One True Story. Three Ways to Experience It.
Judge Not is the true story of Jonathon Parker — a farm boy from a family farm in Ontario who built a career as a real estate developer in Regina, SK and Vancouver, BC, and became the target of a few corrupt RCMP officers determined to destroy him for it. It's a story of institutional betrayal, a wrongful conviction, years behind bars, and a settlement that left the conviction itself untouched — followed, years later, by a second betrayal that tried to use that same unresolved record against him. Jonathon told the whole of it in his memoir, Judge Not, and from there the story has grown into a nine-part limited series and a two-part feature film. However you want to experience it, it's the same true story — just at a different pace, and in a different amount of detail.
Read It in Full — The Book
Judge Not, by Jonathon Parker, as told to Pat Flewwelling, is the complete, first-person account — every detail, every setback, in Jonathon's own voice, from the day he left the farm to the day he chose to forgive.
Every chapter, in order — a few with a closer look:
Chapter One — A Day of Lasts: He left the family farm for good. He never looked back.
Chapter Two — Limitless Horizons: He arrived in Regina and made his first fortune within months.
Chapter Three — A Whirlwind Romance
Chapter Four — The Middle of Nowhere
Chapter Five — Cracks in the Glass: A friend warned him about his wife. He didn't listen until it was too late.
Chapter Six — Safekeeping
Chapter Seven — Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover
Chapter Eight — Taken: A business deal ended with a gun in his face.
Chapter Nine — A Good Place to Dump a Body
Chapter Ten — Running From the Cops: He escaped the men shaking him down — then started recording them.
Chapter Eleven — Left for Dead
Chapter Twelve — Flagged
Chapter Thirteen — Guilty in Print: The newspaper convicted him before any court did.
Chapter Fourteen — Five Minutes
Chapter Fifteen — The Confession Tape
Chapter Sixteen — Someone on the Inside
Chapter Seventeen — Hands on Your Head
Chapter Eighteen — Forty-One Counts: A fire he didn't set became forty-one counts of attempted murder.
Chapter Nineteen — Guilt by Reputation
Chapter Twenty — A Conflict of Interest
Chapter Twenty-One — The Eyewitness Who Never Saw: The star witness hadn't actually seen a thing.
Chapter Twenty-Two — The Verdict: The evidence proved it impossible. The judge convicted him anyway.
Chapter Twenty-Three — False Hope, Punished
Chapter Twenty-Four — The Lockdown: Nine weeks of lockdown, waiting for a single chance at freedom.
Chapter Twenty-Five — I Miss You, Daddy
Chapter Twenty-Six — The Next One
Chapter Twenty-Seven — Seventeen Boxes: Investigators seized seventeen boxes of his own research.
Chapter Twenty-Eight — Never So Ready
Chapter Twenty-Nine — My Soul-Sucking Businessman
Chapter Thirty — The Trust Account: He built a ten-million-dollar trust to try to make it right.
Chapter Thirty-One — A Second Conviction
Epilogue — Tired, But Not Defeated: The book's own closing words, in his voice.
A Second Epilogue — Partners of Convenience: He'd already won once. This time, none of them wore a badge.
Watch It Episode by Episode — The Nine-Part Limited Series
Told as a nine-part limited series, JUDGE NOT gives the story room to breathe — a full episode for each turn:
Episode 1 — Roots and Ruin: He came west for a fresh start. He got a front-row seat to his own undoing.
Episode 2 — Good Fortune: He built a fortune on trust. It cost him everything to find out who he could trust it with.
Episode 3 — Three Men in a Junkyard: They didn't need evidence. They just needed him to stop asking for it.
Episode 4 — The Tape: He finally had proof. It didn't matter — they'd already decided he was guilty.
Episode 5 — The Verdict: The evidence proved his innocence. The verdict proved the system doesn't need evidence at all.
Episode 6 — Stony Mountain: He held out for years for someone to believe him. When they finally did, he'd already lost everything else.
Episode 7 — Starting Over: He finally learned why. It didn't stop them from trying to erase it.
Episode 8 — Tired, But Not Defeated: Thirty-four years. Three men. One choice he made every single time: to stay who he was.
Episode 9 — Partners of Convenience: He'd already won once. This time, the people who turned on him weren't wearing badges.
See The TV Mini-Series for more.
Watch It in Two Parts — The Movie
For the big-screen version, the same story compresses into a two-part motion picture event: JUDGE NOT (Part One), the empire-building and the frame-up; and MAINTAINING THE RIGHT (Part Two), the conviction, the prison sentence, and the fight that finally brought his tormentors down. See The Movie for more.
How It Really Ends
Every version of this story now closes the same way. In 2019, thirty-seven years after his conviction, Jonathon's entire criminal record was formally expunged and he was pardoned. It's the true closing page of the book, and the final image of both the film and the series.
Put It Into Practice — The Forty-Five-Year Builder's Trilogy
The same forty-five-year career sits behind three companion booklets — practical, step-by-step guides to planning, financing and building, drawn from the real projects and real numbers behind the story. Each one comes with a working calculator so you can run your own figures.
Read It Your Way — Editions
Here on judgenot.ca: PDF and ebook together, one download, in Canadian dollars — the best price, straight from the author. On Amazon: Kindle ebook, paperback and hardcover. Below, read the free Kindle sample of Judge Not right on this page.