Lockport Mayor Michael Tucker (L) and his appointee, Judge Thomas DiMillo.

Last week, Lockport business owner Patrick McFall was released from jail after being sentenced to seven months incarceration for a building code violation.

McFall’s attorney successfully argued that Judge Thomas DiMillo violated his client’s constitutional rights by not offering him the option of a jury trial.

This turn of events is possibly due in part to coverage by the Niagara Falls Reporter of the case of another Lockport businessman, Dave Mongielo, who, deprived of a jury trial, was sentenced by a conflicted judge to 15 days in jail for violating a sign ordinance. The Reporter crusaded for his right to a trial by jury.

Both Lockport cases appear to be examples of political retribution and stress the importance of jury nullification.

Jury nullification is a doctrine integral to the Constitution and dates back to Magna Carta. It occurs whenever juries exercise their power to acquit defendants technically guilty of violating a law but not deserving of criminal punishment. It takes place whenever members of a jury disregard the evidence presented and/or the instructions of the judge in order to reach a verdict based on their own conscience.

Since no one can punish a jury for its verdict, a jury has the power to acquit whenever they choose. Their verdict is final. Juries always have the power to veto any law - if they believe the law is unjust or the punishment exceeds the so-called crime. The jury was devised for this sole reason – as a checks and balance to oppressive government.

In these days, apathetic Americans have all but forgotten the history, the purpose, the power and the right of the jury. Our government, increasingly authoritarian, routinely dispenses of jury trials as if they are not guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

The focus of McFall’s case was a building he owned at 316 Willow St. that collapsed. Clean-up was hampered because the property had a small amount of asbestos, McFall could have legally cleaned up himself for next to nothing. Instead a malicious political vendetta allowed unprecedented twisted technicalities in the zoning law to require him to spend $58,000 to clean it up through an environmental company, money he says he didn’t have.

After finding McFall guilty of not cleaning up his property, Judge DiMillo tipped his hand by informing the court he couldn’t pronounce sentence because he wasn’t sure what would be an appropriate punishment.

“I don’t know where I’m going to go (for sentencing advice on this unprecedented case), and I mean that,” said DiMillo.
McFall’s supporters believe they know where DiMillo went for advice.

McFall has been engaged in an ongoing feud with Lockport Mayor Michael Tucker. Supporters of McFall accused Mayor Tucker of pulling strings that landed McFall in jail.

City Attorney John Ottaviano called the charge “absurd,"' adding it would be ridiculous to think a judge would ask a mayor, or any other city official for that matter, what to do.

Is it absurd? Judge DiMillo was appointed in 2005 by Mayor Tucker.

DiMillo owes Tucker for his job. McFall is the political enemy of Tucker.

Are you beginning to get the picture why the founding fathers required trial by jury and put it in the Bill of Rights?
I know first hand what the mere possibility of a jury trial can do to temper malicious prosecutions.

While serving as a member of Lewiston-Porter’s Board of Education, I was accused by a militant member of that district’s teachers union of harassing his family. My accuser, Richard Sweeney, lived eight houses down the road and we drove past each other’s homes every day.

When I voted not to approve Sweeney for lucrative coaching appointments, he and his wife went to a friend at the New York State Police telling him I was driving past their house in a harassing manner. I was arrested at my home and charged with stalking and harassment. The arresting officer was the husband of Lew-Port’s Middle School PTA president where Sweeney teaches.

Justice Hugh Gee signed the arrest warrant then ordered me to take an alternate route to avoid the Sweeneys - a route that forced me to drive past the trooper’s house. The trooper then charged me with stalking him in my car, a charge that was late proven to be completely fictitious.

For the few years, however, the courtrooms of four local jurisdictions became my home away from home as I refused to knuckle under and fought the union and its legion of supporters in government positions.

They used the color of law to haul me off to Niagara County jail on more than one occasion. The Lewiston Justices who gave their stamp of approval for three arrests and 20 bogus vehicle and traffic tickets, I mean absolutely false and lying charges, were Justices Gee and Tom Sheeran, who are, in my opinion, 100 percent politically subservient to the Niagara County political machine and had to support clear injustices perpetrated against me to be permitted to remain on the bench.

It was the Niagara Falls Reporter who turned the tide when reviewing police reports discovered that the so-called vehicle I allegedly used to stalk a state trooper, described in detail down to a faulty muffler in a sworn police statement, had been sold eight months earlier, showing the trooper had been untruthful or stupidly mistaken.

The day after the Reporter article broke, the District Attorney, who for months had been offering my lawyer sentences that would land me in jail, offered me a plea deal - a 24-hour ACD, if I admitted I was guilty. I refused.

All charges were eventually dismissed when I refused all “deals” and demanded a jury trial. It was the “threat” of a jury, 12 independent citizens who were going to hear my case - for the first time, justice and freedom was to be not in the hands of government, but the people, that, ended my persecution.

The jury, the free press and my determination not to lie or admit to something I did not do, to not surrender to corrupt government, saved my freedom. The Founding Fathers knew what they were doing.

Like my case, the cases of McFall and Mongielo are reminders that trial by jury is necessary to prevent the politicization of justice in America and reign in oppressive government.

It’s time for Americans to understand as Patriots that they have a duty as jurors to be, the “only anchor,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote, “ever yet imagined by man to hold a government to the principles of its constitution.”