
Covid-19
Text by Bob Shell, Copyright 2020
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Covid-19 is Holding Me Hostage
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Our law library here is shut down, except for allowing us to order copies of court cases. But, to know what cases to order we need to use the research computers, and our access to them is blocked until the law library reopens, and before it was closed we’d been restricted to using it only two days a week! These things have blocked any hope for me to get my actions before a court with jurisdiction to hear them any time soon.
COVID-19 is holding me hostage. This is terribly frustrating. I have a more than good chance to have my convictions overturned and regain my freedom, and to get my precious forest land back, if I can just get into court. I’d hoped to be free this year, but the ‘Wuhan Virus’ has nixed any possibility of that.
On another topic, much has been said lately about removing the qualified immunity that police have to lawsuits. I agree that this is a good idea, in fact I believe no one should be above the law, so long as any legislation includes protection from frivolous lawsuits. I know from observing men here in prison that many, if not most, of the lawsuits they file are frivolous — most downright silly. But there is a minority of lawsuits that aren’t frivolous, and legislation must protect and enable those.
I strongly believe that prosecutorial immunity should be removed. The immunity to lawsuits that prosecutors now enjoy in our present system, is a threat to the whole system and our personal freedom.
Contrary to what you may think, prosecutorial immunity is not an old part of our system. Lack of access to research computers has prevented me from determining exactly when it infected our judicial system, but one case states that it was established “long after” the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.
Under current prosecutorial immunity, there is absolutely no protection from false prosecution. I’m a victim, and I’ve met others. Currently, there’s nothing to stop a prosecutor from going after you because she/he doesn’t like your politics, religious beliefs, or just your lifestyle.
I was prosecuted for living my life in a way the prosecution didn’t approve of, although my lifestyle was in no way illegal. As one courtroom observer said after my trial, “But he didn’t do anything illegal!” After my convictions, an attorney present in the courtroom loudly observed, “And who says there’s no railroad service in Radford!”
California Federal Judge Kinser has written, “There is an epidemic of false prosecution abroad in the land today.”
How do we stop this epidemic? The answer is simple, make prosecutors accountable.
Most of you have heard the story of the Duke University lacrosse team, who were falsely charged with sex crimes by an unscrupulous prosecutor named Mike Nifong. Yes, they were eventually cleared, but by that time these young men had seen promising careers evaporate. There is no way to regain those lost years.
I’ve been in prison for over thirteen lost years now, based on events the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia says never happened. I was ‘Nifonged,’ falsely charged and convicted by an unprincipled prosecutor with political ambitions who knew the evidence he produced to convict me was nonsense.
Why am I still in prison? Because the system is weighted against the innocent person.
Courts routinely block attempts to overturn bad convictions, as they’ve blocked me repeatedly. They’ve even denied my attempts to depose the Chief Medical Examiner and get his testimony on the record. In law, anything not on the record doesn’t exist.
So I sit here in a prison cell, counting the days, unable to get the truth before a court that will free me. They say, “The truth will set you free,” but not if you can’t get that truth in front of the right people.
In the Virginia Department of Corrections we’ve been living under a ‘modified lockdown’ since March. We spend twenty or more hours in our cells every day, even eating our meals in our cells. The library, law library, and school are closed. There’s no visitation other than video visitation, which is expensive and frustrating. The video visitation station is in the same room as the law library, and I heard, “can you hear me now?” all the time from people trying to use the system. The VDOC video visitation system is not compatible with Apple phones.
Both the quality and quantity of our food has declined dramatically, and if kind people on the outside didn’t send me money for commissary, I’d go hungry a lot. Even that’s problematic, since commissary has been out of many items lately. For a long time they were out of Ramen noodles, the prison staple, because one of the Maruchan factories was shut down.
The VDOC currently has about 29,000 inmates and an annual budget of one billion dollars. That’s about $ 35,500 per inmate per year. I can’t help wondering where all that money goes. Certainly not into inmate meals!
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About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author and former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models. He is serving the 13th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia. To read Bob Shell’s, first essay on civil war, click here: https://tonyward.com/bob-shell-things-i-dont-have-to-worry-about/
Editor’s Note: If you like Bob Shell’s blog posts, you’re sure to like his new book, COSMIC DANCE by Bob Shell (ISBN: 9781799224747, $ 12.95 book, $ 5.99 eBook) available now on Amazon.com . The book, his 26th, is a collection of essays written over the last twelve years in prison, none published anywhere before. It is subtitled, “A biologist’s reflections on space, time, reality, evolution, and the nature of consciousness,” which describes it pretty well. You can read a sample section and reviews on Amazon.com.
Bob Shell: The Incredible Shrinking Business
Text by Bob Shell, Copyright 2021
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The Incredible Shrinking Business
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I didn’t come up with that title. An old friend, veteran of the photography magazine business, used that phrase and it stuck in my mind. When I first got serious about photography in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were many quality 35 mm SLRs to choose from. For those unfamiliar with the terminology, SLR stands for ‘Single Lens Reflex’, the type of camera that uses a flipping mirror to let you see the view from your lens directly, projected onto a viewing screen. Most allow lens interchangeably. Until recently, almost all high end cameras were SLRs. But, recently, a new type of camera has come along, generally referred to as ‘mirrorless’. One disadvantage of the SLR design is that the mirror must flip out of the way during the actual exposure, causing a momentary loss of the image at the moment of exposure, and vibration in some cases. This led to incidences of eyes closed in photos when someone blinked at just the wrong instant, and worse, you never knew it until the film was developed. This is one of the things that mirrorless cameras eliminate.
Back in ‘those thrilling days of yesteryear,’ when I first delved into photography, we had many brands of SLR cameras to choose from. Some, in no particular order, were Alpa, Canon, Nikon, Minolta, Yashica, Contax, Miranda, Rolleiflex, Ricoh, Cosina, Chinon, Exakta, Edixa, Praktica, Praktina, Olympus, Voigtlander, Pentax, Kiev, Topcon, Kowa, Samsung, Contarex, Contaflex, Icarex, Kodak Retina Reflex, Petri, Mamiya, Vivitar, Konica, and, of course, Leica, although the first Leicaflex SLR was a wildly impractical design.
All were either Japanese or German, with a few Russian and Ukrainian, and the outliers Samsung, the sole offering from South Korea, and Alpa from Switzerland. I’m sure I missed some, but all were capable of making decent images.
My first serious SLR camera was a somewhat beat up Nikon F that I bought from a friend when I was living in DC around 1967. It had a 50 mm f/1.4 Nikkor lens, but no light meter, so somewhere I got a Gossen Lunasix hand meter to use with it. Camera and meter were later stolen when I was away from my apartment for a few days.
I didn’t have much money in those days, so my next camera was a Zenit B Russian-made SLR that I bought from Cambridge Camera Exchange in New York, $ 39.95 mail order, brand new. It produced surprisingly good images, but was clunky design. Later I had more money, so I bought a Mamiya/Sekor 1000 DTL from the camera department at J.C. Penney. In those days every major retailer had a camera department, and price competition was fierce.
I’ve always been a tinkerer. I have to know how things work. I never owned a 35 mm camera that I didn’t take apart to see how it worked. So, in the early 70s I took the camera repair mail order course from National Camera in Colorado. I had a ball taking cameras apart and putting them back together, usually with no pieces left over! Once I gained some confidence, I began repairing cameras for money. But, in those days camera repairmen were mechanics, electronics hadn’t invaded the insides of cameras much, aside from the simple electronics of built-in light meters.
All of this is leading up to the electronic invasion of cameras, first starting in the later 70s. I’d be totally out of my depth trying to fix one of today’s digital cameras.
In many ways, it’s like cars. I was at home when cars had points and plugs to be gapped, and the only electronic item in my tool chest was a timing light. Work on one of today’s cars without a diagnostic computer — forget it!
Same with cameras, in many cases they require diagnostic equipment only factory service technicians have access to.
Not long after I got serious about photography and camera repair the first attrition of camera brands began, with brands like Edixa, Praktina, Kowa, Petri, falling by the wayside. In the mid-70s Zeiss-Ikon, the famous German camera maker folded its tent and dropped out of the camera business, their last camera the gorgeous Zeiss-Ikon SL706. They just couldn’t compete with Japanese prices, although the Zeiss-Ikon SL706 was reborn as the Rollei SL35M with cosmetic changes, built at Rollei’s ill-fated manufacturing plant in Singapore.
I won’t try to list the companies that collapsed over the 70s and 80s and into the 90s, but suffice it to say that they fell like leaves in a forest, the last collapses being those that couldn’t make the transition to digital imaging. Minolta, one of the oldest Japanese brands, went into bankruptcy and was bought by Konica, only to have that iconic brand itself go bankrupt. It’s an open secret that Minolta was acquired by Sony, a company that had avoided the SLR market for years. That’s why Minolta lenses fit the first generations of Sony SLRs before they went mirrorless. Even the Minolta Alpha designation for their SLRs was retained by Sony.
With the recent announcement that Olympus is shutting down its camera division, a serious photographer has only Canon, Nikon, Sony, Leica, and Pentax to choose from, Pentax being the only one not to go mirrorless and retain the flipping mirror. I wouldn’t invest in Pentax’s long term survival, but I’ve been wrong before, and some photographers prefer the traditional mirrored SLR’s viewfinder.
Do I expect the photo business to shrink even more? Certainty. Demand for high end cameras is way down, and lower end cameras were killed by cellphones with built-in cameras, some of which produce remarkably good images. I’ve seen full page pictures in several magazines shot with iPhones. But, for those times when the cellphone just won’t do, such as long telephoto shots of nature and sports, the high end camera is still essential.
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About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author and former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models. He is serving the 13th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia. To read Bob Shell’s, first essay on civil war, click here: https://tonywardstudio.com/blog/in-praise-of-reality/
Editor’s Note: If you like Bob Shell’s blog posts, you’re sure to like his new book, COSMIC DANCE by Bob Shell (ISBN: 9781799224747, $ 12.95 book, $ 5.99 eBook) available now on Amazon.com . The book, his 26th, is a collection of essays written over the last twelve years in prison, none published anywhere before. It is subtitled, “A biologist’s reflections on space, time, reality, evolution, and the nature of consciousness,” which describes it pretty well. You can read a sample section and reviews on Amazon.com.