Attn. Sandollar: Paul Pantone Confirmation
Posted By: GreyOtter
Date: Saturday, 3 January 2009, 8:06 p.m.
The link below is to the Salt Lake City Independent News
with a writeup:
http://www.slweekly.com/index.cfm?do=article.details&id=FE7B10D0-1372-FCBB-83E8C5C66C046345
GreyOtter
The article is very long... here's a snip from it
R.
Fuel Injected Lunatic
Inventor Paul Pantone hoped to save the world. Now, will the world save him?
By Stephen Dark
Posted 07/26/2007
Led by a bailiff into Judge Royal Hansen’s 3rd District Court in West Jordan on June 7, Paul Pantone’s shuffling gait might have been caused by a broken big toe—gone untreated for more than year and a half—rather than by his wrist and ankle manacles.
The 56-year-old’s tall frame was stooped, his face, gray and long. He sat down between his two lawyers and looked up almost in bewilderment as Hansen called the hearing to order, the outcome of which Pantone has been awaiting for the 16 months of his incarceration in the state mental hospital.
A broken toe isn’t Pantone’s only ailment. He has untreated Hepatitis C, persistent migraines, skin rashes, rotten teeth and infected gums. But all this, it might be argued, pales beside what he fears will be the impact on his health if the hearing’s outcome goes against him.
What Hansen has to decide is whether or not the Attorney General’s Office can forcibly medicate Pantone to make him competent for trial.
snip
Pantone’s voice, as far as talking to the press, is silenced by hospital regulations designed to protect patients’ privacy. The only clue to Pantone’s current thoughts is from his younger brother Rocky, who lives in Tennessee and talks to him regularly on the phone.
“I try to talk to him, help him stay calm,” he says. “He’s confused, he’s up and down. … He’s pissed and hurting. … If I read him right, he’s extremely scared; he doesn’t want to be medicated.”
This institutionally imposed silence must be frustrating to a man who, for decades, hawked inventions to a highly skeptical world. Extraordinary Technology magazine publisher Steve Elswick says Pantone’s a very accomplished inventor. He’s also, Elswick says, outspoken and egotistical. “You’ve got to be somewhat egotistical to believe you can do something everyone else says is impossible.”
snip
With gas prices reaching all-time highs in 2007, the idea of severing this nation from its imported oil dependency is inevitably a seductive one. Which is why, for members of the Paul Pantone Defense Project, Pantone is “an American energy hero … suffering horrendous prosecution promised by a powerful political machine determined to make him ‘go away.’”
Along with substantial anecdotal evidence from friends, teachers, students and investors that the device does reduce emissions—within limitations—a number of Pantone’s supporters say they have witnessed a GEET-modified engine run on a little gasoline, water, cat urine, Coke and pickle juice while in a closed room for several hours without suffering from ill effects.
But their claims don’t stop there. Supporters say disgruntled investors have conspired to frame Pantone with false fraud charges in order to steal his patent. Assistant Attorney General Richard Hamp, who’s pursued Pantone through the courts since 2003, isn’t impressed. “I’ve seen a number of conspiracy theories,” he says. “I haven’t seen anything to prove any of it at this time.”
To the state, and the inventor’s many detractors, Pantone is a con man who swindled investors with a fanciful idea that never came to fruition.
Whatever the forces that brought Pantone to his current plight, follow the trail he’s left through court documents, the Internet and interviews with former associates, and a picture emerges of a man who, for all his best intentions, seems to be incarcerated by his increasingly desperate attempts to breathe life into his invention as much as by the hospital’s locked doors.
Much Much More at
http://www.slweekly.com/index.cfm?do=article.details&id=FE7B10D0-1372-FCBB-83E8C5C66C046345
Serving Freedom
and Liberty
