What a XIXth century Russian playwright can tell you about the XXIst century American judiciary

There is a drama by a Russian XIXth century playwright Alexander Ostrovsky, called "The Storm", here is a link to an English translation of that drama I found on the Internet.

It is about life and family traditions, good and bad, of Russian XIXth century merchants.

One of the main heroes of the drama is a rich merchant, a father of the family who rules his household with an iron fist.

Here are some excerpts from the drama about him:

When a young attorney walks, all in awe, into a modern American courtroom, he or especially she, is in for a shock, as to how rude and disrespectful judges are, and that other attorneys consider being yelled at rudely by a judge an "occupational hazard" and a "rite of passage".

Judges themselves write about "cranky judges", glorifying their own crankiness - by which "term of art" judges understand and hide outright rudeness, indignity and humiliation they heap up upon parties and litigants appearing in front of them.

Continued Legal Education courses are taught as to how to suit "pet peeves" of various judges.

Legal bloggers list "local rules" of judges that run like those of "grumpy grandparents" and/or "overbearing schoolmarms".

But the best and brightest of the legal profession - the law professors - did the best of all.  A law professor from Texas wrote a law review article where, in top-lofty, sterilized and sanitized language, they "advise" disciplinary authorities hearing complaints against judges to go easy on - guess who? - angry judges.  And guess why?  Not to make them more angry if discipline less than removal is imposed.

A judge can advise a defendant to do the society a favor and go kill himself.  The discipline? A public reprimand.

A judge can order a female attorney be strapped to a wheelchair, with her papers, her shoes, her glasses, her files, taken away, and order her to proceed to trial - or else her client will lose.

Discipline against the judge?  I found none reported.

Because, remember, if authorities dare to impose fair discipline upon an already angry judge, that will make them uncomfortable, that will expose them to social media (and we wouldn't want that), and - to crown it all - that discipline will be counterproductive by making the judge even more angry and hostile ( that is the "legal theory" behind the law review), and that increased hostility will hurt the public.

So authorities do not dare.  They toss nearly 100% of complaints against judges, and then judges gleefully claim that majority of complaints come from "disgruntled litigants" and are worthless - after populating the disciplinary boards with attorneys whose livelihoods depend on keeping those same judges not angry.

To continue the same logic, we need to cancel all criminal statute and disciplinary rules because such rules will anger defendants, and will be counterproductive.  But no, that kind of leniency is not proposed for everybody, only for judges.

So, in an elaborate law review article, after much research and contemplation in their ivory towers, a law professor, a bright legal mind, repeats nearly word-for-word, the advice given by an illiterate wife of a XIXth century Russian merchant to all members of her household:

"Don't anger him, friends!  Dear boys, don't anger him!"

Please, don't anger the petty tyrants in the courtroom.   Just take those who already displayed their anger off the bench.  In order to prevent "increased hostility" from lesser discipline and protect the public.  In full coordination with legal theory.

Or, in the alternative, make law students read for their legal ethics class - Alexander Ostrovsky, "The Storm".  They will then be fully prepared for the realities of the American courtroom.

Gutting the civil rights litigation - sovereign immunity and its conceptual flaws in a popular sovereignty

Who is the sovereign in the United States, and what form of sovereignty United States has?

The question is not a rhethorical as it may seem.

Well, the Declaration of Independence (We The People) clearly indicates what kind of sovereignty we have: a popular sovereignty, where all the people of the country are a collective sovereign.

Yet, the way sovereignty is understood by the courts is that the sovereign is the government.

For example, if you sue your own state for constitutional violations (or state officials in their official capacity), most likely your lawsuit will be dismissed on the so-called "sovereign immunity" ground, or on 11th Amendment grounds, which for many courts is interchangeable.

The 11th Amendment does not create a bar to sue YOUR OWN state - only other states.

The U.S. Supreme Court recognized that, but still invented an "implied" sovereign immunity from "common law", as a judicially created prohibition to sue your own state.

The fact that the "old country" common law applied to a DIFFERENT SOVEREIGN, with a completely different set-up of interaction between the sovereign and the subjects as opposed to a sovereign in a democratic country, never concerned creators of "sovereign immunity".

Apparently, creating sovereign immunity was a way for federal courts to clear their dockets of civil rights cases and provide benefits for state government litigants with whom judges are often joined at the hip through a variety of relationships coming from education, employment, family and friends, as well as participation in various out-of-court organizations.

Yet, let's see what was the interaction between the sovereign and his or her subjects in the "old country", the source of the common law, and whether that set-up is readily translatable for the American soil.

Here is a diagram that I put together to illustrate the differences between the concept of sovereignty in a monarchy, from where the "sovereign immunity" principle has been derived by American courts, through the so-called "common law", and what we have in the United States, popular sovereignty:

 
The differences between the King as a sovereign and a popular sovereign in a constitutional democracy are very clear.

1. Unlike a monarchy where the King is the sovereign with ultimate and absolute control over his subjects, through his servants (the government) or directly, there are no subjects in the popular sovereignty.  All citizens of the country are part of the popular sovereign.

2.  Subjects to the sovereign are not allowed to control the sovereign.   In a popular sovereignty, there are no subjects.

3.  Servants of the King are not allowed to control the King.  In a popular sovereignty, the popular sovereign allows its servants (3 branches of the government the sovereign appoints or elects) to control the sovereign, by consent, in a limited way, within strict rules.

What follows from this simple structural analysis is that the so-called "sovereign immunity" (King's immunity of King's sovereigns) is not readily translatable into a popular sovereignty, because in "common law" sovereign immunity was applied to lawsuits of the King's SUBJECTS against the King's SERVANTS, which was the equivalent of suing the King who had absolute and unrestricted power, and "could do no wrong".

In a constitutional democracy, any lawsuits brought by citizens against the government are lawsuits brought BY THE SOVEREIGN against ITS OWN SERVANTS for misconduct on the job - and sovereign immunity in the way it existed at English common law is conceptually not applicable to a popular constitutional sovereignty, because if courts want to follow common law, they would then have to recognize that it is the civil rights plaintiffs, as part of the popular sovereign who will then be entitled to "sovereign immunity", and that members of the "popular sovereign" have the power, as the King had in the "old country", to remove public servants whose performance displeases them, at will.

Of course, members of the government, including judges, would not like to accept that, as that will mean loss of lucrative positions, salaries, benefits and pensions for themselves and their family members.

Yet, if sovereign immunity is to be applied in an intellectually honest way, the way it was applied in the "old country", then:

• sovereign immunity does not apply in lawsuits BY the sovereign against its servants, because it applied only as a delegation of immunity FROM the sovereign to his servants when his servants were sued by the subjects (a non-existent class in a popular sovereignty/constitutional democracy).

 For that reason, I have an issue with the "sovereign citizen" SCHOOL OF THOUGHT to be called "paper terrorism" or any other kind of "domestic terrorism".

If they engage in acts of violence - then it should be addressed through criminal law, and then they have a right for a defense that they are not happy with the way their servants rule and revoke their consent to be ruled in such a way - which is the right of any citizen, part of a popular sovereignty.

If they simply engage in peaceful legal process, spreading their ideas, filing papers with public servants of various branches of the government and asserting their right of members of a popular sovereign - that is an activity fully covered by the 1st Amendment, and by their of popular sovereignty.

Instead of quashing such arguments, the government should at the very least engage in an honest debate as to what does it mean that We The People are the sovereign of this country, and not sanction people who raise such issues. 

The government must remember that the lack of honest discussion of pertinent issues and the lack of real legal remedies for violation of basic rights of the people - be it subjects or members of popular sovereigns - is what leads to revolutions, and that is not my saying, but part of the discussion in the U.S. Congress as a basis of the enactment of the Civil Rights Act (now thoroughly gutted by federal courts through court-invented restrictions, and the so-called "sovereign immunity", incorrectly applied, is just one of them.

The U.S. Supreme Court: actual innocence is not a good reason to stay an execution

We saw it with Richard Glossip - whose recent execution was stayed only because the State of Oklahoma suddenly found (minutes or seconds before the execution) that they had a food additive instead of a poison in their lethal poison cocktail.

Which did not prevent the State of Oklahoma to kill another prisoner, before Richard Glossip, with just the same cocktail containing the wrong drug.

And, given that pharmaceutical companies increasingly refuse to provide their drugs for executions, it is very possible that the alleged "mishap" was not a mishap at all, but a deliberate act of Oklahoma government to use that defective cocktail on condemned prisoners at executions - only in Richard Glossip publicity was running too high, and it was very likely that even more publicity would have ensued if the "mishap" was to be discovered after the execution - and it was a second-in-a-row execution like that, using the food additive.

I wrote on this blog about a federal judge out of Nebraska who has devised the whole of three reasons as to why he would KNOWINGLY allow execution of a person about whose actual innocence the judge would KNOW before the execution.

The three reasons are:

• a "binding" court precedent that would allow to execute an innocent (of course, no such thing can legally exist or be constitutional, because execution is the ultimate punishment, and there is nothing to punish an innocent for);
• clemency is available, and
• the condemned person sat on his rights for too long, and it is untimely to raise the issue of his ACTUAL INNOCENCE just before the execution.

Here is the "binding precedent" that has led to an actual execution of a human being while the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his plea of actual innocence, while agreeing that, given an opportunity to present to the initial criminal jury the evidence available at the time of his request for a habeas corpus before the execution, there was a chance of a not-guilty verdict.

Herrera v Collins, some of the judges who voted for the execution to proceed (and it proceeded) despite the claims of actual innocence and without giving Leonel Torres Herrera at least an opportunity to present the new evidence in a new evidentiary hearing - these cannibals are still alive and some of them are still on the bench.

Of those who voted to continue execution of Leonel Torres Herrera who was 46 at the time of death:

1. Chief Judge Rehnquist - died in 2005 at the age of 81, see his main opinion here;
2. Justice White - died in 2002 at the age of 85, see his concurring opinion here;
3. Justice O'Connor - retired and is still alive, she is 85 now, see her concurring opinion here;
4. Justice Kennedy - alive and on the court, he is 79 now, see his concurring opinion here;
5. Justice Scalia - alive and on the court, he is 79 now, see his concurring opinion here;
6. Justice Thomas - alive and on the court, he is 67 now, see his concurring opinion here;

There were three dissents, by justices:

• Blackmun,
• Souter;
• Stevens.

See the joint dissent here.

I already wrote on this blog already about U.S. Supreme Court justices getting free rides for their law clerks from private attorneys, from within the U.S. and from foreign attorneys.

I already wrote on this blog about influence of law clerks upon the elderly U.S. Supreme Court judges, which, all in all, makes it impossible to discern, who and for what actual reason, and based on whose paid-for and lobbied agenda, directed this or that U.S. Supreme Court decision, including death penalty cases.

It is disgusting when a bunch of elders send a young man to death, inventing miles of "opinions" as to why the government can rob him of his breath at 46, while they can continue to breathe well into their 80s, despite ordering a state-orchestrated murder, refusing to listen and precluding a human being from even presenting the evidence that could have saved his life.

Three of the Herrera v Collins cannibals, Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas, are still on the court.  And several death penalty cases are coming in front of them.

If they do not care whether a person they send to death is actually innocent, what do they care about any other issues...

Yet, I have a question, especially after reading Justice Breyer's recent book "The Courts and the World" indicating that certain forces in the U.S. Congress wanted to introduce legislation allowing impeachment of the U.S. Supreme Court judges for the contents of their rulings, especially, for striking the death penalty as unconstitutional based on evolving international norms of human decency ( (Kindle edition, location 5165).

If impeachment was considered for abolishing the death penalty, why 

• Rehnquist;
• O'Connor;
• Kennedy;
• Scalia;
• Thomas and
• White

were not actually impeached for allowing execution of a, likely, innocent man, while REFUSING TO LOOK whether he is innocent or not?

Isn't that an ultimate "bad behavior" for a judge?

You know that the U.S. Supreme Court can "work wonders".

It made racial segregation disappear.

It made interracial marriages not a crime.

It made contraception and abortion legal and not a crime.

It made same sex marriage legal and same sex not a crime.

It was very much within its power to create an opinion to give Leonel Torres Herrera - and many other condemned prisoners, life.

They did not do that.

Not for Herrera, not for many more prisoners executed since Herrera.

Not for Richard Glossip, whose claims, similar to Herrera's, of actual innocence and availability of evidence of such innocence, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected as ruthlessly and carelessly, as it did Leonel Herrera's.  Only Richard Glossip was saved by the rage of public opinion that made the Governor, in order to save face, to claim a last-minute botch-up of the lethal cocktail.

But nothing saved Leonel Torres Herrera, and the "precedent" allowing to kill an innocent remains on the books.

It is not too late to impeach the remaining group of cannibals - Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas and take them off the bench.

It will not bring Leonel Torres Herrera back.

Yet, it will at last give his family a sense of justice and restored confidence in the "justice" system.

Let them write memoirs, off the bench.  

It will make the world safer for a lot of people.

Gutting Civil Rights litigation: PLRA leads to torturous deaths

I wrote on this blog recently about discrimination against prisoners as civil rights plaintiffs through the so-called Prisoner Litigation Reform Act, providing for a 15-day statute of limitations and for an exhaustion of state remedies for any person detained before trial or incarcerated after conviction.

PLRA provides additional burdens for federal civil rights plaintiffs to address unconstitutionality of prison conditions, such as:

1. guard brutality;
2. prolonged solitary confinement;
3. denial of the most basic medical care;
4. discrimination on the basis of religion;
5. denial of rights of communication with family;
6. punishment for maintaining innocence after conviction

The underlying rationale for enactment of PLRA was that prisoners have nothing to do but sit behind bars and file frivolous lawsuit against the government, wasting taxpayer money for defense of such lawsuits, and that prisoner lawsuits are nothing more than frivolous claims on the taste of peanut butter in prisoner food.

Yet, scholars pointed out that what is taken away by PRLA was more than crunchy peanut butter.  It was a vast assault upon civil rights of prisoners.

PRLA is used to prevent not lawsuits for the quality of peanut butter (a legitimate claim, by the way, if that peanut butter is rotten and dangerous to prisoner's health, but is given to them anyway, with no other choices, or if prisoners are allergic to it), but lawsuits about ANY civil rights violations.

When people in the position of power, who were already not models in observing civil rights of prisoners, were given a carte blanche by PLRA, hell broke lose in prison conditions.

The hell is described here.

And here.

And here.

In Arizona, prison officials offered to a cancer patient, instead of diagnostics and treatment, to drink "energy shakes".  They had him admitted to a hospital only when he ballooned to the size of a pregnant woman on the verge of labor, his LUNG cancer methastasized into abdominal organs - and he died in that hospital.

That death, and many others, is the DIRECT result of PLRA.

That treatment of human beings is inhumane.

That treatment is TORTURE, prohibited by the International Human Rights Convention - to which the U.S. is a member.

As an intern in Prisoners Legal Services of New York, I read with complete astonishment cases where prisoners were denied pain relief in cases of bone fractures.

Complaining to courts made little difference.

Even when such prisoners broke through the 15-day statute of limitations and the "exhaustion of administrative remedies" requirements, for which they could be punished even more, courts tossed their complaints not finding a constitutional violation in denying of pain relief to a caged human being for over a week for fractured bones.

I can take bets, ladies and gentlemen, that if those fractured bones would be fractured bones of a caged animal or pet, petitions would be spreading by now all over the place and judges would quickly change their decisions, calling such inhumane treatment improper.

With human beings, inhumane treatment is, obviously, nothing to worry about, it is business as usual in federal courts.

That said - in an emotional way - let's get down to business and analyze PLRA in a legal way.

In Marbury v Madison, the U.S. Supreme Court clearly stated that an unconstitutional conduct by the government is VOID.  Not voidable, but void, as in - was never legal.

VOID means that there is no time limit to challenge the void act, there is no way to waive a constitutional violation, and there is no way to defend against it.

Yet, PLRA does just that - it imposes a 15-day (!) statute of limitations, it requires "exhaustion of administrative remedies" as a condition precedent to the right to sue in federal court for a FEDERAL constitutional violation - something no other civil rights plaintiffs are required to do.

And, with the existence of the 3-strikes-and-you-are-out statute I've written about before that blocks access to court for prisoners completely, including to those who were merely detained and not yet convicted, the gutting of any semblance of a legal remedy for inhumane conditions in detention (being held in custody of the government before conviction) and incarceration (being held in custody of the government after conviction) is complete. 

Where courts consider anything that a civil rights plaintiff, and especially a prisoner, files - frivolous, with a certification of frivolousness precluding an appeal, it is only a matter of time for a prisoner to acquire those 3 strikes - even if he or she diligently complied, often risking his or her safety or health, with the draconian requirements of PRLA - a 15-day statute of limitations and "exhaustion of administrative remedies",  or requests filed with the same people who brutalize you, starve you and deny you minimal medical care. 

By showing the disaster that ensued after enactment of PLRA, I want people to realize - gutting the rights of victims of constitutional violations, especially the most vulnerable class of such victims, the caged people who are under total control of prison authorities and depend on them for anything and everything, including food and healthcare - leads to very real deaths.

And, if you think rights of prisoners do not matter, think again.

With nearly 99% of conviction rate through pleas, with the death penalty still on the table, with prosecutors falsifying and concealing evidence, police officers lying on the stand, with no proper effective genuine legal defense in criminal cases available, unless you can afford a private counsel, all average American is just one false report away from the reach of PLRA.

Therefore.

Be very afraid.

And petition your representative to repeal PLRA.

It leads to torturous deaths.

The U.S. cannot maintain its claimed status of a civilized country and of a beacon of democracy and freedom when it treats its prisoners in a way that would be considered inhumane for an animal, and deny those prisoners even a right to complain and obtain legal remedies for such treatment.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners v FTC in February of 2015 revived a Sherman Act lawsuit of disbarred Washington attorney John Scannell

I wrote on this blog that the State of Washington targeted a civil rights attorney John Scannell, disbarred him for protecting his clients, and that after disbarment, obtained a dismissal of John Scannell's civil rights lawsuit that challenged many of the issues later raised in the lawsuit Neroni v Zayas in NDNY and in the Final Report of the NYS Statewide Commission for attorney discipline.

Provided below are portions from the order of dismissal pertaining specifically to the Sherman Act (antitrust) claims of John Scannell:

The court dismissed John Scannell's Sherman Act claims on July 1, 2013 under the "state immunity doctrine".

That doctrine was invalidated in application to occupational regulation by market players on February 25, 2015 in North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners v Federal Trade Commission,  thus reviving (in my legal opinion) the Sherman Act portion of John Scannell's claim, and especially because John Scannell's appeal of that decision is still pending, making North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners applicable to the appeal, as well as on a Rule 60 motion to vacate.

Whether John Scannell will use the opportunity to reopen his case is another story.

I will follow up on this case and report any developments to my readers. 

Stay tuned.

What is common between the Hammer of Witches, the FBI fight against civil rights plaintiffs as domestic terrorists, the crime of seditious libel and the rule of frivolous conduct?

The immediate answer to the question asked in the headline is that it is apparent, based on the way the rules of frivolous conduct are applied to civil rights plaintiffs and their attorneys by courts, and now used by the FBI to brand civil rights litigants (and, I am sure, their attorneys, too) as "domestic terrorists" are identical twins with the medieval Hammer of Witches and with the crime of "seditious libel" against the government, long condemned by the U.S. Supreme Court as being in violation of the 1st Amendment.

All of these institutions:

1. The Hammer of Witches and the Great Inquisition of the Catholic Church;
2. The seditious libel crimes for criticism of the government;
3. The FBI characterization of "frivolous" lawsuit of civil rights plaintiffs expressing certain viewpoints ("They clog up the court system with frivolous lawsuits and liens against public officials to harass them"); see also here;
4. federal courts repeatedly sanctioning civil rights plaintiffs and their attorneys for novel arguments in constitutional litigation - have the same goals:

1) to enforce uniformity of thought in the governed population;

2) to enforce that the population uniformly respects the government no matter what kind of abuses the government is involved in;

3) to instill fear in the population through unavailability of legal remedies for governmental abuses.

The goals are being met admirably, judging by the tendency of a significant drop of civil rights litigation during the population growth (and increasing distrust to judge-presided trials in the surviving civil rights actions), increase of interconnection and spread of information by the Internet and frequent coverage in the social media at least of egregious governmental abuses by all branches of state and federal government.

In my previous blog post I described how the FBI targets certain types of speech, by certain groups of population, as a form of domestic terrorism.

Specifically, I showed that based on the content of viewpoint and legal argument, certain civil rights lawsuits and arguments, branded as "frivolous" by courts, have been also branded by the FBI as a form of "domestic terrorism" that puts individuals who file and litigate such "frivolous lawsuits" "on the radar" of the FBI (of course, as a lip service of its constitutional duty to the public, the FBI invites the public BOTH to report, as "suspicious activity", the filings of "frivolous lawsuits" by civil rights litigants of a certain viewpoint, and to report "civil rights violations", which are mutually exclusive requests.

I also wrote that that particular political philosophy, the so-called "sovereign citizen" philosophy, is, according to a study, increasingly adhered to by African Americans, adding racial profiling and discrimination overtones to the FBI attempts to prosecute free speech and even free political thought as a form of domestic terrorism.

The 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits discrimination based on views, and especially based on political views.

The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the right to criticize the government in the most unattractive ways, to the point of falsehood.

Here are at least some of the most prominent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on the subject.

The Year 1964.  Seditious Libel for criticism of the government is declared unconstitutional, on both state and federal level, 

criticism of the government with impunity, even based on false facts, is allowed

In New York Times v Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964) the U.S. Supreme Court provided that 

 "[The U.S. Congress] did pass the Sedition Act in 1798, ^[n3] which made it a crime -- "seditious libel" -- to criticize federal officials or the Federal Government. As the Court's opinion correctly points out, however, ante, pp. 273-276, that Act came to an ignominious end and, by common consent, has generally been treated as having been a wholly unjustifiable and much to be regretted violation of the First Amendment. Since the First Amendment is now made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth, it no more permits the States to impose damages for libel than it does the Federal Government." 

The court stated further that:

"We would, I think, more faithfully interpret the First Amendment by holding that, at the very least, it leaves the people and the press free to criticize officials and discuss public affairs with impunity."

The Year 1990.  The U.S. Supreme Court prohibits punishment for political criticism of the government, even in an offensive manner, is allowed 

In United States v. Eichman, 460 U.S. 310 (1990) the U.S. Supreme Court has struck on free political speech grounds a criminal prohibition to burn an American flag in front of onlookers that was clearly offensive and upset the onlookers. 

The court's reasoning was that the burning of the flag is permitted to dispose of old flags, but is criminalized as a form of political expression, and that is an unconstitutional violation of the 1st Amendment.

The Year 2012.  The U.S. Supreme Court reaffirms that the government lacks the power for unrestricted content-based regulation of speech about the government, and that truthful arguments in the public forum are enough to rebut false arguments.

In United States v Alvarez, 567 U.S. __, 132 S.Ct. 2537 (2012), the U.S. Supreme Court has struck the Stolen Valor Act criminalizing false claims of military awards.

The court has reasoned that:

"...some false statements are inevitable if there is to be an open and vigorous expression of views in public and private con-versation, expression the First Amendment seeks to guarantee. See Sullivan, supra, at 271 (“Th[e] erroneous statement is inevitable in free debate",

and that

"The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth. See Whitney v. California, 274 U. S. 357, 377 (1927) (Brandeis, J., concurring) (“If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence”). The theory of our Constitution is “that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” Abrams v. United States, 250 U. S. 616, 630 (1919) (Holmes, J., dissenting). The First Amendment itself ensures the right to respond to speech we do not like, and for good reason. Freedom of speech and thought flows not from the beneficence of the state but from the inalienable rights of the person. And suppression of speech by the government can make exposure of falsity more difficult, not less so. Society has the right and civic duty to engage in open, dynamic, rational discourse. These ends are not well served when the government seeks to orchestrate public discussion through content-based mandates."


Thus, quashing criticism of ANY kind against the government save a direct call to physical violence against particular individuals, is an acknowledgement by the government that the government's arguments that are opposing the quashed and punished argument will not win if tested by the "test of truth" and will not be "accepted in the competition of the market".

Blunt suppression through power is an easier way - short-term, of course - to eliminate unwanted speech, and criticism of the government at all times was at the top of unwanted speech - at least, for the government of any kind, church or secular, and in any country, democratic or tyrannical.

Yet, that is not a democratic, or even a legitimate way where the government suppressing that speech, is itself the servant to the sovereign (We the People - see the Declaration of Independence), and where all members of the government take their office through an oath to uphold, protect and enforce the U.S. Constitution and every part of it, including the much disliked 1st Amendment.

Therefore, all attempts of the government to achieve uniformity of thought through punishing people for "thought crimes", for their viewpoints, for their legal opinions, for the contents of their civil rights lawsuits, is unconstitutional in this country.

The thought control was recently exacerbated by the  President of the United States announcing, through its Justice Department, to use political speech screening and control to target people for contents of their political speech, lumping together as "anti-government" anybody who criticizes or sues the government (of course, by manipulating on people's fear of terrorism).

At the same time, President's spouse made a "Pavlik Morozov" speech at a high school graduation calling upon youngsters to spy on and police the speech of their family members - albeit with good intentions of eradicating racism.

So, the FBI - the arm of the President - under the guise of fighting "sovereign citizen" movement as a type of "domestic terrorism", fights African-Americans, see here.

On the other hand, Michele Obama, under the guise of fighting racism, instills into youth the necessity to fight within their own families, as did the (fake) Russian "pioneer hero" Pavlik Morozov (I still remember his story being pounded into my childish brains in school) and the "child heroes" of George Orwell's "1984".

We need to come to a consensus to agree to disagree.

All speech on political subjects, no matter how offensive, no matter how disliked by the "mainstream" establishment - whatever it is - is permissible unless it calls for acts of violence.

That is what the 1st Amendment is for.

And government officials - from the FBI to attorneys working for the government to federal judges - should well remember their own oaths of office, and should well remember that their vicious pursuit of civil rights plaintiffs and their attorneys for "frivolous lawsuits" OF ANY KIND - fighting race discrimination of blacks against whites, fighting "reverse race discrimination" of whites, fighting misconduct of any public officials including judges, equates them with those who administered the infamous

• Hammer of Witches and
• seditious libel laws

That's NOT a good company.


*  *  *



"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: 

From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink— greetings! 

He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. The consequences of every act are included in the act itself. 

He wrote: Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death."

Orwell, George (1983-10-17). 1984 (p. 74). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition. 

Racial and political profiling by the FBI of African Americans as domestic terrorists

The question seems rhetorical and not requiring an answer.

Yet, so much confusion and turmoil exists over this question that research and coverage of the issue is needed.

Some time ago, my husband and I were viciously sanctioned by a federal court judge for reciting to the court the law of the State of New York, the Declaration of Independence of the United States and the 11th Amendment to the United States Constitution, all providing that the sovereign in this country  is "we the People", and not the government.  I did not understand why it was so important for the court to drill into me that the 11th Amendment does not mean what its clear text means.

I understood yesterday when reading the FBI announcement.  The judge must have believed I am a part of a "sovereign citizen" movement - and whatever such people say is domestic terrorism.

The FBI put "on their radar" the so-called "sovereign citizen movement" as "domestic terrorism" and extremists because (and I omit scams, not paying taxes, which does not qualify as terrorism, or having illegal weapons, which qualifies as crime, but not as terrorism, and making physical threats to public officials, which is the only thing that is terrorism):

1. the sovereign citizens (SCs) make "frivolous lawsuits" - that is unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination;
2. SCs "hold their own courts";
3. SCs issue illegal warrants against public officials
4. SCs harass public officials
5. SCs threaten courts and court employees 

By the way, I do not belong to any organizations, am not affiliated to any SC "cell", "chapter", or anything like that, and my legal and political opinions in this blog are just my own.

But, I have a right to speak my own opinion, especially, as a criminal defense attorney and a civil rights attorneys, as to whether political beliefs may be considered as a form of "domestic terrorism", and to that I firmly believe that such a consideration is screamingly unconstitutional.

As to my own experience that leads me not to believe that "threats against judges", they way litigants' conduct is interpreted by courts, are a form of domestic terrorism.  

First, I was sanctioned by a federal court (judge Gary Sharpe, of NDNY) for simply quoting to the court the state and federal law and the Federal Constitution as to who is the sovereign in this country - something Judge Sharpe had to know before he graduated from law school, much less before he came to the bench.

Second, I was sanctioned for "threatening the court" (by the now quickly-retired Judge Carl F. Becker of Delaware County Family/County Court) for as much as making a motion to recuse Judge Becker where I cited issues of his well documented judicial misconduct and appearance of impropriety, bordering on bribery.

In view of those experiences, I take the claims of anybody "threatening the courts" with a grain of salt until I see how exactly that alleged "threat" is expressed, because judges appear to react to completely lawful acts that question propriety of their actions as hysterical prima donnas.

But, nothing like having FBI on the side of the government claiming that "anti-government" sentiments and believing that citizens are sovereigns of this country is now a form of "domestic terrorism".

The FBI invites people who have "information" about "suspicious activities" - such as described above ("frivolous" lawsuits against the government, motions to recuse considered as "threats" against judges?) - to the FBI.  I wonder how many times I was reported to this venerable organization.  I think I need to verify through a Freedom of Information Act request and report back to my readers as to the results.

As to the SC movement, I saw a lot of articles on SC movement being violent, but I did not find much addressing the essence of its ideology in legal literature.  Interestingly, I found the most comprehensive overview of the history and the essence of the SC movement in an article of a psychiatrist about competency evaluations to stand trial of individuals claiming themselves to be sovereign citizens.

That threw me, as a person born and raised in the Soviet Union where political views were also assessed by psychiatrists and were grounds for a sort of civil commitment without any hearings, through abductions and lockups of dissidents by the government.

The article on competency evaluations noted that the FBI started to regard SC as a terrorist organization after two police officers were killed by allegedly two SCs, during a routine traffic stop.

I double-checked in the news, and the killer was only one - a teenager, who could hardly be driven by any kind of ideology, rather than protecting his father and having undue access to weapons.

Yet, commission of a crime by a teenager, which is punishable under penal law, can hardly be used as a true legal basis to consider a whole ideological movement as domestic terrorism.

Since both the teenager and his father were killed by police gunfire, no trial was ever held, and we will never know the truth.

Yet, as the recent information emerges about police shootings, not everything that the police says about grounds for fatal shooting of citizens is true.

I found information on the Internet by friends grieving the deaths of Jerry Kane and his son Joe who contest the claims of the police as to the reasons for shooting them and link the fatal shooting with the "ole boys' club" operation of traffic stops on a certain highway, and the fact that Jerry Kane was going to file a complaint for an unlawful traffic stop.

Since both Jerry Kane and Joe Kane are dead, and are presumed innocent in their deaths, as never charged or convicted of a crime, and against the background of police lies about fatal shootings unless caught on camera, I would take police claims that Jerry Kane and Joe Kane opened fire first and were gunned down because they were SCs and, as such, domestic terrorist, with a big grain of salt.

The psychiatrist in the article about competency evaluation treads way outside of his competency and right into evaluation of people who hold "SC" beliefs, into which the psychiatrist lumps tax protestors.

Yet, perfectly mainstream law scholars and government officials, such as the former federal prosecutor the late Carrol D. Kilmore in his book "Judicial Tyranny: On the Integrity of the Federal Judiciary", share the belief that federal taxes in this country are illegal and unconstitutional - whether one complies with the government's oppressive machinery to collect them or not - and substantiates it very well based on good legal theory.

The article of the psychiatrist also noted the spread of "sovereign citizen" beliefs in "African-Americans and prison populations" - where African Americans are also disproportionately represented.  

So now African Americans are targeted by the FBI as inherent domestic terrorists?  On the basis of psychiatric science?  Same as when psychiatry pitched in an diagnosed run-away African American slaves as being nuts for wanting to run from their masters?  Very nice, indeed.

The racial profiling continued when the psychiatrist went into the actual "case studies".

His "case studies" of competency evaluations of individual allegedly having "sovereign citizen beliefs" returned 67% (two thirds) of African-Americans.

The psychiatrist makes a "statistical" observation from an extremely "representative" group of 6 people that all of holders of SC beliefs had a GED level of education, moreover, 3 attended college and one had a master's degree.

The psychiatrist did not find the interviewed individuals as having "cognitive deficits".

The good psychiatrist even provided a table of his so-called "research" of POLITICAL beliefs of individuals to whom he was giving a PSYCHIATRIC COMPETENCY examination in trials where they were raising POLITICAL objections:

The table is very much in the spirit of the Soviet-type punitive psychiatry.

Look at the extensive legal research that the good psychiatrist did in support of his "competency evaluations" of political beliefs of criminal defendants:

Our good psychiatrist does not even try to conceal that he is analyzing POLITICAL beliefs of litigants:

Here is the description-by-psychiatrist of political beliefs of "sovereign citizens":

I discerned nothing terrorist in the beliefs.

Then, the psychiatrist goes into affirmative statements that "sovereign citizen" common law courts actually engage in "paper terrorism" by issuing certain documents.

Freedom of Speech, as far as I checked, is still allowed in this country by the 1st Amendment.

If the "common law courts" did something wrong, that is addressable by legal process.  

There is no statute in criminal law defining "paper terrorism".

Yet, we have a psychiatrist "diagnosing" people who hold certain political beliefs and engage in certain political actions, without use of force, as "paper terrorists".

So much for the neutrality of an expert for purposes of competency evaluation, and so much for competence of the expert.

Then the good psychiatrist goes into the legal analysis of such completely non-psychiatric subjects as:

1. The Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution;
2. The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution;
3. the Admiralty Law;
4. Redemption Theory
5. Uniform Commercial Code
6. Accepted for Value
7. Use of Capital Letters
8. Office of the Person
9. License Plates and Drivers Licenses

and starts the section "Discussion" with the following statement:

So, now psychiatrists pass on whether LEGAL theories are "idiosyncratic" or whether certain POLITICAL beliefs are "delusional". 

The psychiatrist ruled most of the defendants competent to stand trial, but the main point is they were subject to competency evaluation for possible psychiatric disorder because of their "extreme political philosophy", which sounds pretty much like Middle Ages to me:

But, the most flooring statement comes at the end of this amazing pseudo-legal/psychiatric article:

In fact, political beliefs cannot be used in competency evaluations in ANY way - to rule a competency problem IN or to rule it OUT, as the our "good psychiatrist" did.

Simply because a person holds certain beliefs, does not indicate whether he is competent or incompetent to stand trial, whether he or she "understands the nature and objectives of criminal proceedings", and whether the person is able or not to assist his or her attorney.

If a person recites Shakespeare from memory, that does not make him competent - or incompetent - to stand a criminal trial.

If a person recites a legal theory or a political philosophy from memory, that does not make him competent - or incompetent to stand a criminal trial.

Different criteria to assess competency to stand trial are necessary, not taking into account political beliefs or legal theories of the accused and presumed-innocent criminal defendant.

So, whatever the claims is about "sovereign citizens" as a form of domestic terrorism, the use of psychiatry in political oppression and racial profiling of the predominantly African American movement strips such claims of all credibility.

I will address the essence of the law as to who exactly is the sovereign in this country, how the sovereign power is to be enforced in this country, whether the legal theory of sovereignty is well developed in the U.S. and on state level, and how courts misinterpret existing federal law and state law of sovereignty and deny people legal remedies, thus giving credibility to various "sovereign citizen" movements, in my next blog posts.

Stay tuned.