Dixon’s legal woes cited
OLYMPIA – At a gathering last week in Olympia, U.S. Senate candidate Aaron Dixon decried the nation’s “Puritan roots,” saying the justice system is obsessed with punishment.
“We have to be able to realize that people make mistakes,” the 57-year-old former Black Panther said.
He was speaking, it turns out, from extensive experience.
Public-records research by a left-wing Web site author, a right-wing Bellevue lawyer and by The Spokesman-Review shows that Dixon:
“ Owes more than $2,800 in traffic fines, including four counts in the past 18 months of driving without insurance;
“ Was accused by his estranged wife in a 1994 divorce case of having problems with marijuana use and threatening to kill her;
“ And had two liens placed on him by King County officials for allegedly failing to pay child support in 1989 and 2003.
This week, “disappointed” with the growing cascade of revelations about his past, Dixon revealed that:
“ In 1980 he was convicted of embezzlement from a medical supply company in Oakland, Calif., and served six months in a California prison.
“ And that in 1984 he was convicted of check fraud and “served a short prison sentence.”
“These incidents happened at a very difficult time in my life,” Dixon, 57, wrote in a statement posted to his campaign Web site this week. “I have since dedicated myself to helping at-risk youth and young adults not make the same mistakes that I have made.”
Some of the people who’ve been chronicling Dixon’s past brushes with the law say the biggest mistake wasn’t by the former leader of Seattle’s Black Panther Party. It was by Green Party members, who recruited him to run for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Maria Cantwell.
“They want to be taken seriously as a party. But they don’t take themselves seriously,” said David Goldstein, a Seattle Democrat and writer who runs a political Web log called horsesass.org. “They should have vetted the guy and said ‘we need to find somebody else.’ They would have spared the guy the humiliation. … It’s their fault for picking him.”
Dixon’s run has been blasted by Goldstein and some other Seattle-area liberals. With no hope of winning, they say, Dixon will simply siphon votes away from Cantwell. And that would help Republican candidate Mike McGavick.
“On a whim, Goldstein said, he last week ran Dixon’s name through a state voter-registration database. He discovered that Dixon – who’s urging voters to boot Cantwell from office for not opposing the Iraq war and Patriot Acts – has never voted.
“Who the hell is he to make that criticism when he doesn’t even bother participating in the process at its most basic level?” said Goldstein.
He posted the news on his Web site late. It was read by Bellevue lawyer Richard Pope, who fired up his legal database to check further into Dixon’s past. He found dozens of cases, most of them traffic infractions, in Seattle and King County courts. He posted his findings on Goldstein’s blog, and on Wednesday morning e-mailed a long summary of Dixon cases to Green Party leaders throughout Washington. The Spokesman-Review confirmed much of what Pope found – and unearthed more – by pulling court records this week at the Superior, District and Municipal courts in Seattle.
“Ignoring traffic laws and fines isn’t the biggest thing, but he’s been doing this for 40 years,” said Pope, citing a 1970 Seattle Post-Intelligencer story listing arrest warrants for several traffic offenses.
Green Party leaders – who will consider whether to accept Dixon as their nominee at a convention in May – said that they’re not troubled by Dixon’s past.
“I’m comfortable with it,” said Jody Haug, co-chair of the Green Party of the United States and chair of the state party. People need to keep Dixon’s past in perspective with the larger world problems that he’s trying to address, she said.
“This is so nothing. Traffic tickets?” said Mike Gillis, a party member and the media contact for Dixon’s campaign. “When you look at the big picture, I don’t think you can compare traffic tickets and being in a dispute with his ex-wife to voting for war.”
Gillis dismissed the blog revelations as a “partisan smear” by a “glorified tabloid.”
“They’ve got a very clear agenda. They want to take Aaron down,” Gillis said of Goldstein’s and Pope’s revelations. “They can’t fight us on the issues. They know that Maria Cantwell has an atrocious record. So they’re just going to proverbially dig through Aaron’s garbage.”
Goldstein scoffed, saying it didn’t take much digging.
“What did they expect to happen?” he said. “This is what blogs do now. I don’t know what world they’re living in.”
Gillis said that Green Party members “absolutely” vetted Dixon and his record before nominating him to run for Senate.
“I think what we’ve really created is a culture in politics where you’re not even allowed to fart in public,” Gillis said. “Any mistakes he’s made in the past have been so overwhelmed by what he’s done for his community. I think there’s nothing in his past that regular people haven’t run into at some point.”
As for Dixon, he addressed what he called the “contrived controversy” by “Democratic Party loyalists” in a two-page statement posted this week on his campaign Web site.
“The question of unpaid traffic citations is an issue facing many Seattleites, who must choose between paying a traffic fine and putting food on the table,” he wrote. “As a single father of three at the time of the citations, I was not able to keep track of my fines.”
He’s fixing that now, he said. He said he’s a legal driver with insurance.
As for the child support payments, he said that “during a period of unemployment, I was unable to pay for day care costs which were in addition to regular child support payments. As a result, a lump sum was added to my child care debt four months ago.” He said he’s paying off that debt now.
And his time in prison? After a decade as a Panther in the late 1960s and 1970s, he said, he was angry and disillusioned at the sacrifices made and the lack of meaningful change in America.
“It is impossible to overestimate the intensity of that time in American history,” he said. People must have the opportunity to redeem themselves, he said.
He said he expects “personal attacks and attempts at public humiliation” to continue, but said he’ll press on.
“At a time when our government spends $100,000 a minute to occupy Iraq,” Dixon wrote, “this entire media frenzy has been but a distraction to my campaign and me.”
Pope thinks the revelations about Dixon’s past and a backlash against perceived bashing might actually win Dixon more votes.
“A lot of the Green support comes from people who are disaffected,” he said. “It could make him more popular.”