You've been denied access to your own records in a currently pending court proceedings that can take your livelihood, by a court that is not supposed to have those records, but admits it has them - why ask again?

I have written on this blog that the Appellate Division Third Judicial Department transferred my disciplinary proceedings to the Appellate Division Fourth Judicial Department, by a "confidential" order of June 11, 2014 that relied upon "Petitioner's application and papers submitted in support thereto".

So, there allegedly was an application (a written motion) and papers in support of that application.

That motion and those papers were never served upon me, so that was a clear ex parte communication, which is misconduct on behalf of both the attorneys (disciplinary attorneys!) who made such an application and the court (the disciplinary court!) that accepted and ruled on it. 

So, I guess it is all right to break the law while trying to enforcing the law against somebody else, isn't it?

The order of transfer of June 11, 2014 ordered the transfer of ALL the records of my disciplinary proceedings.

It says that the order was granted upon the "Application by the Committee on Professional Standards" and "upon the papers filed in support of the application".

Obviously, the application for the transfer, as well as the papers supporting the application, are part of the record of my currently pending disciplinary proceedings and had to be transferred with it to the 4th Department, not to mention that such an "application", before being reviewed, has to be first served upon me as a party to the proceedings, which was never done.

I asked the clerk of the 4th Department for a copy of that "application", papers in its support and proof of service of the same upon me.  Since the order of June 11, 2014 somehow added my husband to the caption, my husband also asked for the same.

The 4th Department answered that it did not receive the application among papers of my disciplinary proceedings.

I moved to dismiss proceedings in the 4th Department for lack of jurisdiction since the 4th Department could not proceed on an incomplete record.

The motion was denied without an explanation.

I moved to vacate, renew and reargue the motion that was denied without an explanation, and asked for a reasoned decision this time, as a matter of due process of law.

The motion was denied without an explanation, and with an imposition (without a hearing) of an anti-filing injunction and a sealing order on the basis of Judiciary Law 90 which does not support imposition of sealing orders.

One of the judges who decides the case in the 4th Department, Eugene Fahey, was elevated to the Court of Appeals and recently participated in the denial of a constitutional appeal as of right to me in another case, once again without a plausible explanation.

One of the judges who decided the order of transfer in the 3rd Department, Leslie Stein, was also elevated to the Court of Appeals.

So, engaging in judicial misconduct in this state against a "difficult" attorney who criticizes judicial misconduct is grounds for a promotion.

But, the interesting part is that I keep asking for access to the "application", and now I've got two answers - 

1) from the Third Department court that acknowledged that all records of the current disciplinary proceedings was to be transferred to the 4th Department, but denied to me access to the "application", as if it was still had it, despite the order of transfer:

and

2) from the office of the NYS Court Administration, which attached to its answer the previous answer by the 3rd Department.

 

 

The answer of the NYS Court Administration is blunt:

you were already denied access to it - why ask again?

The NYS Court Administration also states, somewhat vaguely, that "the clerk where the matter is handled typically is the custodian of the court records".

First of all, the clerk of the court "where the matter is handled" is not "typically" the custodian of the court records, but, as a matter of law is the ONLY custodian of the court records.

If it is only "typically", then who ELSE may be the custodian of that court's records?

Yet, neither the 4th Department, nor the 3rd Department, nor the NYS Court Administration gave me answers to the following questions:

(1) Why the "application" was not transferred from the 3rd Department to the 4th Department despite the order of transfer of June 11, 2014;

(2) What is the legal grounds for the 3rd Department, which is no longer the court of record (by its own order of transfer), holds on to a portion of my record that the 4th Department must be using in its decision of a motion for a SUMMARY JUDGMENT in the currently pending proceedings, which requires reliance upon the FULL RECORD.

Apparently, the 3rd Department, no longer the court of record, is blatantly interfering in the course of my disciplinary proceedings and the NYS Court Administration is condoning this behavior.

By the way, I asked the 3rd Department to recuse from multiple other appeals because of this misconduct, and the 3rd Department refused, again, without an explanation.

I guess I will have to ask some other authorities to help the NYS Court Administration and the Appellate Division Third Judicial Department to better understand their own duties.