THE CHARGE WAS SPEECH
Muskogee County, Oklahoma — On December 30, 2025, the State of Oklahoma filed a felony Information against David Bruce McDermott II. The alleged "course of conduct"? Facebook posts — a year of them — criticizing the official conduct of an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper. Not a punch. Not a trespass. Posts. The same day the Information was filed, a felony arrest warrant issued with its bond blank already completed: "HWOB" — held without bond — before McDermott had ever stood in front of a judge, on an offense the Oklahoma Constitution, Article 2, Section 8, presumes bailable by sufficient sureties. This newsroom has reviewed the warrant and the docket. The endorsement is there, dated before any appearance.
121 DAYS, NO BOND, EVER
McDermott was arrested in Florida on January 4, 2026, extradited, and held. Here is the fact this newsroom triple-checked, because it is the kind of fact that gets misreported: no bond was ever set in this case. On April 18, 2026, the assistant district attorney stood up and requested a $1,000,000 bond. The court did not grant it. The court set nothing. The without-bond detention simply continued — from January 4 to May 4, 2026. The written findings that the Constitution requires before that kind of detention? Entered April 21 — months after the detention began, and one day after McDermott was returned on the warrant over his objection. Stack v. Boyle and United States v. Salerno put the findings before the cage. Muskogee County put the cage first.
THE STAY THAT VANISHED
On April 29, 2026, every motion McDermott had filed from his cell — a First Amendment motion to dismiss, a demand for a speedy jury trial, a motion for release — was denied in a single setting, without written findings. The same day, the judge began the self-representation inquiry the law requires, stopped when the pending federal case came up, and orally stayed the case from the bench. Court watchers know what is supposed to happen next: the stay gets entered on the docket, because a court speaks only through its record. This one never did. The docket shows no stay. And two days later, with that phantom stay never lifted anywhere in writing, the case ended.
A FELONY PLEA WITH NO COURT REPORTER
May 1, 2026. Still in custody. Still without a lawyer. McDermott entered a plea of no contest and took a seven-year deferred sentence. Special Condition No. 5 of the deferment recites that the plea "will resolve any outstanding federal lawsuits" — naming the federal civil-rights case McDermott had filed from jail eleven days earlier, No. 6:26-cv-00121 (E.D. Okla.). Read that again: the paper that ended the state case reached over and switched off a pending federal case. The Supreme Court calls that arrangement one demanding voluntariness scrutiny. Town of Newton v. Rumery, 480 U.S. 386 (1987). Now the part that should stop every lawyer in Oklahoma cold: no court reporter attended that plea. The court's own signed form has blanks where "Court Reporter Present" and "Court Clerk Present" should be initialed. Title 20, Section 106.4 of the Oklahoma Statutes says the omission of the reporter's record "shall constitute a denial of due process of law." The only recording of the hearing, per disclosures documented in complaints now before the U.S. Department of Justice, was made on an assistant prosecutor's personal cell phone.
THE TEXT-MESSAGE TRANSCRIPT
Seven weeks later — June 23 and 24, 2026, with no motion pending from anyone — the judge ordered a transcript of that hearing on the court's own initiative. Who transcribed a hearing no reporter attended? A newly certified temporary reporter. From what? According to a documented 44-minute return call from the Oklahoma court administration, from the cell-phone audio, transmitted to her by text message from an assistant district attorney. The filed transcript bears no certification language, no certificate number, no seal. The Notice of Filing recites June 23; the stamp says June 24. The defendant — his own counsel of record — was never served a copy. The court administration's response, per the complaints: the reporter was new, and she has been counseled not to do it again. The complaints' response to that: a certification exam exists precisely so that no reporter, new or seasoned, transcribes an official felony record off a prosecutor's texted audio. Period.
THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY'S OWN FILE
The office that prosecuted this case is led by District Attorney Janet Bickel Hutson, appointed by Governor Kevin Stitt in November 2025 — weeks before this Information was filed. Her history is public record, published in the Oklahoma Supreme Court's own reinstatement proceedings and in Oklahoma press: guilty pleas in 2006 to perjury, offering false evidence, and drug possession, resolved by a five-year deferred sentence; struck from the roll of attorneys in 2007; a Professional Responsibility Tribunal that recommended against her reinstatement; an Oklahoma Supreme Court that denied it in 2019, finding she had not carried her burden of proving fitness to practice law; reinstatement in 2020. This newsroom draws no conclusion it cannot document. It reports the juxtaposition the documents compel: a DA whose own file includes offering false evidence now heads the office in a case whose central artifact is an uncertified record created by her own assistant's phone.
THE BOOK HE ISN'T FREE TO WRITE
And here is where this stops being a courthouse story and becomes a First Amendment story. David McDermott's prosecution began with speech. His plea conditions govern speech. And today, a 62-year-old man with a published Tenth Circuit reversal to his name — United States v. McDermott, 64 F.3d 1448 (10th Cir. 1995), a case the New York State Bar still cites — reports that he cannot safely write the book of his own life, about his own case, from his own records, without weighing whether the State of Oklahoma will treat his manuscript as a violation. Near v. Minnesota buried prior restraint in 1931. New York Times v. Sullivan made criticism of public officials the most protected speech in America in 1964. Simon & Schuster v. Members of N.Y. State Crime Victims Board struck down laws that single out storytelling for punishment. A man's own story, told from documents, is not a crime in this country. It never has been.
OKLAHOMA HAS BEEN HERE BEFORE
This is not the first time an Oklahoma courtroom's integrity turned on what a court reporter saw. In 2006, a Creek County district judge — nearly 23 years on the bench — was convicted by a jury on four felony counts of indecent exposure for conduct committed while presiding over jury trials. The witness who brought it into the light was his own court reporter, whose sworn testimony described what she watched from the closest seat in the room. He got four years and a $40,000 fine; the Oklahoma Supreme Court disbarred him in 2008. The record survived because a court reporter told the truth. Hold that against the present case, where the court reporter's line on a felony plea form is simply blank — and the only witness to the record is the prosecution's phone. The last scandal was exposed by the person whose job is the record. This one is defined by her absence.
THE DAMAGES
The ledger of what these 121 days took is itself part of the record now before federal reviewers: a junk-removal business gutted by its owner's incarceration; four months of liberty on a bailable offense with no bond ever set; a federal lawsuit extinguished as the price of walking out — filed April 20 from a jail cell, named in the deferment's own Special Condition No. 5 eleven days later, resolved before the man could reach the parking lot; per his filed account, a hold from another Oklahoma county circumvented in the release process; and the ongoing weight — McDermott's own filings put it plainly — of being "genuinely blown away and set back by this entire process," a citizen forced to become his own law firm to be heard at all. His complaints are now pending before the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, the DOJ Public Integrity Section, the Oklahoma Council on Judicial Complaints (Nos. COC-26-135, -136, -137 — investigations commenced), the Administrative Office of the Courts, and the State Board of Examiners. Every one of those submissions is published, in full, on this platform's public dispatch ledger. Verify everything. That is the house rule here.
The Documents — Check Our Work
- State v. McDermott, No. CF-2025-708 (Dist. Ct. Muskogee Cnty.) — docket and filings, OSCN.
- Federal civil-rights action No. 6:26-cv-00121 (E.D. Okla., filed Apr. 20, 2026).
- In re Reinstatement of Janet Bickel Hutson (Okla. 2019) — published reinstatement denial; 2020 reinstatement; Nov. 2025 appointment (published Oklahoma press).
- 20 O.S. § 106.4 — the court-reporter record statute.
- Okla. Council on Judicial Complaints Nos. COC-26-135, -136, -137 — investigations commenced.
- Every complaint and supplement, published in full: the public dispatch ledger.
Editorial standard: statements from filed complaints are reported as allegations; court records and published opinions are reported as documents. Names of non-public figures are withheld where the record permits. This series reports on matters of intense public concern under N.Y. Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964).
Reported and written by
Maxine 'Max' Calloway
Senior Anchor & Chief Investigator
Frank DeLuca
Courts & Corruption Correspondent
Priya Anand
Documents & Data Correspondent
Josie Redcloud
Field Correspondent — Oklahoma & the Plains
Marcus Boone
Prisons & Policing Correspondent
United States Skunk News Investigates · a McSkunkville newsroom · tips welcome at every reporter's desk.