The prohibition of child marriage in New York - 17-year olds can lawfully have sex, but cannot marry?

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo just announced, with much fanfare, that he had signed a bill to end child marriage in New York.

Now the age of consent to marriage is 18 only, marriages of minors under the age of 17 are prohibited, and between 17 and 18 are done only based on changed procedure of obtaining parental and judicial consent.

The legislation, the way it was passed, creates bizarre problems though.

In New York, the age of consent to have sex is 17.

And, minors in New York under the age of 17 can be charged with a sex crime and prosecuted by adults - and even the recent bill also signed by Cuomo with much fanfare, that raised criminal responsibility for non-violent crimes up to 18 years of age - did not change that.

Moreover, even under the current age of criminal responsibility for violent crimes - 14 years old - minors as young as 8 can be charged for a sex crime through a juvenile delinquency proceeding.

I remember that in a criminal case I represented, a #JudgeJohnFLambert, assigned to Delaware County Court) considered against a criminal defendant, over my objection, the alleged "sexual offense" committed by a sex offender at the age of 6 (!) - with no proof of it whatsoever, simply on a hearsay allegation of probation department.

In fact, Delaware County was proud of treating "sex offenders" that it kept in foster care - which means they were minors, likely under the age of consent to have sex.  Since the treatment was experimental, and Delaware County did not provide to me, up to this day, on my FOIL requests, any records that a proper formal procedure was followed to secure such experimental treatment for minors, such "treatment" was unlawful experimentation on minors.

So, let's reiterate what is the situation with sex and marriage in regards to minors in New York:

1) a minor as young as 6 years of age can be considered a "sex offender" for purposes of future calculation of a sex offender risk as an adult - while being 11 years under the state's age of consent to sex, meaning that any sexual acts that such a child engages in are PRESUMED BY LAW to be involuntary;

2) a minor as young as 8 can be charged with a sex crime through a juvenile delinquency proceeding - while being 9 years under the age of consent, meaning that any sexual acts that such a child engages in are PRESUMED BY LAW to be involuntary;
moreover, there is a possibility that such a child, as the self-report of the former Delaware County Attorney Porter Kirkwood indicated, is then forcibly "treated" as a "sex offender" - which includes manipulations with his erection patterns, thus "treatment" in itself constitutes unlawful experimentation on human subjects and sexual child abuse;

3) a minor as young as 14 can be charged and convicted as an adult for a criminal sexual offense - while, once again, being under the age of consent, and while all of his acts charged against him as a crime, are presumed to be involuntary under the state law;

4) the age of consent to have sex is 17;

5) but, the age to consent to marriage is now 18?


So, a 14-year-old can understand what he is doing enough to be charged with a FELONY RAPE AS AN ADULT, but does not have enough understanding to marry if he sires a child on another teenager?

New York needs to bring consistency into its sex offender laws.

If 18 is the age of majority, it has to be the age of majority for ALL PURPOSES, including for criminal liability for violent crimes.

If sex with a minor is statutory rape, it should be statutory rape with a minor under the age of 18, not 17.

If sex with a minor is statutory rape, a minor cannot be charged with a sex crime - either in juvenile delinquency proceeding, or in a criminal proceeding, nor can alleged sexual "misbehavior" of a minor be used against him in criminal or civil proceeding when he or she becomes an adult - because under the law, there is no such thing as sexual mis-behavior of a minor, sexual acts of minors are not VOLUNTARY under the statutory law.

As the bill exists now, it makes no sense.

Not only it is not accompanied by raising the age of criminal responsibility and prohibition to charge or prosecute minors for sex crimes.

It also infringes on constitutional rights of minors to marry, based on the current age of consent to have sex in New York at the age of 17.

The right to marry is a basic human right, and a constitutional right in the U.S.

While the state can regulate such rights to ensure health and safety of its residents, regulating the way New York did - allowing minors, by its criminal laws, to have sex at 17, but disallowing 17-year-olds to enter into marriage without consent of parents or the court at the age of consent, makes no sense to me.

Is the gender of the judge's sex partner a new qualification for office - or is it a distracting trick from the unseemly speed of how a judge's death investigation was hushed up?

A "first openly gay judge" was quickly appointed and no less quickly confirmed in New York for its highest court - New York State Court of Appeals.

See him here, sitting when a woman is standing next to him, clapping for him.  But, I guess, while who the judge has sex with is the new qualification for office in the New York judicial system, manners aren't.

Judge Feldman was appointed not only quickly, but too quickly - in fact, 2.5 months passed after the death of Judge Abdas-Salam whose body was found in the Hudson river, and investigation into her death closed less than a month after her death.

Does Cuomo think that appointing a gay man will somehow cover up the unseemly speed of how the investigation into a potential murder of a high-ranking judge was hushed up?

New survival tricks of law schools further expose the sham of attorney regulation - on ownership of law schools by law firms

It has been a trend for a while that law schools are losing students and lower admission standards, and while the legal job market continues to plummet - because there are simply not enough paying clients, and because people increasingly cannot afford high legal fees that have to incorporate the cost of legal education.

Recently, some deans of California law schools whose students had a high failure rate on the bar exam accused the bar examiners of putting standards too high.

Increasingly, there are lawsuits by law students against their law schools alleging that they were lured into incurring debt for 3 years of law schools by misleading law school statistics regarding employment rates of their graduates.

Law schools, in answer to such lawsuits, claim that law students enter law schools with open eyes and should have known about their job market prospects - and so far, law schools have won such lawsuits.

Yet, such lawsuits, and the general market tendencies of legal jobs market, do not help future enrollment, and law schools try to invent tricks to wiggle out of regulation in order to survive financially.

One of such tricks is to accept GRE scores instead of LSAT scores for enrollment - even Harvard Law School is doing it now.

Another, just recently, was proposed by a law professor - for law schools to be OWNED by law firms.

While a law professor would have a vested interest for law schools (in their current format) to survive, the concept of ownership of law schools by law firms runs contrary to the declared purpose of attorney regulation in the first place (that keeps falling through the cracks) - protection of consumers, quality of legal services.

If standards of legal education are to be maintained in order to protect consumers, it is consumers and not providers who need to set those standards - that should be a given, but somehow this common sense concept is not implemented in attorney regulation across the country.

If legal education (required by regulators in order - ostensibly - to protect consumers of legal services) is OWNED by providers of legal services - it is apparent that it is not consumers' interests, but interests of providers that would be dictated and met by such legal education, and interests of a provider of services and of a consumer of such services may be vastly different, especially in terms of scope and price of services.

A provider has an interest to provide

1. the narrowest scope of service,
2. with the least innovation,
3. at the highest price possible.

A consumer has the opposite interest on all three points above.

Of course, the law professor suggesting ownership of law schools by law firms argues actually that ownership by law firms (whose interest is to provide, once again,

1. the narrowest scope of service,
2. with the least innovation,
3. at the highest price possible -

will actually enhance efficiency and innovation of legal education.  Of course, that was a person on the brink of unemployment speaking.

To a point, I am glad that such a proposal was made - and, by a law professor, too, because it simply makes the current status quo of law schools, already heavily sponsored by law firms (which is as good as owned by them) more apparent.

It is very clear that having foxes guard chicken coops is not going to work - it will create problems, not resolve them.

In the U.S., heavy regulation of the market of legal services has already caused, and ever expands the "justice gap", where the majority of Americans cannot afford a lawyer, while not being able to hire who they want (like any individual they trust, on a power of attorney), to represent them in court or draft a legal document for them.

As I wrote before, such regulation by legal profession to allegedly protect the consumer of legal services makes no sense in the first place because of the concept of presumption of knowledge of the law BY ALL people in the U.S.

It does not make sense for the government:

• to presume that all people know all the law  - in order to put them in jail; but
• to presume that the same people do not know the law - for purposes of hiring their own legal representatives, including for the defense in the same criminal actions where their knowledge of the law is presumed for purposes of criminal liability.

Of course, the author of the piece suggesting ownership of law schools by law firms is the Professor of the struggling Charlotte School of Law, a candidate for unemployment as soon as this coming August - because his law school stands to lose its state license to operate in North Carolina if it does not prove its financial stability by this coming August.

As the saying goes, desperate people do desperate things, but in this particular situation, the desperate thing suggested - to sell law schools out to law firms - strips the fig leaf of alleged consumer protection as the justification of why law school education in a certain way is even required for legal representatives of consumers, overriding consumers' free choice of their own providers to protect themselves the way they want it.

Cancellation of Obama's political patronage policy - and the continuing "cy pres" funding of nonprofits

I recently wrote a 5-part article about the lawsuit by immigration lawyers suing the federal executive branch of the government to lift a disciplinary rule against them prohibiting ghost-writing and partial representation in federal immigration courts and before its appellate Board of Review:

• Part I - showing that the essence of the fight is for the alleged constitutional right of immigration lawyers NOT to represent clients fully in the immigration proceedings, as disciplinary rules require, thus hurting their chances for a good outcome;
• Part II - showing the conflict of interest in the Board of Directors of the plaintiff non-profit and personal interest of some of the Directors in their private businesses in the outcome of this supposedly "public interest" lawsuit;
• Part III - discussing what kind of "constitutional right" it is for attorneys to engage in ghost-writing and partial representation of clients, instead of providing a representation throughout the case;
• Part IV - discussing what the heck (and that is put politely) is the state's interest in federal regulation of representatives in front of federal boards, which is what the lawsuit is frivolously asserting, while the same states are filibustering instead of enforcing federal immigration law; and
• Part V - how existing regulation of who represents people in front of immigration boards, in its entirety, makes no sense and hurts consumers.

I specifically wrote about the fact that California State Attorney General made the plaintiffs in the case his office's paid informants - by giving them a $125,000 grant and by putting an attorney into their office whose only job was to investigate "notario fraud" - in other words, to conduct investigations against NWIRP's own competitors, ordered by a State Attorney General to enforce what a State Attorney General has no right to enforce - federal disciplinary rules of representation in federal immigration courts.

That was disclosed in California State AG's amicus brief.

Of course, the inconsistency of the argument that the State Attorney General of the State of California is supporting, through an amicus brief in support of his own paid informant NWIRP, VIOLATIONS of the very same disciplinary rules that the State Attorney General is enforcing and financing such enforcement by giving NWIRP (violator of federal regulations) $125,000 in grant money to conduct investigations against its own competitors, other violators of the same disciplinary rules - is somehow completely overlooked by the plaintiffs in that lawsuit, the State of California Attorney General, by the federal judge who has so far imposed a stay without giving an explanation or legal reasoning, and by the media and members of the public who support the lawsuit simply because it is "against Trump".

But, one more thing needs to be clarified for the public, and especially in view of U.S. Attorney General's announcement that it is stopping the unconstitutional policy of directing settlement money from settlements with wrongdoers to finance special interest groups - something that the Obama administration introduced and widely practiced.

NWIRP is exactly such a special interest group, and the California State Attorney General did exactly what U.S. Attorney General just prohibited - gave it a "cy pres" grant of $125,000 to conduct investigations of alleged violators of the same disciplinary rules that NWIRP is suing U.S. Attorney General Sessions for its own "constitutional right" to violate (with support from the State of California Attorney General).

Let's go back to what the California State AG said in its amicus brief:






So, while fighting the Trump administration in court AGAINST enforcement of federal immigration law, the State of California gave $125,000 to a non-profit, NWIRP, to SUPPORT enforcement of the same federal immigration law - but only some of it, and only against NWIRP competitors.

And, the mysterious "cy pres" grant means "leftovers" from class lawsuits awarded BY JUDGES to non-profits designated by the government, and thus favored by the government.

Since NWIRP is taking a political stand against the federal government, the "cy pres grant" is used by the state government, the chief law enforcer of the State of California, to finance  special interest group - which was just prohibited by U.S. Attorney Sessions.

U.S. Attorney sessions pointed out WHO should get the "cy pres leftovers":

• victims in a potential class action, or
• the taxpayers - whatever is unclaimed should go back to the government, not to the special interest groups.

So, once again, the "hero" NWIRP, that is suing for special treatment, is nothing other than a special interest group and a paid informant of the Attorney General of the State of California getting money that victims in class lawsuits did not get, in order to promote business and political interests of its Directors.

And that practice is unconstitutional, and just prohibited by the U.S. Attorney General.

Will the U.S. Attorney General now look into "cy pres grants" distributed by states to their special interest groups?  Those non-profits who declare they do something good, while there is no law requiring the non-profits to dedicate any amount of money or even percentage from its budget to the declared mission - and who can instead finance lavish offices, good salaries, political campaigns, and dedicate the most minimal amount of money, simply to maintain interest of political donors in their company?

He should.

Political correctness, occupational regulation and the 1st Amendment

What is occupational and industry regulation for?

Isn't it supposed to be protection of consumers from bad products and dishonest merchants or service providers?

Then, what is the legality of prohibition for a farmer to sell his perfectly good apples to consumers in 2017 because he refused to provide his orchard as a location for a wedding of a gay couple in 2014?

What did that do to the quality of his apples?

And, what good does ruining a business of an apple grower do to consumers of apples?

Wouldn't there be less apples, at higher prices?

Not to mention that the government may not regulate based on somebody's political views.

And, the orchard grower did not discriminate as to who is or is not to buy his apples.

So, the politically correct assault of the government on the 1st Amendment continues.  The stupid way.  And at the expense of consumers - as always.

On cynicism about the government, execution of innocents and satisfaction with justice

U.S. Supreme Court Judge Neil Gorsuch, the latest addition to U.S. taxpayers' burden in a useless court that enforces the U.S. Constitution only if it feels like it, gave a speech recently at Harvard where he claimed he does not share "cynicism about the government". 

That is an interesting proposition, coming from this judge, and from this court.

First, I wonder whether it was an all expenses paid plus a fee-for-lecture speech, as it usually happens with "justices" of this useless court that is doing nothing to enforce the law, but has long usurped the power to act as the ultimate lawmaker and policymaker based on judges' own personal values.

The fight over who is going to replace Scalia (Gorsuch did) was only a litmus test of what the U.S. Supreme Court has become - once again, a useless drain on taxpayers that takes only those cases it wants to take, and then makes policy and the law in those cases that it does take - likely in exchange for speaking engagements, all expenses paid national and international trips and the like favors, otherwise the identity of who is going to be the next judge on this court and who will impartially apply the law to the facts should not really matter.

Second, Judge Gorsuch did not elaborate what he considers as "cynicism about the government".  Very possibly it is criticism of the government - protected by the 1st Amendment.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court rules on cases based on personal values and views of its judges - and rejects 99% of cases for review - it is apparent that Gorsuch is no different than the other judges who, for example, refused to take a case of an attorney disciplined for criticism of a judge (one of their own class) for half a century.

Gorsuch's claim that he does not share "cynicism about the government" made in the same speech where he lauded (while his court is about to review immigration cases against the Trump administration) that the government may be stopped by courts without the use of arms - constitutes, in my view, a type of judicial misconduct.

It is a potential pre-judgment of cases against Trump, indicating that Judge Gorsuch thinks that no matter the lower federal courts do, whether their decisions are lawful or not, whether they are constitutional or not, somehow they need to be obeyed - even though unconstitutional court decisions are void, and a nullity, and even though precedents of federal courts are not part of the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution that Judge Gorsuch keeps taking various oaths (as an attorney, and then as a judge of various levels) to uphold.

Judge Gorsuch's own court has decided - in a case 214 years ago by which the U.S. Supreme Court has usurped the right to interpret the U.S. Constitution - that

"[c]ertainly all those who have framed written constitutions contemplate them as forming the fundamental and paramount law of the nation, and consequently the theory of every such government must be, that an act of the legislature repugnant to the constitution is void."

In other words, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that an act of the government (no matter which branch) "repugnant to the constitution is void".

Void means a nullity, having no force of law.

Certainly the same applies to unconstitutional decisions of courts.

Yet, as to court decisions, courts - including the U.S. Supreme Court - have a different position: no matter whether a court decision is or is not lawful, it must be obeyed, which is an opinion that lacks common sense and is unconstitutional.

So, we see that Judge Gorsuch, from a get-go, started spouting opinions that he does not "share" "cynicism about the government" - which is, from a judge of his rank, and coupled with his praise of the government obeying court decisions, no matter whether they are constitutional or not, can be regarded as a thinly veiled threat to critics of courts.

Moreover, Judge Gorsuch spouted in the same lecture one more "truth", which, considering the ongoing debate about the ever widening "justice gap", and a continuing debate of wrongful executions of innocent people - TWO of them already on Judge Gorsuch's conscience:

• of Ledell Lee in Arkansas where Gorsuch played God and cast the decisive vote in execution of what could be an innocent man - a black man; and
• of Robert Melson - another black man, in the state of Alabama - who was tied to a triple murder only by a co-defendant's testimony (in order to get himself out of his own death penalty) and a shoe print that was found (or appeared) at the crime scene "coincidentally" after the police forcibly took shoes from Robert Melson (and likely fabricated evidence to put him on the death row).

Robert Melson was not given a free attorney for his criminal appeals, and his out-of-state pro bono attorney, reportedly, screwed his appeals.

Judge Gorsuch and his court had a DISCRETION NOT to take the appeal of the State of Alabama to lift the stay imposed on Robert Melson's execution by the 11th Circuit - as the court does in 99% of cases coming for its review.

Yet, Judge Gorsuch took that case and lifted the stay imposed by the 11th Circuit, effectively killing Robert Melson and other Alabama death row inmates.

Robert Melson did not have an easy death.   Reportedly, he may have been not only innocent and framed, not only denied effective assistance of counsel by the racist "justice" system of the State of Alabama, but also may have been tortured to death - thanks to Judge Gorsuch's use of "discretion".

Gorsuch said something else in his speech at Harvard - something that gives a real insight into the mindset of Gorsuch, and other "golden boys" - and girls - who have been born with a silver spoon in their mouths and have had an easy way to the top, as Gorsuch did, because of their blue blood, the "titles of nobility" Clause of the U.S. Constitution notwithstanding.

Here it is:

So, in a country where

• the death penalty is imposed EXCLUSIVELY on indigent criminal defendants who cannot afford their own attorney;
• where the majority of people cannot afford a private attorney even at the trial level, much less at the appellate level;
• where appeals have become prohibitively expensive - because of complexity of the law CREATED by the judiciary in order to keep in business the legal elite that pays for wining-and-dining and all-expenses-paid trips for judges -

in this country, a judge of the top court, the ultimate regulator of the legal profession who CREATES the justice gap

a judge of the court that consistently refuses to hear from attorneys who were disciplined for criticism of the judiciary, thus eliminating effective advocates for the public and thus widening the justice gap -

the judge of that court, that CREATES and EXECERBATES the problem of the justice gap,

the judge who KILLS PEOPLE, whether innocent or not, whether their constitutional rights were violated or not -

the judge who rejects 99% of cases coming for ultimate review of his court,

has the audacity to claim that the scarcity of appeals means satisfaction of the litigants with how trial courts work.

And, the same judge issues a thinly veiled threat, disclosing that he "does not share" the "cynicism about the government", in other words, if you want to criticize the government (to which Gorsuch belongs, especially the courts) for the prohibited "C" word - as in "CORRUPTION" - the court "will not share" your views, the U.S. Constitution and their own precedents be damned.

Now SUCH VIEWS of a judge would cause a lot of "cynicism about the government", wouldn't they?

Common sense and 1st Amendment prevails in an attorney disciplinary case in Ohio

An appeals court in Ohio vacated sanctions against an attorney for giving the media public information about an upcoming lawsuit, correctly indicating that the lawyer had protected 1st Amendment rights to talk to the media.

Common sense in attorney discipline?

Something new.