagine you're parched, but the very water you take into your mouth causes blisters because you are chemically sensitive to fluoridated water, the only water you have. This is happening in a California prison to a converted commandment-keeping (imagine trying to keep the Sabbath in prison) inmate by the name of P.F. Lazor who has served 21 years for a crime he didn't commit.

His story reads like a movie script, beginning when John Alfred, who had attacked him twice before, and for whom Lazor had repeatedly requested police protection, broke into Lazor's bedroom, swinging a meat cleaver.

Lazor shot him in self-defense, and although, he called police and ambulance, Alfred died later. Despite having no criminal record, and doing everything he could for his attacker, Lazor was arrested, and later charged with murder. Lazor's lawyer was either incompetent, corrupt, or both and only briefly mentioned self-defense as an option to a second degree murder conviction with a possible life sentence! No character witnesses were allowed. In addition, thirty-five pieces of evidence had either been altered, destroyed, or hidden. The meat cleaver was kept from trial, returned to the attacker's family; the "body of [the] attacker with critical bullet wound evidence [was] deliberately destroyed prematurely by cremation, by prosecution directive," and "autopsy photos, which indicated the bullet entered the attacker's front, not back (as the prosecutor alleged), were concealed for 16 years," states Lazor.

The coroner has been found recently to have falsified other autopsy reports and committed perjury to cover it up. With this new information, doors may possibly be opening to grant Lazor an appeal for a new trial. Lazor believes he knows the right legal approach and has a friend who will help pay the attorney's fees, but a new trial is easier said than done. "It is a rare attorney who will stand up for his client, and risk possible disbarment for going against the decisions of judges and other attorneys," states "Servants' News" (http://www.servantsnews.com/sn0209/local0209.htm) writer Norman Edwards.

"Finding an attorney who will take a difficult case and one who will do everything he can to win it are two completely different matters. This is especially true in criminal cases where there is no money to divide if the case is won," writes "The Journal" (http://www.thejournal.org/).

So while Lazor suffers, forced to drink water that causes boils, the criminal INjustice system sleeps. Reminds you that "No one calls for justice, Nor does any plead for truth. They trust in empty words and speak lies; they conceive evil and bring forth iniquity," (Isaiah 59:4).

It may be a new year, but P.F. Lazor needs "a Christian lawyer for post-conviction (habeas corpus) work." Have any leads? Anyone wishing to help can contact: Gayle Travis, 78 Lone Pine Court, San Ramon, CA, 94583, ph. 925-277-9665.

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Appeared in slightly different form in the "Aitkin (MN) Independent Age,"

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