Montana Citizens' Council On Judicial Accountability

03/20/2026

01/14/2026

Conviction Integrity Unit…every state needs one of these. Montana will have an opportunity in the next legislative session. Montanans let your legislators know you expect a “YES” vote.

Maurice Hastings, a 73-year-old Black man who spent nearly four decades behind bars for a crime he did not commit, was awarded $25 million in August 2025 in what his attorneys describe as the largest wrongful conviction settlement in California history. Hastings was convicted in 1983 for the sexual assault and murder of Roberta Wydermyer and sentenced to life without parole, despite insisting on his innocence. “No amount of money could ever restore the 38 years of my life that were stolen from me,” Hastings said, reflecting on the years he lost. “But this settlement is a welcome end to a very long road, and I look forward to moving on with my life.”

From the beginning, Hastings faced a system stacked against him. His lawsuit accused Inglewood police and a Los Angeles district attorney investigator of deliberately framing him, a tactic long used to criminalize Black communities. Even when Hastings sought DNA testing of evidence in 2000, prosecutors denied his request, effectively burying the truth for decades. It wasn’t until 2021, when the DA’s Conviction Integrity Unit revisited his claim, that testing proved the semen found at the crime scene was not his. In 2022, after 38 years of incarceration, his conviction was vacated.

The DNA evidence pointed instead to Kenneth Packnett, a man already convicted of another violent assault with strikingly similar details to Wydermyer’s killing. Police had even recovered Wydermyer’s belongings when Packnett was arrested shortly after her murder, but they never pursued him as a suspect. By the time the truth emerged, Packnett had already died in prison in 2020. In 2023, a California judge ruled Hastings “factually innocent,” a rare acknowledgment that the state had imprisoned the wrong man.

Hastings now lives in Southern California and is active in his church. For him, freedom came decades too late, but his case stands as a glaring reminder of how the prison system operates—more invested in securing convictions than seeking truth. His attorney, Nick Brustin, put it plainly: “Police departments throughout California and across the country should take notice that there is a steep price to pay for allowing such egregious misconduct on their watch.” For abolitionists, Hastings’ story is not just about one man’s stolen life but about exposing a system built to discard people rather than deliver justice.

01/05/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1G9BxUUuf6/

In 1994, James Pugh was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a young mother in a suburb of Buffalo, New York. He was in 2025, after DNA testing excluded him as a contributor to genetic material at the crime scene and a judge ruled that the state had failed to disclose exculpatory evidence.

You can read his entire case history at: https://exonerationregistry.org/cases/19166. That is part of our full database, which can be found at exonerationgregistry.org, where you can use the Explore Exonerations tool to search through the more than 3,750 cases documented by the NRE.

01/01/2026

Happy New Year from the Board of Directors of The Montana Citizens Council on Judicial Accountability.

12/27/2025

Trevor Walter here is a snapshot of the data and I was right in my assumption about the rate of incarceration of indigenous women in Montana being higher.

12/24/2025

This is WHY we are pushing to bring back The Peoples State Grand Jury here in Montana. About half the States in this Republic require the use of a Grand Jury before officially charging someone with a serious crime.
About two years ago, Montana egregiously charged and convicted a man of 3 counts of attempted deliberate homicide because he defended his home from an onslaught of attack by three other men (35 bullet holes in his house). He was sentenced to 40 years, with a minimum of 18 before parole eligibility. THE MAN IS INNOCENT, and was convicted only because of overzealous prosecutors and the lack of hi RIGHT to a Grand Jury. Now think how much this is costing the taxpayers of Montana....and the harm it has done to his entire family.
This is why we are fighting against the UTTER CORRUPTION in our judiciary here in Montana.

A grand jury declined to indict Jacob Lee Bard for the shooting that killed one person and injured another, finding he acted in self-defense.

12/18/2025

How repulsive is this?

Montana doesn't just have the second highest incarceration rate per capita for the United States, it has the second-highest per capita rate in the entire world, second only to South Dakota, and outpacing per capita rates for entire countries, including the U.S., China, and Canada. Stay tuned for more.

12/13/2025

There is no reason, other than deception, to have TWO Citizens Initiatives driving the same cause.
To have one initiative state that "Supreme Court justices and district court judges must be elected in nonpartisan elections", and the other saying "judicial elections shall remain nonpartisan".....is in effect the same thing. DO NOT SIGN EITHER CI-131 OR CI-132.

https://www.ktvh.com/news/montana-politics/montana-supreme-court-rules-in-favor-of-proposed-nonpartisan-judicial-initiative?fbclid=IwY2xjawOqcS9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeK7mBbyclQZlDwLnpudqN0BbTpGggZHzkDGVja57A4-DB-BEZjpaVFa6DVxE_aem_i-QVlChKGGdgL35betkWHA

The Montana Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a group sponsoring a proposed ballot measure that would require the state’s judicial elections remain nonpartisan.

12/07/2025

More proof that lawyers and "those in street clothes under those black robes" are partisan, and carry that partisanship into the courtroom. Another good argument to deny CI-132.
"For decades, the ABA has moved steadily to the left." A good read.

The ABA is likely to continue on this path of activism over professionalism.

08/18/2025

Greetings.

As many of you know, our petition for a Grand Jury petition in the Michael Hanson case in the Montana Eighth Judicial District Court was denied. And our petition for a Writ of Mandamus at the Montana Supreme Court was also rejected.

We are now preparing to file a complaint in Federal court against the State of Montana for refusing “We The People” our bedrock Constitutional right to our State Grand Jury in the Michael Hanson case.

There are going to be multiple causes of action, including several Constitutional violations. We have legal consultants and paralegals outside of Montana assisting us with this costly endeavor.
We have put in a LOT of our volunteer time into this case up to this point, and I personally have just donated $250.00 to this cause to the Federal court.

We are now seeking to raise approximately $20,000, reaching out to as many people as possible in the next few days to help us reach this goal.

Please donate whatever amount you feel you can at this time, or plan on making several donations over the next month.

Here is the link to the donation page:
https://peacefulsea.network/supportcascade

Thank you,
Bart Crabtree

Make an impact today Support our legal costs directly. Get your rights back. our court system is failing us The Cascade Effect, our fastest growing and most popular show, has highlighted the extreme inadequacies and corruption of our legal system, especially of the judicial branch. We have been deni...