[mchannon]

Appreciate your updating (and catching) that. GoFundMe apparently thought it needed to be changed. No alert to me or anything.

Guess I'll have to make one minor change in iMovie and re-upload 2GB. I hope they don't pull this again.

[hirundo]

Mr. Channon, is there anything you can say at this point about the allegations in the indictment? Are they whole-cloth fabrications, misreadings of the law, accurate, something else? Is there a victim here besides yourself?

[mchannon]

There were three indictments in this case. The two lies the case was based on were:

•OfficeMax lost money every time I traded them a cartridge for $3 in net 45 store credit (pay no attention to the fact they refilled them, put them in generic packaging, and sold them for $10 less than a new $60 cartridge). They went off what they thought I paid as what they were actually worth (like having a pizza delivered, and telling them it's only worth $1.26 because that's all you believe they paid for the ingredients). Also pay no mind to the fact they could have stopped paying me at any time for them, for years, or asked me to stop bringing them in. But no, every time I came in with a bag, beep beep went the scanner 20 times, handed me a receipt confirming same with a smile, and out I went. Yet I was somehow the one stealing from them.

•I got explicit written permission from them with the receipt adjustments. They even reworded it to make it more explicitly permissible to do what I did. My public defender slow-walked this in front of the jury so I couldn't raise it as ineffective assistance.

If you watched the video, you'd know my wife was a victim. But the biggest victim I'd say is the American people. I've worked many years as a bay area mobile developer, and paid a lot in income taxes, and supported my family. Throwing a fine at me wouldn't have cost the tax base anything, but the hit to the taxpayer was substantial by taking away my ability to work and throwing my family onto public assistance. Most of America is disturbingly comfortable pinching pennies when it comes to aid to the poor but goes full drunken sailor when it comes to spending money on prisons.