Tax cheat lawyer sues prison for back pay

[Demosthenes]

Defense Lawyer Serra Sues Over His Prison Pay

Matthew Hirsch
The Recorder
03-22-2007

The government got 10 months of J. Tony Serra's freedom for his long-running tax boycott. This week, the rebel lawyer from San Francisco struck back with an attempt to get more money for the hours he worked behind bars.

Standing in his office before a life-size painting of an orange-clad inmate and two shadowy guards on a cellblock, Serra talked Wednesday about the class action he just filed against officials who run the federal prison where he made his extremely humble home for much of the past year.

The criminal defense lawyer wants at least the minimum wage for himself and other inmates who've worked in prison industries at the Lompoc low-security federal prison, located about 55 miles northwest of Santa Barbara, Calif.

Because of Serra's age and physical condition -- he's 72 years old -- he escaped some of the less desirable jobs at Lompoc. Instead, he was assigned to water the flowers on the prison grounds. Though Serra called it "an aesthetic experience" that enabled him to stand under eucalyptus trees and watch hawks flying overhead, he complained that the job paid less than a quarter an hour.

Oakland, Calif., solo John Murcko and two other attorneys filed the suit Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of Serra plus an estimated 300 to 500 inmates in the proposed plaintiffs' class. Lompoc, Serra said, operates a large dairy farm that produces meat, milk and cheese, and runs a factory that manufactures electronic cables. The facility also has inmates tending to alfalfa fields to produce feed for its dairy cows. Serra said that system-wide, the federal prison workforce generates about $65 million per year in net profits. But he compared compensation for inmates at Lompoc to slave wages.

"I got 19 cents an hour. Some people get 5 cents, and some get, oh boy, a buck sixty five!" the long-haired lawyer said sarcastically.

Serra called the prison's pay practice "shocking, disgusting [and] a disgrace," noting that inmates come back from work dirty, tired and occasionally injured.

The suit alleges that Lompoc's pay scale violates the U.S. Constitution's Fifth and Thirteenth Amendments, the United Nations covenants on civil, political and prisoner rights, and also rights guaranteed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bivens v. Six Unknown Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 403 U.S. 388.

Murcko said he thinks previous legal attempts to get the minimum wage for prison labor have failed because they have relied on federal law but not the U.N. covenants.

Reached Wednesday afternoon, Sandra Hijar, a public information officer for the federal Bureau of Prisons' western regional office, said she was not aware of Serra's lawsuit and so could not respond to his allegations.

Serra entered prison last May for evading taxes and was released from a halfway house on March 13. He said his most recent sentence differed greatly from a previous trip to Lompoc some 30 years ago, for a similar tax conviction, during a time Serra recalled as "the good ol' days of rehabilitation."

Back then, Serra said Lompoc inmates would board buses each day to enrich their minds at the University of California campus in Santa Barbara, or at one of the nearby junior colleges. He knew things would be different this time around, he said, when he spotted a sign at the prison entrance warning of "punishment and retribution."

Despite the harsher environs, Serra said he found more time during his most recent incarceration to practice law. He represented other inmates in divorce cases and probate claims and wrote letters to their creditors. He also read extensively and dabbled a bit in creative writing.

"For me," he said, "it was like going through a Buddhist monastery."

[The Observer]

Murcko said he thinks previous legal attempts to get the minimum wage for prison labor have failed because they have relied on federal law but not the U.N. covenants.

There ya go! Another new tactic for Sui Juris adherents. When you file your next lawsuit, instead of trying to get that pesky federal judge to follow federal law, just make sure you get some of those UN covenants entered into the record as evidence. Since the UN has infiltrated and taken over the US government, the judge is obviously on the UN salary and will have to follow UN law.