Challenge to Chief Justice
Dalit’s
Diary - e News Weekly
Working For The Rights
& Survival Of The Oppressed
Editor: NAGARAJA.M.R… VOL.11 issue.35…… . 13 /
09 / 2017
Editorial : Judges
are NOT Perfect
Corruption is
rampant among judges worldover. Why not
jail , 3rd degree
punishment for corrupt judges , corrupt police in India ?
JAIL Chief
Justice Dipak Mishra
https://sites.google.com/site/dalitsdiary/dipak-mishra-unfit-judge Mishra Threatens Complainant
https://sites.google.com/site/dalitsdiary/mishra-threatens-petitioner
Legal Notice to Honourable Chief Justice of India
To,
Honourable Chief Justice of India,
SUPREME COURT OF INDIA,
New Delhi.
Honourable Sir ,
Subject : Legal Notice to Chief Justice of India
Are Judges , Police PERFECT ? Satya Harishchandra ?
Hereby , I challenge Chief Justice of India in the exercise of my FUNDAMENTAL DUTIES as a citizen of india , that subject to conditions I will legally prove the crimes of few judges , police , public servants within the government service and other criminals. Is the CJI ready to book those criminals , traitors , anti nationals ?
Since 25 years I am appealing to apex court for justice concerning various public issues , no justice in sight but injustices meted out one after another. But the same judges are SHAMELESSLY taking huge pay perks for years now are also poised to get almost triple fold salary increase. Parasites feeding on Indian Public. Whenever questions of accountability are asked judges level contempt charges against the questioner or police fix him in fake cases or he is silenced by threats , murders , denial of jobs , etc. Since 25 years in many ways they are trying to silence me. Just take the recent example of Justice Karnan who leveled corruption charges against specific judges with CJI. Instead of conducting a fair investigation into the matter , CJI tried to silence him by serving him contempt notice.
Our Judges , Police are NOT Perfect Not Satya Harischandras . There are criminals as well as honest people side by side in judiciary & police. We whole heartedly respect honest few in judiciary , police & public service. But we detest corrupt judges , corrupt police. Honest Judges & Police are not coming into open to prosecute their corrupt colleagues, why ? silenced ?
Criminalization of all wings of government has taken place , unfit people are in the positions of power. Corruption in judiciary , police , CBI , CVC , Public service is rampant. Now MAFIA is at work. Only few scandals , scams become public , many are buried. If one criminal public servant is caught other public servant who is also a criminal conducts name sake investigation , gives report , clean chit. Law courts rely on the government reports as evidences , courts are not bothered about credibility of reports or investigations. It is quid pro quo. Therefore technically criminal public servants are never proved for their crimes & convicted , as investigation itself is not fair.
A Crime may happen without the knowledge of police but cann’t continue for years without the connivance of police. A Crime reported to court cann’t continue for years without connivance of judges.
At the bottom of the paper , I have given web sites about few ACB raids on government officials and unearthing of crores worth property. How they have earned it , by misusing their official positions. Therefore government reports , records prepared by these officials , investigations conducted by corrupt police are suspect. But Law courts in various cases , considers government reports , records , statements of government officials as sacrosanct . Therefore in many cases injustice is meted out by court , as they depend on reports of corrupt government officials , corrupt police.
The public servants & the government must be role models in law abiding acts , for others to emulate & follow. if a student makes a mistake it is excusable & can be corrected by the teacher. if the teacher himself makes a mistake , all his students will do the same mistake. if a thief steals , he can be caught , legally punished & reformed . if a police himself commits crime , many thieves go scot-free under his patronage. even if a police , public servant commits a crime , he can be legally prosecuted & justice can be sought by the aggrieved. just think , if a judge himself that too of apex court of the land himself commits crime - violations of RTI Act , constitutional rights & human rights of public and obstructs the public from performing their constitutional fundamental duties , what happens ?
"Power will go to the hands of rascals, , rogues and freebooters. All Indian leaders will be of low calibre and men of straw. They will have sweet tongues and silly hearts. They will fight among themselves for power and will be lost in political squabbles . A day would come when even air & water will be taxed." Sir Winston made this statement in the House of Commons just before the independence of India & Pakistan. Sadly , the forewarning of Late Winston Churchill has been proved right by some of our criminal , corrupt people’s representatives , police , public servants & Judges.
I don’t know whether secretariat staff of CJI office & DARPG / DPG officials are forwarding my appeals for justice , e-mails to you or not. They will be held accountable for their lapses if any. This notice is against the repeated failure of constitutional duties & indirect collusion with criminals by previous CHIEF JUSTICEs OF INDIA. Notice is served against them , to the office of CJI , NOT personally against you.
Please refer my appeal for justice through DARPG ;
DLGLA/E/2013/00292
DEPOJ/E/2013/00679
In india democracy is a farce , freedom a mirage. the most basic freedom RIGHT TO INFORMATION & EXPRESSION , is not honoured by the government,as the information opens up the crimes of V.V.I.Ps & leads to their ill-gotten wealth. The public servants are least bothered about the lives of people or justice to them. these type of fat cats , parasites are a drain on the public exchequer . these people want ,wish me to see dead , wish to see HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH closed . so that, a voice against injustices is silenced forever , the crimes of V.V.I.Ps closed , buried forever.
To my numerous appeals , HRW’s appeals to you ,you have not yet replied. It clearly shows that you are least bothered about the lives of people or justice to them .it proves that you are hell bent to protect the criminals at any cost. you are just pressurising the police to enquire me ,to take my statement, to repeatedly call me to police station all with a view to silence me.all of you enjoy “legal immunity privileges” ,why don’t you have given powers to the police / investigating officer to summon all of you for enquiry ?or else why don’t all of you are not appearing before the police voluntarily for enquiry ?at the least why don’t all of you are not sending your statement about the case to the police either through legal counsel or through post? you are aiding criminals ,by denying me job oppurtunities in R.B.I CURRENCY NOTE PRESS mysore , city civil court ,bangalore , distict court , mysore ,etc & by illegally closing my newspaper. Even Press accreditation to me as a web journalist is denied till date. there is a gross, total mismatch between your actions and your oath of office. this amounts to public cheating & moral turpitude on your part.
1.you are making contempt of the very august office you hold.
2.you are making contempt of the constitution of india.
3.you are making contempt of citizens of india.
4.you are sponsoring & aiding terorrism & organized crime.
5.you are violating the fundamental & human rights of the citizens of india and of neighbouring countries.
6.you are violating & making contempt of the U.N HUMAN RIGHTS CHARTER to which india is a signatory.
7.you are obstructing me from performing my fundamental duties as a citizen of india.
8. As a result of your gross negligence of constitutional duties you have caused me damages / losses to the tune of RUPEES TWO CRORE ONLY.
9. You are responsible for crime cover ups mentioned in my RTI Appeals , PILs and continuation of those crimes unabated.
10. You are responsible for denial of information, which vindicates the crimes of powers that be.
11. You are responsible for physical assaults , murder attempts on me.
12. You are responsible for job denials to me at NIE , PES Engineering college , RBI Press , Mysore , Bangalore Courts.
13. You are responsible for my illegal retrenchment from RPG Cables , denial of medical care to me towards occupational health problems.
14. You are responsible for denying me legal aid.
15. You are responsible for illegal closure of my news paper.
16. You are responsible for denial of press accreditation to me as a web journalist till date.
17. You are responsible for repeatedly passing on my appeals to police. So that they can take statements , close the file under the threat of police power.
18. You have violated my Human Rights & Fundamental Rights.
19. In terms of Integrity , Honesty You & other public servants are nowhere near Baba Saheb B R Ambedkar , Mahatma Gandhi & Satya Harishchandra . Many Public servants are UNFIT to be in their posts.
You are hereby called upon to Pay damages to me and SHOW-CAUSE within 30 days , why you cann’t be legally prosecuted for the above mentioned crimes . If you don’t answer it will be admission of the charges by you. It will amount to confession of crimes on your own.
If i am repeatedly called to police station or else where for the sake of investigations , the losses i do incurr as a result like loss of wages , transportation , job , etc must be borne by the government. prevoiusly the police / IB personnel repeatedly called me the complainant (sufferer of injustices) to police station for questioning , but never called the guilty culprits even once to police station for questioning , as the culprits are high & mighty . this type of one sided questioning must not be done by police or investigating agencies . if anything untoward happens to me or to my family members like loss of job , meeting with hit & run accidents , loss of lives , etc , the jurisdictional police together with above mentioned accussed public servants , Chief Justice of India & Jurisdictional District Magistrate will be responsible for it. Even if criminal nexus levels fake charges , police file fake cases against me or my dependents to silence me , this complaint is & will be effective.
if anything untoward happens to me or my dependents , the government of india is liable to pay Rs. TWO crore as compensation to survivors of my family. if my whole family is eliminated by the criminal nexus ,then that compensation money must be donated to Indian Army Welfare Fund. afterwards , the money must be recovered by GOI as land arrears from the salary , pension , property , etc of guilty judges , police officials , public servants & Constitutional fuctionaries.
Thanking you. Jai Hind , Vande Mataram.
Send reply to :
Nagaraja Mysuru Raghupathi
Editor , SOS e Voice for Justice & SOS e Clarion of Dalit,
LIG 2 , NO 761 , HUDCO First Stage,
Laxmikantanagar , Hebbal ,
Mysuru – 570017.
Date : 05.09.2017……………..your’s sincerely,
Place : Mysore , India ……….Nagaraja Mysuru Raghupathi
When judicial corruption leads to severe punishment of
free speech
Two judges in
Pennsylvania pleaded guilty last week to taking $2.6 million in exchange for
sentencing juveniles to time in privately run detention centers. 5,000
juveniles have been sentenced since this kickback scheme started; many of them
were first-time offenders.What if sentencing of those 5,0000 juveniles had been done by a judge seeking accountability and rehabilitation for the offender rather than financial gain for himself? How many of those teens might have been spared life-long negative outcomes? How many guardians might have avoided the pain of interference with their parental rights? This kickback scheme offends justice and decency, and reflects a broken juvenile court system. But what does it have to do with speech?
One of the teens devastated by this kickback scheme is Hillary Transue. Hillary was sentenced by the corrupt Judge Ciavarella Jr. in 2007. She received 3 months in a juvenile detention center for creating a spoof MySpace page about her assistant principal. According to the New York Times, the page clearly stated that it was a joke.
Teenagers regularly use forums like MySpace for self-expression. Making the publication of a MySpace parody a jailable offense likely chills teen speech in this and other on-line forums. Sentenced teenagers and their families clearly are the primary victims of the judges’ crimes, but the chilling of speech is a notable secondary effect. With hope, the chill will be lifted with the eventual sentencing of these corrupt judges. Perhaps they’ll be subject to MySpace parodies of their own.
Corrupt judge sentenced to 30 years in prison for
jailing innocent children in 'kids for cash' scheme
5 Corrupt Judges & The Countless Lives They Tried
To Destroy
We’d like to think our justices and judges are defined by respect, duty and impartiality. But behind that iconic black robe isn’t always a tireless drive to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States. Some of the most revered judges are worse than the criminals they should be sentencing. Below we examine five corrupt judges who will make you question your faith in the legal system.
1. Judge Mark Ciavarella’s Kids For Cash Scheme
Nicknamed “Mr. Zero Tolerance”, Ciavarella was a big supporter of harsh sentences…for kids. Ciavarella sent thousand of children to a local detention center during his tenure in Luzerne County, PA. Think the kids deserved it? Listen to this: Ciavarella sent an 11-year-old to juvenile detention for almost two years after the kid took his mom’s car for a ride down the block. He also sent a 15-year-old to the same detention facility for mocking her assistant principal on MySpace and gave a 17-year-old five months for helping steal DVDs.
Here’s the part that puts Ciavarella on our list — he got kickbacks from the facility where he sent those kids. No wonder the hearings often lasted only two minutes, Ciavarella got up to a million dollars for putting hundred of innocent children behind bars. The courts wised up to his plans, and eventually sentenced Mr. Zero Tolerance to 27 years in prison. Following his sentencing, nearly 4,000 of Ciavarella’s previous convictions were overturned. Too little, too late if you ask us.
2. Judge Thomas J. Maloney Defined Corruption In Cook County
Thomas J. Maloney was a judge in Cook County, Illinois from 1977 to 1991. Maloney and numerous fellow Cook County judges were the focus of an investigation named Operation Greylord. The operation was a joint investigation by the FBI, IRS, USPS and the Illinois State Police to track down corrupt judges.
Like many of the public officials on our list, Maloney had an interesting way of dolling out sentences, especially in high-profile murder cases. In exchange for rigging murder cases Maloney got over $100,000 in bribes. Maloney let mafia members, murderers and gangsters walk free, as long as he got his “fee.” To this day Maloney is listed as “one of the worst judges in history.”
3. Judge Michael Cicconetti’s Bizarre Sentences Puts His Community At Risk
Cicconetti of Lake County, Ohio might not be taking bribes or sending innocent children to a dark future behind bars, but he is guilty of beyond bizarre sentencing. Cicconetti had a particularly creative way of prescribing punishment to anyone unfortunate enough to end up in his court room. The honorable Cicconetti had a woman spend the night alone in the woods without food after she a banded 35 kittens. He forced men who had been arrested for soliciting sex dress up as giant chickens and wonder around town.
While we can appreciate his desire to be original, Cicconetti’s sentences often caused more harm than good. For example, when a man shot his dog in the head and Cicconetti gave him 20 days in a dog costume teaching kids about traffic safety and drug abuse. Dog killer and kids just don’t mix.
4. Judge Kurt Eisgruber Shamed The Victim
While money can drive corrupt judges to make deplorable decisions, a few justices don’t need any incentive to handout horrifying sentences. In 2008, Mandy Boardman discovered that her husband, David Wise, had been drugging and rapping her, along with recording the attacks on his cell phone. Boardman filed for divorce but waited two years before taking the videos to the police. Boardman claimed that she didn’t want her kids’ father behind bars until they were adults.
Wise was arrested and found guilty of rape and criminal deviate conduct. The felony convictions could equate to six to 20 years in prison…unless Judge Eisgruber is handing out the sentences. Eisgruber took the opportunity to lecture Boardman, aka the victim, about forgiveness.
To make matters worse, the judge only gave Wise eight years of home detention with a GPS tracking devise. It wasn’t until Wise let the battery on the tracking devise die that the judge upgraded Wise’s sentence to five years in prison. FYI Eisgruber was re-elected and will be on the bench in Indianapolis, Indiana until at least 2020.
5. Judge Lisa Gorcyca Likens Kids To Charles Manson
When three kids refused orders to meet their father for lunch, Judge Lisa Gorcyca sent the kids to a junivenile detention center. Judge Lisa Gorcyca said the kids needed to have a “healthy relationship” with their father, said they weren’t behaving like “normal human beings” and likened them to Charles Manson (?!) for having the audacity to avoid their dad. (The children’s parents had been enmeshed in a long custody battle.)
The judge then told the children to apologize and have lunch with their father. When they refused, she held them in contempt of court and ordered them sent away to Children’s Village juvenile hall until the age of 18. The judge even wanted the children to be separated while inside of the facility. The kids had good reason to avoid their father, he is allegedly violent and reportedly hit their mother in front of them.
Thankfully the court of public opinion put the heat on Judge Gorcyca. The judge reluctantly took the kids out of juvenile detention and sent them to summer camp instead.
CORRUPTION FRAUD JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT
Corruption is the abuse of power by a public official for
private gain or any organized, interdependent system in which part of the
system is either not performing duties it was originally intended to, or
performing them in an improper way, to the detriment of the system's original
purpose. The abuse of public offices for private gain is paradigmatic of
corruption.
A common belief is that corruption is a judge taking bribes. The definition exceeds this theory. Corruption describes any organized, interdependent system in which part of the system is either not performing duties it was originally intended to, or performing them in an improper way, to the detriment of the system's original purpose.
Corrupt judicial systems not only violate the basic right to equality before the law but deny procedural rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution.
A common belief is that corruption is a judge taking bribes. The definition exceeds this theory. Corruption describes any organized, interdependent system in which part of the system is either not performing duties it was originally intended to, or performing them in an improper way, to the detriment of the system's original purpose.
Corrupt judicial systems not only violate the basic right to equality before the law but deny procedural rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution.
While corruption may facilitate criminal enterprise such as drug trafficking, money laundering, and mail fraud.;
it is not restricted to these activities. In this country, corruption is so
common that it is expected when ordinary businesses or citizens interact with
government officials. The end-point of political corruption is a kleptocracy, literally
"rule by thieves".
America's Corrupt Legal System - A Danger to All
by Dr Les Sachs
(This article may be freely reproduced and republished in full by anyone, anywhere.)
The tragic reality of the world's biggest corrupt legal system -America's rigged courts, bribed judges, fake and phony trials, extortion by lawyers, and over 2 million prisoners in the USA gulag. Why USA "justice" is not like in Hollywood movies, and why YOU could be the next victim on USA territory - innocent and sent to prison, or strapped to a table and put to death; or robbed of your life savings by American lawyers. Why YOU can be tortured, have your freedom and rights taken away, and why people in America are afraid to help you, or even tell what happened to you. The recent pattern of American violations of international law are ultimately based in the corruption of the USA domestic legal system. Phony USA courts are very dangerous even for travellers and visitors to America, who can easily wind up among the USA's more than 2 million prisoners, or lose all their family's possessions to corrupt American lawyers. All world citizens should know how the corrupt USA legal system, is a danger to every traveller, visitor, and guest worker from overseas, and to every individual who takes the risky step of entering upon American territory. Just ask the overseas families of prisoners who were put to death inside the USA, with their embassies never even being informed that they were arrested - or the many foreign people serving hugely long prison terms in America, after they were jailed on flimsy tainted "evidence" from criminal snitches. The reality is that the United States of America, which proclaims itself the "land of freedom", has the most dishonest, dangerous and crooked legal system of any developed nation. Legal corruption is covering America like a blanket. The corruption of the USA legal system is well-known, but also well-hidden, by the news services of America's corporate-owned media. The US media companies are afraid both of reprisal, and of the social revolution that would come from exposing the truth. Here is what the US media companies know, but are afraid to tell you about American "justice".
(This article may be freely reproduced and republished in full by anyone, anywhere.)
The tragic reality of the world's biggest corrupt legal system -America's rigged courts, bribed judges, fake and phony trials, extortion by lawyers, and over 2 million prisoners in the USA gulag. Why USA "justice" is not like in Hollywood movies, and why YOU could be the next victim on USA territory - innocent and sent to prison, or strapped to a table and put to death; or robbed of your life savings by American lawyers. Why YOU can be tortured, have your freedom and rights taken away, and why people in America are afraid to help you, or even tell what happened to you. The recent pattern of American violations of international law are ultimately based in the corruption of the USA domestic legal system. Phony USA courts are very dangerous even for travellers and visitors to America, who can easily wind up among the USA's more than 2 million prisoners, or lose all their family's possessions to corrupt American lawyers. All world citizens should know how the corrupt USA legal system, is a danger to every traveller, visitor, and guest worker from overseas, and to every individual who takes the risky step of entering upon American territory. Just ask the overseas families of prisoners who were put to death inside the USA, with their embassies never even being informed that they were arrested - or the many foreign people serving hugely long prison terms in America, after they were jailed on flimsy tainted "evidence" from criminal snitches. The reality is that the United States of America, which proclaims itself the "land of freedom", has the most dishonest, dangerous and crooked legal system of any developed nation. Legal corruption is covering America like a blanket. The corruption of the USA legal system is well-known, but also well-hidden, by the news services of America's corporate-owned media. The US media companies are afraid both of reprisal, and of the social revolution that would come from exposing the truth. Here is what the US media companies know, but are afraid to tell you about American "justice".
Concentration camps with concrete
walls
America has the largest prison gulag in the entire world - yes, right there in the USA, the self-proclaimed "land of freedom". The starting point for understanding anything about the USA, is to digest the fact that just this one country, the United States of America, has twenty-five percent of ALL of the prisoners in the entire world.
More than 2 million prisoners - more than 1 out of every 150 people in America - are behind bars in the American gulag. This is now the world's biggest system of what are effectively concentration camps, though most of these prisoners are behind masonry walls and inside prison buildings.
For minorities, the statistics are even more brutal. For example, the USA is now imprisoning about 1 out of every 36 people in its black population. American "justice" is especially focused on jailing young black males.
Quite amazingly, Americans and the American government, continually criticize the legal systems and so-called "political" legal proceedings in other countries such as China, Russia, and even Belgium among many other places. Yet, for example, the proportion of prisoners is 30 times higher in the USA than in China, even though China is a country regularly criticized and denounced by the USA government.
No one imprisons people as readily, or casually, as does America. As you learn more about America's horrifying legal system, you find out how easily and carelessly America arrests people, and tosses innocent people into prison. It is estimated that America has at least 100,000 completely innocent people in jail, but the statistics of innocence may well run far higher. The number of people known to be innocent, and yet who were actually sentenced to death in recent years in America, is already running into the hundreds.
The USA jailing of more than 2 million people is also, quite literally, a revival of slavery and slave labor, on a scale not seen since the days of the Nazis. USA business corporations are using these prisoners as a giant slave labor pool. Prisoners are forced to produce goods and products while earning mere pennies per hour, which they sometimes have to pay back to the prison for their own upkeep. The expanding system of USA prison slave labor is not only a major source of business profit, but also a wedge to drive down the wages of workers outside the prison walls.
This USA policy, of using mass casual imprisonment as a way to revive slavery, is targeted particularly at minorities, but ends up affecting all working people. Supervised by malicious judges and corrupt lawyers, this culture of mass prisons and slave labor is sold to the citizens by creating a psychology of fear among USA residents. This climate of fear is nourished in the USA by both the media and the government, who work together with the judges and lawyers to maintain the whole crooked game.
Of America's more than 2 million prisoners, about 50,000 are known to be foreign citizens. This proportion might seem small, but remember that 50,000 prisoners is more than the entire prison population of many other countries. It only appears as a small percentage, because of America's obsession with jailing its own people, who have had more time to get caught in America's web of legal horror.
The USA is extremely casual about the jailing of foreigners, and not honouring their rights under international law or treaties and agreements. Often, foreign citizens have been sentenced to death, while the USA didn't even bother to notify the foreign government that their citizens were arrested. Several other governments are working hard just to try and obtain even the most primitive judicial rights for their own nationals, who have been seized and held in abusive conditions by the USA empire. And yet, the United States of America somehow still brags about its own legal system, while criticizing other countries. Understanding that America has such a huge percentage of even its own people in prison, is to start to understand the subconscious fear behind much of American life. Before you set foot in America, you should have a clear picture of the terror of America's legal system - the judges and lawyers and money and bribery, that have made this system of fear so pervasive. There is not yet enough public media information about America's domestic legal horrors, horrors which have been rapidly increasing. And the American public, even the victims of its legal system, have a hard time realizing why it is so hard to fight legal corruption there. The situation is so bad, that a social explosion is beginning inside America. You can read some news stories - about people murdering judges, or attacking the families of judges, or people setting fire to courthouses in the USA - and see the pattern that is emerging, even though the news media are afraid to connect the dots and suggest what might be behind all these events. America is trying to maintain its myths about its legal system, even while the desperate reality of life inside the USA is starting to blow back into escalating social upheaval.
USA torture and illegal jailing overseas, starts with USA domestic torture and illegal jailing at home
The world press has documented clear violations of human and legal rights by America in its overseas jails, such as the infamous situations in Guantanamo and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, and the even more secret network of prisons in places like Diego Garcia or on board American ships.
But the problem is much bigger, than America's legal abuses under its military invasions and "war on terrorism". These USA violations of international law, are consistent with the corruption in America's home legal system within its own borders, and have partly evolved from America's legal abuses against its own citizens and residents.
American prisons are often horrible, with lots of torment of prisoners, like you would expect in some petty dictatorship. Conditions are brutal in USA jails; rape and beatings are common, and there is little help for abused inmates. In addition to the many official USA executions, numerous people are also illegally killed in jail cells, "mysteriously" said to have hanged themselves or "found stabbed to death".
Scandals of overseas prison abuse, as in the USA-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, have arisen from sources much deeper than America's foreign policy. These scandals are in part replications of inmate abuse inside of America's domestic prison gulag. Without diminishing the brutality of the crimes committed by Americans in Iraqi prisons, it is also true that such crimes are consistent with the brutality of prisons inside America.
In the regular functioning of the USA courts, America's domestic lawyers and judges, threaten people with illegal jailing, and rape, torture and murder in jail, just like the threats used by Americans against Iraqi subjects of the American occupation. America will play the song about "just a few bad apples in the barrel" whenever an abuse scandal gets exposed, either domestically or abroad, but the cover-up of such abuse is more the routine response.
Theoretically, torture and abuse is totally outlawed by America's Constitution, but some of the nice words in America's Constitution hold little power anymore, despite how often people quote them. The Americans who still believe the Constitution protects them, are mostly those people who haven't yet dealt with the judges and lawyers of America's corrupt legal system.
America's Constitution and Bill of Rights are nearly dead, not just because the judges will no longer enforce them, but even more because America's lawyers will not even fight for them. The two American "political parties" are not fighting for them, either, and America's news media are also very passive. If you look at America in depth, you can see there has been a widespread moral collapse in America's legal and political structures. This means that America's legal system has become largely a tool of government terror, and of bribery for the rich and the powerful. The average person is just fodder for the meat-grinder of America's courts.
America's lies and sleazy arguments to make excuses for torture, or to deny people the rights of the Geneva convention, or holding people for many years without charges, are also just an extension of the deviousness in America's domestic legal system. Inside America, neither its laws nor its Constitution nor the facts nor evidence nor anything else, no longer have real authority inside the American courts.
All that's left is what American lawyers and judges call "the game". As part of playing this game, USA lawyers and judges just twist words around, in order to produce any excuse, however flimsy, to achieve their objective, whether that be to jail an innocent person, or give the verdict that was sought by the big company that paid the big bribe through its law firm.
It is an endlessly devious manipulation of words and phrases to get the desired result, just devious falsehood and lies backed by the naked power of the judges. The only "real" part is the power that the judges and lawyers hold in America, to jail you and take away your property. The words of the law don't protect you in the USA, because American judges and lawyers have no scruples about bending them to mean the opposite of what they say.
America's lawyers are controlled by the judges, and don't really work for you - that's why they sell you out to the government, or to the big companies that pay bribes
There's some very special aspects about the way American lawyers are controlled by American judges, which is central to why America's legal corruption is so much worse than any other advanced nation. Even if you are paying an American lawyer huge amounts of money, he or she doesn't really work for you, and in fact may sell you down the river to the jailhouse.
American lawyers are directly under the thumb of the judges and the government, and must submit to the culture of bribery and perversion of justice, or else face terrifying revenge. Lawyers, just like you, can be instantly jailed by an American judge on flimsy pretexts, and American lawyers can be quickly stripped of their right to practice law, and personally and financially destroyed, if they dare to criticize legal corruption. Lawyers who try to fight the system can find themselves not only dis-barred, but also criminally charged and jailed, and no other lawyer will help them. It is a horribly crooked system in America.
This is different from other advanced countries, where lawyers are usually a professional guild, whose status and right to practice law, is under the control of only their fellow lawyers. This means that, in other countries, the judges and the government cannot easily ruin or attack the lawyers for purely political reasons. This is also part of why, in other developed countries, outside of America, you really do see brave lawyers fighting for un-popular clients, or challenging the government, and asking for justice.
But in America, it's different. Over the past century, the American lawyers lost the right to regulate themselves, and instead fell under the power of the judges. So American lawyers are afraid to do things in court, that the judges don't want them to do. America's army of nearly 1 million lawyers, is almost totally under the control of a few thousand judges, with their entrenched culture of bribery and fraud and miscarriage of justice.
Some USA lawyers don't like this, but they are helpless and can't fight it. Most lawyers in America have, to one degree or another, signed up with the devil, to do things the way the devil wants them done.
That means that any time you hire an American lawyer, he already is in a conflict of interest. He has to make the judge happy first. And if the judge wants to make the government happy, or make somebody else happy who is paying a big bribe, then guess what? You are destroyed. It doesn't matter what you paid the lawyer. He works for the judge, first and foremost. So a totally unique factor in USA legal corruption is the amazingly dishonest profession of American lawyers, these lawyers who "play the game" with America’s judges and politicians and police. It is a savage culture of legal fraud, where lawyers work with judges to rob and terrify people, especially minorities, but also foreigners, and above all those who dare to question the system. People accused of serious crimes have the "right" to a lawyer, but this may mean only a crooked lawyer who is stage-managing the victim to help the government and prosecutors. If the lawyer does not help the government, he can be put out of work and not "assigned" to any more cases, or treated badly the next time he is in a courtroom. This legal fraud is the core of the danger to those who visit America. A lawyer who is "representing" you in the USA, whether the government is paying him, or even if you are paying him yourself, may just be a stooge who is helping the prosecutors to put you in jail, even though you are innocent. The judges of America gave every accused criminal the "right" to a lawyer, not because they cared about the rights of the accused, but because it helps stage-manage the victim, with a lawyer who has to do things the judge's way. In America, such government-appointed lawyers are the means by which hundreds of thousands of poor people are railroaded into prison. Some of these people were just foreign tourists, in the wrong place at the wrong time, and wound up rotting in an American prison. Some lawyers are fairly subtle about it, and their victims never realize the lawyer has sold them out to the judge and the government. Most American court cases never go to trial, never see a jury; it is the job of the victim's lawyer to "sell the deal" that the judge has decided will happen, or else. This is how people accept a "plea bargain" so they accept going to jail for 3 years even though they are innocent, instead of going to trial before a jury. Because of the corruption of lawyers under the thumb of the judges, there's a very fake and phony aspect of court proceedings in America. They are really fake "show trials" in many cases, sometimes very obviously so, where both purported "sides" of lawyers are actually working together for the government, or for the big corporation or rich person that is bribing the judge.
You will also find, in the American legal system, that you essentially have no recourse whatsoever against wrongdoing by your own lawyer. A lawyer can sell you out, betray you, steal your money, engage in malpractice, help out the other side, hide the evidence that proved you were right, or commit felony crime against you, and there is nothing you can do about it, so long as the lawyer made the judge happy, and the judge got his cut of any money the lawyer stole from you.
Innocent and being arrested - they don't like to admit a mistake in America
Yes, lots of people live their whole lives in America and never get arrested. And yet, some poor foreign visitor comes to America for a short holiday, gets arrested by mistake, and gets sentenced to death by lethal injection even though he is totally innocent. Well, that's the lottery of life for those who visit or live in America. The police and prosecutors in America have no concern at all whether they have arrested someone who is innocent. They just don't care. When a crime is committed, they try to arrest somebody, anybody, just to say they got the bad guy. And they never like to admit they made a mistake. Once they arrest you, they will try to make up and plant false evidence, to help try and convict you. A common trick is to take other criminals they know, who are facing jail on other charges, and get those criminals to be false witnesses against you. The cops justify this kind of thing by saying to themselves, "Well, if you didn't commit this crime, you probably committed some other crime we don't know about." If they do arrest you in America, they like to pile on all sorts of criminal charges. The idea is to charge you with 10 crimes, because it makes you sound bad, and maybe convict you on 3 of them or you will accept a plea bargain on 1 or 2 of them. Any kind of guilty plea, and they call it a success, even though you were totally innocent.
For the police and prosecutors, it's all a kind of sporting game, so they can bring about their "high conviction rate". Perhaps part of the reason America has so much crime, even with more than 2 million people in prison, is because the people who actually committed the crimes were never arrested. Also, some poor people may feel that the odds are high they will be arrested someday anyway, so they may as well be criminals and enjoy life in the meantime.
The system is extremely racist, of course, and white people are arrested less than many minorities. But no one is safe. Any innocent person can get railroaded to death in America.
Multi-millionaires and big corporations, vs. everybody else
The only people who really can get expect some fairness in American courts are multi-millionaires and big corporations. Nobody else really matters to American judges and lawyers.
There is a huge amount of bribery in America, perhaps even more than in the courts of any other country in the world. Even some American ex-judges have admitted the near-universality of bribery there. Nearly all bribes are given to the judges by lawyers; this is considered the safe way to bribe a judge. Bribery is rarely spoken about, just understood. Rich people pay huge amounts of money to law firms with connections, the lawyers walk around with a certain amount of cash in their jacket, and they pass it to the judges in their quiet moments together. It is mostly all cash of course. Sometimes the bribery is blatantly obvious, because of the other crimes that lawyers and judges commit in broad daylight together. In the courtrooms you can see the judges being extremely friendly to their rich lawyer friends who pay big bribes.
As an average person, there's no real way to out-bribe a big corporation, regardless of what your lawyer promised you. That's why the big companies win so often.
American judges are very devious, and use all sorts of techniques to prevent a victim from getting justice. Lots of judges issue gag orders, and bans on freedom of speech, to help prevent other people from finding out what is going on. Judges set up a trial in all sorts of ways, giving orders that all sorts of evidence be hidden from a jury, for example. The judge may declare, for example, that the evidence that proves you are innocent or right, will not be allowed at the trial.
Jury trials are actually very rare in America, unlike what you see in the movies. Most cases are settled through some deal or extortion or intimidation, before there is an actual trial. If there is a jury trial, they tend to stack the jury with un-educated idiots who will tend to believe whatever lies they are told by the judge and the government. If you are trying to fight a rich person in court, the judge might let the fancy lawyers for the rich person say anything they want, while he tells you to shut up as soon as you start talking. The judges have a thousand ways to rig a legal proceeding, to benefit rich people or the government.
It's no wonder so many innocent people go to prison. With the fundamental brutality and harshness of life in America, American citizens are confused and fearful, and gullible to propaganda. So, a jury in a courtroom, these people who tend to be poorly educated, will tend to go along with any lies presented by government prosecutors. In this environment of fear, the feeling of safety for the jury, comes from following the "strong" government in sending various "suspected criminals" to jail.
Yes, there are appeals courts, but these are just more judges, who are often friends with the lower court judge who originally sold you out. The appeals judges tend to go along with the lower court judge, unless you have suddenly acquired some politically powerful backing on your side.
Americans love to talk about "taking it all the way to the Supreme Court!", but this is a nearly empty hope. The U.S. Supreme Court simply refuses to consider most cases that are presented to it.
If you are a little helpless nobody, the appeals judges often barely reply to you, and sometimes don't reply at all. Sometimes people have been strapped to a table and given the lethal poison and put to death in America, with the victim's appeal never even answered by the judges.
What about when people win millions of dollars in a lawsuit against the big company?
Every now and then, there is worldwide news of how some average person in America has won a lawsuit for $25 million or some other huge sum of money, from some company or other. What's going on here - if the American legal system is so crooked, how can people be winning such big money?
Such cases are indeed real, but they are actually somewhat rare, numerically - rather like winning the lottery - and it's important to see why they take place, and how they fit into the big pattern. Such cases are typically after someone has been seriously injured or died due to some defective product or prescription drug or hospital treatment or accident.
These cases have a certain "place" in the American legal framework, accepted by the judges. They are also very important for maintaining the bribery culture. A lot of the money won in such cases goes into the lawyer's pockets, and is a major source of bribery money for the judges. As regards big companies and the judges, such cases are viewed as a kind of "tax" on the big corporations, part of the cost of doing business in America, part of the price of being able to otherwise make huge profits.
Such cases, as well, have the same function as in a gambling casino, when the casino proudly announces that one customer has just won a huge jackpot. The hype about the one jackpot winner, hides the fact that most everyone else is losing money. The person whose husband died from the defective prescription drug, and won millions of dollars (one-third of that to the lawyer, of course), is the person who is shoved forward to prove that "the legal system works - it's the greatest legal system in the world!"
The small handful of such personal-injury cases, are intended to distract the public from all the innocent people sentenced to prison, from all the families destroyed by bribed judges in divorce cases, and from all the people whose lives are destroyed by big companies, companies who cheerfully pay bribes to win their routine cases in court.
Big companies know that some big "injury" cases will be lost, in order to supply money for the lawyers and judges who otherwise take good care of the big company's interests. When you are making hundreds of millions of dollars, the loss of a few million here and there is just another expense of business. In the end, the companies just raise their prices to cover the costs of lawyers and lawsuits. The whole world pays for the millions earned by American lawyers, they are the ultimate parasites.
There are other casualties here, too. America's health care system has been destroyed from the inside by the legal culture of constant lawsuits against doctors and hospitals, with huge amounts of money being given to the lawyers in these cases, driving up the cost of medical care and putting it out of reach of many people. America is the only economically advanced nation without a national health plan, with tens of millions of Americans having no health coverage. USA lawyers joke openly about how, when the courts make big money awards to pay a lawyer, the lawyer often gives the judge a bribe by way of gratitude. Some lawyers grow rich, and doctors are afraid to continue practicing medicine in the US, and many Americans die from lack of health care.
But while America's lawyers will very casually file legal charges against doctors, hospitals, or ordinary people, for any flimsy reason, to try and squeeze some money from the situation, they are extremely afraid to take any legal action against another lawyer or judge engaged in misconduct. That's where fear takes over, and lawyers are suddenly too timid to file any lawsuits.
The Hollywood image, versus the grim reality
Once you have digested the fact that America has the world's largest prison gulag, another major thing to digest is the USA government, and much of America, is primarily a sales organization, whose chief tool is hype and propaganda and outright lies. America is a culture built on sales and advertising; it focuses on portraying an image, not the reality beneath it.
This is why America was so casual about inventing and selling the lies about "weapons of mass destruction" to help start the Iraq invasion. It was just a question of whatever lies needed to be told, in order to sell the product; there was no concern about afterwards, when the lies were exposed. America just figures it can later send out more salespeople with more lies, in an endless cycle. Tomorrow is just another day, when America will try to sell another product, the "war on terror", the "spread of freedom", or whatever.
The selling never stops, in Washington or Hollywood. America sells political lies like Hollywood sells movies. When the USA President talks about "advancing the cause of freedom", he basically means freedom for big corporations to do business. He's not really talking about actual personal freedom for real people. But he grins when he talks about "freedom" because it's a good word of salesmanship, people hear him and some of them can be duped into believing that America cares about personal or political freedom. Hollywood movies and American television are a major element of political myth-making. Around the world, people derive an image of America, and its legal system, from these fictional creations on film. America's propaganda about having "the greatest legal system in the world" is one of those phony stories that Hollywood is helping to sell.
It is also a myth sustained by the few trials about which there is a lot of publicity, like with the celebrity trials of Martha Stewart or Michael Jackson. Judges behave very differently when the cameras are rolling, or the media is reporting everything that goes on, and millions of dollars are being spent on lawyers. But in the 98 percent of court activity that does not have big media coverage, the judges of America provide a bizarre sideshow of horror.
In the Hollywood version, the judges in American courts are like kind uncles, smiling and being wise and calmly dispensing justice. But in reality, American judges sometimes scream at people like disturbed perverts, and show off their bribed corruption right there in the courtroom. Sometimes judges engage in flagrant extortion, where you have to agree to pay money to the judge's lawyer friends as the price to stay out of jail. It is really that bad. You can find no end of documented horror about American judges behaving like criminal lunatics, and it is getting worse all the time.
In the Hollywood version, there are brave lawyers who will fight for your rights, to win justice for you in the American courts. In reality, you can't find an American lawyer brave enough to fight judicial corruption, even if you are innocent and the judge's friends have threatened to murder you, or to send you to jail for the rest of your life. The lawyers who used to be brave, were destroyed or intimidated, and nearly all American lawyers now submit themselves to the culture of corruption and bribery, and betraying and abandoning the people who need legal help.
In the sad reality, American lawyers line up by the dozen to help the government or the big corporations, and regularly betray the average person, even if they are supposedly representing you. Even the lawyers who don't want to be wicked themselves, are too timid to really fight the system. At a certain point, nearly all American lawyers will hold back and abandon their clients, because they are trying to survive themselves and avoid revenge by the judges. In the Hollywood version, the average person is also helped by the "brave investigative reporter" at some newspaper or television station, who shows great courage in exposing the truth, and bringing powerful wrongdoing to face justice. However, the brave "investigative reporter" in America is now as fictional and non-existent as the "brave lawyer" who will fight for your rights. This is especially true on any topic pertaining to corruption by judges and lawyers.
In America today, reporters are little timid people who are afraid of getting fired, and who almost never write a story on government corruption, unless some other part of the government is officially investigating or prosecuting. That goes triple when judges or lawyers are involved. The owners of the newspapers and television stations are afraid of revenge by the judges if they have to go to court, and the nervous little reporters who work for them understand the rules of the game. If you look closely at a modern newspaper or news magazine in the USA, you will see how almost all stories originate with the government itself. When the media "investigates", they are usually just adding more details on a situation already being targeted by the government. Every news media and television station in America is swamped with people begging them to report on stories, that they totally refuse to cover. The reporters are too scared, and they know the stories wouldn't get printed or broadcast even if they were written. America is the land of fear, as regards the legal system and the culture of corruption. Everyone involved with the USA legal system is afraid, very afraid, of stepping on the wrong toes. Even American judges themselves get driven out of office, if they don't participate in the bribery culture.
No recourse against crime and fraud by judges and lawyers in America
In reality, there is almost nothing you can do against misconduct, and even open felony crime, committed against you by American judges and lawyers. All of the official complaint procedures you find on the internet, or at the courthouse or in the law books, turn out to be a joke, a farce and a fraud.
Complaints about lawyers in America, usually go to the "Bar", which is itself run by the judges who are involved in bribery with the lawyers. And complaints about judges go to other judges, their friends. Nearly all the complaints about lawyers and judges - tens of thousands of them - are kept secret. Nearly all are dismissed or ignored. They are generally only used if the judges or politicians want to specially destroy someone - some radical minority lawyer, someone who is not playing the bribery game, somebody who has dared to expose wrongdoing. Otherwise, even criminal acts by lawyers and judges get a smiling cover-up.
You will almost certainly not find any lawyers to help you sue another lawyer for wrongdoing. They are too scared of revenge by the judges. Even the lawyers who are broke and unemployed and desperate for work, are too scared to sue another lawyer. (Special caution: Lawyers may make false promises to you about suing another lawyer, cash your checks and steal your money, and then refuse to help you. And then you will have another lawyer who wronged you.) The police and FBI almost certainly will not help you, either. They all know the bribery game, and they rely on the same crooked judges to help send innocent people to prison after they have been arrested. The more crooked the judge, the more eager the judge will be, to help the police or FBI do a dirty deal and convict an innocent person. And, of course, the newspapers and television and media won't help you. They hear stories like yours all the time. If they publish or broadcast your story, then they will have problems the next time they get sued in court. Or they might find themselves arrested on false charges, and end up in an even worse situation than you.
The newspapers are so tied into the establishment of judges and lawyers, that the newspapers sometimes help the judges and lawyers to commit their crimes, and to unfairly smear and attack their victims. The big media newspapers have even helped to plant false "evidence" in court cases, and help the legal establishment to destroy innocent people. But even if not harming you, the USA media is afraid to help you, afraid of revenge if they expose judicial corruption. These fears are just as big, if not bigger, with America's radical and alternative media, and bloggers and internet sites. Such people will criticize American foreign policy and so on, but everybody is scared of talking about specific cases of corruption by lawyers and judges. The independent media has even more reason to be afraid, because they are even more vulnerable if the lawyers start to file false charges against them in the courts.
Of course, America's politicians will not help you, either. Many politicians are themselves lawyers, very used to the whole game of bribery with judges and other lawyers. The politicians accept the crooked courts as the way that America is run, and as helping the two big parties to monopolize the political scene and prevent alternative political movements. America's two big political parties, the Democrats and Republicans, can be seen as another phony game like America's courts. The two parties actually get their hundreds of millions of dollars in money from the same people at the same big corporations who own the rest of America. These two American parties pretend to argue with each other over emotional issues like gun control and abortion rights, but in the end both of these parties serve the big corporations. Half of Americans are still fooled into thinking that these parties represent them, the other half sense it is phony but feel helpless and don't know what to do. This is why people don't vote very much in America; they feel it is hopeless and useless.
You can also forget about America's human rights and civil liberties groups, even though it looks, at first, like there are many such groups on the internet. Many such groups are just money-raising groups which don't help victims, or are tied to the two main political parties or some narrow agenda. They are all scared of the legal system, too, and there is no one with any significant funding or money, who is out there helping the victims of legal corruption. They can't find lawyers to help them, either. There are some overwhelmed and struggling projects here and there, doing worthy work for a few of the innocent people in prison, but they function in an environment of timidity and fear, and without the resources or clout or media access to expose or change what is happening. It's getting worse and worse in America all the time. As the judges and lawyers can get away with committing crimes, they are getting more open and blatant, committing felony crimes in broad daylight, because they know no one will stop them or bring them to account. It is also important to know, that once you have started complaining about, or exposing, judicial and legal corruption in America, you become a kind of outlaw there. You are in a very dangerous situation, and you are considered fair game to be either arrested and jailed on false charges, or to be totally robbed and betrayed by America's lawyers. Once you have spoken out about legal corruption, you may find that no other lawyer will then help you for any reason, even if it is un-related to your complaint about judicial wrongdoing. You may be trapped in a nightmare from which there is no escape unless you can leave America altogether.
Dealing with American lawyers, if you have no other choice
Perhaps the statistical chance of getting arrested in America as an innocent person, and then being sent to prison or put to death, is relatively small. But think of how you will feel if you end up as one of those 2 million American prisoners, including 50,000 foreign citizens. Or perhaps even one of those several thousand people on Death Row, waiting for the lethal poison to be injected into your arm.
Visiting America now, is probably similar to visiting or doing business in 1936 with Hitler's Reich, or Mussolini's fascist empire. If you did such a thing in 1936, you might have visited and had a wonderful time, maybe even have done some business with companies in those countries. You might have seen some beautiful sights, and met some very friendly individual people, perhaps drunk a beer or two, or a nice glass of wine, maybe attended the 1936 Olympics. Very likely, you wouldn't have seen any concentration camps, in the places where you travelled. You might have had a very pleasant trip.
But nonetheless, you were in a dangerous place, where horrible things were going on. That's true of the United States of America today, the land of 2 million prisoners in a giant gulag. With America's corrupt legal system, it's certainly not the wisest place to keep money or assets, which can be easily grabbed by American lawyers in legal proceedings. Many smart Americans have opened overseas bank accounts, and it is wise to not keep too much money where American lawyers can seize it. There is no bigger group of thieves in the world, than American lawyers.
If you are in a lawsuit situation in America, get all your money out of the country, fast, before the USA lawyers can put any kind of hold or freeze on it. But you shouldn't keep substantial assets in the USA in the first place. Sell any USA real estate and rent instead, get that money out where it is safe. Certainly, don't ever expect any justice from American courts. Expect the judges and both sides of lawyers to tilt toward the government, or toward the big company that can pay bribes on a regular basis. All that most people get out of American courts, is grief, and lawyers stealing their money. Best not to approach American courts unless absolutely necessary. Despite the commonplace fraud and dishonesty of American lawyers, it's still important to have one if you must be in an American court. The reason is that American judges absolutely hate people who come to court without lawyers, especially if they have any money at all. The judge takes it as a personal insult if you are not giving some money to one of his lawyer friends, and will tend to take revenge on you unless you hire a lawyer, even a very stupid one, to stand by your side.
What American lawyers love to do, is to steal all your money, tell you a bunch of false promises and lies, and then do nothing for you, while they sell you out to the other side. That is a perfect scenario for an American lawyer. A lawyer's goal is to squeeze as much money from you, while at the same time doing as little as possible to rock the judge's political boat. Some lawyers even make money by the "research and review" scam, where they don't even agree to represent you, but just steal your money to "research" your case.
Accept in advance that an American lawyer will rob you and betray you, and everything will go more smoothly if you quietly understand this. Never actually trust an American lawyer, but don't let on that you know he's a crook. Don't tell the lawyer how much money you really have, he will try to get all of it. Try to pay a lawyer very slowly, in small chunks, that will keep him more interested, and prevent some of the bigger robberies and betrayals, and will leave you some money to try another lawyer if things get too awful. Remember, once you give a USA lawyer any money, it's almost impossible to get it back. Lawyers will almost never sue another lawyer, and if you go to court, the judge will almost certainly protect the lawyer who defrauded you (and get a share of the money, of course). Lawyers and judges in America like people to appear to be submissive and stupid and easily manipulated. They like to feel superior to you. By letting them think that you are weak and falling for their lies, you may give yourself some breathing room. This tactic has even enabled some people to stay alive and not get murdered, and to escape from America back to safety.
The growing American nightmare
It is just getting worse and worse in America's legal system. For some years now, the USA judges and lawyers have gotten used to denying people justice, to the great flow of bribery money, and even to committing felony crimes in broad daylight and getting away with it. It just keeps on escalating. Though a social explosion is lurking beneath the surface - with judges starting to get murdered, and people lighting courthouses ablaze - the people who run America are letting the current system chug along as it is, justice be damned, and to hell with the people who seem to have no way to fight back.
It can't go on like this forever, but it may get a lot worse first, despite the fair internet visibility on documented American legal corruption. One should note a brave and promising grass-roots attempt at judicial reform in the USA called (Jail 4 Judges - www.jail4judges.org), which attempts to place onto American ballots, a referendum for a new procedure to give citizens a real right of redress against corrupt judges. It is a wonderful and beautiful idea that deserves success, and will help transform America if it moves forward. Regrettably, though, for all the usual reasons of fear, there is no one with any big money or media clout, yet making a foray against the real-life nightmare of America's courts and prisons. It remains a taboo subject for the American media, and the media silence feeds and encourages the whole machine of bribery and repression.
Perhaps, though, it will not be until after America has had a major economic or social cataclysm, that the big American machine of legal corruption finally comes to be reformed. Sociologically speaking, it's astonishing how disgraceful American lawyers have become - they are now both the mafia and the gestapo of American life. America's lawyers, as a whole, have had little to say about America’s recent international crimes of prisoner abuse, and violation of international human rights agreements. American lawyers, as always nowadays, are "playing the game" with America's government and its judges. America, indeed, does not have the rule of law at all. Instead, it is just the rule of lawyers, lawyers who crave money and power. And, in America, it can be jail or worse for anyone who tries to fight these lawyers. The reality of the United States of America is that Americans, despite their overall wealth as a nation, are now a people living in a society of great fear. Their fears are complicated, and many Americans cannot even put their fears into words. They are afraid of lawyers and the prison system, afraid of losing their jobs in a brutal society with no social safety net, afraid of needing health care in a disastrous system with no health plan. And Americans are afraid of what will happen if they try to question the system and the way things work. They often feel helpless and powerless against the great forces dominating their country. American citizens are confused and fearful, and gullible to propaganda. Because Americans have difficulty in sorting out their many fears, they have become ripe candidates for racial and religious hatreds, and for following their government into war. The issues of "terrorism" and war distract the emotions of Americans from the terrible problems in their own society at home. The foreign "enemy" gives Americans a face on which to project their fear and their anger. The result is the horrifying misconduct of some Americans in these wars; while back inside the USA, there is increasing corruption and repression in the legal system. Americans desperately would like to believe that they still live in a "free" country, as it is so horrifying to them to face the ugly truth, that their freedom is already largely lost. Americans can imagine they are "free" because they can still choose among different products to buy, or quit their job, or buy a gun at the store. And the Americans most likely to imagine they are still "free" are the ones who have not yet been trapped in the halls of America’s legal system. They have not yet seen the lawyers and judges who smirk and laugh as they deny victims the most basic human rights. The truth is that, inside America, a nightmare has begun. The lawyers and judges and courts, "playing the game", regularly trample upon the freedoms that Americans thought they had. It is people like myself, escaped from the USA, living in kinder and gentler places, who are now the lucky ones. No one should ever again be fooled by USA propaganda about being the "land of freedom". Those who are thinking of travelling to, visiting, or working in America, should think again. It might not be worth the risk of being in a country that has one of the most crooked legal systems in the world.
America has the largest prison gulag in the entire world - yes, right there in the USA, the self-proclaimed "land of freedom". The starting point for understanding anything about the USA, is to digest the fact that just this one country, the United States of America, has twenty-five percent of ALL of the prisoners in the entire world.
More than 2 million prisoners - more than 1 out of every 150 people in America - are behind bars in the American gulag. This is now the world's biggest system of what are effectively concentration camps, though most of these prisoners are behind masonry walls and inside prison buildings.
For minorities, the statistics are even more brutal. For example, the USA is now imprisoning about 1 out of every 36 people in its black population. American "justice" is especially focused on jailing young black males.
Quite amazingly, Americans and the American government, continually criticize the legal systems and so-called "political" legal proceedings in other countries such as China, Russia, and even Belgium among many other places. Yet, for example, the proportion of prisoners is 30 times higher in the USA than in China, even though China is a country regularly criticized and denounced by the USA government.
No one imprisons people as readily, or casually, as does America. As you learn more about America's horrifying legal system, you find out how easily and carelessly America arrests people, and tosses innocent people into prison. It is estimated that America has at least 100,000 completely innocent people in jail, but the statistics of innocence may well run far higher. The number of people known to be innocent, and yet who were actually sentenced to death in recent years in America, is already running into the hundreds.
The USA jailing of more than 2 million people is also, quite literally, a revival of slavery and slave labor, on a scale not seen since the days of the Nazis. USA business corporations are using these prisoners as a giant slave labor pool. Prisoners are forced to produce goods and products while earning mere pennies per hour, which they sometimes have to pay back to the prison for their own upkeep. The expanding system of USA prison slave labor is not only a major source of business profit, but also a wedge to drive down the wages of workers outside the prison walls.
This USA policy, of using mass casual imprisonment as a way to revive slavery, is targeted particularly at minorities, but ends up affecting all working people. Supervised by malicious judges and corrupt lawyers, this culture of mass prisons and slave labor is sold to the citizens by creating a psychology of fear among USA residents. This climate of fear is nourished in the USA by both the media and the government, who work together with the judges and lawyers to maintain the whole crooked game.
Of America's more than 2 million prisoners, about 50,000 are known to be foreign citizens. This proportion might seem small, but remember that 50,000 prisoners is more than the entire prison population of many other countries. It only appears as a small percentage, because of America's obsession with jailing its own people, who have had more time to get caught in America's web of legal horror.
The USA is extremely casual about the jailing of foreigners, and not honouring their rights under international law or treaties and agreements. Often, foreign citizens have been sentenced to death, while the USA didn't even bother to notify the foreign government that their citizens were arrested. Several other governments are working hard just to try and obtain even the most primitive judicial rights for their own nationals, who have been seized and held in abusive conditions by the USA empire. And yet, the United States of America somehow still brags about its own legal system, while criticizing other countries. Understanding that America has such a huge percentage of even its own people in prison, is to start to understand the subconscious fear behind much of American life. Before you set foot in America, you should have a clear picture of the terror of America's legal system - the judges and lawyers and money and bribery, that have made this system of fear so pervasive. There is not yet enough public media information about America's domestic legal horrors, horrors which have been rapidly increasing. And the American public, even the victims of its legal system, have a hard time realizing why it is so hard to fight legal corruption there. The situation is so bad, that a social explosion is beginning inside America. You can read some news stories - about people murdering judges, or attacking the families of judges, or people setting fire to courthouses in the USA - and see the pattern that is emerging, even though the news media are afraid to connect the dots and suggest what might be behind all these events. America is trying to maintain its myths about its legal system, even while the desperate reality of life inside the USA is starting to blow back into escalating social upheaval.
USA torture and illegal jailing overseas, starts with USA domestic torture and illegal jailing at home
The world press has documented clear violations of human and legal rights by America in its overseas jails, such as the infamous situations in Guantanamo and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, and the even more secret network of prisons in places like Diego Garcia or on board American ships.
But the problem is much bigger, than America's legal abuses under its military invasions and "war on terrorism". These USA violations of international law, are consistent with the corruption in America's home legal system within its own borders, and have partly evolved from America's legal abuses against its own citizens and residents.
American prisons are often horrible, with lots of torment of prisoners, like you would expect in some petty dictatorship. Conditions are brutal in USA jails; rape and beatings are common, and there is little help for abused inmates. In addition to the many official USA executions, numerous people are also illegally killed in jail cells, "mysteriously" said to have hanged themselves or "found stabbed to death".
Scandals of overseas prison abuse, as in the USA-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, have arisen from sources much deeper than America's foreign policy. These scandals are in part replications of inmate abuse inside of America's domestic prison gulag. Without diminishing the brutality of the crimes committed by Americans in Iraqi prisons, it is also true that such crimes are consistent with the brutality of prisons inside America.
In the regular functioning of the USA courts, America's domestic lawyers and judges, threaten people with illegal jailing, and rape, torture and murder in jail, just like the threats used by Americans against Iraqi subjects of the American occupation. America will play the song about "just a few bad apples in the barrel" whenever an abuse scandal gets exposed, either domestically or abroad, but the cover-up of such abuse is more the routine response.
Theoretically, torture and abuse is totally outlawed by America's Constitution, but some of the nice words in America's Constitution hold little power anymore, despite how often people quote them. The Americans who still believe the Constitution protects them, are mostly those people who haven't yet dealt with the judges and lawyers of America's corrupt legal system.
America's Constitution and Bill of Rights are nearly dead, not just because the judges will no longer enforce them, but even more because America's lawyers will not even fight for them. The two American "political parties" are not fighting for them, either, and America's news media are also very passive. If you look at America in depth, you can see there has been a widespread moral collapse in America's legal and political structures. This means that America's legal system has become largely a tool of government terror, and of bribery for the rich and the powerful. The average person is just fodder for the meat-grinder of America's courts.
America's lies and sleazy arguments to make excuses for torture, or to deny people the rights of the Geneva convention, or holding people for many years without charges, are also just an extension of the deviousness in America's domestic legal system. Inside America, neither its laws nor its Constitution nor the facts nor evidence nor anything else, no longer have real authority inside the American courts.
All that's left is what American lawyers and judges call "the game". As part of playing this game, USA lawyers and judges just twist words around, in order to produce any excuse, however flimsy, to achieve their objective, whether that be to jail an innocent person, or give the verdict that was sought by the big company that paid the big bribe through its law firm.
It is an endlessly devious manipulation of words and phrases to get the desired result, just devious falsehood and lies backed by the naked power of the judges. The only "real" part is the power that the judges and lawyers hold in America, to jail you and take away your property. The words of the law don't protect you in the USA, because American judges and lawyers have no scruples about bending them to mean the opposite of what they say.
America's lawyers are controlled by the judges, and don't really work for you - that's why they sell you out to the government, or to the big companies that pay bribes
There's some very special aspects about the way American lawyers are controlled by American judges, which is central to why America's legal corruption is so much worse than any other advanced nation. Even if you are paying an American lawyer huge amounts of money, he or she doesn't really work for you, and in fact may sell you down the river to the jailhouse.
American lawyers are directly under the thumb of the judges and the government, and must submit to the culture of bribery and perversion of justice, or else face terrifying revenge. Lawyers, just like you, can be instantly jailed by an American judge on flimsy pretexts, and American lawyers can be quickly stripped of their right to practice law, and personally and financially destroyed, if they dare to criticize legal corruption. Lawyers who try to fight the system can find themselves not only dis-barred, but also criminally charged and jailed, and no other lawyer will help them. It is a horribly crooked system in America.
This is different from other advanced countries, where lawyers are usually a professional guild, whose status and right to practice law, is under the control of only their fellow lawyers. This means that, in other countries, the judges and the government cannot easily ruin or attack the lawyers for purely political reasons. This is also part of why, in other developed countries, outside of America, you really do see brave lawyers fighting for un-popular clients, or challenging the government, and asking for justice.
But in America, it's different. Over the past century, the American lawyers lost the right to regulate themselves, and instead fell under the power of the judges. So American lawyers are afraid to do things in court, that the judges don't want them to do. America's army of nearly 1 million lawyers, is almost totally under the control of a few thousand judges, with their entrenched culture of bribery and fraud and miscarriage of justice.
Some USA lawyers don't like this, but they are helpless and can't fight it. Most lawyers in America have, to one degree or another, signed up with the devil, to do things the way the devil wants them done.
That means that any time you hire an American lawyer, he already is in a conflict of interest. He has to make the judge happy first. And if the judge wants to make the government happy, or make somebody else happy who is paying a big bribe, then guess what? You are destroyed. It doesn't matter what you paid the lawyer. He works for the judge, first and foremost. So a totally unique factor in USA legal corruption is the amazingly dishonest profession of American lawyers, these lawyers who "play the game" with America’s judges and politicians and police. It is a savage culture of legal fraud, where lawyers work with judges to rob and terrify people, especially minorities, but also foreigners, and above all those who dare to question the system. People accused of serious crimes have the "right" to a lawyer, but this may mean only a crooked lawyer who is stage-managing the victim to help the government and prosecutors. If the lawyer does not help the government, he can be put out of work and not "assigned" to any more cases, or treated badly the next time he is in a courtroom. This legal fraud is the core of the danger to those who visit America. A lawyer who is "representing" you in the USA, whether the government is paying him, or even if you are paying him yourself, may just be a stooge who is helping the prosecutors to put you in jail, even though you are innocent. The judges of America gave every accused criminal the "right" to a lawyer, not because they cared about the rights of the accused, but because it helps stage-manage the victim, with a lawyer who has to do things the judge's way. In America, such government-appointed lawyers are the means by which hundreds of thousands of poor people are railroaded into prison. Some of these people were just foreign tourists, in the wrong place at the wrong time, and wound up rotting in an American prison. Some lawyers are fairly subtle about it, and their victims never realize the lawyer has sold them out to the judge and the government. Most American court cases never go to trial, never see a jury; it is the job of the victim's lawyer to "sell the deal" that the judge has decided will happen, or else. This is how people accept a "plea bargain" so they accept going to jail for 3 years even though they are innocent, instead of going to trial before a jury. Because of the corruption of lawyers under the thumb of the judges, there's a very fake and phony aspect of court proceedings in America. They are really fake "show trials" in many cases, sometimes very obviously so, where both purported "sides" of lawyers are actually working together for the government, or for the big corporation or rich person that is bribing the judge.
You will also find, in the American legal system, that you essentially have no recourse whatsoever against wrongdoing by your own lawyer. A lawyer can sell you out, betray you, steal your money, engage in malpractice, help out the other side, hide the evidence that proved you were right, or commit felony crime against you, and there is nothing you can do about it, so long as the lawyer made the judge happy, and the judge got his cut of any money the lawyer stole from you.
Innocent and being arrested - they don't like to admit a mistake in America
Yes, lots of people live their whole lives in America and never get arrested. And yet, some poor foreign visitor comes to America for a short holiday, gets arrested by mistake, and gets sentenced to death by lethal injection even though he is totally innocent. Well, that's the lottery of life for those who visit or live in America. The police and prosecutors in America have no concern at all whether they have arrested someone who is innocent. They just don't care. When a crime is committed, they try to arrest somebody, anybody, just to say they got the bad guy. And they never like to admit they made a mistake. Once they arrest you, they will try to make up and plant false evidence, to help try and convict you. A common trick is to take other criminals they know, who are facing jail on other charges, and get those criminals to be false witnesses against you. The cops justify this kind of thing by saying to themselves, "Well, if you didn't commit this crime, you probably committed some other crime we don't know about." If they do arrest you in America, they like to pile on all sorts of criminal charges. The idea is to charge you with 10 crimes, because it makes you sound bad, and maybe convict you on 3 of them or you will accept a plea bargain on 1 or 2 of them. Any kind of guilty plea, and they call it a success, even though you were totally innocent.
For the police and prosecutors, it's all a kind of sporting game, so they can bring about their "high conviction rate". Perhaps part of the reason America has so much crime, even with more than 2 million people in prison, is because the people who actually committed the crimes were never arrested. Also, some poor people may feel that the odds are high they will be arrested someday anyway, so they may as well be criminals and enjoy life in the meantime.
The system is extremely racist, of course, and white people are arrested less than many minorities. But no one is safe. Any innocent person can get railroaded to death in America.
Multi-millionaires and big corporations, vs. everybody else
The only people who really can get expect some fairness in American courts are multi-millionaires and big corporations. Nobody else really matters to American judges and lawyers.
There is a huge amount of bribery in America, perhaps even more than in the courts of any other country in the world. Even some American ex-judges have admitted the near-universality of bribery there. Nearly all bribes are given to the judges by lawyers; this is considered the safe way to bribe a judge. Bribery is rarely spoken about, just understood. Rich people pay huge amounts of money to law firms with connections, the lawyers walk around with a certain amount of cash in their jacket, and they pass it to the judges in their quiet moments together. It is mostly all cash of course. Sometimes the bribery is blatantly obvious, because of the other crimes that lawyers and judges commit in broad daylight together. In the courtrooms you can see the judges being extremely friendly to their rich lawyer friends who pay big bribes.
As an average person, there's no real way to out-bribe a big corporation, regardless of what your lawyer promised you. That's why the big companies win so often.
American judges are very devious, and use all sorts of techniques to prevent a victim from getting justice. Lots of judges issue gag orders, and bans on freedom of speech, to help prevent other people from finding out what is going on. Judges set up a trial in all sorts of ways, giving orders that all sorts of evidence be hidden from a jury, for example. The judge may declare, for example, that the evidence that proves you are innocent or right, will not be allowed at the trial.
Jury trials are actually very rare in America, unlike what you see in the movies. Most cases are settled through some deal or extortion or intimidation, before there is an actual trial. If there is a jury trial, they tend to stack the jury with un-educated idiots who will tend to believe whatever lies they are told by the judge and the government. If you are trying to fight a rich person in court, the judge might let the fancy lawyers for the rich person say anything they want, while he tells you to shut up as soon as you start talking. The judges have a thousand ways to rig a legal proceeding, to benefit rich people or the government.
It's no wonder so many innocent people go to prison. With the fundamental brutality and harshness of life in America, American citizens are confused and fearful, and gullible to propaganda. So, a jury in a courtroom, these people who tend to be poorly educated, will tend to go along with any lies presented by government prosecutors. In this environment of fear, the feeling of safety for the jury, comes from following the "strong" government in sending various "suspected criminals" to jail.
Yes, there are appeals courts, but these are just more judges, who are often friends with the lower court judge who originally sold you out. The appeals judges tend to go along with the lower court judge, unless you have suddenly acquired some politically powerful backing on your side.
Americans love to talk about "taking it all the way to the Supreme Court!", but this is a nearly empty hope. The U.S. Supreme Court simply refuses to consider most cases that are presented to it.
If you are a little helpless nobody, the appeals judges often barely reply to you, and sometimes don't reply at all. Sometimes people have been strapped to a table and given the lethal poison and put to death in America, with the victim's appeal never even answered by the judges.
What about when people win millions of dollars in a lawsuit against the big company?
Every now and then, there is worldwide news of how some average person in America has won a lawsuit for $25 million or some other huge sum of money, from some company or other. What's going on here - if the American legal system is so crooked, how can people be winning such big money?
Such cases are indeed real, but they are actually somewhat rare, numerically - rather like winning the lottery - and it's important to see why they take place, and how they fit into the big pattern. Such cases are typically after someone has been seriously injured or died due to some defective product or prescription drug or hospital treatment or accident.
These cases have a certain "place" in the American legal framework, accepted by the judges. They are also very important for maintaining the bribery culture. A lot of the money won in such cases goes into the lawyer's pockets, and is a major source of bribery money for the judges. As regards big companies and the judges, such cases are viewed as a kind of "tax" on the big corporations, part of the cost of doing business in America, part of the price of being able to otherwise make huge profits.
Such cases, as well, have the same function as in a gambling casino, when the casino proudly announces that one customer has just won a huge jackpot. The hype about the one jackpot winner, hides the fact that most everyone else is losing money. The person whose husband died from the defective prescription drug, and won millions of dollars (one-third of that to the lawyer, of course), is the person who is shoved forward to prove that "the legal system works - it's the greatest legal system in the world!"
The small handful of such personal-injury cases, are intended to distract the public from all the innocent people sentenced to prison, from all the families destroyed by bribed judges in divorce cases, and from all the people whose lives are destroyed by big companies, companies who cheerfully pay bribes to win their routine cases in court.
Big companies know that some big "injury" cases will be lost, in order to supply money for the lawyers and judges who otherwise take good care of the big company's interests. When you are making hundreds of millions of dollars, the loss of a few million here and there is just another expense of business. In the end, the companies just raise their prices to cover the costs of lawyers and lawsuits. The whole world pays for the millions earned by American lawyers, they are the ultimate parasites.
There are other casualties here, too. America's health care system has been destroyed from the inside by the legal culture of constant lawsuits against doctors and hospitals, with huge amounts of money being given to the lawyers in these cases, driving up the cost of medical care and putting it out of reach of many people. America is the only economically advanced nation without a national health plan, with tens of millions of Americans having no health coverage. USA lawyers joke openly about how, when the courts make big money awards to pay a lawyer, the lawyer often gives the judge a bribe by way of gratitude. Some lawyers grow rich, and doctors are afraid to continue practicing medicine in the US, and many Americans die from lack of health care.
But while America's lawyers will very casually file legal charges against doctors, hospitals, or ordinary people, for any flimsy reason, to try and squeeze some money from the situation, they are extremely afraid to take any legal action against another lawyer or judge engaged in misconduct. That's where fear takes over, and lawyers are suddenly too timid to file any lawsuits.
The Hollywood image, versus the grim reality
Once you have digested the fact that America has the world's largest prison gulag, another major thing to digest is the USA government, and much of America, is primarily a sales organization, whose chief tool is hype and propaganda and outright lies. America is a culture built on sales and advertising; it focuses on portraying an image, not the reality beneath it.
This is why America was so casual about inventing and selling the lies about "weapons of mass destruction" to help start the Iraq invasion. It was just a question of whatever lies needed to be told, in order to sell the product; there was no concern about afterwards, when the lies were exposed. America just figures it can later send out more salespeople with more lies, in an endless cycle. Tomorrow is just another day, when America will try to sell another product, the "war on terror", the "spread of freedom", or whatever.
The selling never stops, in Washington or Hollywood. America sells political lies like Hollywood sells movies. When the USA President talks about "advancing the cause of freedom", he basically means freedom for big corporations to do business. He's not really talking about actual personal freedom for real people. But he grins when he talks about "freedom" because it's a good word of salesmanship, people hear him and some of them can be duped into believing that America cares about personal or political freedom. Hollywood movies and American television are a major element of political myth-making. Around the world, people derive an image of America, and its legal system, from these fictional creations on film. America's propaganda about having "the greatest legal system in the world" is one of those phony stories that Hollywood is helping to sell.
It is also a myth sustained by the few trials about which there is a lot of publicity, like with the celebrity trials of Martha Stewart or Michael Jackson. Judges behave very differently when the cameras are rolling, or the media is reporting everything that goes on, and millions of dollars are being spent on lawyers. But in the 98 percent of court activity that does not have big media coverage, the judges of America provide a bizarre sideshow of horror.
In the Hollywood version, the judges in American courts are like kind uncles, smiling and being wise and calmly dispensing justice. But in reality, American judges sometimes scream at people like disturbed perverts, and show off their bribed corruption right there in the courtroom. Sometimes judges engage in flagrant extortion, where you have to agree to pay money to the judge's lawyer friends as the price to stay out of jail. It is really that bad. You can find no end of documented horror about American judges behaving like criminal lunatics, and it is getting worse all the time.
In the Hollywood version, there are brave lawyers who will fight for your rights, to win justice for you in the American courts. In reality, you can't find an American lawyer brave enough to fight judicial corruption, even if you are innocent and the judge's friends have threatened to murder you, or to send you to jail for the rest of your life. The lawyers who used to be brave, were destroyed or intimidated, and nearly all American lawyers now submit themselves to the culture of corruption and bribery, and betraying and abandoning the people who need legal help.
In the sad reality, American lawyers line up by the dozen to help the government or the big corporations, and regularly betray the average person, even if they are supposedly representing you. Even the lawyers who don't want to be wicked themselves, are too timid to really fight the system. At a certain point, nearly all American lawyers will hold back and abandon their clients, because they are trying to survive themselves and avoid revenge by the judges. In the Hollywood version, the average person is also helped by the "brave investigative reporter" at some newspaper or television station, who shows great courage in exposing the truth, and bringing powerful wrongdoing to face justice. However, the brave "investigative reporter" in America is now as fictional and non-existent as the "brave lawyer" who will fight for your rights. This is especially true on any topic pertaining to corruption by judges and lawyers.
In America today, reporters are little timid people who are afraid of getting fired, and who almost never write a story on government corruption, unless some other part of the government is officially investigating or prosecuting. That goes triple when judges or lawyers are involved. The owners of the newspapers and television stations are afraid of revenge by the judges if they have to go to court, and the nervous little reporters who work for them understand the rules of the game. If you look closely at a modern newspaper or news magazine in the USA, you will see how almost all stories originate with the government itself. When the media "investigates", they are usually just adding more details on a situation already being targeted by the government. Every news media and television station in America is swamped with people begging them to report on stories, that they totally refuse to cover. The reporters are too scared, and they know the stories wouldn't get printed or broadcast even if they were written. America is the land of fear, as regards the legal system and the culture of corruption. Everyone involved with the USA legal system is afraid, very afraid, of stepping on the wrong toes. Even American judges themselves get driven out of office, if they don't participate in the bribery culture.
No recourse against crime and fraud by judges and lawyers in America
In reality, there is almost nothing you can do against misconduct, and even open felony crime, committed against you by American judges and lawyers. All of the official complaint procedures you find on the internet, or at the courthouse or in the law books, turn out to be a joke, a farce and a fraud.
Complaints about lawyers in America, usually go to the "Bar", which is itself run by the judges who are involved in bribery with the lawyers. And complaints about judges go to other judges, their friends. Nearly all the complaints about lawyers and judges - tens of thousands of them - are kept secret. Nearly all are dismissed or ignored. They are generally only used if the judges or politicians want to specially destroy someone - some radical minority lawyer, someone who is not playing the bribery game, somebody who has dared to expose wrongdoing. Otherwise, even criminal acts by lawyers and judges get a smiling cover-up.
You will almost certainly not find any lawyers to help you sue another lawyer for wrongdoing. They are too scared of revenge by the judges. Even the lawyers who are broke and unemployed and desperate for work, are too scared to sue another lawyer. (Special caution: Lawyers may make false promises to you about suing another lawyer, cash your checks and steal your money, and then refuse to help you. And then you will have another lawyer who wronged you.) The police and FBI almost certainly will not help you, either. They all know the bribery game, and they rely on the same crooked judges to help send innocent people to prison after they have been arrested. The more crooked the judge, the more eager the judge will be, to help the police or FBI do a dirty deal and convict an innocent person. And, of course, the newspapers and television and media won't help you. They hear stories like yours all the time. If they publish or broadcast your story, then they will have problems the next time they get sued in court. Or they might find themselves arrested on false charges, and end up in an even worse situation than you.
The newspapers are so tied into the establishment of judges and lawyers, that the newspapers sometimes help the judges and lawyers to commit their crimes, and to unfairly smear and attack their victims. The big media newspapers have even helped to plant false "evidence" in court cases, and help the legal establishment to destroy innocent people. But even if not harming you, the USA media is afraid to help you, afraid of revenge if they expose judicial corruption. These fears are just as big, if not bigger, with America's radical and alternative media, and bloggers and internet sites. Such people will criticize American foreign policy and so on, but everybody is scared of talking about specific cases of corruption by lawyers and judges. The independent media has even more reason to be afraid, because they are even more vulnerable if the lawyers start to file false charges against them in the courts.
Of course, America's politicians will not help you, either. Many politicians are themselves lawyers, very used to the whole game of bribery with judges and other lawyers. The politicians accept the crooked courts as the way that America is run, and as helping the two big parties to monopolize the political scene and prevent alternative political movements. America's two big political parties, the Democrats and Republicans, can be seen as another phony game like America's courts. The two parties actually get their hundreds of millions of dollars in money from the same people at the same big corporations who own the rest of America. These two American parties pretend to argue with each other over emotional issues like gun control and abortion rights, but in the end both of these parties serve the big corporations. Half of Americans are still fooled into thinking that these parties represent them, the other half sense it is phony but feel helpless and don't know what to do. This is why people don't vote very much in America; they feel it is hopeless and useless.
You can also forget about America's human rights and civil liberties groups, even though it looks, at first, like there are many such groups on the internet. Many such groups are just money-raising groups which don't help victims, or are tied to the two main political parties or some narrow agenda. They are all scared of the legal system, too, and there is no one with any significant funding or money, who is out there helping the victims of legal corruption. They can't find lawyers to help them, either. There are some overwhelmed and struggling projects here and there, doing worthy work for a few of the innocent people in prison, but they function in an environment of timidity and fear, and without the resources or clout or media access to expose or change what is happening. It's getting worse and worse in America all the time. As the judges and lawyers can get away with committing crimes, they are getting more open and blatant, committing felony crimes in broad daylight, because they know no one will stop them or bring them to account. It is also important to know, that once you have started complaining about, or exposing, judicial and legal corruption in America, you become a kind of outlaw there. You are in a very dangerous situation, and you are considered fair game to be either arrested and jailed on false charges, or to be totally robbed and betrayed by America's lawyers. Once you have spoken out about legal corruption, you may find that no other lawyer will then help you for any reason, even if it is un-related to your complaint about judicial wrongdoing. You may be trapped in a nightmare from which there is no escape unless you can leave America altogether.
Dealing with American lawyers, if you have no other choice
Perhaps the statistical chance of getting arrested in America as an innocent person, and then being sent to prison or put to death, is relatively small. But think of how you will feel if you end up as one of those 2 million American prisoners, including 50,000 foreign citizens. Or perhaps even one of those several thousand people on Death Row, waiting for the lethal poison to be injected into your arm.
Visiting America now, is probably similar to visiting or doing business in 1936 with Hitler's Reich, or Mussolini's fascist empire. If you did such a thing in 1936, you might have visited and had a wonderful time, maybe even have done some business with companies in those countries. You might have seen some beautiful sights, and met some very friendly individual people, perhaps drunk a beer or two, or a nice glass of wine, maybe attended the 1936 Olympics. Very likely, you wouldn't have seen any concentration camps, in the places where you travelled. You might have had a very pleasant trip.
But nonetheless, you were in a dangerous place, where horrible things were going on. That's true of the United States of America today, the land of 2 million prisoners in a giant gulag. With America's corrupt legal system, it's certainly not the wisest place to keep money or assets, which can be easily grabbed by American lawyers in legal proceedings. Many smart Americans have opened overseas bank accounts, and it is wise to not keep too much money where American lawyers can seize it. There is no bigger group of thieves in the world, than American lawyers.
If you are in a lawsuit situation in America, get all your money out of the country, fast, before the USA lawyers can put any kind of hold or freeze on it. But you shouldn't keep substantial assets in the USA in the first place. Sell any USA real estate and rent instead, get that money out where it is safe. Certainly, don't ever expect any justice from American courts. Expect the judges and both sides of lawyers to tilt toward the government, or toward the big company that can pay bribes on a regular basis. All that most people get out of American courts, is grief, and lawyers stealing their money. Best not to approach American courts unless absolutely necessary. Despite the commonplace fraud and dishonesty of American lawyers, it's still important to have one if you must be in an American court. The reason is that American judges absolutely hate people who come to court without lawyers, especially if they have any money at all. The judge takes it as a personal insult if you are not giving some money to one of his lawyer friends, and will tend to take revenge on you unless you hire a lawyer, even a very stupid one, to stand by your side.
What American lawyers love to do, is to steal all your money, tell you a bunch of false promises and lies, and then do nothing for you, while they sell you out to the other side. That is a perfect scenario for an American lawyer. A lawyer's goal is to squeeze as much money from you, while at the same time doing as little as possible to rock the judge's political boat. Some lawyers even make money by the "research and review" scam, where they don't even agree to represent you, but just steal your money to "research" your case.
Accept in advance that an American lawyer will rob you and betray you, and everything will go more smoothly if you quietly understand this. Never actually trust an American lawyer, but don't let on that you know he's a crook. Don't tell the lawyer how much money you really have, he will try to get all of it. Try to pay a lawyer very slowly, in small chunks, that will keep him more interested, and prevent some of the bigger robberies and betrayals, and will leave you some money to try another lawyer if things get too awful. Remember, once you give a USA lawyer any money, it's almost impossible to get it back. Lawyers will almost never sue another lawyer, and if you go to court, the judge will almost certainly protect the lawyer who defrauded you (and get a share of the money, of course). Lawyers and judges in America like people to appear to be submissive and stupid and easily manipulated. They like to feel superior to you. By letting them think that you are weak and falling for their lies, you may give yourself some breathing room. This tactic has even enabled some people to stay alive and not get murdered, and to escape from America back to safety.
The growing American nightmare
It is just getting worse and worse in America's legal system. For some years now, the USA judges and lawyers have gotten used to denying people justice, to the great flow of bribery money, and even to committing felony crimes in broad daylight and getting away with it. It just keeps on escalating. Though a social explosion is lurking beneath the surface - with judges starting to get murdered, and people lighting courthouses ablaze - the people who run America are letting the current system chug along as it is, justice be damned, and to hell with the people who seem to have no way to fight back.
It can't go on like this forever, but it may get a lot worse first, despite the fair internet visibility on documented American legal corruption. One should note a brave and promising grass-roots attempt at judicial reform in the USA called (Jail 4 Judges - www.jail4judges.org), which attempts to place onto American ballots, a referendum for a new procedure to give citizens a real right of redress against corrupt judges. It is a wonderful and beautiful idea that deserves success, and will help transform America if it moves forward. Regrettably, though, for all the usual reasons of fear, there is no one with any big money or media clout, yet making a foray against the real-life nightmare of America's courts and prisons. It remains a taboo subject for the American media, and the media silence feeds and encourages the whole machine of bribery and repression.
Perhaps, though, it will not be until after America has had a major economic or social cataclysm, that the big American machine of legal corruption finally comes to be reformed. Sociologically speaking, it's astonishing how disgraceful American lawyers have become - they are now both the mafia and the gestapo of American life. America's lawyers, as a whole, have had little to say about America’s recent international crimes of prisoner abuse, and violation of international human rights agreements. American lawyers, as always nowadays, are "playing the game" with America's government and its judges. America, indeed, does not have the rule of law at all. Instead, it is just the rule of lawyers, lawyers who crave money and power. And, in America, it can be jail or worse for anyone who tries to fight these lawyers. The reality of the United States of America is that Americans, despite their overall wealth as a nation, are now a people living in a society of great fear. Their fears are complicated, and many Americans cannot even put their fears into words. They are afraid of lawyers and the prison system, afraid of losing their jobs in a brutal society with no social safety net, afraid of needing health care in a disastrous system with no health plan. And Americans are afraid of what will happen if they try to question the system and the way things work. They often feel helpless and powerless against the great forces dominating their country. American citizens are confused and fearful, and gullible to propaganda. Because Americans have difficulty in sorting out their many fears, they have become ripe candidates for racial and religious hatreds, and for following their government into war. The issues of "terrorism" and war distract the emotions of Americans from the terrible problems in their own society at home. The foreign "enemy" gives Americans a face on which to project their fear and their anger. The result is the horrifying misconduct of some Americans in these wars; while back inside the USA, there is increasing corruption and repression in the legal system. Americans desperately would like to believe that they still live in a "free" country, as it is so horrifying to them to face the ugly truth, that their freedom is already largely lost. Americans can imagine they are "free" because they can still choose among different products to buy, or quit their job, or buy a gun at the store. And the Americans most likely to imagine they are still "free" are the ones who have not yet been trapped in the halls of America’s legal system. They have not yet seen the lawyers and judges who smirk and laugh as they deny victims the most basic human rights. The truth is that, inside America, a nightmare has begun. The lawyers and judges and courts, "playing the game", regularly trample upon the freedoms that Americans thought they had. It is people like myself, escaped from the USA, living in kinder and gentler places, who are now the lucky ones. No one should ever again be fooled by USA propaganda about being the "land of freedom". Those who are thinking of travelling to, visiting, or working in America, should think again. It might not be worth the risk of being in a country that has one of the most crooked legal systems in the world.
Corrupt justice: what happens when judges' bias taints
a case?
When Margaret Besen, a 51-year-old nurse from East Northport, Long Island, filed for divorce from her husband in March of 2010, she believed justice was on her side.
Judge William Kent’s preliminary ruling seemed like a first step toward compromise. Margaret and Stuart Besen, who agreed their marriage was beyond repair, would remain in their suburban Suffolk County house, living in separate rooms – and keeping away from each other – while sharing custody until a resolution could be reached.
But within weeks, the situation deteriorated. Stuart Besen, a politically connected attorney for the town of Huntington, had an anger problem, Margaret told authorities. The couple’s screaming matches left Margaret feeling intimidated and their children – a daughter, 11, and son, 7 – terrified, she said. So in August of that year she obtained an order of protection prohibiting Stuart from harassing her. Three weeks later, Stuart entered Margaret’s bedroom and hovered over her as she slept, she told police. They arrested him for violating the order, reporting that Stuart had stared down at Margaret with his arms folded on three consecutive nights. She got temporary possession of the family home.
In the years that followed, Besen’s hopes for an equitable settlement dwindled as she battled a series of harsh and hard-to-explain decisions against her. Though she could never prove anything, she suspected that the scales had tipped for reasons unrelated to the evidence in her case. If true, Besen faced what experts say is one of the most troubling threats to our nation’s system of justice: judges, who, through incompetence, bias or outright corruption, prevent the wronged from getting a fair hearing in our courts.
“The decorum and bias and the perfectly unethical behavior of the judges is really rampant,” said Amanda Lundergan, a defense attorney in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, who confronted a nest of judicial conflicts in her state’s rapid-fire foreclosure rulings – dubbed the “rocket-docket” – following the housing market collapse. “It’s judicial bullying.”
Judges in local, state and federal courts across the country routinely hide their connections to litigants and their lawyers. These links can be social – they may have been law school classmates or share common friends – political, financial or ideological. In some instances the two may have mutual investment interests. They might be in-laws. Occasionally they are literally in bed together. While it’s unavoidable that such relationships will occur, when they do create a perception of bias, a judge is duty-bound to at the very least disclose that information, and if it is creates an actual bias, allow a different judge to take over.
All too often, however, the conflicted jurist says nothing and proceeds to rule in favor of the connected party, while the loser goes off without realizing an undisclosed bias doomed her case.
“Everybody should have the right to ensure the judge sitting on their case doesn’t have a conflict,” said Mary McQueen, executive director of the National Council on State Courts. “It’s absolutely imperative that people have full faith and confidence in the judicial process.”
‘Explain, defend or apologize’
Hundreds of judicial transgressions have been uncovered during the last decade, with results that cost the defeated litigants their home, business, custody, health or freedom.
Some of the best-known cases involve judges who ultimately did suffer consequences for their behavior, including Texas judge Christopher Dupuy, who bullied four lawyers who filed conflict-of-interest recusal motions between 2011 and 2013. Attorney Lori Laird asked that Dupuy bow out in 2013 because she’d represented Dupuy’s ex-wife in the couple’s custody battle in Galveston. The judge responded by slapping her with 37 counts of contempt, demanding that she “explain, defend or apologize” for her motion. He later sentenced her to 220 days in jail, although she didn’t serve any time.
“It was the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever seen,” Laird told Contently.org. “It also caused great damage to both of my clients.” Dupuy was admonished in November – after he’d already retired and was sentenced to two years’ probation for pleading guilty to misdemeanor counts of perjury and misuse of government property.
But court critics say that one reason judicial violations are common is because they frequently go unpunished. When litigants ask a judge to back away because of a conflict, they risk being told no, then face possible retaliation, so many don’t bother. If a litigant or an attorney files a complaint with an oversight body, there’s only about a 10% chance that state court authorities will properly investigate the allegation, according to a Contently.org analysis of data from 12 states.
The analysis shows that a dozen of these commissions collectively dismissed out of hand 90% of the complaints filed during the last five years, tossing 33,613 of 37,216 grievances without conducting any substantive inquiry. When they did take a look – 3,693 times between 2010 and 2014 – investigators found wrongdoing almost half the time, issuing disciplinary actions in 1,751 cases, about 47%.
The actions taken ranged from a letter of warning to censure, a formal sanction that indicates a judge is guilty of misconduct but does not merit suspension or removal.
Actually removing a judge was a rarity. Just 19 jurists in 12 states were ordered off the bench for malfeasance, which is about three per decade for each state. And even that result is becoming less common, with only one removal in 2014 and three in 2013 among all 12 states.
The states examined – California, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Indiana, Minnesota, Colorado, Washington, Georgia and South Carolina – were chosen because they comprise a representative sample from different populations and areas of the country and because they had matching data for the years 2010 through 2014.
California, which created the first judicial disciplinary body in the country in 1960, had a dismissal rate of 98%. It did not suspend or remove a single judge in 2013 or 2014 and acted just once over the last five years, removing a sitting judge in 2012. Colorado’s lone judicial action since 2010 was a suspension in 2013. Texas has not removed a judge in five years, though it has suspended 23 for varying lengths of time.
One discouraging factor is the secrecy under which these commissions operate. Allegations against a judge are commonly kept confidential unless a sanction of some kind is imposed. New York’s CJC, for example, is prevented by law from disclosing whether anyone has complained about a judge, discussing specific allegations, revealing what evidence might have been presented or what steps, if any, it took to investigative.
When conduct boards do act, the sanctions usually amount to an admonishment that may be embarrassing but costs the judge little.
Advertisement
Among those still on the bench after ethical violations are Louisiana judge Robin Free. Free oversaw a personal injury claim in 2010 by a man and his wife, Israel and Leslie Robles, who were hurt in an oil field run by Houston-based fracking contractor Integration Production Services, Inc. The trial had begun when the two sides agreed to a $1.2m settlement. As he mulled signing off on the deal, Free arranged for some post-trial R&R at Casa Bonita, a hunting and fishing ranch in George West, Texas, owned by the victims’ lawyer, David Rumley. He flew there aboard the Rumley firm’s private jet.
It wasn’t Free’s first ethical blunder. In 2001 he presided over a fouled-water case against Dow Chemical, trying to resolve the matter even as his mother was a member of the plaintiff’s class. Free is still serving on the bench after being docked 30 days pay in December and forking over a $6,723.64 fine.
Raoul Felder, the well-known New York divorce attorney, served as a CJC board member between 2004 and 2008, helping the commission sift through thousands of complaints. He came away from the experience perplexed by its decision-making.
“I wouldn’t say [the CJC] is toothless, but it’s arbitrary,” Felder said. “It can be unreasonably tough on judges who commit trivial offenses while going easy on judges who are really bizarrely out of the mainstream, doing things they shouldn’t be doing.”
Judicial discipline at the federal level is almost non-existent. A Contently.org examination of the most recent five years of complaint data shows that 5,228 grievances were lodged against federal jurists between 2010 and 2014, including 2,561 that specifically alleged bias or conflict of interest. But only three judges were disciplined during those years and each got the mildest rebuke on the books: censure or reprimand. None was suspended or removed.
The numbers suggest that at least some of these judges’ rulings did not pass the smell test: 4,168 of the dismissed complaints were tossed due to a lack of sufficient evidence, bringing up the possibility that some litigants raised valid concerns but failed to find definitive proof.
‘I’m on food stamps’ and he makes more than $500,000 a year
In the Besen divorce, judge Kent’s initial decisions were fairly typical for a couple in their situation. He imposed financial obligations on Stuart, the moneyed spouse, including $200 in weekly child support and $500 in monthly car payments. But when Stuart didn’t make the payments and the vehicle was repossessed, the judge did nothing. Nor did he act when Stuart honored only part of the support he owed, leaving Margaret, who was then unemployed, struggling to provide for her kids.“Occasionally he paid $200 a week, sometimes $175, sometimes $120,” she recalled. “The church had given me vouchers for gas, and I was getting food from the food pantry. I couldn’t cash checks. One year I found on his tax returns he had made $528,000, and I am getting food stamps and trying to get groceries home on a bicycle. It was extremely humiliating.”
Advertisement
Margaret and Stuart accused one another of mistreating their children. Police and child protection service workers became involved. Kent ordered her to undergo a psychological evaluation, which slammed Margaret as a danger to her children as she was allegedly alienating them from their father. No abuse by either parent was substantiated.
Margaret won a court order of protection barring Stuart from contact with her children for a year. But when Kent issued his final decree less than six weeks later, he awarded Stuart full custody, while Margaret was allowed only supervised visits. And he ordered Margaret to pay back half the cost of her nursing degree and to sell her diamond engagement ring and split the proceeds with Stuart. The judge also reversed the support arrangements. While Stuart would pay $1,500 a month in maintenance to Margaret, she now owed Stuart $153.90 a week for the children, even though she was earning about $13,000 a year as a part-time aide in an assisted-living facility.
Margaret began to look into her husband’s dealings and discovered, through searching public records, that he and judge Kent had possible connections. In 2010, Stuart was appointed as the Suffolk County representative on a statewide commission for vetting local judicial candidates. That same year, an organization based at Stuart Besen’s Garden City law office, the Long Island Coalition for Responsible Government, donated $7,500 to candidate Richard Ambro, who got elected and became one of Kent’s fellow Supreme Court judges in Suffolk’s 10th district. In his role as Huntington’s town lawyer, Besen argued cases before these very judges. He’d entered a circle of judicial insiders.
“I’m in the middle of a large group of people who’ve got money and influence and who are all connected,” said Margaret Besen. “I’m not being afforded an opportunity to get a fair shake.”
Margaret had no way of knowing whether the connections she uncovered played any role in how Kent ruled in her case. But her concern deepened when she made an additional discovery about her house. Kent had ordered the Besen home, the most valuable marital asset, to be sold and the proceeds divided, putting Margaret in line to receive possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then she found an online listing offering the property for sale – with the judge’s wife, Patricia Kent, as broker. The home, which was listed for $749,999 with Patricia Kent’s photo and contact information on Realty Connect USA, is currently more than $15,000 in arrears on its property taxes and no longer appears to be actively offered. Margaret was evicted from the house in 2013 and lives in a modest apartment a few miles away. She has yet to receive a penny for her interest in the property.
Patricia Kent claimed she had never represented any of the properties her husband had ordered sold in divorce or other cases. “I have never been a broker for any of his houses; we’re very clear about that,” Patricia Kent said in a phone interview.
Advertisement
A reporter informed her of the agency listing with her information attached to the Besen property. She said her photo could have appeared because she was a broker with the same firm as the agent who did have the listing. “The only person who gets the commission is the listing agent that listed the property,” she said.
Patricia said William Kent was unlikely to comment. “I’m not so sure that he’d want to speak with you,” she said, adding: “When I see him, I’ll let him know, and if he’s interested he’ll give you a call.”
Kent didn’t call. And Stuart Besen did not respond to messages left at his office.
Scott L Cummings, a professor of legal ethics at UCLA law school, said the case raised “significant ethical red flags”, because of the judge’s wife’s alleged involvement in offering the Besen family home for sale. “Not knowing the details of how his spouse might have been assigned as broker, the idea that a judge might benefit financially from the sale of a property in dispute in a pending matter seems to raise a serious question of impartiality.”
Ronald Rotunda, a professor at Chapman University law school in Orange, California, said: “What judge Kent did here seems odd. The husband makes over a half million a year, she makes $13,000 a year, and the judge orders her to pay child support (which is tax free to him and not deductible for her).”
But when Margaret Besen protested, she found no relief. When she asked Kent to recuse himself, he refused. When she complained to the state watchdog responsible for investigating judicial wrongdoing, writing two letters, they blew her off. In a terse response this June, the New York Commission for Judicial Conduct reiterated its initial decision, stating that “there was insufficient indication of judicial misconduct to justify discipline”. When a panel such as the CJC declines to get involved, the plaintiff has little recourse.
This was not the first time a litigant raised questions about Kent’s integrity.
Donna Schuler, also a divorcing mother in Suffolk County, asked that judge Kent recuse himself from her case in 2011 after claiming his unwarranted delays and stalling had drained her financially. Schuler was also rebuffed when she asked the commission to step in and remove Judge Kent from her case.
A culture of judicial impunity
Critics of the Suffolk supreme court claim a culture of rule-breaking exists, pointing to a red-faced moment in 2007 when Marion McNulty, then the county’s top matrimonial judge, was admonished by the state’s disciplinary panel for aggressively fund-raising for her favorite charity, a women’s nonprofit, while on the job. McNulty went so far as to hit up attorneys for checks in the courthouse, a blatant violation of ethical rules.But a culture of judicial impunity extends far beyond Long Island’s county courts. Indeed, even the US supreme court has been tarnished on this issue.
Advertisement
Justice Steven Breyer owned $215,000 in health-care stocks when deciding on the legality of the Affordable Care Act in 2012. Justice Samuel Alito’s portfolio included $2,000 in stock in The Walt Disney Co. in 2008, the year the court heard Disney, FCC v. Fox Television Stations. And perhaps most famously, justice Antonin Scalia has participated in the Bush v. Gore case, even though his son Eugene’s law firm represented one of the parties. In another case, Scalia remained in the panel despite having gone on a duck hunting trip with former Vice-President Dick Cheney while he was being sued to reveal the details of secret meetings he held with oil company executives in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
After his vacation with Cheney was revealed, Scalia scoffed at the suggestion he was compromised and defended his decision to remain on the case. “I do not believe my impartiality can reasonably be questioned,” he said in a 21-page memo. “If it is reasonable to think that a supreme court justice can be bought so cheap, the nation is in deeper trouble than I had imagined.” But Sen Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat, implored Scalia to withdraw. “Instead of strengthening public confidence in our court system, Justice Scalia’s decision risks undermining it,” he stated.
In fact, US supreme court justices enjoy a special privilege: they are the only judges exempt from the federal Code of Conduct, which demands judicial impartiality and prohibits a jurist from presiding when he or she has “a personal bias concerning a party to the case”.
Restoring court’s battered integrity
Recusal issues often spur judicial complaints. But the watchdog panels that evaluate them, both on the state and federal level, are not courts and therefore lack the authority to review the merits of a litigant’s case. Even a substantiated charge of misconduct won’t change the outcome of a ruling or verdict; it merely opens the door for a new appeal to be filed, which for beleaguered litigants can be costly, time-consuming and often not worth it. Many do continue to fight. Others simply vent.The online vitriol directed at unscrupulous judges, which began in the mid- 2000s, has built to a howling digital crescendo. Websites including The Robe Probe, The Judiciary Report and The Robing Room, which rate judges the way Yelp rates restaurants, are rife with railing as embittered, mostly anonymous plaintiffs rip into judicial decisions they feel were biased or corrupt.
Mounting criticism led to a remarkable development last year. The chief justices of each state gathered and declared that something had to be done. They implored lawmakers to enact legislation that might restore their courts’ battered integrity by forcing more transparency on their systems and holding judges accountable when they engaged in unethical behavior.
“Fair and impartial justice requires that judges act without regard to the identity of parties or their attorneys, the judge’s own interests or likely criticism,” said the resolution of the Conference of Chief Justices in January 2014. A judge should step away when there is “actual conflict or bias or other impropriety...or when a reasonable disinterested person would conclude that an appearance of impropriety exists.”
Advertisement
The decree was set in motion by a precedent-setting 2009 Supreme Court decision involving a dispute between two West Virginia coal companies that had done business with each other for years - until one went bankrupt - leading to a judicial scandal that inspired a John Grisham novel.
In an appeal of a case in West Virginia court, A.T. Massey Coal Co. CEO Don Blankenship spent $3m to elect Brent Benjamin, who ultimately provided the swing vote that overturned a $50m judgment against his company. Benjamin rebuffed repeated demands that the newly elected justice recuse himself because of his obvious conflict.
The US Supreme Court ruled that Benjamin’s bias was so extreme that his failure to step aside violated Caperton’s right to due process under the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. The case, which spawned Grisham’s 2008 best-seller, “The Appeal,” underscored the kind of underhanded dealing that has stained the judiciary.
A further nudge for reform came last year when the Center for Public Integrity published a report on financial conflicts of interest. Among its findings: on 26 occasions in the preceding three years, federal appellate judges ruled on cases involving companies in which they owned stock or where they had a financial tie to an attorney appearing before them.
It also created a grading system to gauge how diligent each state was in collecting personal financial information from its judges, including stock ownership and outside sources of income, and how accessible that data was to the public. The center said that 42 states, plus the District of Columbia, failed its test. Six others earned a D grade, while two – California and Maryland – got Cs. California’s score, 77, the highest of any state, was seven points below the federal government’s grade of 84.
The report highlighted the type of conflict that can be most readily identified and that doing so requires full disclosure from the judges. Stock ownership, even if minimal, should automatically disqualify a judge from hearing a case, many experts believe. “If a judge owns a single share in a company involved in a case, he should recuse himself instantly,” says Rotunda, a leading law scholar.
It’s been more than two years since Margaret Besen has seen her children, who are now 12 and 16. There’s no money to pay the court supervisor, so they can’t visit. Nor does Besen have the funds to continue fighting. Kent retired shortly after making his decision.
“The hardest thing in my life is that I can’t be with my children and I can’t have an impact on my children’s upbringing,” Besen said over coffee at a Long Island diner. “A lot of people do not have any idea how the judicial system works or doesn’t work until you’re in it. We think we’re in a democratic society. We think we’re run by rules. But they are not being upheld by the court at all.”
Former Municipal Court Judge Pleads Guilty in
Corruption Case
PHILADELPHIA—Joseph C. Waters, Jr.,
61, of Philadelphia, pleaded guilty today to using his judicial position to
influence the outcome of two cases in the Philadelphia Municipal Court,
announced United States Attorney Zane David Memeger. Waters, a former Philadelphia
Municipal Court Judge, pleaded guilty to an information charging mail fraud and
honest services wire fraud.
According to documents filed in the
case, on September 30, 2011, Waters was asked by Person #1 – a politically
active business owner – to use his judicial office to achieve a favorable
outcome in a small claims case filed in Philadelphia Municipal Court against
Person #1’s real estate management company. To that end, Waters called two
other Municipal Court judges, assigned to the case on different dates, and
asked them to rule in Person #1’s favor. A Municipal Court Judge identified in
the information as Judge #2 ultimately adjudicated the case in favor of Person
#1 after Waters told Judge #2 “he’s a friend of mine.” The information charges
that Judge #2’s ruling in favor of Person #1’s company prevented the plaintiff
in the small claims case, Company B, from collecting $2733 in unpaid fees owed
to it for security services it delivered to Person #1’s company.
Waters admitted today that he gave
Person #1 a secret advantage through a series of secret ex parte communications
with other Municipal Court judges scheduled to hear the small claims case and
used his position to cause favorable rulings for Person #1.
The information outlined a second scheme
in which Waters used his position as a judge to facilitate a favorable outcome
in a criminal firearms case. According to the information, Person #1 urged a
witness cooperating with the government, “CW#1,” to contribute money to help
pay down debts Waters had incurred while campaigning for a position on the
Municipal Court. In January 2010, CW#1, gave Waters $1,000 in cash. The
information charged that, in accepting the money, Waters told CW#1 that he
would help CW#1 with future problems that CW#1 or CW#1’s friends may encounter
in the court system. The information further alleged that between 2010 and
2012, CW#1 provided gifts and cash contributions to Waters that were not
reported on Waters’ campaign finance reporting forms.
In May 2012, CW#1 asked Waters for
his assistance with a firearms prosecution pending in the Municipal Court. CW#1
introduced Waters to an undercover agent (“UC#1”) as a business associate. CW#1
and UC#1 asked Waters to help UC #1’s “cousin” who had been arrested for felony
possession of a firearm. On July 23, 2012, Waters called Judge #1 alerting
Judge #1 to the preliminary hearing of a “friend” for the firearms charge and
asked Judge #1 to “help him.” According to the information, at a July 24, 2012
preliminary hearing, Judge #1, without proper legal basis, reduced the felony
firearms charge to a misdemeanor.
U.S. District Court Judge Juan R.
Sanchez scheduled a sentencing hearing for January 22, 2015. Waters faces a
maximum statutory sentence of 40 years in prison, a fine of up to $500,000 and
up to three years of supervised release.
The case was investigated by the FBI
and is being prosecuted by Chief of the Public Corruption Unit Richard P.
Barrett and Assistant United States Attorney Michelle L. Morgan.
An Indictment, Information or
Criminal Complaint is an accusation. A defendant is presumed innocent unless
and until proven guilty.
FINALLY! Prosecutor jailed for false conviction
GEORGETOWN, TEXAS (3/24/15) – According to a breaking story in the Huffington Post, former D.A. and Judge Ken Anderson pled guilty to intentionally failing to disclose evidence in a case that sent an innocent man, Michael Morton, to prison for the murder of his wife.
That story states: When trying the case as a prosecutor (D.A.) Anderson possessed evidence that may have cleared Morton, including statements from the only eyewitness to the crime that Morton was not the culprit. D.A. Anderson sat on this evidence, kept it out of sight and then watched Morton get convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
While Morton remained in prison for the next 25 years, District Attorney Anderson's career flourished, and he eventually became a judge. This along with the financial reward received for this conviction which serves as the motivation that drives the justice system today.
An example of this was the Glesty story below. The DA on that case was Charles Rodgers, who after the false conviction, went on to become a judge, while his replacement, Deputy D.A. Bonnie Dumonis completed the case successfully for the D.A. and was promoted from Deputy to D.A., became a judge, then went back to become District Attorney of San Diego County. This is known as career advancement in the business of cash for convictions.
The conviction of Ken Anderson is a rarity in an age where police and prosecutorial misconduct goes largely unpunished. Even though this D.A. was convicted on April 23, 2013 and sentenced on December 9th, 2013, that news was mostly kept low-key but finally broke on Tuesday, March 24, 2015.
This revelation comes on the heels of my own story published just before this one, titled, A Man Called Glesty-An Unlikely Suspect. It detailed a classic such case and mentioned two other news-focused cases involving myself and a County Superintendent. Here is the link to the story about Glesty which you need to see: http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/miles/150323
My story details how District Attorneys are given a bonus for every charge they make against someone, with even more bucks for every conviction. This gives a monetary reward which is an incentive to convict and jail people, guilty or not. Here is that link: http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/miles/150128
We are grateful for the writer of the Huntington Post story, Mark Godsey, a Carmichael Professor of Law, University of Cincinnati College of Law, and Director of the Ohio Innocence Project who made us all aware of this important event.
The Innocence Project using law school students, has reopened cases of many, many people wrongfully convicted and who have been rotting in prison for decades for something they did not do, but something for which a District Attorney was given a financial incentive to make sure it was accomplished. Unfortunately, many, many innocent people have been executed-yes horribly put to death, for something they did not do.
That is absolutely NOT a concern of District Attorneys. These money-hungry power seeking fanatics have absolutely no morals or even decency. They do not have one ounce of concern for the people whose lives they ruin. They have no conscience, no heart and not even a soul.
And what was this sentence given to District Attorney/Judge Ken Anderson for falsely putting a man in prison for 25 years? Ten days in jail, which was reduced to 5 days, a $500 fine and 500 hours of community service.
WHAT? One gets 2 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for littering. Yep, Don't Mess With Texas. But it seems to me that the crime of ruining a man's life and his family would require more punishment than throwing a wrapper out of your car window.
Even that Texas prosecutor-Judge, who was disbarred and had to surrender his law license, will still get his cushy retirement package. That is yet another crime against citizens.
As for the sentence, that corrupt District Attorney should have received the exact same sentence, 25 years, that was imposed upon Michael Morton. And that should be the standard for ALL such cases overflowing with prosecutorial misconduct.
The office of The District Attorney is supposed to be about JUSTICE, not convictions for cash. But that is what it is today. This is the result of neglecting Constitutional law implemented for the protection of all citizens. Instead these prosecutors manipulate and hide evidence to insure a conviction. What happened to that legal reference, Innocent until PROVEN guilty?
What is called for today is to recruit honest lawyers, now hold on, there are some out there, and have them begin to file lawsuits against those who prosecute these false cases, and then sue the D.A.s and corrupt judges. There should also be a huge lawsuit against each county where these abuses take place. This must and can be done.
Honest lawyers, come front and center. We need you. Help right this wrong and there may be a reduction of lawyer jokes and barbs as a result. Correction is needed in our legal system. And it begins with you.
The Innocence Project is a beginning. That can be enlarged to include the above false cases, and bring lawsuits against all who are a part of legal malfeasance, a necessary action to indeed protect our citizens. This has gone far enough.
These six things doth the Lord hate, yea, seven are an abomination unto him; a proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren. Proverbs 6:16
Former NY Judge Found Guilty of Attempted Extortion and Bribery
Guilt is final act in career
A strong advocate for Republican causes, Thomas J. Spargo faces prison in shakedown bid
The Albany Times Union by ROBERT GAVIN - August 28, 2009
A strong advocate for Republican causes, Thomas J. Spargo faces prison in shakedown bid
The Albany Times Union by ROBERT GAVIN - August 28, 2009
ALBANY,
NY – Former Judge Thomas J. Spargo was convicted Thursday of trying to shake
down lawyers and solicit a $10,000 bribe to pay his mounting legal bills,
completing the downfall of a once pre-eminent election law attorney later
ousted from the state Supreme Court bench. Spargo, 66, showed little expression
in U.S. District Court as the verdict was handed up on the second day of jury
deliberations: Guilty on both counts of attempted extortion and attempted
bribery. The prominent East Berne Republican, who went to bat in Florida for George
W. Bush following the disputed 2000 presidential election, is now a convicted
felon facing the possibility of several years in a federal prison cell. Spargo
kept his composure after the verdict, hugging one teary-eyed supporter and
smiling in the face of a conviction that will cost him his law license and two
fines of $250,000. But the bespectacled lawyer's outlook and distinguished
appearance now only contrast allegations the federal government proved in less
than a week: That he not-so-subtly tried to shake down personal injury lawyers
for tens of thousands of dollars like a common extortionist.
"Judges are supposed to serve the people who elected them, not their own self-interests," said John F. Pikus, the special agent who heads the FBI's Albany branch, which was involved in the case. "What Mr. Spargo did is nothing more than old-fashioned extortion." While Spargo faces a maximum of 20 years in prison for his attempted extortion and a maximum of 10 years for the attempted bribery conviction, federal sentencing guidelines would likely result in lesser penalties. Defense attorney E. Stewart Jones indicated the punishment for his client could range from probation to 3 years behind bars. Spargo will be sentenced Dec. 21 by District Judge Gary Sharpe, who presided over the four-day trial. "The jury system works," Spargo told reporters outside the James T. Foley U.S. Courthouse, "whether you like it or not." Jones, a prominent Troy defense attorney, described Spargo's trial as an "uphill battle," noting the federal government's extremely high conviction rate. "This is a sad outcome for someone who was a superb judge, superb lawyer and superb human being," Jones said. Asked why Spargo was convicted, Jones said, "You'll have to talk to the jury about that." Spargo was cross-endorsed in a deal for election to a 14-year term in state Supreme Court in 2001. Although his chambers were in Albany, Spargo presided over cases in Ulster County, which is part of the state's Third Judicial District.
By January 2002, Spargo faced allegations of ethical violations -- unrelated to his future bench removal and criminal case -- from the state Commission on Judicial Conduct. Court papers showed that by September 2003, Spargo's legal bills had "outstripped his ability to pay them." The bills would eventually exceed $140,000. At the federal trial, the government proved Spargo tried to extort attorneys to offset his legal costs, including Bruce Blatchly, an Ulster County lawyer with more than 32 years of experience, who had eight cases before the judge. Spargo solicited a $10,000 bribe from Blatchly on Nov. 13, 2003. But when the attorney declined to pay up, Spargo pressured him again through a friend, identified as attorney Sanford Rosenblum, in the coat room of a Kingston restaurant, the government said in court papers. Blatchly testified Monday that Spargo then called him on his cellphone on Dec. 19, 2003. He said the judge boasted he would be returning to Ulster County in 2004 and would handle Blatchly's cases. In addition, he testified, the judge revealed that Spargo's close friend, Albany County Surrogate's Court Judge Cathryn Doyle, was expected to preside over Blatchly's divorce from his now ex-wife. According to Blatchly, Spargo said "it looked like a nice Christmas for him."
When a federal prosecutor, Senior Trial Attorney Richard C. Pilger, asked Blatchly how that remark made him feel, the lawyer replied, ''Pretty much the opposite,'' saying, ''Now that my divorce was in his control, or the control his friend ... screwed.'' The Spargo case was also prosecuted by Trial Attorney M. Kendall Day of the public integrity section of the U.S. attorney's office. Blatchly had filed a complaint with the state commission. Spargo was removed from the bench three years ago. Spargo was indicted in Albany last December. Jones said he will file a motion to reverse the verdict, but did not say on what he would base any appeal. Jones told reporters judges should either be appointed or publicly funded rather than rely on donors for campaign funds. "They should take this process and change it." He accused the state commission of targeting his client. Robert Tembeckjian, the commission's administrator, said the state commission's decision and the jury's verdict both ''speak for themselves… there wasn't anything personal. We were just doing our jobs."
Spargo, a onetime seminarian and Army paratrooper, was hearing cases in Albany on March 31, 2006, when word of the commission's ouster was delivered to him in a note from a secretary. "I've just been removed from the bench," he said aloud at the time. "I have to go." The removal was due to the same charges he was convicted of Thursday. Spargo had faced other allegations from the commission that he wrongly participated during the Bush-Gore recount in Florida, but they were dropped. In 1990, Spargo went before the Commission on Government Integrity on allegations he funneled $750,000 into a Poughkeepsie Town Board race to elect candidates who would back a mall the Syracuse-based Pyramid Co. had wanted to build in the 1980s. He denied any wrongdoing and the probe was closed after he resigned as counsel to the state GOP. Spargo had invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 19 times.
"Judges are supposed to serve the people who elected them, not their own self-interests," said John F. Pikus, the special agent who heads the FBI's Albany branch, which was involved in the case. "What Mr. Spargo did is nothing more than old-fashioned extortion." While Spargo faces a maximum of 20 years in prison for his attempted extortion and a maximum of 10 years for the attempted bribery conviction, federal sentencing guidelines would likely result in lesser penalties. Defense attorney E. Stewart Jones indicated the punishment for his client could range from probation to 3 years behind bars. Spargo will be sentenced Dec. 21 by District Judge Gary Sharpe, who presided over the four-day trial. "The jury system works," Spargo told reporters outside the James T. Foley U.S. Courthouse, "whether you like it or not." Jones, a prominent Troy defense attorney, described Spargo's trial as an "uphill battle," noting the federal government's extremely high conviction rate. "This is a sad outcome for someone who was a superb judge, superb lawyer and superb human being," Jones said. Asked why Spargo was convicted, Jones said, "You'll have to talk to the jury about that." Spargo was cross-endorsed in a deal for election to a 14-year term in state Supreme Court in 2001. Although his chambers were in Albany, Spargo presided over cases in Ulster County, which is part of the state's Third Judicial District.
By January 2002, Spargo faced allegations of ethical violations -- unrelated to his future bench removal and criminal case -- from the state Commission on Judicial Conduct. Court papers showed that by September 2003, Spargo's legal bills had "outstripped his ability to pay them." The bills would eventually exceed $140,000. At the federal trial, the government proved Spargo tried to extort attorneys to offset his legal costs, including Bruce Blatchly, an Ulster County lawyer with more than 32 years of experience, who had eight cases before the judge. Spargo solicited a $10,000 bribe from Blatchly on Nov. 13, 2003. But when the attorney declined to pay up, Spargo pressured him again through a friend, identified as attorney Sanford Rosenblum, in the coat room of a Kingston restaurant, the government said in court papers. Blatchly testified Monday that Spargo then called him on his cellphone on Dec. 19, 2003. He said the judge boasted he would be returning to Ulster County in 2004 and would handle Blatchly's cases. In addition, he testified, the judge revealed that Spargo's close friend, Albany County Surrogate's Court Judge Cathryn Doyle, was expected to preside over Blatchly's divorce from his now ex-wife. According to Blatchly, Spargo said "it looked like a nice Christmas for him."
When a federal prosecutor, Senior Trial Attorney Richard C. Pilger, asked Blatchly how that remark made him feel, the lawyer replied, ''Pretty much the opposite,'' saying, ''Now that my divorce was in his control, or the control his friend ... screwed.'' The Spargo case was also prosecuted by Trial Attorney M. Kendall Day of the public integrity section of the U.S. attorney's office. Blatchly had filed a complaint with the state commission. Spargo was removed from the bench three years ago. Spargo was indicted in Albany last December. Jones said he will file a motion to reverse the verdict, but did not say on what he would base any appeal. Jones told reporters judges should either be appointed or publicly funded rather than rely on donors for campaign funds. "They should take this process and change it." He accused the state commission of targeting his client. Robert Tembeckjian, the commission's administrator, said the state commission's decision and the jury's verdict both ''speak for themselves… there wasn't anything personal. We were just doing our jobs."
Spargo, a onetime seminarian and Army paratrooper, was hearing cases in Albany on March 31, 2006, when word of the commission's ouster was delivered to him in a note from a secretary. "I've just been removed from the bench," he said aloud at the time. "I have to go." The removal was due to the same charges he was convicted of Thursday. Spargo had faced other allegations from the commission that he wrongly participated during the Bush-Gore recount in Florida, but they were dropped. In 1990, Spargo went before the Commission on Government Integrity on allegations he funneled $750,000 into a Poughkeepsie Town Board race to elect candidates who would back a mall the Syracuse-based Pyramid Co. had wanted to build in the 1980s. He denied any wrongdoing and the probe was closed after he resigned as counsel to the state GOP. Spargo had invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 19 times.
8 People Who Were Executed and Later Found Innocent
It’d be nice to think our judicial system is totally infallible, but unfortunately, that’s just not the case. Innocent people are convicted of crimes they didn’t commit more often than anyone would like to admit, and in some cases, people who were later found to be innocent have actually been put to death.
Here are 8 people who were executed and innocent.
1. Cameron Todd Willingham—In 1992, Willingham was convicted of arson murder in Texas. He was believed to have intentionally set a fire that killed his three kids. In 2004, he was put to death. Unfortunately, the Texas Forensic Science Commission later found that the evidence was misinterpreted, and they concluded that none of the evidence used against Willingham was valid. As it turns out, the fire really was accidental.
2. Ruben Cantu—Cantu was 17 at the time the crime he was alleged of committing took place. Cantu was convicted of capital murder, and in 1993, the Texas teen was executed. About 12 years after his death, investigations show that Cantu likely didn’t commit the murder. The lone eyewitness recanted his testimony, and Cantu’s co-defendant later admitted he allowed his friend to be falsely accused. He says Cantu wasn’t even there the night of the murder.
3. Larry Griffin—Griffin was put to death in 1995 for the 1981 murder of Quintin Moss, a Missouri drug dealer. Griffin always maintained his innocence, and now, evidence seems to indicate he was telling the truth. The first police officer on the scene now says the eyewitness account was false, even though the officer supported the claims during the trial. Another eyewitness who was wounded during the attack was never contacted during the trial, and he says Griffin wasn’t present at the crime scene that night.
4. Carlos DeLuna—In 1989, DeLuna was executed for the stabbing of a Texas convenience store clerk. Almost 20 years later, Chicago Tribune uncovered evidence that shows DeLuna was likely innocent. The evidence showed that Carlos Hernandez, a man who even confessed to the murder many times, actually did the crime.
5. David Wayne Spence—Spence was put to death in 1997 for the murder of three teenagers in Texas. He was supposedly hired by a convenience store clerk to kill someone else, but he allegedly killed the wrong people by mistake.
The supervising police lieutenant said “I do not think David Spence committed this crime.” The lead homicide detective agreed, saying “My opinion is that David Spence was innocent. Nothing from the investigation ever led us to any evidence that he was involved.”
6. Jesse Tafero—In 1976, Tafero was convicted of murdering a state trooper. He and Sonia Jacobs were both sentenced to death for the crime. The main evidence used to convict them was testimony by someone else who was involved in the crime, ex-convict Walter Rhodes. Rhodes gave this testimony in exchange for a life sentence. In 1990, Tafero was put to death. Two years later, his companion Jacobs was released due to a lack of evidence…the same evidence used to put Tafero to death.
7 & 8. Thomas Griffin and Meeks Griffin— The oldest case on this list dates back to 1915. The Griffin brothers, two black men, were convicted of the murder of a white man. The reason they were convicted is because Monk Stevenson, another black man suspected of committing the murder, pointed to the brothers as having been responsible. He later admitted the reason he blamed them is because they were wealthy, and he assumed they had the money to beat the charges. The Griffin brothers were completely innocent, but they were put to death nonetheless.
Top Indonesia judge gets 8 years in prison for corruption
Indonesia's corruption court on
Monday sentenced one of the country's top judges to eight years in prison for
taking bribes, the second time a Constitutional Court judge has been imprisoned
for bribery since 2014.
A five-member panel of judges ruled
that Patrialis Akbar was guilty of receiving thousands of dollars from a meat
importer to influence the outcome of a judicial review of the law on animal
husbandry.
Akbar was caught in an anti-graft
sting in January, Indonesia's anti-corruption police say.
Akbar, a law and human rights
minister under former President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, denied any
wrongdoing. After the sentencing, he said it was up to God to decide what was
right and wrong.
The meat importer, Basuki Hariman, was earlier sentenced to seven years in prison and his secretary, Ng Fay, received five years.
The judges said Akbar received
$10,000 in expenses to perform minor hajj and about $300 for golf expenses. The
panel also fined Akbar $22,500 or a further three months in prison.
In 2014, Akil Mohtar, the former
chairman of the nine-member panel of judges of the Constitutional Court, was
sentenced to life in prison for accepting bribes. Mohtar also was caught by the
Corruption Eradication Commission.
China
jails former top judge for corruption
A former Chinese supreme court judge was jailed for life after being convicted of embezzlement and receiving nearly £500,000 in bribes.
Huang Songyou, the court's former vice-president, is the first judicial official of his stature to be tried and convicted on such charges, part of a continuing Communist party campaign against deep-seated and high-level corruption.
Formally known as the supreme people's court, the body is the highest judicial panel in China with wide-ranging powers including overseeing lower courts and reviewing death sentences. The court has 13 members, with its grand justice also sitting on the party's decision-making central committee.
Huang's entire property also was confiscated under the ruling, according to the official China News Service.
Huang, 52, was accused of taking 3.9m yuan (£349,000) in bribes from a law firm in return for favourable rulings on cases between 2005 and 2008.
He was also charged with embezzling 1.2m yuan in government funds while serving as president of a city-level court in southern Guangdong province in 1997.
Huang was fired and kicked out of the party in August and was tried last Thursday at the Langfang municipal intermediate court in Hebei province, outside the capital, Beijing.
The official Xinhua news agency said Huang had confessed to the charges during the investigation. Most of the bribes and embezzled funds had been recovered.
"As a chief justice, Huang knowingly violated the law by trading power for money and taking a hefty sum of bribes, which has produced a bad impact on the society, and should be punished severely," Xinhua said. The agency said it did not know whether Huang would appeal.
China hopes such high-profile prosecutions of leading party members will scare the rank and file straight.
Shanghai's former powerful party chief, Chen Liangyu, became the most senior official to fall foul of the law when he was jailed for 18 years in 2008 for his role in a pension fund scandal. In 2007, the director of China's food and drug agency was executed for approving deadly fake medicine in exchange for cash.
https://sites.google.com/site/sosevoiceforjustice/notice-to-chief-justice
Crimes by Khaki
https://sites.google.com/site/sosevoiceforjustice/crimes-by-khaki
FIRST Answer Judges Police
https://www.scribd.com/document/336585411/FIRST-Answer-Judges-Police
The Tyranny Of The Judiciary: Who Judges The Judges?
by Daniel Korang
'... to consider the judges as the
ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous
doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an
oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They
have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the
privilege of their corps... their judicial power the more dangerous as they
are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries
are, to the elective control.' Thomas Jefferson
Introduction
The question who judges the judges? evokes
serious philosophical concerns as does the question who determines the
justness of God's dealings with mankind. Judges are only legally trained,
and not divinely ordained as infallible humans.
They do not draw inspiration from some
unseen super spirit in forming judicial decisions; their decisions
represent their personal understanding of law and situations. Judges all
belong to political parties. Yes, they have passions for party, for power
and compliments from their fellow men. Indeed all the judges we have and
know of exercise their franchise in general elections. They have political,
moral, cultural and religious preferences.
They have personal whims, caprices,
proclivities, idiosyncrasies, quirks, eccentricity and suchlike tendencies.
Their fallibilities, frailties, imperfections and weaknesses oftentimes
animate their verdicts.
Whether or not inherited from Adam, the
sin of judicial self-indulgence or self-celebration is a perpetual
temptation. Judicial self-restraint is a perpetual challenge. And
perfection is an unattainable goal. The primary constraint on the tendency
toward that evil of those who sit in judgment on others is the moral constraint
imposed by the professional community to which they belong. Whatever its
source, the proclivity for bias and general evil is real and a universal
problem for judges and those who judge judges.
The primary function of the judiciary is
to manifest the virtue of disinterest to those required to accept a
judicial decision. The disinterest of the judiciary has been made
increasingly difficult in our time by the movement away from legal
formalism to the legal realism that commissions judges to pay heed to the
social consequences of their judgments.
But the more heed judges are expected to
pay to the social consequences of their decisions, the harder it is for
them to lay aside their personal preferences or the interests of their
friends and allies. This explains why the verdict of the courts in Ghana
can, in some cases, be suitably and comfortably classified as a political
memoir.
At best, Judges can only be presumed to be
men who are squarely fit to administer justice and settle the differences
and cases that roil our lives. This is a mere presumption. No human judge
is perfect or infallible. Being manned by men who are essentially amenable
to the common and ordinary frailties of humans, the judiciary cannot be
seen as or claim to be beyond human checks and controls. The humans who
fill the seemingly uncontrolled judiciary are the same as those who fill
other state institutions which are carefully controlled, limited and
checked against possible excesses and abuses.
The Judiciary: The God That Be?
The judiciary seems to be an organ of government that is exalted above every other organ of government. The authors of the constitution have made the judges independent, in the fullest sense of the word. There is no power above them, to control any of their decisions. There is no authority that can remove them; they alone determine when they must be removed for whatever reason(s) and they cannot be controlled by the laws of the legislature.
The judiciary seems to be an organ of government that is exalted above every other organ of government. The authors of the constitution have made the judges independent, in the fullest sense of the word. There is no power above them, to control any of their decisions. There is no authority that can remove them; they alone determine when they must be removed for whatever reason(s) and they cannot be controlled by the laws of the legislature.
Indeed the law is said to lie in their
bosom. The world owes it to Justice Oliver W. Holmes that: 'The prophecies
of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what
I mean by the law.'This observation has received a well-nigh unanimous
acceptation by legal scholars, and if it is correct, then the judiciary ought
to be reasonably checked in order to ensure that the reason for its
existence may not be prejudiced and jeopardized. Montesquieu put it most
strongly: 'Of the three powers above-mentioned, the judiciary is in some
measure next to nothing.'
In short, the judiciary, in the exercise
of its judicial functions, is independent of the people, of the
legislature, the executive and of every power under heaven. Men placed in
this situation will generally soon feel themselves independent of heaven
itself.
The overzealousness of the draftsmen of
the 1992 Constitution to give absolute independence and lack of
accountability to the judiciary under our current constitutional
arrangement is perhaps a brainchild of careful reflection of the
trajectories of our history as a people. In time past, under some military
juntas, judges held their places at the will and pleasure of the juntas, on
whom the judges depended not only for their offices, but also for their
salaries; they were subject to every undue influence.
If the junta wished to carry a favorite
point, the accomplishment of which needed the aid of the courts of law, the
pleasure of the junta would be signified to the judges. And it required the
spirit of a martyr for the judges to determine a case contrary to the junta's
will. They were absolutely dependent upon him both for their offices and
livings. Do you remember the three judges who were murdered in cold blood
for upholding the law? This is our history.
In our collective zeal to tidy up our
minds, consign every memory of our gloomy past to the trash can and make it
practically impossible for the resurgence of military rule with its
attendant molestation of judges, we, under the 1992 Constitution have
exalted the judiciary above every other organ of government with
practically no or little accountability.
The language of article 127 of the
constitution makes the judiciary absolutely independent of any person(s),
state institutions or authority in terms of both judicial and
administrative functions, finances etc. The only limitation - a seemingly
vague one, of course - is that the judiciary is subject to the constitution
itself. This is no limitation, properly so-called, as the constitution
itself has no meaning independent of the viewpoints of judges. Beyond this formless
and amorphous limitation, one reads the entire constitution in vain in
one's voyage to discover practical constitutional controls and limits of
the power of the judiciary.
The absolute lack of check(s) or controls
of the judiciary under our present constitutional arrangement has the
tendency of plunging the judiciary into the arena of judicial absolutism,
tyranny and activism, a situation which is much abhorred even in the worst
monarchical governments.
Limitless Tenure of Judges
One aspect of the judiciary is that judges have no fixed term of office. They hold office till they retire or die or are removed from office. This situation gives a lot of people goose pimples. An eloquent statement of the problem published in 1848 is that of Frederick Grimké, a Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court: 'If it is not wise to confer a permanent tenure of office upon the executive and legislative,' he concluded, 'it should not be conferred upon the judiciary; and the more so, because the legislative functions which the last perform is a fact entirely hidden from the great majority of the community.'
One aspect of the judiciary is that judges have no fixed term of office. They hold office till they retire or die or are removed from office. This situation gives a lot of people goose pimples. An eloquent statement of the problem published in 1848 is that of Frederick Grimké, a Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court: 'If it is not wise to confer a permanent tenure of office upon the executive and legislative,' he concluded, 'it should not be conferred upon the judiciary; and the more so, because the legislative functions which the last perform is a fact entirely hidden from the great majority of the community.'
In 1823, the ageing Thomas Jefferson
stated in his Letter to A. Coray, October 31, 1823 that:
'At the establishment of our
constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless
and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in
what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of
the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and
irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern
individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large;
that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by
little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its
change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible
and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In
truth, man is not made to be trusted for life if secured against all
liability to account.'
On March 9, 1821, Thomas Jefferson also
stated in a Letter to Judge Spencer Roane that: 'The great object of my
fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with
noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding
what it gains, is ingulfing insidiously the special governments into the
jaws of that which feeds them.'
The life tenure of judges has been
criticised by many scolars and ordinary Ghanaians. But I have always asked
myself, is there any better arrangement? Must judges have a fixed term of
office? If yes, how long?
The Courts as Political Agencies
Although we profess to be a democracy, our judges have, at times, expressed themselves in a manner that smacks of an abiding faithfulness to one political party or the other. In purely political cases, one easily sees that the difference between the majority view and the minority view is primarily actuated by the political affiliation of individual judges sitting on the case. It is interesting to note that every one judge in Ghana, like any ordinary Ghanaian, exercises a his or her franchise.
Although we profess to be a democracy, our judges have, at times, expressed themselves in a manner that smacks of an abiding faithfulness to one political party or the other. In purely political cases, one easily sees that the difference between the majority view and the minority view is primarily actuated by the political affiliation of individual judges sitting on the case. It is interesting to note that every one judge in Ghana, like any ordinary Ghanaian, exercises a his or her franchise.
Every judge votes, signifying that judges
are not politically neutral persons as we presume them to be. We can, at
best, hope that judges will value the public confidence reposed in them to
do justice and uphold fidelity of law. It is sad and regrettable that
judges make their political stance so plainly conspicuous that their choice
of words in their judgment merely betrays them as the exalted alter egos of
the government that appointed them.
Our system of government makes appointment
of judges the prerogative of the president. This brings about a situation
where party apparatchiks with legal background are appointed by the
president as judges to fill the courts. When judges are appointed by the
President, they, as people argue, feel obliged to use their office to
champion the policies, political whims and caprices of the appointing
president. Certain decisions in our law reports portray the ugly situation
where a particular government used the court as a fiat to carry out
political vengeance on some members of the opposition.
In fact, the court has become a tool for
effecting witch-hunting and punishing dissenting members of the polity.
What accounts for this major problem in our national life? Is the problem
the mode of appointment of judges? Is the problem merely one of personal
failings of the judges? Are there better systems of government that fosters
independence of the judiciary while making the courts as responsible and
accountable as any other state organ? What do you suggest we do?
Objections to the court: How Made?
The judiciary of Ghana seems an institution of overwhelming monstrosity and mystery. Upon hearing of the court, the citizens are immediately put in a state of utter fright. When the courts sit, they appear very unfriendly and distant. The courts are free to pass any verdict at all without any fear of control or objection from anyone. Lawyers more frequently raise objections to their fellow lawyers to signify their dissensions. However, it is contemptuous for a lawyer to raise abjection to a proposition made by a judge, not even when such objection is prefaced by the soothing phrase, 'with all due respect'. All that the law and practice permit a lawyer to do is to bow to the judge and say, 'I am grateful, my Lord', 'As the Court pleases', 'Most grateful' and suchlike phrases.
The judiciary of Ghana seems an institution of overwhelming monstrosity and mystery. Upon hearing of the court, the citizens are immediately put in a state of utter fright. When the courts sit, they appear very unfriendly and distant. The courts are free to pass any verdict at all without any fear of control or objection from anyone. Lawyers more frequently raise objections to their fellow lawyers to signify their dissensions. However, it is contemptuous for a lawyer to raise abjection to a proposition made by a judge, not even when such objection is prefaced by the soothing phrase, 'with all due respect'. All that the law and practice permit a lawyer to do is to bow to the judge and say, 'I am grateful, my Lord', 'As the Court pleases', 'Most grateful' and suchlike phrases.
Who can question the court for what it
does - parliament, the executive, the citizenry or who? Is the Supreme
Court of Ghana too supreme for a good? If it is, what ought we to do?
The courts have the power to validate the
invalid and invalidate the valid. What can't the Supreme Court of Ghana do
under the sun? Perhaps, what the Supreme Court cannot do is to order that a
man be changed into a woman. The Supreme Court has the power not only to
enforce the law, but to legislate at will. In fact, the life of the
ordinary Ghanaian depends on the intelligence of the judiciary. The
judiciary encourages and discourages actions of the masses.
What is happening in Ghana today confirms
the fears and foreboding of Thomas Jefferson expressed in his Letter to
John Wayles Eppes, in 1807 when he said: 'The original error was in
establishing a judiciary independent of the nation, and which, from the
citadel of the law, can turn its guns on those they were meant to defend,
and control and fashion their proceedings to its own will.'
When a judgment of a court is
unsatisfactory or considered bad, the law enjoins the dissatisfied party to
appeal against the said verdict and perhaps go for a review. What happens
when the final decision of the highest court is deemed palpably wrong and
ill-motivated? What happens when the verdict of the court is deemed as
politically motivated? Where else do we go? Who has the power or even right
to hold the Supreme Court accountable? Is the Supreme Court always right?
We have instances where the Supreme Court
has held that the Court of Appeal was wrong in its decisions. But is the
Supreme Court itself always correct in its opinions.
In Korblah II Alias Tetteh And Another v.
Odartei III [1980] GLR 932-945 the Court of Appeal in allowing an appeal
from a High Court stated that 'the learned judge clearly erred'. Republic
v. Kumasi Traditional Council; Ex Parte Nana Kofi Dei [1973] 2 GLR 73 -
90the Court of Appeal held that, 'Consequently, the High Court had erred in
holding otherwise'.
I hope it may not surprise anyone to hear
that the Supreme Court also, even by majority, errs in its decisions. In
the famous case of Tsatsu Tsikata v. Attorney-General [26/06/2002] CIVIL
MOTION NO. 11/2002 the Supreme Court, in overturning an earlier majority
decision in a review application held thus: 'The majority judgment omitted
to consider and examine relevant constitutional provisions to which I have
made reference and consequently erred in law in the conclusions it
reached.' It was also observed that, 'The majority erred when they came to
a contrary conclusion'.
If the majority of the Supreme Court
judges can err in their decisions, then how safe are we if the Supreme
Court is subject to no control by any other organ of government or group of
trained persons?
The decision of a court, no matter how
manifestly erroneous, is final and binding unless it has been reviewed or
appealed against. In Bisi v. Kwakye [1987-88] 2 GLR 295, Taylor, J.S.C.
said: 'In our system of adjudication the majority view of a plural bench of
a court represents the binding judgment of the Court, even if it can
subsequently be demonstrated to be vulnerable to attacks'.
In many cases before the courts, mere
homespun wisdom is sufficient to reveal the errors, vacuities and mistakes
in the judgment of even the highest court of the land. Many Ghanaians may
well be dissatisfied with the verdict of the just ended election petition.
But beyond review, who can legitimately question the verdict? This is the
system we have adopted for ourselves. We must accept it or call for
necessary reforms.
Who Judges the Judges: How to Remove a
Judge
In Ghana, a judge can only be removed from office for stated misbehaviour or incompetence or on ground of inability to perform the functions of his office arising from infirmity of body or mind. The question is who determines what constitutes incompetence or inability? The same judiciary does that. The process of removing a judge is also purely judicial in nature, undertaken by judges. We are back to square one - judges are judged by judges! No other organ of government has any overriding power to effect the removal of a judge.
In Ghana, a judge can only be removed from office for stated misbehaviour or incompetence or on ground of inability to perform the functions of his office arising from infirmity of body or mind. The question is who determines what constitutes incompetence or inability? The same judiciary does that. The process of removing a judge is also purely judicial in nature, undertaken by judges. We are back to square one - judges are judged by judges! No other organ of government has any overriding power to effect the removal of a judge.
To this end, it is necessary to say that
the independence of the judiciary is a keystone of true democracy. However,
the judiciary is not beyond human flaws. The courts err. It behoves us all
as a people to change the status quo if we desire so or be temperate,
gentle and humane in our comments and criticisms of judicial decisions.
edited , printed , published & owned by NAGARAJA.M.R. @ : LIG-2 / 761 , HUDCO FIRST STAGE , OPP WATER WORKS OFFICE , LAKSHMIKANTANAGAR ,HEBBAL ,MYSORE -570017 INDIA
cell : 91
8970318202
home
page:
https://sites.google.com/site/dalitsdiary/ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/dalits--diary
https://dalitsdiary.blogspot.in/
https://eclarionofdalit.wordpress.com/
Contact :
Naag@protonmail.com , Naag@dalitonline.in ,
Secure Mail : Naag@torbox3uiot6wchz.onion ,
posted by DALIT online @ 8:50 PM
<< Home