There comes a point in every citizen's life when they realize they have wandered into a government process so convoluted that it deserves its own agricultural classification.
Some people encounter red tape.
I encountered an onion.
A very large onion.
An onion with legal counsel called Sir Frank W. Miller, Esq. of Hancock Estabrook, LLP, a law firm belongs to a very important person: Timothy Murphy, brother of Chief Administrative Judge of Upstate New York James P. Murphy.
The story began innocently enough. My husband and I needed court and deed records. Not because we collect court records and deed records for fun, but because (1) we wanted to see whether we could clear address certain unfairly imposed sanctions and restore our law licenses based on new evidence and new laws; and because (2) we wanted to prepare a non-frivolous tax certiorari petition on inequality grounds for our property in the Town of Hamden this year - which already did not happen because of the paywall.
Issue No. 1 was important also because Sir Miller was trying very hard to convince courts that we deserved sanctions and anti-filing injunctions specifically because of sanctions that we sought to vacate - and that Lady Gransbury helpfully (to Sir Miller) paywalled away from us.
Lady Gransbury's publicly confirmed that she digitized and destroyed originals of the court records from 2007 to 2024 - compare:
But - instead of putting those records on NYSCEF into public access - as other court records already are - she is SELLING them, for
(1) a $5.00 pay-per-view fee;
(2) per-document fee; and,
(3) annual fees are also "available" - $300.00 for in-state viewers and double, $600 - for out-of-state viewers.
Gransbury says: to fight online deed fraud.
So - we sued her in Neroni v Gransbury, EF2026-106 (when you click on the name, the text of the lawsuit will open from the official court archive, NYSCEF) for presuming that we, out of state users, are more prone to deed fraud than in-state viewers, by putting a double fees on us.
What did she do - moved for sanctions claiming she never made such a presumption. Maybe sometimes she needs to think what she is doing and what conclusions may be reasonably drawn from what she is doing.
Of course, Gransbury - and her attorney Frank W. Miller, Esq., and Delaware County Attorney Amy Merklen - tried to fraudulently (I stress that word, fraudulently) claim that no such paywalls exist.
That false claim is - what is the polite French word? - ah: BULL.
Because the pay-per-view wall both on the deeds and on the digitized court records in Delaware County (NY) online VENDOR's portal - not official court portal - is observable evidence clearly shows when anybody visits Delaware County public records website:
Now - why did I need to see A LOT of deed records so that the pay-per-view paywall would start meaning a lot to me, to the point of filing a lawsuit against "Lady" Gransbury?
Let's continue this as a fairy tale.
As of January 1, 2026, The Custodians of the Records (Lady Haley L. Gransbury of 3 Court Street, Delhi NY Supreme and County Court Castle), explained that access would now cost us - and any other litigant in Delaware County, NY who would want to prepare and honest-to-God non-frivolous tax certiorari petition on inequality grounds - approximately the GDP of a not-so-small island nation.
Because The Honorable Knights of Tax Assessment Units of each of the Delaware County townships use 5-year-comparative sale method in assessment of property taxes.
Which means - in order to verify whether a taxpayer/property owner has a non-frivolous ground to bring a tax certiorari petition, allowed by the NYS Legislature to be brought every single year (Article 7 of Real Property Actions and Proceedings Law), the taxpayer/property owner must first pay Lady Gransbury $5.00 to simply view each one of the thousands of deeds of properties sold in the municipality over the 5-year period
Which, of course, throws legislative intent for an easy, quick and economical tax certiorari proceeding contemplated by the NYS Legislature out the door, and makes tax certiorari proceedings UNAFFORDABLE in Delaware County, NY, one of the poorest counties in New York State.
Lady Gransbury explained her decision for paywalls, for both digitized court records, and the deeds, in the following way:
Meaning - she admitted, under the penalty of perjury, that she INTENTIONALLY restricted my access to those records, "for fear of online deed fraud". Figure.
So, her fear of "deed fraud" - unsubstantiated as to me - she never provided any proof substantiating it, trumps the Legislative intent behind making tax certiorari proceedings easy, efficient and cheap - for everybody, INCLUDING me.
What happened next is hilarious.
After over a year of attorney Miller chasing me and my husband with applications for sanctions and anti-filing injunctions, I finally finally filed with the court my grievance against attorney Miller about his doxxing the child to spite former DSS Commissioner Scuderi-Hunter, I wrote about it in a prior blog on April 6, 2026.
What did Miller do?
Miller is very predictable.
He had a knee-jerk reaction and immediately put his foot further into his own mouth.
Here is what he did: he asked the court in one of our cases to punish my husband and I for my grievance against him to attorney grievance committee about child-doxxing, where he admitted under the penalty of perjury that he had to remove unredacted records of the child from NYSCEF and replace them with redacted records.
When my husband brought a motion for sanctions against Miller for attempting to punish my husband for my substantiated grievance, Miller (1) defaulted by not opposing the motion - at all; (2) then ran his mouth at the oral argument that Fred still needs to be sanctioned - because, according to Miller, if we sue together, we are fair game to be sanctioned together, both, for acitons of one another - even if those actions were out of court, unrelated to the particular litigation and a protected activity, like my attorney grievance was.
Of course, Miller claimed that that attorney grievance was "unsubstantiated" - without providing any evidence of that.
So - I filed another grievance, for Miller's repeated retaliation for that grievance, attaching all the necessary documents.
Here is the grievance of today:
And another one.
Supported by the text of a sworn affirmation to withdraw from a federal lawsuit because CPS represented by Miller were blackmailing my clients, the lawsuit itself, and the docket report showing Miller as representing Delaware County defendants in the case.
That is about "ad hominem attacks" that the supposedly noble Sir Miller is constantly complaining about.
And even now - his entire hysterical (or drunk? or both) campaign for sanctions since February of 2026 (and the longer one, since May of 2025) did not even need to happen.
All I needed was access to records to which I had an entitlement of access.
I asked politely for that access before filing the lawsuit, too, so Delaware County taxpayers would not have to foot the bill for my lawsuit.
But Miller - as a very helpful ... smart person - put his foot into his mouth even further. He was so irate about me publishing the grievance against him into open access into the court docket that he forgot himself - once again - and volunteered this, under the penalty of perjury, mind:
Which immediately begged multiple questions:
(1) why didn't Miller disclose his WITNESS status in Neroni v Gransbury? - where I clearly alleged that the County may have monitored my actions in the online deed registry and the pay per view paywall was introduced BECAUSE OF ME;
(2) what records he reviewed showing that the County was surveilling my IP address activity - FOR YEARS?
(3) Where are those logs?
So - I filed a Freedom of Information/1st Amendment request with the newest self-appointed Delaware County Records access officer - who is also, by coincidence, the County Attorney, who is also, by coincidence, one of the defendants on whose behalf Miller asked the court for sanctions against my husband for my grievance against Miller to AGC.
Here:
So - let's go back to our fairy tale and go on with our peeling of the onion layers.
We stopped at the layer called:
We noticed that you are looking at the records.
Wait, what?
Apparently someone had become interested in my internet activity.
Nothing says "public access policy" quite like keeping an eye on the people trying to access the public records.
Then came another layer:
Because we noticed your activity, we have decided to impose restrictions.
Now we were entering performance-art territory.
I was denied access to records because I wanted access to records.
Kafka himself would have demanded royalties.
But the true masterpiece was hidden in the center of the onion.
While arguing that I should not have access to the records...
While charging enormous fees for the records...
While monitoring my efforts to obtain the records...
While defending restrictions on the records...
The very same people marched into court and demanded sanctions against me.
And what evidence did they rely upon?
The records.
The same records.
The records I supposedly should not have.
The records I was allegedly abusing.
The records they were trying to prevent me from seeing.
The records they insisted were unnecessary.
Those records.
At this point I began to suspect I was not participating in a legal proceeding but rather starring in an escape room designed by bureaucrats.
Imagine a bank announcing:
"You are not authorized to view your account balance."
Then suing you for incorrectly calculating your account balance.
Then introducing your account balance as evidence.
That is roughly where we were.
The deeper I looked, the stranger it became.
The system appeared to operate according to a revolutionary new principle of public administration:
If a citizen does not know what the government is doing, the citizen is uninformed.
If a citizen finds out what the government is doing, the citizen is suspicious.
If a citizen complains about what the government is doing, the citizen is troublesome.
If a citizen files a lawsuit, the citizen is sanctionable.
A perfect closed-loop ecosystem.
Like a self-cleaning oven, except with constitutional implications.
Eventually I stared at the onion diagram spread across my desk.
Arrows pointed everywhere.
Records pointed to sanctions.
Sanctions pointed to records.
Restrictions pointed to monitoring.
Monitoring pointed to restrictions.
The same people appeared repeatedly, like recurring villains in a low-budget legal thriller.
And there, in the center, sat the onion itself.
The Core Contradiction.
They say I do not deserve access to the records.
Yet they use those same records to punish me for asking.
I have to admit, as contradictions go, it is elegant. Even too elegant.
The sort of contradiction that should be preserved behind glass in a museum.
Schoolchildren could visit.
"Mommy, what is that?"
"That, dear, is a Class-A Bureaucratic Onion."
"What does it do?"
"No one knows. Every time somebody tries to understand it, another layer appears."
And that is how I learned that the problem was never really the records.
The problem was peeling the onion.
Because once you start peeling, everyone becomes very nervous about what might be underneath.
And judging from the frantic effort to stop the peeling, I suspect they are nervous for a reason.
