This is all good news for me. The investigation may appear quiet on the surface, but internally the pressure grows. My worst nightmare is a bold headline announcing the arrest of someone, but that appears less and less likely. The days pass, and I wait patiently.

I see clients by appointment only. I meet them at my cubicle in the library. They haul in their legal papers, a stack of assorted pleadings, orders, motions, and rulings that as inmates we have the right to keep in our cells. The COs cannot touch our legal papers.

For most of my clients, two appointments will suffice to convince them that there is nothing to be done with their cases. During the first appointment, we review the basics, and I go through their papers. Then I’ll spend a few hours doing research. During the second appointment, I usually deliver the bad news that they’re out of luck. There’s no loophole to save them.

In five years, I have helped six inmates gain early release from prison. Needless to say, this adds mightily to my reputation as a masterful jailhouse lawyer, but I caution every new client that the odds are stacked heavily against him.

This is what I explain to young Otis Carter, a twenty-three-year-old father of two who’ll spend the next fourteen months here at Frostburg for a crime that should not have been a crime. Otis is a country boy, a Baptist with a deep faith, a happily married electrician who still cannot believe he’s in a federal prison. He and his grandfather were indicted and charged with violating the Civil War Battlefield and Artifact Preservation Act of 1979 (as amended in 1983, 1989, 1997, 2002, 2008, and 2010). His grandfather, aged seventy-four and suffering from emphysema, is in a Federal Medical Center in Tennessee, also serving fourteen months. Because of his medical condition, he will cost the taxpayers about $25,000 a month.

The Carters were hunting for artifacts on their two-hundred-acre farm adjacent to the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park, in the Shenandoah Valley, less than an hour from my hometown of Winchester. The farm has been in the family for over a hundred years, and from the time he could walk, Otis accompanied his grandfather as he “went digging” for Civil War relics and souvenirs. Over the decades, his family assembled an impressive collection of minié balls, cannonballs, canteens, brass buttons, pieces of uniforms, a couple of battle flags, and several dozen guns of all varieties. This they had done legally. It is illegal to remove artifacts and relics from a National Historic Landmark, which is federal land, and the Carters were well aware of this law. Their private little museum, in a converted hay barn, was stocked with items they had found on their own property.

However, in 2010, the Civil War Battlefield and Artifact Preservation Act was amended again. In response to efforts by preservationists to restrict development near battlefields, some last-minute language was added to a one-hundred-page amendment. It became illegal to dig for relics “within two miles” of the borders of a National Historic Landmark, regardless of whose land one happened to be digging on. The Carters were not informed of the new rules; indeed, the language was buried so deep in the amendment virtually no one knew about it.

Over the years, the federal agents had harassed Otis’s grandfather and accused him of digging on protected land. They periodically stopped by his home and demanded to see his museum. When the law changed, they waited patiently until they caught Otis and his grandfather scouring a wooded area of Carter property with metal detectors. The Carters hired a lawyer who advised them to plead guilty. Criminal intent is no longer required for many federal crimes. Lack of knowledge is no defense.

As the victim of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), an often misguided and famously flexible federal law, I am keenly interested in the proliferation of the federal criminal code, now at twenty-seven thousand pages and counting. The Constitution names only three federal offenses: treason, piracy, and counterfeiting. Today there are over forty-five hundred federal crimes, and the number continues to grow as Congress gets tougher on crime and federal prosecutors become more creative in finding ways to apply all their new laws.

Otis could possibly attack the constitutionality of the amended law. This would take several years of litigation and would drag on long after he’s paroled and back home with his family. As I explain this to him during our second meeting, he seems to lose interest. If he can’t get out right now, why bother? But the case intrigues me. We decide to discuss it later.

If my grand scheme falls flat, I might take Otis’s case and fight all the way to the Supreme Court. That will keep me busy for the next five years.

The Supreme Court has twice refused to consider my case. Though we couldn’t prove it, there was a strong feeling that my appeals were hurried through the system because of the government’s enthusiasm in putting away Barry Rafko and his confederates, me included.

I was convicted in November 2005 and sentenced two months later to ten years. At my sentencing I was “remanded,” which meant I was taken into custody. A few lucky federal felons are allowed to “self-surrender,” or remain free until ordered to report to a facility. They have time to prepare, but most are not given this luxury.

My lawyer thought I would get five or six years. Barry the Backhander, the star defendant, the target, the colorful villain everyone enjoyed hating, got twelve years. Surely I deserved less than half the time of that slimeball. Dionne, my beautiful and loving and fiercely supportive wife, was in the courtroom, sitting bravely next to my humiliated father. I was the only one of the eight sentenced that day, and as I stood before Judge Slater, with my lawyer to my right, I had trouble breathing. This cannot be happening, I said to myself, over and over, as I took in the blurred images around me. I don’t deserve this. I can explain. I am not guilty. Slater scolded and preached and played for the press, and I felt like a battered heavyweight in the fifteenth round, sagging on the ropes, covering my face, waiting for the next shot to the face. My knees were putty. I was sweating.

When Judge Slater said “ten years,” I heard a gasp behind me as Dionne collapsed in tears. As they led me away, I glanced back for the last time. I’ve seen this a hundred times in movies, TV shows, and in real-life court reporting—the last, frantic farewell look of the condemned. What do you think about as you’re leaving the courtroom and you’re not going home? The truth is that nothing is clear. There are too many random thoughts, too much fear, anger, and raw emotion to understand what is happening.

Dionne had both hands over her mouth, in shock, crying, tears everywhere. My father had his arm around her, trying to console her. That was the last thing I saw—my beautiful wife distraught and destroyed.

Now she’s married to someone else.

Thanks to the federal government.

My jurors came from the District. A few appeared bright and educated, but most were not, shall I say, sophisticated. After three days of deliberations, they announced to the judge that they were making little progress. And who could blame them? By unloading a sizable chunk of the federal code, the prosecutors had adopted the timeworn strategy of throwing as much mud as possible against the wall and hoping something would stick. This overkill had turned what should have been a relatively easy case against Barry Rafko and the congressman into a legal quagmire. I had spent countless hours working on my own defense, and I couldn’t understand all of the prosecution’s theories. From the beginning, my lawyer had predicted a hung jury.