Ok, when I started to criticize and investigate judicial misconduct in my state - through motions to recuse, FOIL requests, civil rights lawsuits, complaints to the New York Commission for Judicial Conduct (a glorified shredder, I know, but just to make the record), and, finally, when I saw that nothing else helps, through this blog - I was put into the disciplinary proceedings which remain pending up to now, and I was charged with criminal contempt (by the main witness to that alleged crime), simply for blogging about my disciplinary case and incompetence and misconduct of judges and attorneys involved in the case.
I was fined to death when any of my actions, no matter how legitimate, were considered "frivolous" in the "discretion" of the judges whom I sued and investigated and whose misconduct I documented.
I was risking my liberty when the object of my criticism attempted to put me in jail for exercising my 1st Amendment right.
I was, and am trying to continue, to protect people's (and my own) constitutional rights against the ruthless system perversely called "the justice system" where the main actors know and enforce the unspoken rule that there is no such thing as justice, only connections.
Even though what I was doing was rare among attorneys, I as a species, an attorney criticizing judicial misconduct, am not unique.
Courageous attorneys expose judicial misconduct in other states, too, usually with sad consequences.
Yet, they do that anyway, knowing what dire consequences awaits them.
In Illinois, two attorneys were suspended, and their suspension continues at this time, for trying to protect an elderly (relatively wealthy) person who wanted to live and die at home, in the loving care of her daughter and to pass away after receiving her rites from the Roman Catholic priest that the person knew for a long time and trusted.
Those simple pleasures were denied Mary Sykes by the court system, she was placed in the "care" of a guardian who put her in a nursing home (then into a hospice), denied her daughter access to her elderly mother, and finally, now the report is that Mary Sykes passed away in a hospice, while her money will go to attorneys in her surrogate's case.
One of the attorneys was suspended for allegedly "lying" about Mary Sykes case.
One thing I won't believe that she was "lying" about is that Mary Sykes preferred to stay at home to going to a nursing home. Nobody wants to go to a nursing home. Nobody wants to cede freedom of communicating with whoever she wants and making her own decisions.
I bow to the attorneys who put their reputation and livelihoods on the line, and lost their law licenses, trying to save a life of an elderly person from abuse of the court system. They did not save her, but they did make her plight public - at a great sacrifice to themselves., and as far as I know, the social media is picking up on elder abuse and surrogate court corruption.
The fight of these two honest attorneys Joanne Denison and Ken Ditkowsky, at a great personal sacrifice, may be saving lives as we speak and in the future, and not only in the State of Illinois.
Thank you!
THE EVOLUTION OF JUDICIAL TYRANNY IN THE UNITED STATES:
"If the judges interpret the laws themselves, and suffer none else to interpret, they may easily make, of the laws, [a shredded] shipman's hose!" - King James I of England, around 1616.
“No class of the community ought to be allowed freer scope in the expression or publication of opinions as to the capacity, impartiality or integrity of judges than members of the bar. They have the best opportunities of observing and forming a correct judgment. They are in constant attendance on the courts. Hundreds of those who are called on to vote never enter a court-house, or if they do, it is only at intervals as jurors, witnesses or parties. To say that an attorney can only act or speak on this subject under liability to be called to account and to be deprived of his profession and livelihood by the very judge or judges whom he may consider it his duty to attack and expose, is a position too monstrous to be entertained for a moment under our present system,” Justice Sharwood in Ex Parte Steinman and Hensel, 95 Pa 220, 238-39 (1880).
“This case illustrates to me the serious consequences to the Bar itself of not affording the full protections of the First Amendment to its applicants for admission. For this record shows that [the rejected attorney candidate] has many of the qualities that are needed in the American Bar. It shows not only that [the rejected attorney candidate] has followed a high moral, ethical and patriotic course in all of the activities of his life, but also that he combines these more common virtues with the uncommon virtue of courage to stand by his principles at any cost.
It is such men as these who have most greatly honored the profession of the law. The legal profession will lose much of its nobility and its glory if it is not constantly replenished with lawyers like these. To force the Bar to become a group of thoroughly orthodox, time-serving, government-fearing individuals is to humiliate and degrade it.” In Re Anastaplo, 18 Ill. 2d 182, 163 N.E.2d 429 (1959), cert. granted, 362 U.S. 968 (1960), affirmed over strong dissent, 366 U.S. 82 (1961), Justice Black, Chief Justice Douglas and Justice Brennan, dissenting.
" I do not believe that the practice of law is a "privilege" which empowers Government to deny lawyers their constitutional rights. The mere fact that a lawyer has important responsibilities in society does not require or even permit the State to deprive him of those protections of freedom set out in the Bill of Rights for the precise purpose of insuring the independence of the individual against the Government and those acting for the Government”. Lathrop v Donohue, 367 US 820 (1961), Justice Black, dissenting.
"The legal profession must take great care not to emulate the many occupational groups that have managed to convert licensure from a sharp weapon of public defense into blunt instrument of self-enrichment". Walter Gellhorn, "The Abuse of Occupational Licensing", University of Chicago Law Review, Volume 44 Issue 1, September of 1976.
“Because the law requires that judges no matter how corrupt, who do not act in the clear absence of jurisdiction while performing a judicial act, are immune from suit, former Judge Ciavarella will escape liability for the vast majority of his conduct in this action. This is, to be sure, against the popular will, but it is the very oath which he is alleged to have so indecently, cavalierly, baselessly and willfully violated for personal gain that requires this Court to find him immune from suit”, District Judge A. Richard Caputo in H.T., et al, v. Ciavarella, Jr, et al, Case No. 3:09-cv-00286-ARC in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, Document 336, page 18, November 20, 2009. This is about judges who were sentencing kids to juvenile detention for kickbacks.
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