The Schultz defense in LA - 1,000 criminal cases fixed over 5.5 years for $8,000 a pop, but judges and prosecutors knew nothing about it

Interesting news are coming from California.

A now-former court clerk, and 10 of his alleged accomplices, were indicted in a federal 38-count indictment for fixing court cases.

1,000 of them over the period of 5.5 years (since 2010), for $8,000 a pop.

Here are the names of the defendants:

And, of course, it is being claimed that judges and prosecutors who were supposed to handle and monitor all those cases were not aware of the case-fixing, where the clerk noted the bought-off cases on the court computers as fines paid when they were not, and as charges reduced when they were not.

I do not know who would believe in this bullshit.

First of all, that shows that judges and prosecutors do not do their job monitoring cases post-conviction.

Second, such a massive bribery scheme, going on over the years and involving 1,000 cases in 5.5 years in the court of one county (one courthouse) is not possible either.

That is 181 FELONY cases fixed in any given year - because nobody will pay $8,000 to pay for fixing a misdemeanor charge.

Not only judges and prosecutors had to be involved, but the charging police officers too.  It is a matter of professional pride, not to mention record of employment, for the arresting officer in each case to monitor how the case progresses.

A lobotomy is required to believe that an officer would not be pissed off that his FELONY cases were reduced to nothing en masse.

And, we are talking about the same Orange County Superior court in California which was recently the center of a controversy where:

• prosecutors did not tell defense attorneys that they were improperly using jail snitches to talk to represented criminal defendants;
• the Sheriff's office (whose various officers serve as arresting officers, jail/corrections officers  and court security officers), knowing all that, were mum about it - for years; and
• the criminal defense attorney who outed the "practice", got beaten up by those "court security officers" in the courthouse - and charged for assault on the security officer.

So, we have a whole lot of grounds to trust in the integrity of prosecutors and local police officers for telling the truth whether they were not involved in the case-fixing.

And, we have a lot of grounds to trust integrity of Los Angeles judges, too - after they

• received, for years, unlawful addition of around $50,000 annually from the County that was appearing in front of them,
• disbarred and put in solitary confinement attorney whistleblower about that corrupt scheme Dr. Richard Fine, and
• when the scandal went too far, the California Legislature gave judges retroactive immunity for CRIMINAL liability - an unheard of thing.

Imagine that you commit a crime, and then the state legislators, to rescue you, gave you immunity from criminal liability going backwards.

Such legislative gifts will are never given to "ordinary Joes".

As to the "we didn't know anything" indictment-for-corruption in the Orange Count Supreior Court, I will continue to cover this story, which has only begun to develop.

Stay tuned.