And the second, and the third:

Other documents:

What is the next step in this case?

There are three options right now:

Hell: Frog Gravy 71 [updated]

John Carpenter
In The Mouth of Madness
Bicycle Scene

Naeem Murr
The Boy

Frog Gravy is a nonfiction incarceration account in Kentucky.

Inmate names are changed.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

McCracken County Jail, late winter/early spring, 2008

“The cops do that,” says Christie.

“Do what?”

“How do you know?”

A lake of fire (Rev. 20:15)

A place of torments (Luke 16:23)

Where they scream for mercy (Luke 16:24)

I star and underline Luke 16:28:

The nurse tells me that this is not her department.

I say a silent prayer for Ada.

Update: here is that doll: Frog Gravy Legal Case Coming Soon

Posted: September 14, 2011 in Update for readers, Video unrelated
Tags: DUI with no drugs or alcohol or bad driving, Florida vs JL, Florida vs Royer, Fourth Amendment, FROG GRAVY, Frog Gravy Legal Case, Frog Gravy legal case, Garcia vs Commonwealth, INCARCERATION, Rachel Leatherman legal case Kentucky, tech with bachelor's degree used as expert witness in trial, Terry stop so long it exceeds scope of youtube limits, Terry vs Ohio

For folks who are curious about my legal case, I will be writing about that as well. Issues are numerous and interesting. The case currently sits with the Kentucky Supreme Court as a Motion For Discretionary Review. I will be posting the initial 911 call, the dash-cam video, all recordings of hearings prior to the trial, all official transcripts that I have, briefs, responses, lab reports, open records requests, orders denying suppression, the order of sentencing, and the corrected order of sentencing, as well as anything else that anyone wrote or said, such as the Bill of Particulars and as much of the trial transcript as anyone can stomach before racing to the nearest porcelain receptacle. (I spoke to my attorney today and gave her a heads up.)

With my husband’s help, I will introduce relevant legal issues, binding case law, statutes, and case history.

Brush up on your Fourth, Fifth, First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Anything that is a matter of public record, in fact, will be here (or on YouTube).

I will start this process, I hope, about sixty days from now. In the meantime, I will continue to bring you the nonfiction account of incarceration, Frog Gravy.

I would like to thank my readers for stopping by this site and taking the time to read. I would also like to thank you for your patience. My notes are voluminous and disorganized, and although I have tried to make each essay a stand-alone, I realize that flow is an issue. I am attempting to fix these issues in the Frog Gravy manuscript.

If you are at this site by mistake, worry not. I post about other things also. I aim to please. Which brings me to this. Ever felt like you were not quite communicating with someone? Take a look at this: Names have been changed.

The Hole, McCracken County Jail, January 23, 2008

“Huh?” say several cellmates.

“Oh yeah? Why?” I ask.

“I moved the body.”

I want to hit Roberta as hard as I can.

Belly Of The Beast: Ricky’s World. Frog Gravy 9

Posted: July 14, 2011 in Uncategorized

Author’s note: Frog Gravy is a depiction of daily living during incarceration in Kentucky, during the years 2008 and 2009, and is reconstructed from my notes. Names are changed, except in this case, Ricky is a real name. Nicknames that do not reveal identity are also unchanged.

Belly Of The Beast: Ricky’s World. Fulton County Detention Center, early May, 2008.

After committing a major game misconduct by writing the Governor, various government agencies in Frankfort and Washington, about thirty other people, and a newspaper in Louisville, I am transferred out of McCracken County Jail to the famed Fulton County Detention Center also known as ‘Ricky’s World.’ I will become known in the inmate world as the one that wrote herself out of McCracken County Jail.

I first heard of Ricky’s World when I was in the hole after my trial (My judge wanted me in the hole. We had an adversarial courtroom history and would add to it before we uh, ‘divorced.’)

A woman in the hole with me in McCracken said that when she was at Ricky’s World playing truth-or-dare, she ate pussy on a steel table in the cell on a dare, and the next day, Ricky called her into his office and said, “You mean to tell me that you ate pussy on mah dinner table?”

Ricky’s World is a privately owned and operated jail in Hickman, KY. The jailer’s first name is Ricky. Ricky is an enormous man, the size of a tree.

Ricky’s World is famed in the Kentucky inmate community as being one of the places where the ‘worst of the worst’ are shipped.

Since Hickman is an hour away from my husband, he will have to drive two hours each week for his fifteen-minute visit. This is a source of personal amusement for the judge.

During my ride to Ricky’s World, two guards in the front seat discuss slaughtering chickens, planting vegetables and shopping at WalMart and in the back seat a male inmate and I discuss our legal cases.
On arrival I am placed in a hole that doubles as a holding cell for an hour, and I do step-ups on the cement ledge for an hour. A tray arrives through the food slot but I am only able to positively identify the cookies, so I eat two cookies for lunch.

A guard retrieves me to check me into the facility, produces a sturdy 30-gallon black garbage bag with the whole of my new life in it and upends the contents onto the cement floor in front of the front desk in the jail entryway. She begins to paw through the contents consisting of, to my shock and utter horror, all of the mail, pictures, books and magazines that my family had attempted to send me in McCracken.

I observe her for about five minutes and assume, without internal debate on the merits, that she is high. She finally says, “You are a State inmate. I will let you have all of this.” I silently thank God and we head to the cell. We pass a large men’s population cell and head down a hallway with wolf whistles and cat calls receding. The long hallway is painted a depressing grey and the walk actually slopes downward, even though the facility is on ground level, giving the feel of decent into an actual dungeon. Adding to this feel is the fact that none of the cells we pass have windows of any kind. The atmosphere is dark.

We arrive at a door to a cell, and the guard accompanying me fumbles with the keys for a bit, then hands them to me, and says, “Here, you open it.”

The cell is a twelve-person cement room that houses several people on the unfinished cement floor in addition to four rows of three-tiered steel bunks, for a total of nineteen or twenty inmates. When the door closes, I notice how dark it is compared to McCracken and I am thankful, yet disoriented by the lack of any windows to a hallway, as well as the lack of a clock.

I claim a space on the floor and notice that most of the cell occupants are someplace else. Another inmate sees what I notice and says, “They’re at rec. Out there with all the drama. How much time you got?”

“Eight years,” I say. “More time than that woman at PeWee that boiled her baby and fed it to her husband.”
Two inmates, Tiki and Brooke, are seated at a PlayStation. There is even a microwave, I note with increasing thankfulness.

TiKi is younger than my son, has been here for a year, and is a War on Drugs inmate that will go home soon on the Governor’s new early release program.

TiKi is playing “Grand Theft Auto” on the PlayStation.

On the screen, a criminal runs up and down a city street with a nightstick, mercilessly beating the hell out of innocent pedestrians. He runs to the driver’s side of a stopped car, opens the door, throws the driver onto the street, and steals the car.

Brooke asks, “Is this the one where he takes the prostitute into the woods and fucks her?”

TiKi’s car thief picks up a streetwalker and drives to the woods with her and stops. On the screen the car starts rocking, and she says, “Look at the car move faster and faster, and when she’s done she gets out.”
The car stops rocking and the hooker gets out. TiKi says, “Now look. He shoots her and steals her money.”
After killing the prostitute and stealing her money, the car thief returns to the car and drives away, running over several pedestrians on the sidewalk.

TiKi’s thief stops at a pay phone, gets on the phone and says, “I want to show these punk-ass bitches how a real drive-by works.”

The callee asks, “Don’t you just shoot ‘em like you always do?”

“Can’t just shoot ‘em in a drive-by shooting, dickhead. You gotta be in a car,” answers the thief. “I’m gonna show these people how to shoot from the car. What do you think?”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” says the callee.

TiKi is frustrated. She says, “I cain’t git the gun to aim the way I want it to, oh hail. You cain’t just shoot ‘em, gotta be in a car, it’s a drive-by. This is pissin’ me the fuck off motherfucker-you-just-shot-me-you-stupid-prick.”

Author’s end note: For those of you familiar with Grand Theft Auto, my recall of the telephone conversation above may not be word-for-word accurate. It is, however, in essence what I heard.

Pregnancy Disaster In Jail: Frog Gravy 8

Posted: July 13, 2011 in Frog Gravy, Uncategorized
Tags: FROG GRAVY, INCARCERATION, JAIL, Nonfiction incarceration account, pregnancy disaster in jail, pregnant woman in jail, prison, WOMEN'S INCARCERATION

Author’s note: Frog Gravy is a depiction of daily life during incarceration in Kentucky, first in jails and then in prison, during 2008 and 2009, and is reconstructed from my notes.

This post is from jail.

Names are changed, except nicknames that do not reveal identity.

Cell 107, McCracken County Jail, early March, 2008.

I am in a women’s cell situated on a hallway, Cell 107. On one side adjacent is another women’s cell, a four-person cell housing six, Cell 104. On the other side adjacent is a four-person men’s cell housing six, Cell 111. Adjacent to Cell 111 are three isolation cells housing men.

The cells communicate with each other by various means. Talking through the wall, tapping on the wall, and talking under the door are common.

One of the women next door, Stacey, is six months pregnant and due in late June.

Stacey has not been convicted of a crime. She is a Federal War on Drugs pretrial inmate.

At 12 AM, inmates in cell 104 tap on the wall to our cell and ask YaYa to help them yell for some help. YaYa is 5’9” and weighs 315 pounds. To say she can be loud is a massive understatement.

Cell 104 reports that Stacey is bleeding.

We start yelling for help and pounding on the doors. Harry, in isolation at the end of the hall, also yells: “HELP! Helpme Help me HELP! HELP Helpme helpme help me HELP!”

The men join in the pounding and screaming, so now the entire hallway is yelling, pounding on the walls, kicking the steel doors.

Stacey says, “I’m scared to death.”

I yell, “We need some help down here! Call an ambulance!”

Our pounding, yelling and screaming goes on for five minutes. Stacey’s cellmates report, “It’s gushing.”

12:05 AM: Three guards arrive and remove Stacey from Cell 104 and walk her down the hallway. The guards tell the rest of us to go to bed.

While Stacey is being walked, the women in the two adjacent cells pray.

12:19 AM: Stacey returns to her cell.

12:20 AM: A sergeant guard tells Stacey to go to bed and put her feet up.

12:22 AM Guards swing by and threaten us with the hole if we do not go to bed. They say that they have called another male guard at home to come in and take Stacey to the hospital, instead of calling an ambulance.

I scream repeatedly, “Call an ambulance. Get a fucking ambulance right now!”

12:25 AM: The male guard coming from home has not arrived and no one has checked on Stacey since guards walked her down the hall and back to her cell.

All of the cells continue to yell for help.

12:27 AM: Guards tell Cell 104 to stop yelling and Cell 104 replies, “Come look in the toilet and then we will stop yelling.”

12:28 AM: Another guard informs us, “She had a pelvic exam earlier in the day and that’s why she is bleeding little spots, pink spots.”

He also informs us that the jail has contacted a female RN staff member and summonsed her from home, because “it has to be a woman to take her to the hospital.” He adds, “That’s all we can do.”
The phones are off in all cells in the hallway, so we cannot contact Stacey’s husband or attempt to raise any outside intervention.

12:31 AM: No one is here and no one has checked the toilet in Cell 104 to see how much blood there is.

12:33 AM: We ask Stacey if she is having cramps and she replies, “Yes.” We ask her “When was the last time the baby moved?” She replies, “The baby has not moved.”

12:35 AM: Cell 104 tells us there are “big chunks of blood in the toilet.”

12:38 AM: Stacey reports, “It’s more than little spots.”

12:40 AM: A female guard goes into Cell 104 and then leaves.

12:42 AM: Cell 104 tells us that the guard came in looked in the toilet and then told them that Stacey would have to wait for the male guard that the jail originally contacted at home, to arrive and then fill out paperwork, before the female RN guard can accompany Stacey to the hospital.

12:45 AM: No staff here.

12:49 AM: No staff here.

12:55 AM: No staff here.

1:02 AM: A female guard removes Stacey from Cell 104 and walks her down the hall in handcuffs.
For the next hour, all of the hallway cells remain upset, yelling, pounding at the doors, outraged.
The guards come to Cell 111, remove two men, and take them to the hole. We will lose our television privileges.

5:00 AM: A male guard comes to our cell to deliver the mop bucket. We ask him how Stacey is and he replies, “She had the baby.”

We say, “It was serious,” and he says, “Yes.” This guard’s facial expression is one of sorrow, the first and only that we will see. He tells us Stacey “won’t be back until Monday or so.”

6:15 AM: I ask Cell 104 about the baby. They tell me the baby was “flown to Vanderbilt,” but we will find out later that the baby was actually flown to a closer center at Cape Girardeau, MO.

By the time Stacey arrived at the hospital, carefully restrained in handcuffs and shackles, with all of the proper paperwork filled out, she was experiencing the following crisis: She had a 75% effacement, and the baby’s foot was through her cervix. The baby was delivered by emergency C-section, and weighed two pounds. Stacey nearly lost her uterus, and although the baby survived with early tests indicating no oxygen deprivation or brain damage, long-term effects of his traumatic birth remain unknown.

Stacey returns to the jail on Monday with an incision.

She begins to use menstrual pads to cover the incision because the jail does not provide enough clean gauze.

When the jail finds out about the pads, they place Stacey on a “pad watch,” where she is allowed only three pads each day. We try to ‘fish’ pads under the door and into her cell without getting caught.

Collectively, we decide not to submit a grievance about this situation because we fear the hole or some other retaliatory punishment.

I decide to write the Governor. He will respond in a positive manner for future pregnant incarcerated women, but the jail will view my letter negatively and I will be shipped to a more horrific, privately owned jail known as “Ricky’s World,” but I do not know this yet.
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