After reading the racist, threatening e-mails sent to Democratic Representative Rhonda Fields in mid-February and hearing about a hateful, harassing call, no one was surprised that on Monday, Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey formally charged Franklin Sain with an attempt to influence a public servant and harassment-ethnic intimidation. Sain, who's been released from custody on a $30,000 bond, is scheduled to appear on March 8; he's facing up to six years in prison on the felony charge.
Back in August, a man called the office of another local politician, Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler, and said that "Republicans should be shot in the head, and that way maybe they would learn," according to Minerva Padron, the staffer who took the call. Four days later, the office received an e-mail from someone threatening to rape Gessler's wife and daughter. No one was charged in connection with either the phone call or the e-mail threat — though it's possible that Gessler himself will be. Last fall, Morrissey's office announced that it would investigate whether Gessler misused taxpayer dollars when he flew home early from the Republication National Convention, in response to this threatening e-mail:
Shithead Gessler:
Although you are part of a cabal, with Ohio & Florida, to suppress and steal voting rights you are in the crosshairs of the media: you are being watched and we are going to be watching the punk-ass Republic CONnies that will try to intimidate and harass voters. You are going to be captured on video wherever you drag your racist, unAmerican Republic Party offal.
I know pieces of shit like you sleep very well at night because your parents were mentally-ill enough to neglect teaching the basic precepts of fairness, freedom, civility and general tolerance. You, obviously, are a DSM-3 addled sociopath that would — had you your druthers — impose theocracy under some delusional aegis of "founding fathers federalism."
So getting your fat, white pink fingers into the cunts and uteruses of ALL women — clearly a little-dicked inadequacy that led to misogyny (I'm sure you can't stand that women will fuck whomever they want, whenever they want it, and wherever the urge strikes them: fuck your paternalistic, radical-mongering jay-zoos, who you follow when self-serving while quoting millenia-old ravings of people who barely used the wheel!) Here's what I earnestly and gladly wish upon you: that your daughter/s or wife or other female family member get raped — either "forcibly & legitimately" or otherwise — and then that you get to watch the barbarism of forcing them to incubate an abomination that certainly scars their psyche for life. But they won't have to: you cannot intimidate the American voter with your feckless little Truther (and most likely birther, too) co-conspirators. We — meaning America — are watching you and your egregious unAmerican strategems to rob this country of its basic building block of democracy. No Florida, no Ohio, now no Colorado, and NO WAY.
Why was the man who allegedly threatened Fields arrested, while the DA's office passed on those making the threats to Gessler's office? "Ask Mitch Morrissey," says David Lane, who's defending Gessler in one of his cases.
The DA's office decided not to prosecute the man who made the phone call to Gessler's office, saying he hadn't broken any laws. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation has been looking into the e-mail threat. As for the DA's investigation into Gessler? It's still active, and could conclude soon.
