The Inmate Who Won’t Shut Up

Allan Parmelee spends his days in a cell, most recently at McNeil Island Corrections Center, carefully hand-printing lawsuits, motions, records requests, and legal appeals on a pad of lined paper. Known to fellow inmates as the "jailhouse attorney," he's filed dozens of lawsuits in state and federal courts. His complaints have spanned everything from denial of habeas corpus to assault by jail guards and other inmates to unfair treatment at the hands of his ex-wife's attorney. He usually represents himself.

Most of Parmelee's suits are thrown out by a judge in short order, but every once in a while something sticks: Last month, he got a big win challenging a state criminal-libel law that dates back to the Civil War era.

On July 20, 2005, Parmelee wrote a letter to then–Department of Corrections secretary Harold Clarke complaining about the conditions at Clallam Bay Corrections Center, where Parmelee was then incarcerated. He attributed the problem to the institution's (female) boss at the time: "Having a man-hater lesbian as a superintendent is like throwing gas on [an] already smoldering fire," he wrote, according to court records.

Three months later he was charged under an 1869 law that prohibits all Washington citizens from exposing "any living person to hatred, contempt, ridicule, or obloquy, or to deprive him of the benefit of public confidence or social intercourse." Violation of the law is a gross misdemeanor. At a jail hearing, Parmelee was found guilty and sentenced to 10 days of isolation.

True to form, Parmelee then sued the Department of Corrections, saying his right to free speech had been impinged. A Clallam County Superior Court judge threw out the suit. Appealing to a higher court, Parmelee sought help from the Public Interest Law Group.

"Personally I found [Parmelee's] letter offensive," says attorney Hank Balson, who represented Parmelee in the appeal. "But what I found even more offensive was the DOC's reaction to it."

Usually people who print libelous statements are pursued in civil court. If something is written that is both false and damages someone's reputation in a way that hurts their income or community standing, that's libel. When pursued in civil court, victims can get financial recompense and often a published apology. In criminal court, the victim doesn't stand to gain anything, which may be part of the reason why the law has gone out of use. Eric Stahl, an attorney working with the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Parmelee, believes the old criminal law was trotted out by jail personnel looking for a way to punish a bothersome inmate. "The Department of Corrections stumbled on it when they were looking for a way to prosecute this guy," he says.

In a brief filed during the appeals process, the ACLU pointed out that nearly all other state criminal-libel statutes have been struck down under a 1964 federal Supreme Court decision. On June 19, the Washington State Court of Appeals sided with Parmelee, writing in an opinion that the state law does indeed run afoul of the U.S. Constitution.

The ruling allows Parmelee to take his case back to Superior Court and seek money from the DOC for violating his rights by disciplining him under an unconstitutional law. The DOC hasn't yet decided whether to appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court.

Parmelee's legal briefs are all handwritten, and mimic the legalese used by licensed attorneys. As firms do with professional legal filings, Parmelee prints his name and address—usually a DOC facility—in the lower right-hand corner of each page. That address is the result of the other reason Parmelee spends so much time in the courts: his extensive criminal record. According to an arrest report, he had racked up convictions in North Carolina, Florida, and Illinois long before he came to Washington a decade ago.

After serving time for smuggling undocumented immigrants, Parmelee got married in 1994 and moved with his then-wife, to Seattle, where they had a son. Three years later, she filed for divorce. The proceedings got messy, and Parmelee developed an intimate knowledge of the state legal system, filing more than 60 motions before and during the three-week trial, according to his now ex-wife's attorney Kathryn Jenkins. "He uses the law as a sword," she says.

None of Parmelee's motions had much success, but Jenkins alleges that he became physically threatening as well. At one point, he set up a Web site with a map to Jenkins' home. Another time he called Jenkins' assistant with threats, Jenkins says. Then on Valentine's Day 1998 someone poured gasoline into the passenger seat of Jenkins' husband's Ford truck and threw in a lighter. Hearing a car, she went to the window to see the truck engulfed in flames. Jenkins suspected Parmelee, but he wasn't charged at the time.

Parmelee's ex-wife walked away from the divorce with the house and a restraining order. But Parmelee didn't stay away from his ex, and was convicted in 1998 of violating the order and one count of felony stalking. He was sentenced to four years in King County Jail, as the arrest also violated the terms of his release after the smuggling charge. From jail, he started filing civil suits against his ex-wife and Jenkins, accusing them of damaging his property by throwing it into his yard and conspiring to defame him.