You all remember the Paulsen case up in Wagoner County where the corrupt and alleged child abusing Wagoner County Commissioner James Hanning had used the offices of the D.A. and sheriff office to punish and harass the young business partner that he had taken advantage of and possibly embezzled a huge amount of money from. The case had spilled over into Mayes County after Paulsen had been stopped for speeding, was a few days late on his license renewal and got his car towed and his weapon seized until he could fix his license after the holiday weekend and get the car back.
Well Commissioner Hanning heard about the traffic stop and went up to the city office were the ticket was generated and misinformed the city clerk that Paulsen was under D.O.C. supervision. He wasn't of course, he was under local D.A. supervision and the ADA knew that the original charges were complete bull biden. Paulsen had already paid the speeding ticket and impound costs up in Mayes county but Commissioner Hanning convinced the local D.A. to dismiss the already settled and paid case and refile at the County seat along with felony charges to trigger an acceleration of the original suspended sentence that led to the felony gun possession charges.
There was one catch, the Wagoner County judge realized that they didn't have jurisdiction in the original case and he reversed the original convention/plea deal which by the way never said that Paulsen couldn't possess guns. The judge also ruled the case void ab initio, a specific legal term that means only one thing.
Void ad initio means from the start, from the beginning, void from the outset. An example is a person forced to sign a contract under duress. This is opposed to a finding of a legal matter being voidable, void when the court said it was void. In the later example a legal matter would be void from the date that the court ruled in the matter; void ad initio means the parties are restored to where they were at the beginning of the issue. Legally there is no fixing of the problem, it is a nullity, it never literally happened.
So you have a predicate case years before that was declared void from the beginning, being used to punish a man, to send him to prison for being in possession of a gun, when the supervision never called for his gun rights to be lost and then the predicate case was not just over turned, it was declared non existent.
Yet Mayes County District Attorney Matt Ballard is fighting tooth and nail to persecute this young man. For the simple reason he wants to curry favor or repay a favor to the Wagoner County officials.
Paulsen and his attorneys have filed a writ of mandamus. That is a request for a higher court to force a lower court to complete a duty or to uphold the law, to correct an abuse of discretion. The writ can order something stopped or it can be used to order something to be completed.
The writ of mandamus is aimed at the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. There is only one way the appellate court can rule, to force the Mayes County judge and prosecutor to back off and to do the right thing as justice demands and drop all charges against this politically persecuted young man.
