Prisoner Grenda Harmer is giving this man, Warden Shawn Phillips, administrative notice about evil conditions at the Morgan County Correctional Complex. (Photo YouTube)
This is the top of a two-page administrative notice given to correction commissioner Tony Parker about Warden Phillips in Morgan County, parties operating under administrative law and subject entirely to statute and procedure whose personal liability is kept out of view under the concepts of good-faith ignorance and unintentionality. (Photo David Tulis)
[Editor’s note This post contains important corrections to the administrative notice coverage. DJT] The use of administrative notices is wonderfully suitable to the local economy perspective in holding local officials accountable to the constitution and just laws.
It’s a local economy device, a kind of remedy, because it brings the officeholder’s oath to God into his personal realm and exposes him to personal responsibility for evil acts in his office or as a government employee.
By David Tulis / NoogaRadio 92.7
In other words, administrative notice is a vehicle to make people protected by bureaucracy and by the impersonalism of the modern state aware of their personal exposure in their jobs. It makes them want to be careful about the constitution and statute. Administrative notice is part of local economy, where individuals hold other individuals accountable to the proper authority and law.
Tune in to the David Tulis show weekdays at 9 a.m.
Below is one of a series of letters discussing this remedy with a prison inmate, Grenda Ray Harmer, my correspondent, who is enslaved by state government for a crime for which he was duly convicted. He is confined in Wartburg, Tenn., in the Morgan County Correctional Complex.
My letter below refers to Mr. Harmer’s first attempt at administrative notice, one dated Nov. 10, a document that was really a list of grievances. The images with this story are improvements of Mr. Harmer’s later effort, an improvement in his understanding of giving proper notice so that the law might be followed.
Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2017
Dear Grenda, have received your recent communications. I think your two-page administrative notice is an excellent document. I read a good part of it on my program on Tuesday.
Grenda Ray Harmer, prisoner
Your excellent Nov. 10 document is really a complaint, not really a strict administrative notice.
You’ve invented a hybrid. What I think will be more effective in terms of the administrative world would be simply a notice that doesn’t make an argument nor argue any facts.
Your Nov. 10 document makes an argument and a complaint; it does an excellent job of citing the rules that apply.
However, it may not have the effect that we are hoping might be brought about by a proper admin notice, for which you will have time to research, Lord willing. Your Nov. 10 document is written in brief form, with facts delineating the offense, and the citing rules that make these observations of facts. The largest accusation is that Mr. Phillips and his subordinates are violating their oaths of office.
I got a letter today postmarked November 13th that I have not opened on account of my press of time hoping to get this letter out to you. You should have received separately a draft of an admin notice I’m working on which makes no argument though as a whole it makes a great argument, indeed, regarding this distinction between transportation and travel.
In your case, you have two jobs going at once. No. 1, grievances and complaints. No. 2, the administrative notice which rides underneath and does not try to bring any particular facts into view that are covered in the Grievances and complaints in No. 1.
The administrative notice is written ultimately with a jury in view because that is a document they will review. Again it lays out the obligation and duty of Mr. Phillips. Separately. your grievances show that he has become detached from the written lines which are his commands and authority. Your administrative notice secures him to the duties and rules for his office. Your grievances pull him away from these authorities. Your lawsuit will show that in neglecting his office or imposing dangers upon you, he is acting in bad faith, acting willfully, malignantly, with evil intentions, with careless and vile disregard of those people who are his responsibility, namely, you. And also people like Robert Whipple, stuck outside the law library door.
And admin notice, because it comes near to being an operations manual from the statute and the rules, brings to the front of every state actor’s mind his personal vulnerability, his personal exposure, his individual and in persona propria obligation, having taken the state office and enriched himself and his family with the state paycheck.
I know it sounds like an awful big job to cite enough rules and regulations and statute for your notice to be an operations manual. And it sounds fruitless, you think. After all, doesn’t he know what he’s supposed to do? Well, maybe he doesn’t. And what we’re trying to do with admin notice is to make him cautious about his personal liability to you.
We want to separate the office from the man. We want to delink the man born to his mother, Shawn Phillips, from Warden Shawn Phillips. It may take a while to finish it, but I think it may bring a protection abd benefit to you and the other men. Once it’s done, you can cite it as the authority since it is more or less comprehensive. You can say, “pursuant to the notice,” etc etc and etc. Your notice becomes that you cite. and maybe other people can cite it, too, if it circulates. I think your handwriting is so nice that it would be a very usable little book. But then the question is how does it circulate among inmates whom are limited in their access to each other and outside material?
I would think your notice probably fit in 4-5 pages of the type size of the notice that you sent me. Just guessing.
In my understanding of this remedy, your administrative notice is above any fact base or any particular injury harm or wrong. You could say, rather, that it is beneath all of them. Particular human circumstances in your prison unit are above its operation. Hopefully, admin notice will be like a mine placed at the bottom of a castle wall through a tunnel whose entry point is on the backside of a nearby Hill from the castle.
This page is the first of a two-page administrative notice that improves on a Nov. 10 administrative notice by Grenda Ray Harmer, prison inmate. The earlier document was a cross between a grievance and a genuine administrative notice. But this one appears more correctly to perform the function of administrative notice by not indulging in particular grievances or conflicts. The job of administrative notice is simply to lay out all relevant law and inform a state actor sufficiently that he cannot escape personal liability because of good faith ignorance, error or unintentionality.
This page is the second of a notice given Warden Shawn Phillips in a Wartburg, Tenn., slave camp called a state prison run by the department of correction.
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