Skip to search.

Breaking News Visit Yahoo! News for the latest.

×Close this window

jail4judges · J.A.I.L. -- The Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - A proposed law to increase the accountability of our judiciary.

The Yahoo! Groups Product Blog

Check it out!

Group Information

  • Members: 1581
  • Category: Law
  • Founded: May 20, 2000
  • Language: English
? Already a member? Sign in to Yahoo!

Yahoo! Groups Tips

Did you know...
Hear how Yahoo! Groups has changed the lives of others. Take me there.

Messages

Advanced
Messages Help
Messages 840 - 869 of 1784   Oldest  |  < Older  |  Newer >  |  Newest
Messages: Show Message Summaries Sort by Date ^  
#840 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Fri Aug 6, 2004 3:34 am
Subject: Maine JIC & Partner Go To Bat
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
 

J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                              August 5, 2004

Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L.
                           FAQs                    What?MeWarden?


Maine JIC and Her Partner/Investigator Go To Bat Against Judicial Misconduct

Written by Maine JAILer, David Deschesne
 

BIDDEFORD INVESTIGATOR FILES COMPLAINT AGAINST COURTS

By: David Deschesne

On June 22, 2004 Maine Private Investigator, Phil Castora filed a formal complaint against Maine's judicial court system to State Court Administrator, James T. Glessner.

Castora, a former York County Deputy Sheriff and Biddefored City Councilor, states, "I have been conducting an investigation, for over 10 years, into criminal conduct by bank officials in concert with city officials and others to deprive people of their life, liberty, livelihood and property, all with the approval of the judges in York County courts in denying citizens their right to due process of law and jury trials. Innocent citizens have been crucified by York County judges, maliciously prosecuted by corrupt York County's District Attorney and due to the recent judicial misconduct of York County Superior Court Judge Arthur Brennan and Maine Supreme Court Justice Leigh Saufley, I am their recent target." Castora goes on to say in his letter to Glessner, "I am not going to be ridiculed by any judge, lawyer, or shady individuals because judges refuse to uphold the law and violate their sworn oath of office." (photo:  Phil Castora)

The letter was written because the judicial system is attacking Dottie Lafortune; an innocent, law-abiding citizen. "Dottie turned to the courts for justice, not to be persecuted for wanting to speak the truth. Her persecution continues with the rubber stamp of approval of the courts. Dottie Lafortune did nothing wrong, she is being charged with trespassing upon her own property which she owns. I have the documents to prove everything that I am stating," says Castora. While property rights and due process are protected by Maine's Constitution, District Court Judge Arthur Brennan dismissed a case brought by Lafortune against the City of Biddeford without a trial as mandated by law.

An appeal to the Maine Supreme Court was filed July 20. District Attorney Mark Lawrence intends to prosecute Lafortune for a crime that she did not commit. "If anyone should be prosecuted, it's Mark Lawrence for Misprision of Felony. But the cover up continues with him," says Castora. He goes on to say, "With the documents that I have, I challenge Mark Lawrence to prove me wrong. I want the entire State of Maine to know what kind of District Attorney we have in York County."

Castora sent copies of his letter along with a package of documents supporting his claim of judicial misconduct, to Senator Peggy Pendleton, Senate Chair of the Judiciary Committee, with copies to Maine State Representatives William Norbert, Thomas Bull, Debrah Simpson, Philip Bennett Jr., Stan Gerzofsky, Janet Mills, Roger Sherman, Roderick Carr, Brian Duprey, Joan Bryant-Deschenes, and Donna Loring, and Senators Chandler Woodcock and Mary Cathcart who are members of the Judiciary Committee. Cathcart returned her package to Castora unopened. To date, Castora has received no reply from either Court Administrator Glessner, or any of the elected officials he forwarded his complaint to.

From this bad nightmare, good will come to the people of Maine. With the threat of higher taxes and the possibility of other peoples' home being taken from them, Ms. Lafortune will pursue the abolishment of Maine's unconstitutional Automatic Foreclosure statute where cities can just take peoples' properties from them without just compensation, or propose a city ordinance which forbids the taking of peoples' property. Property rights are as sacred as free speech rights and neither must ever be taken from anyone again. Len Harrison, of Black Cat Media, and Tito Abao, both from San Francisco were in Biddeford last month interviewing and filming Dottie for a "documentary/political satire" they are producing. They are exploring how government fails to serve the people and the subject of their interview was Dottie. The filmmakers plan to release the film the first of next year which may end up in Cannes, said Abao, referring to the international film festival.

There is currently a movement underway in the United States to pass a judicial accountability law at the State level, which will hold judges legally responsible for upholding the law, and allow for their removal by the citizenry in the event they violate the trust instilled in them by their office. More information on the Judicial Accountability Initiative Law can be obtained by going to www.jail4judges.org

Contact Dottie LaFortune and Phil Castora at pcastora@...

On behalf of National J.A.I.L., thanks to Phil for sending us this article and for standing up strong for justice against this tyrannical force. We admire your and Dottie's tenacity under such trying circumstances. Congratulations to both of you-- you both set the kind of examples for which we're thankful and proud to have as J.A.I.L. leadership. We applaud you greatly! (Also thanks to JAILer David Deschesne for writing this great article.)
-Ron and Barbie


J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
JAIL is making inroads into Congress for federal accountability!
E-Groups sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Donate offerings to J.A.I.L., P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603

"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><

 


#841 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Mon Aug 9, 2004 8:35 am
Subject: J.A.I.L. Gives Us More Than Just Hope!
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. Gives Us
More Than Just Hope!
(Exchange Between JAILers Wornock, Arkansas & Stark, CA.)
 
----- Original Message -----
From: D Wornock
Sent: Saturday, August 07, 2004 2:30 AM
 
Angela Stark,
 
I read subject e-mail; it seems that judicial corruption is unending.  From what I have been reading the last couple of years, I have concluded that, except for non-government issues like private contracts, it is not possible to get justice in the courts.  I have almost concluded that, should I ever be charged with a crime or have a dispute with the government, my best course of action would be to talk to them and meekly ask, "What is the best you can do for me?" and accept it, no matter how unjust.  That it would be silly to waste money on an attorney, except for the above negotiations, because justice in the courts would be impossible.  I am not certain I would do that; but, considering how the courts work, it may be the best course of action
 
The media is no help because they support the courts by being selective in what they publish.  I am not even sure who is in control.  Sometime, I suspect it is a few very powerful people that own the media and select through what and how they publish who gets appointed and elected.
 
Voting will not help because the media tells people who to vote for or people will just vote a straight ticket.  And, even if that is not so, there are so many elected offices and candidates that most people don't have a clue as to what they are getting, nor are they willing to take the time to learn.
 
Passing new laws will not help when those in power get to say what they mean.
 
That is the reason I support the Judicial Accountability Initiative Law (JAIL).  Although, I am not sure those in power would ever allow it to become law.  I have read JAIL and it is the only force that is not under government control.  Normal, Grand Juries will not work because they are selected and controlled by the judges and prosecutors.
 
JAIL should work, and may be the only possible solution to judicial corruption, because the JAIL grand juries are randomly selected without any input or control by government.  That makes them independent of government selection and control.  The JAIL grand jurors will investigate because it is their job for which they are well paid.  Further, their terms expire before they become jaded. 
 
However, if JAIL should be enacted, my concern is that, although JAIL requires selection by lottery, if the government runs the lottery then it may not be a true lottery allowing the government to hand pick the so called lottery selections.  As you can see, where government is concerned, I believe, if evil is possible, government will find a way.  Do you have any comment regarding my concern?
 
In any event, I am a supporter of JAIL.
 
Sincerely,
DC Wornock
Little Rock, Arkansas
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, August 07, 2004 3:14 AM
 
J.A.I.L. gives us more than just hope. The passage of J.A.I.L. in every state, will be the closest thing to a guarantee that there will be JUSTICE for ALL!~>  http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
 
We have to start picking up the momentum folks. I'm sure you are aware of the "dark nature" of the present administration (Dems and Reps) and the dire course they are on. Dragging us into the darkness along with them. Forcing us into a hateful place, a place where we don't fit in and certainly don't belong. It's foreign to everything we've been raised to believe in.  Where is the goodness?
 
The government thinks they can get away this via their buddies in the judiciary. Passing laws by decision behind closed doors, giving approval to the most criminal actions against innocent people. And I'm not talking about terrorists either. I'm talking about us. Americans. Are you going to just stand by and let them get away with this? It has to STOP! It's only going to stop when WE make the judiciary accountable for upholding their oath. They will need to think twice about making erroneous decisions.  Or, else they are OUT!
 
Take charge of your individuality. No one is going to take care of you, but you. You, and me and all of us together, we that long for the truth and justice that we've not seen for a long while, we can make it happen. We are the real strength of this country, together, and not the government. Let's use what we have to work with, to make it happen.
 
J.A.I.L. is it!
 
J.A.I.L. is the gateway to achieving justice for all, and the door is open so come on in. Everyone has to get in on this, to make it happen. Even if you just display the bumper sticker. The more folks are exposed to it, the better our odds of achieving our goal.
 
The government seems to be falling faster, denying freedom of speech rights and right to petition for redress of grievances and all the rest, closing off the possibilities of us ever having our country back, back to that glorious status that she had not so long ago. If you desire an America that represents Unity for Liberty and Justice for All, I strongly urge you to get on-board and support the J.A.I.L. mission. Judicial accountability should be at the top of the Tax-Honesty advocate/activist's priority list. For Justice. Justice for all. Not just a few. But it's up to us ALL to fight for it.
 
Join the J.A.I.L. chapter in your state now. Not tomorrow. Now. Please.
 
God Bless America,
but the evil ones taking her into darkness, be damned!
 
Angela
J.A.I.L. Member Los Angeles/Culver City Chapter
 
Irwin Schiff News

#842 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Thu Aug 12, 2004 12:03 am
Subject: Appellate Court Rules Against City Misconduct
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                          August 11, 2004
 
Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L.
                           FAQs                    What?MeWarden?
 
Appellate Court Rules Against City Misconduct
 
A J.A.I.L. subscriber, Pastor Robert (Roby) Roberson of Wenatchee WA. is one of a few victims of corruption who can praise the ruling of a court in his favor. He sent J.A.I.L. the below opinion written by The Wenatchee World newspaper and a report on the case itself. We're happy for Pastor Roby, but we remind everyone that an occasional honest court decision does not eliminate the need for J.A.I.L. to be in place nevertheless-- to keep judges honest!
 
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, August 07, 2004 7:49 PM
Subject: Re: Ignorance Justifies Dysfunction

(Quoting from our recent JNJ):
1. First, JAILers must "act in an orderly manner to dismantle [public] ignorance" by educating the people of the root problem (judicial corruption).
 
2. Then, J.A.I.L. (when in effect) will "reverse the dysfunction [of government] to reconstruct Liberty and [Security] from government [intrusion] to achieve Happiness and Prosperity, to be Free, and to Live Free from tyranny, oppression and usurpation."  (It is our DUTY to... provide new guards for [our] future security. -Declaration of Independence). 
___________________________________________
 
(Pastor Roby): How's this for a big gain? We are working at taking them down. Stay tuned
 

The following is the opinion of The Wenatchee World and its Editorial Board: Editor and Publisher Rufus Woods, Managing Editor Gary Jasinek and Editorial Page Editor Tracy Warner.

Once again a court in high standing has shamed the city of Wenatchee for deplorable conduct in the wake of the infamous 1994-95 child sex-ring cases. The state Court of Appeals upheld more than $700,000 in penalties against the city for withholding key evidence in a civil rights lawsuit brought by the Rev. Robert "Roby" Roberson and others.

We would not presume to give the city's attorneys advice, but should say that local citizens must be growing weary of the repeated disgrace brought by the mistakes of its government, and by attempts to cover up those mistakes. The acts that brought this fine are particularly galling. Prior to a previous trial, the city was ordered to hand over the personnel records of Detective Bob Perez, the chief investigator whose conduct is the focus of the lawsuits. It delivered most of the records, but overlooked a few, which coincidentally contained the information most likely to damage the city's case. Withheld were medical files that may have indicated Perez suffered from mental disabilities, and pre-employment screening files that included a polygraph test. Spokane Superior Court Judge Michael Donohue, who assessed the fine last year, said he thought the city withheld the information deliberately, and that it would have had a significant impact on the trial's outcome.

So, while the city was on trial for abusing the justice system, it was abusing the justice system. The appeals court agreed that the city's protestations to the contrary were "without merit." The city's offense voided the result of a 13-week trial. Whatever your opinion of the merits of the multiple sex-ring lawsuits still pending against this city, it is difficult to argue that this kind of action does not deserve sanction.

Of course, the fine is potentially only the beginning. Because of the city's offense there will be a new trial in the lawsuit. The defendants seeks tens of millions in damages. Barring an unlikely settlement, all this evidence, including the evidence in those missing files, will be bared anew.

It shows, if nothing else, the lasting effect of a single mistake. A decade ago the city's police chief had an opportunity to take Perez off these investigations, when his unsuitability should have been clear and the legal dangers obvious. Had that simple move taken place, chances are good no one would be discussing these cases now.

More mistakes followed, though, and now we have no idea how much the aftermath of this fiasco will cost the city. It is clear that after a decade the end of the legal process is nowhere in sight. It would be best for the city and its battered reputation not to do anything more to prolong it.

  *************************************

The Wenatchee World

   A1 Story - Wednesday - August 4, 2004
Sex-abuse case to be retried, court rules: City of Wenatchee ordered to pay $718,000

WENATCHEE — The state Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court decision restoring a major civil rights lawsuit against the city of Wenatchee over how the 1994-95 child sex-abuse investigations were handled and ordering the city to pay more than $700,000 in penalties.

The state court ruled Tuesday that Spokane County Superior Court Judge Michael Donohue did not err when he fined the city for withholding employment records of former Wenatchee Police Detective Bob Perez in lawsuits stemming from the cases. The records indicated Perez was suffering from a serious mental disability at the time he was conducting the investigations, attorneys have said in court.

Donohue also was justified in vacating two earlier jury verdicts, and allowing a new civil rights trial to be brought by East Wenatchee Pastor Robert “Roby” Roberson, Honnah Sims of Malaga and other co-plaintiffs. The ruling also restores Perez and former Wenatchee Police Chief Ken Badgley as defendants.

According to attorneys representing Roberson, about $125,000 in interest could be tacked onto the $718,000 Donohue levied against the city in January 2003.

“We’re very pleased with the decision,” said Auburn attorney Tyler Firkins, who represents Roberson, Sims, Donna Rodriguez, and their families.

“We believe that the Court of Appeals strongly stated and agreed with Judge Donohue that the city intentionally withheld documents in violation of the judge’s orders of discovery. We feel the plaintiffs have been vindicated by this decision,” he said.

In a 13-week trial held in 1998, a King County jury found the city and other defendants did not violate the civil rights of Roberson, Sims and the others. Plaintiffs had sought $60 million in damages. In 2001, a Spokane County jury found the city was negligent in the investigation of Roberson and his wife, Connie, but didn’t award any damages.

In his ruling last year, Donohue threw out the earlier verdicts and found Perez’s records were intentionally withheld from the court and Roberson’s attorneys by the city. The judge said the records were of great importance and could have changed the case’s direction. The documents included results of a pre-employment polygraph test and separate medical and state Department of Employment Security files. Police officials also expressed concerns about Perez’s fitness for duty. The records surfaced in 2002 in a separate case.

The city argued that it did not intentionally withhold the information, and that the action did not hurt the plaintiffs’ case during the trials.

But the state appellate court ruled Tuesday the city’s argument “is without merit,” the violation was “substantial,” and the withheld files were “material to the plaintiffs’ fair presentation of their case at the time of trial.”

The state appellate court, consisting of judges Frank L. Kurtz, Dennis Sweeney and Kenneth Kato, wrote that “a new trial was the appropriate sanction for the city’s willful failure to comply” with a court order to turn over the documents.

The appellate judges also ruled that Perez and Badgley could still be held as parties to the lawsuit, and thus liable for damages. The two had been dismissed from personal liability during the two earlier civil trials.

The city has 20 days to petition the appellate court to review Tuesday’s decision, or appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court.

The city’s attorney, Patrick McMahon, said city officials have not yet reviewed the decision or decided how to proceed.

“At this stage we don’t agree with the decision,” he said. “But we’ll sit down and see what’s the appropriate action to take.”

Asked whether he thought the city might try to settle the case out of court before another trial could begin, Firkins said, “We haven’t had terrific luck in that regard, so we don’t hold out any hope of that happening.”

The 1994-95 investigations led to the felony convictions of 25 people in Wenatchee and East Wenatchee. Since then, 18 people have had their convictions overturned or accepted plea bargains to lesser charges. Four served out their sentences and three received suspended sentences.

Roberson, his wife, Sims, and Rodriguez were never convicted of any sex crimes.

Michelle Partridge can be reached at 664-7152 or by e-mail at partridge@...

 

 

 


 

Sex-

 
J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><

#843 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Sat Aug 14, 2004 1:43 pm
Subject: **Great Day For Property Rights**
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                           August 14, 2004
 
Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L. 
                          FAQs                    What?MeWarden?
 
Great Day For Property Rights
Eminent Domain Abuse Halted
 
From: "Julie Smithson" <propertyrights@...>
July 31, 2004
Landmark Eminent Domain Abuse Decision [UNANIMOUS!] - Michigan Supreme Court Halts Eminent Domain For "Economic Development": Court States Poletown Was "Erroneous"
"We overrule Poletown," the Court wrote, "in order to vindicate our constitution, protect the people's property rights and preserve the legitimacy of the judicial branch as the expositor, not creator, of fundamental law."

Justice Robert Young [Jr.], who wrote the lead opinion, called the 1981 case allowing Detroit's Poletown neighborhood to be cleared for a GM plant a "radical departure from fundamental constitutional principles."

"It was a terrible mistake. Now, the Michigan Supreme Court has restored the rights of all Michiganders to keep their homes and businesses, even if another, politically connected private business wants them. This is a great day for property rights nationwide."

July 31, 2004
By John Kramer
The Institute for Justice
http://www.IJ.org

Washington, D.C. - In a case with nationwide implications to halt the abuse of eminent domain, the Michigan Supreme Court last night reversed its infamous Poletown decision, which had allowed the condemnation of private property for so-called "economic development."

In a unanimous decision in County of Wayne v. Hathcock, issued at 9:30 p.m. on Friday, July 30, the Court decisively rejected the notion that "a private entity's pursuit of profit was a 'public use' for constitutional takings purposes simply because one entity's profit maximization contributed to the health of the general economy."

In the 1981 Poletown decision, the Michigan Supreme Court allowed the City of Detroit to bulldoze an entire neighborhood, complete with more than 1,000 residences, 600 businesses, and numerous churches, in order to give the property to General Motors for an auto plant.

That case set the precedent, both in Michigan and across the country, for widespread abuse of the power of eminent domain.

It sent the signal that courts would not interfere, no matter how private the purpose of the taking.

But in Hathcock, the Court called Poletown a "radical departure from fundamental constitutional principles."

"We overrule Poletown," the Court wrote, "in order to vindicate our constitution, protect the people's property rights and preserve the legitimacy of the judicial branch as the expositor, not creator, of fundamental law."

According to Dana Berliner, an attorney with the Institute for Justice http://www.ij.org, which filed a brief in the Hathcock case, the case has profound nationwide implications.

"Poletown was the first major case allowing condemnation of areas in the name of jobs and taxes. It is cited in every property textbook in the country. The Court literally rewrote the book with this decision," said Berliner.

The use of eminent domain for private development has become increasingly common throughout the United States. According to Public Power, Private Gain, authored by Berliner, there were 10,000 properties either taken or threatened with eminent domain for private parties in the U.S. between 1998 and 2002.

And state supreme courts from Nevada to Connecticut have relied on the Poletown decision when upholding the condemnation of land for private parties.

"The Court made an exception in Poletown because of the supposedly enormous benefits of the General Motors plant," said Berliner. "Instead, the exception swallowed the rule."

The application of Poletown in Michigan produced disastrous results.

Michigan courts tended to forbid small condemnations for private parties, but when the city and developer claimed the project would have a significant economic impact, lower courts upheld the takings.

"Poletown gave cities and developers an incentive to make outrageous, wildly inflated predictions [regarding] the impact of the project," explained Scott Bullock, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice.

"It was the worst possible incentive. The Poletown project itself also didn't come close to living up to the promises. In all likelihood, it destroyed more jobs than it created."

The Michigan Supreme Court also decided another important eminent domain case, although one that has received less attention.
In Detroit Wayne County Stadium Authority v. Alibri, the Stadium Authority told Frida Alibri it would condemn her property if she didn't sell "voluntarily."

It promised, among other things, that it would not be given to a private party. After the sale, it was indeed transferred to a private corporation.

At that point, Alibri sought to get her property back, because the Stadium Authority didn't have the power to condemn for that purpose, and it had told her that the purpose was not transfer to a private party.

The trial court agreed with Alibri; the appellate court, however, agreed with the Stadium Authority.

The Michigan Supreme Court returned the property to its rightful owner -- Mrs. Alibri.

"Most people end up selling under threat of eminent domain, rather than spend years in court fighting it, so these two decisions truly prevent the government from taking property for private parties," according to Berliner.

"The government can't convince people to sell by telling them their property will be used for a public use, then turn around and transfer it to a private party."

"The Poletown decision gave cities the green light to take property for private parties," said Chip Mellor, president and general counsel of the Institute for Justice.

"It was a terrible mistake. Now, the Michigan Supreme Court has restored the rights of all Michiganders to keep their homes and businesses, even if another, politically connected private business wants them. This is a great day for property rights nationwide."

The Institute for Justice and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy filed a friend of the court brief in the Hathcock case -- co-authored by George Mason Law School professor Ilya Somin and Institute for Justice Senior Attorney Dana Berlinner -- discussing the disastrous effects of the Poletown decision in Michigan and the country, as well as the failure of the Poletown project to live up to its promises.

The Institute for Justice also filed a friend of the court brief in the Alibri case.

The Hathcock decision is available at:
http://courts.michigan.gov/supremecourt/Clerk/Opinions-03-04-Term/124070.pdf

Additional, related reading:

Front Row, Left to Right: Justice Robert P. Young, Chief Justice Maura D. Corrigan, Justice Stephen J. Markman

Back Row, Left to Right: Justice Marilyn Kelly, Justice Michael F. Cavanagh, Justice Clifford W. Taylor, Justice Elizabeth A. Weaver
http://courts.michigan.gov/supremecourt/graphics/MSCBench-web.jpg

Michigan Supreme Court
P.O. Box 30052
Lansing, Michigan 48909

Chief Justice's Office: 517-373-0126
Clerk's Office: 517-373-0120
http://www.courts.michigan.gov/supremecourt 

Biography of Justice Robert P. Young, Jr.
http://courts.michigan.gov/supremecourt/graphics/young.jpg

Justice Young, of Detroit, received a bachelor’s degree and graduated cum laude from Harvard College in 1974, and a Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School in 1977. He practiced law for 15 years with the law firm of Dickinson, Wright, Moon, Van Dusen & Freeman, then in 1992 was named vice president, corporate secretary and general counsel of AAA Michigan. He has served as a member of the Michigan Civil Service Commission and the Central Michigan University Board of Trustees. Justice Young was appointed to the Michigan Court of Appeals, 1st District, in 1995 and elected to the court in 1996. He was appointed to the Michigan Supreme Court by Governor Engler, effective January 3, 1999, to fill the seat vacated by Chief Justice Conrad L. Mallett, Jr. In 2000, he was elected to complete the term, which expired January 1, 2003. He was reelected in 2002. Justice Young's term expires January 1, 2011.

http://courts.michigan.gov/supremecourt/AboutCourt/biography.htm

=====

Poletown seizures are ruled unlawful - [Michigan] State Supreme Court restricts government rights to take land

July 31, 2004
By John Gallagher, [Detroit] Free Press Business Writer
gallagher@... or 313-222-5173
Detroit Free Press
Detroit, Michigan
http://www.freep.com

To submit a Letter to the Editor: letters@... 

Reversing more than two decades of land-use law, the Michigan Supreme Court late Friday overturned its own landmark 1981 Poletown decision and sharply restricted governments such as Detroit and Wayne County from seizing private land to give to other private users.

The unanimous decision is a decisive victory for property owners who object to the government seizing their land, only to give it to another private owner to build stadiums, theaters, factories, housing subdivisions and other economic development projects the government deems worthwhile.

Detroit and other municipalities have used the Poletown standard for years to justify land seizures as a way to 'revitalize'.

In the decision, the court rejected Wayne County's attempt to seize private land south of Metro Airport for its proposed Pinnacle Aeropark high-technology park.

The Pinnacle project, announced in 1999, is geared to making Wayne County a hub of international high-tech development linked to the airport.
Backers of the Poletown standard warned that Friday's decision could be a "significant blow" to revitalization efforts in blighted cities like Detroit.

John Mogk, a professor of land-use law at Wayne State University, said Detroit needs to use its powers, known as eminent domain, to seize land to clear large tracts for new economic development, including retail centers, office parks and residential projects.

John Mogk
http://www.habitatdetroit.org/what/jcwp2005/images/martaezjcwp1mod.jpg

"Any limitation on the power of eminent domain will reduce the chances of the city accomplishing those kind of projects," Mogk said. "No other city with which Detroit competes has such limitations placed upon its ability to acquire tracts of land for future development."

In the original Poletown ruling, the court allowed the City of Detroit to seize private homes and businesses on the east side so General Motors Corp. could build an auto factory.

The bitterly-contested seizures and the court's ruling in favor of the city had national implications and led to similar rulings elsewhere.

Thousands of homes and dozens of churches and private businesses were bulldozed in Detroit's former Poletown neighborhood to make way for the GM plant.

Of 1,300 acres needed for Wayne County's Pinnacle project, property owners representing about 2 percent of the land have refused to sell.

They have resisted, in part, because much of the project would later be turned over to private developers and other entities.

In Friday's decision, known as Wayne County v. Hathcock after one of the landowners in the case, the court ruled that the sweeping powers to seize private land granted in the 1981 Poletown case violated the state's 1963 constitution.

"The county is without constitutional authority to condemn the properties," the court's opinion read.

All seven justices voted to overturn Poletown, although three dissented over some technical aspects that do not affect the main ruling.

Justice Robert Young, who wrote the lead opinion, called the 1981 case allowing Detroit's Poletown neighborhood to be cleared for a GM plant a "radical departure from fundamental constitutional principles."

"We overrule Poletown," Young wrote, "in order to vindicate our constitution, protect the people's property rights and preserve the legitimacy of the judicial branch as the expositor, not creator, of fundamental law."

Alan Ackerman, one of the attorneys who represented landowners in the case, said he was "elated at the recognition that it is a government of limited powers. The Constitution did not contemplate that the government would do everything for everybody."

But a spokesman for Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano issued a statement saying that "the Michigan Supreme Court's decision to change Michigan law and divest municipalities from their ability to create jobs for their citizens is a disappointment not only for Wayne County, but for all of the Michigan communities struggling to address these difficult economic times."

The court said its ruling covers any condemnation cases now being heard before lower courts in which Poletown issues have been raised.

The former owners of Poletown properties that were seized to clear land for the GM plant are not affected by the decision.

The decision won't stop all uses of eminent domain.

All sides agreed [that] governments can still take private land for traditional uses such as slum clearance or for a private use deemed essential to the public good, such as to build a regulated public utility.

And the government's ability to seize land for governmental purposes such as building schools and roads was never in question.

What the decision [means] is that the cost of land just went up for municipalities trying to accomplish economic development.

Now that governments can no longer use the threat of seizure, private owners and speculators could demand higher prices to get out of the way of projects that government leaders deem essential.

http://www.freep.com/news/mich/land31_20040731.htm
 
Sent to J.A.I.L. by Spence Kerrigan kc5ezp@...  Thank you.


J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><



#844 From: "jail4judges" <jail4judges@...>
Date: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:40 am
Subject: * * Engaging The Judiciary of South Dakota * *
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                          September 13, 2004


Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L.                           FAQs                    What?MeWarden?


Engaging The Judiciary of South Dakota

 

It seems as though government periodically seeks to test the gullibility and stupidity of the public to see how far government can go. All they have to do is give their cause some well-sounding title, accompanied by telling the public that the particular act offered to them is good for them. For instance, who could find themselves in opposition to 'The U.S. Patriot Act." After all, it's for your safety!

 

So, what is the government trying to promote this time in the name of being good to us? Ah, yes -- this time it is the benefits of our voting away our right to vote in South Dakota. After all, aren't you "sick and tired" of all them political ads, and those counter-attacks in which candidates expose each other. No problem. The South Dakota Legislature proposes Amendment A sparing the South Dakotans the burden of having to go to the polls to vote on their favorite candidate -- at least as far as judges are concerned. While they make this opportunity look as sweet as honey, it is full of stingers, those being namely distancing accountability further from the people. But that's okay, the people won't catch on. (5% of the people make things happen, 15% watch things happen, and 80% don't know what's happening.)

 

First off, judges, as it is now, are the only branch of government in South Dakota that must face the voters every eight years. Not even the governor of the state, nor the legislators can enjoy distancing themselves from the voters for eight years. And consider by way of comparison, the President of the United States faces the voters every four years, a Congressman every two years, and U.S. Senators every six years.

 

Has it ever dawned upon you that it is always the judges who hold all the cards in government -- namely judicial immunity, unaccountability to inquisition, highest order of privacy, greatest distance from the public, voter obscurity, etc., etc.? Is this just a coincidence? Absolutely not, it is planned this way! This is because it is the judges who control the entire direction of society against the people, and who defend all arbitrary government actions, and who keeps things just the way they are. It is the judges who are the ballast of all corruption in government. What is a ship without a ballast? It would otherwise face being tossed to and fro, and in strong diverse wind, may even sink the ship.

 

To help sweeten the pottage of Amendment A, we are told in the Rapid City Journal article below that the recommendations for judges will be performed by a bipartisan Judicial Qualifications Commission. If you really believe this Judicial Qualifications Commission is bipartisan, I have some ocean-front property to sell you South Dakota. These type commissions exist in all fifty states, and are known, without exception, to be very political. Their unofficial "duty" is to cover for complaints against all corrupt judges within the state, but to keep the judges from crossing over the line of becoming an overwhelming public embarrassment to the judicial profession. After all, one can only dilute the milk so much before the public realizes they are purchasing watered milk.

 

Further, the Rapid City article states: "A cynical electorate expects some politicians are going to wallow in the mud and try to deceive them. But what would be the effect if judges were to behave similarly?"  God forbid that we should have sunshine illuminating the judges! All vermin tend to flourish in darkness, under rocks and out of sight.

 

J.A.I.L., which stands for Judicial Accountability Initiative Law, is planned to be placed on the South Dakota ballot for 2006. This measure will place the focus upon accountability of the judges of South Dakota, and will hold judges to their Oaths of Office to protect and defend both the Constitution of the United States and of the State of South Dakota, and to honor all laws in pursuance thereof. It will deter judicial activism (laws issued from the bench), and all political influence. Judges will no longer be able to comfortably cover for government corruption, and the people will start to see the restoration of their rights like they have never seen before.

 

J.A.I.L. will restore the sense of justice to all, and reduce the dependence upon attorneys in litigation before judges. People will feel more free to produce and prosper for their own benefit and for that of their children and their children's children. More resources will be left over to spend upon one's own interests because accountability will reduce the size of government. There will be no downside to J.A.I.L.  If you care to get involved in the judicial accountability effort in South Dakota, we ask that you contact the following; State Senator Bill Napoli at (605) 348-7373, Ward 2 Alderman Sam Kooiker at skooiker@..., and Bill Stegmeier, South Dakota JIC, at rmsroll@....      

Ron Branson

 

 

http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2004/09/12/news/opinion/top/opin01.txt

 

The Rapid City Journal.com 

 

Amendment A protects courts

By The Journal Editorial Board

 

At some point, most people become sick and tired of political ads - especially those that attack an opponent. You know, "Sen. So-And-So's a crook." A cynical electorate expects some politicians are going to wallow in the mud and try to deceive them. But what would be the effect if judges were to behave similarly?

 

In South Dakota, circuit court judges face an election every eight years. Some circuit court judges win their spot in an election, but usually they are appointed by the governor following a vacancy. The elections of judges has been in place since 1921. In 1972, a constitutional amendment created the Unified Judicial System; another amendment in 1980 adopted merit selection for Supreme Court justices and interim appointments to the circuit court. Supreme Court justices face a retention election every eight years (voters cast yes or no votes on retention), while circuit court judges, whether appointed or elected, can face an opponent in a judicial election every eight years, although only about 20 percent of judges are opposed.

Now, thanks to recent U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Appeals Court decisions, the judicial landscape has changed.

 

Our system of judicial elections has worked because candidates must adhere to the South Dakota Code of Judicial Conduct during elections. Judicial candidates cannot directly solicit campaign contributions - not even knowing who has contributed - nor can they make campaign promises (e.g., "Every DUI will get the maximum sentence").

 

Our tradition of nonpartisan judicial elections may be finished after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Minnesota's canon of ethics for judicial elections in 2002 (Minnesota vs. White).

 

In response, and in an effort to keep money and special interests from influencing the judiciary, the Legislature has placed Amendment A on the 2004 ballot that would make circuit court judges subject to the same rules as Supreme Court justices. Under the amendment, applicants for circuit court vacancies would be reviewed by a seven-member, bipartisan Judicial Qualifications Commission, which would forward two or more candidates based on the merits of their qualifications to the governor, who would appoint one. This is the same process that exists now for filling Supreme Court and circuit court vacancies and is how about three-quarters of the state's 38 circuit court judges got their jobs. The amendment eliminates elections for circuit court judges, who would face instead a retention election every eight years, like Supreme Court justices. The more open the candidate review process and appointment process is, the better the public will be served.

 

7th Circuit Court Judge Janine Kern told the Journal editorial board that Minnesota vs. White inevitably will weaken an impartial judiciary and lead to judges participating in the type of electioneering that often besmirches politicians. 8th Circuit Court Judge Jerry Eckrich, who defeated a sitting judge to win his position, agreed, saying partisan judicial elections unrestrained by a canon of ethics will erode the public's respect for the courts. "Our judiciary works because the public has respect for the rule of law," he said.

 

South Dakota is one of 33 states that use merit selection for all or part of their court systems. In those states where unrestricted elections decide who sits on the bench, political ads have been used to accuse judges of corruption for accepting campaign donations, and judicial candidates are allowed to announce how they'll rule in certain type of criminal cases or accuse their opponent of making poor sentencing decisions. Without ethics rules to prevent the practice, a judge could pressure a law firm to contribute to his re-election campaign. Retention elections won't prevent groups or individuals from campaigning against a particular judge, but they also won't be able to handpick a judge to shower their money on in an election contest.

 

Opponents of the measure say it takes away the right of citizens to elect a judge. Amendment A, however, would allow voters to reject incompetent or unpopular judges through the retention process.

 

Amendment A protects our courts by requiring merit selection of judicial candidates - which is how most judges are chosen now - and allowing voters to vote yes or no in a retention election every eight years. South Dakota has altered its judiciary from time to time in its past. We believe Amendment A introduces changes that will ensure that South Dakota's court system remains independent, nonpartisan and respected.


Copyright © 2004 The Rapid City Journal
Rapid City, SD


J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><
 
 

#845 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Wed Sep 15, 2004 4:48 am
Subject: Let's Get Behind the Anti-Amendment A Campaign in South Dakota
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                     September 14, 2004
 
Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L. 
                          FAQs                    What?MeWarden?

 
Let's Get Behind the Anti-Amendment A Campaign in South Dakota
 
Bill Stegmeier, (rmsroll@...) the South Dakota JAILer-In-Chief, is rolling up his sleeves to pitch in for the Anti-Amendment A effort in South Dakota. It proposes the appointment of judges by the governor, and takes away the voters' right to elect judges. We must do everything we can to see that Amendment A is defeated this November. The below is presented by Bill and explains the entire issue. If anyone will go the extra mile for a cause, Bill Stegmeier will! This will be a great springboard for the South Dakota J.A.I.L. campaign next year. Let Bill know what you can do.
 
Origin of Amendment A and the new Pro/Con/ Voter Pamphlet

Friends:
 
I just received the following from Bob Newland here in South Dakota, ...  It spells out the origin of the proposed Amendment A.  Just as we suspected, Lawyers.  Lawyers infatuated over Judges!  Infatuated "Officers of the Court"!  Long live the Judges, right boys?  
 
Begin origin of "The South Dakota Judiciary Protection Act of  2004" ...er, I mean "Merit Selection of Circuit Court Judges Amendment."  ....
 
I listened to the testimony given in the legislature in 2003. It's
available online at
http://legis.state.sd.us/sessions/2003/HJR1003.htm
(click the winged icons in the right column).
House Joint Resolution 1003 (2003 Session) was sponsored by--
Representatives Michels, Cradduck, Cutler, Engels, Frost, Garnos,
Gillespie, Hanson, Hargens, Hennies, Hunhoff, Juhnke, Kroger, Lange,
LaRue, Madsen, McCaulley, McCoy, Murschel, Nesselhuf, O'Brien, Olson (Mel), Pederson (Gordon), Peterson (Bill), Peterson (Jim), Rhoden, Rounds, Sebert, Solum, Teupel, Van Norman, and Wick and Senators Bogue, Abdallah, Albers, Brown, de Hueck, Dempster, Diedrich (Larry), Duniphan, Duxbury, Earley, Jaspers, Knudson, Koetzle, Kooistra, McCracken, Moore, Olson (Ed), Reedy, Sutton (Dan), Symens, and Vitter

HJR1003 was overwhelmingly passed by the legislature (7 nays in the
Senate, none in House). The bill put a proposed amendment to Art. V Sec. 7 of the SD constitution on the ballot for 2004.

Art. 5 Sec. 7 currently reads...

§ 7.   Judicial selection.
Circuit court judges shall be elected in a nonpolitical election by the
electorate of the circuit each represents for an eight-year term.
      A vacancy, as defined by law, in the office of a Supreme Court
justice or circuit court judge, shall be filled by appointment of the
Governor from one of two or more persons nominated by the judicial
qualifications commission. The appointment to fill a vacancy of a
circuit court judge shall be for the balance of the unexpired term; and
the appointment to fill a vacancy of a Supreme Court justice shall be
subject to approval or rejection as hereinafter set forth.
      Retention of each Supreme Court justice shall, in the manner
provided by law, be subject to approval or rejection on a nonpolitical
ballot at the first general election following the expiration of three
years from the date of his appointment. Thereafter, each Supreme Court
justice shall be subject to approval or rejection in like manner every
eighth year. All incumbent Supreme Court justices at the time of the
effective date of this amendment shall be subject to a retention
election in the general election in the year in which their respective
existing terms expire.
---------------------------------------------------

If the voters elect to adopt the proposed changes in November, this is
how the section will read.

§ 7.   Judicial selection.
A vacancy, as defined by law, in the office of a Supreme Court justice
or circuit court judge, shall be filled by appointment of the Governor
from one of two or more persons nominated by the judicial qualifications
commission. The appointment to fill a vacancy of a Supreme Court justice or a circuit court judge shall be subject to approval or rejection as
hereinafter set forth.
      Retention of each Supreme Court justice or circuit court judge
shall, in the manner provided by law, be subject to approval or rejection on a nonpolitical ballot at the first general election following the expiration of three years from the date of his appointment. Thereafter, each Supreme Court justice and circuit court judge shall be subject to approval or rejection in like manner every eighth year. All incumbent Supreme Court justices and circuit court judges at the time of the effective date of this amendment shall be subject to a retention election in the general election in the year in which their respective existing terms expire. Each Supreme Court justice shall be subject to a statewide retention election and each circuit court judge shall be subject to a retention election by the electorate
of the circuit the judge represents.
==============================

In a nutshell, the amendment would remove running for office directly as
an option for an aspirant to a judgeship. He/she would have to apply for
the position whenever a vacancy occurs, then undergo a background check performed by the Judicial Qualifications Committee (JQC) and the Div. of Crim. Investigation (DCI), and be submitted by the JQC to the governor on a list of at least three names. The governor can choose one applicant or reject all on the list. If he rejects all, the JQC repeats its procedure.

Instead of facing opponents (who might point out to the voters good
reasons to not re-elect an incumbent), judicial appointees would only
have to face retention votes (no opponent) every eight years. If one
were to be removed by the voters, he/she would be replaced by another
appointee.
==============================

In House State Affairs, where testimony was first taken on the bill, the
following people testified in favor of putting the issue on the ballot.
Rep. Matt Michels;
Steve Zinter, Supreme Court Judge;
Curt Jones, Judicial Qualifications Committee, Britton;
Mike Braley, Judicial Qualifications Committee, Parkston;
Brent Wilbur, Governor's Office;
Thomas Barnett Jr., State Bar Of SD

Pretty much the same people appeared as proponents in Senate State Affairs.
 
Proponents' arguments were centered around a couple of political TV ads run in Ohio and Illinois from a recent election. The ads featured
attacks on judicial candidates for having taken large sums of campaign
money from lawyers, insurance companies, etc.

Proponents testified that recent Supreme Court decisions have gutted the
Canon of Judicial Ethics in So. Dak., allowing candidates for judgeships
to make statements regarding how they would rule on certain matters of
law in case that could very well reach their courtrooms. They would also
be allowed to solicit campaign money.

All proponents stated that this had not been a problem in So. Dak., but
that it probably would be, given the Supreme Court rulings, and given
that all circuit judges in the state are up for re-election in 2006.

Proponents praised the level of quality of the background checks and the
process of the JQC, which has recommended SD Supreme Court justice
nominees to the governor since 1979. "That process has worked really
well," they said.

No opponents testified at any step along the legislative process.

That, I believe is a pretty good summary of what's happened so far.
=============================

Our group, the Citizens for Open Government (COG, until we come up with a better name, I guess), believes that the proposed amendment reduces, removes, the voters' influence over one leg of government; further, it removes the "advise and consent" options from both the legislature and the people with regard to that leg of government.
For me, personally, this issue presents a choice similar to, "Would I
like to have you chop off my right index finger, or my left?"

On one hand, the current system sucks. Almost nobody knows what judges do. Fewer know why. Most voters couldn't name a local judge. Most voters wouldn't recognize a constitutional violation if they searched their underwear drawer (which happens regularly). Most SD judges seem not to be able to recognize them, either.

On the other hand, passage of "A" would mean that the People of So. Dak. have lost forever their ability to affect the direction their courts
take. They will have given it to a group of about ten people, who are at
least as subject to the temptations of special interest groups as are
those they are trying to shield from those temptations.

That having been said, I think it's better to know your local elected
judge is in the pockets of the insurance lawyers, than to simply suspect
it about the members of the JQC, the State Bar, and the governor.
 
End origin of Amendment A article.
 
And now, visit the following link to read the much awaited Amendment A Pro/Con arguments, which by law, must be made available to the voters.
 
 
On a sad note, I see my "friend" Greg Belfrage of talk radio KELO AM here in Sioux Falls has so far chosen to remain silent on Amendment A.  I really thought he'd hammer this one.  Do you suppose Greg sought out advice from his lawyer/legislator chums at the state capitol who may have advised Greg to lay low on this one?  Well, maybe it's time to put a little healthy shame on Greg.  From here on out, anything I say or write about Amendment A will mention Greg's timidness.  Hey, even if he agrees with the Pharisees, he should still open the issue up to discussion on his show, not crawl into a hole and hope the issue fades away.  What say you Greg?
 
But even more sad is that even the local liberal rag "The Argus Liar", (oops, I meant to say Leader, Argus Leader) whose motto should be "All the news that fits our liberal bias is fit to print", also has no opinion on the proposed Amendment A.  Well what a surprise!  
 
It appears to me, at least at the present time, the only way to raise awareness to this blatant power grab may very well be by taking it directly to the street. 
 
We will need yard signs, car window signs, and paid spots in the newspapers. We will need to put up flyers at every bulletin board in every town, including the local grain elevators and coffee shops, Get n'Go's, Gas Stops, Food N Fuel and what have you. Time to crank out letters to the Editors.  Let's hit every possible SD paper.  Repeatedly.
 
Time to spread the word "Vote No on Amendment A" wherever we go, including church. Print up business cards explaining what the lawyers and judges are up to.  (pass these cards out like they were candy.  Get your friends to pass them out.  Leave a few laying on counters, restaurant tables, and anywhere else you can think of.
 
We need more judicial accountability, not less.  We The Citizens, We The People.... MUST NOT LOSE our say in who sits in judgment of us.
 
I myself have three large company trucks.  These trucks will be movable billboards, displaying  professionally made signs around Sioux Falls and the surrounding area.  Anywhere there is something going on, people will see my "Stop the Judicial Power Grabbers.  Vote No on Amendment A" signs.
 
Even a mini-van can be used as a mobile billboard.  How 'bout all those pickups.  A 4'x8" piece of plywood, painted on both sides and supported upright in the back of your pickup works great as a mobile billboard.
 
And, we need a web site so people can get more info on why Amendment A stinks. Anyone up to it?  I would, but I am between webmasters.
 
Please pass this around.  Let's brainstorm.  Screw the establishment media.  We can do this without them.
 
Let's get busy.
Bill Stegmeier
(South Dakota J.I.C.)
 
 
Bill corresponds to Sam Kooiker, S.D. Alderman
 
Let the judges' oily hides cure in the sunshine of voter scrutiny!
 
Sam,
 
....
What the hay, I'll just forward this email to Greg (Belfrage)! [talk show host]   (Come on Greg, if you ARE for Amendment A, which is fine, why not convince your audience of it's merits?  p.s Greg, your "Daily Download" http://www.keloam.com/shows.php?show=afternoon is over a week old.  Great time to update it with a discussion of Amendment A, don't you think? )
 
With the Rapid City Journal coming out in favor of Amendment A, the Argus sure to follow, and with the almost unanimous support in the Good ol' Boy's Club legislature, I think we can now see what's going on here.  The judges don't want a no-holds-barred campaign environment.  Amendment A would avoid that, and as an added bonus give the incumbents an extra layer of immunity from the unwashed. 
 
One must also keep in mind, the judge's troopie-dupes, the lawyers, (legislators) are all "officers of the court".  Sure, they come on to the public like they are independent and care only for their clients' well being, but the fact of the matter is they must lick the judges' feet or they are out of a job. The voters matter little to these lawyer slimeballs. If the judges want to be appointed instead of elected, then that will be what the lawyers want too. They owe their allegiance to the courts.
 
It's very revealing what the two judges interviewed by the RCJ said about what could happen if Amendment A is not passed. Basically, they admit the likelihood of their  black-robed brothers sinking to their lowest moral denominator if given free reign during their election campaigns! 
 
I say let the games begin. Let the sunlight of voter scrutiny warm their oily hides. They are worried that certain members of their profession will not be able to control their lust for judicial control, and without Amendment A will resort to finger pointing to gain votes.  
 
"Well, we can't have that sort of behavior from such an esteemed institution as the Judiciary, can we?  My God, one lawyer stabbing another in the back,  just to get elected?  How will we maintain the public's unquestioning respect once they see us for who we are?  We must at any cost protect our phony baloney public perception of "Justice for All."
 
Ri-i-ight.
 
I for one enjoy finger pointing.  So let them expose each other.  Then let the people decide at the ballot box.
 
Bill


J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, North Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><

 

#846 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Thu Sep 16, 2004 1:34 am
Subject: * *We Must Focus On SPECIFIC Lawyers, i.e., JUDGES* *
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                     September 15, 2004
 
Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L.                           FAQs                    What?MeWarden?

 
We Must Focus On SPECIFIC Lawyers, i.e., On JUDGES
 
The below article sent to our Legal Discussions Group by JOSEPHN126@... is excellent-- except for one vital factor: IT LACKS FOCUS!  We quote in our J.A.I.L. signature:  "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."  -- Henry David Thoreau.  The entire profession of "Lawyers" represents many BRANCHES of evil. Every aspect of life involves lawyers as advisors and/or legal representatives. While there are many BRANCHES of evil, there is only one ROOT from which all branches 
flourish. That one ROOT consists of one specific sect of lawyers, and that is the judiciary. Folks, that is where the People must set their focus if we are to accomplish any control over our tyrannical, unconstitutional form of government as it currently operates.  
 
Taking on all lawyers is like taking on government itself. It's too broad a field to challenge and in attempting to do so, our resources become diffused and depleted with no resolution accomplished. Rather, we have to limit our focus on the source of evil in government-- not on the entire scope of it. Track every aspect of government corruption (wrongdoing) to its ultimate source of authority. Where does the buck (pardon the pun) stop? Where does everything in controversy-- you name it-- end up?  Think, People, THINK!  Where is the end of the line-- the final backstop-- as far as redress of grievances goes? What do people say whenever they run into an unsolvable predicament--  whatever it is?  Yes, "We'll have to take it to court!" --as if court were the ultimate resolution to all controversies! Well, IS IT?? 
 
Picture a funnel, where all government alleged wrongdoing is dumped into. The top of the funnel is a wide, gaping opening to take in all claims and allegations of wrongdoing, all of which allegations and defenses are mixed in with lawyers of all kinds. They are all eventually sucked into the narrow bottom of the funnel leading to the ultimate destination-- yes, the courts where only one sect of lawyer controls-- JUDGES (including hearing officers, commissioners, magistrates, arbitrators, referees, etc. --anyone sitting in judgment of a case). And that destination includes the entire judicial system, from administrative hearings, to supposed courts "of law," to courts "in equity," to appellate courts, to state supreme courts, and to the U.S. supreme court-- whatever they may be called: admiralty courts, law merchant courts, Article I courts, Article III courts --the whole enchilada. That's where they all end up. The judicial process churns and chews it all up until the case finally, after often many years and much expense (yes-- to the various and sundry scope of lawyers), the final level of JUDGE control is reached, exhausting the process. After all the JUDGES have had their chance at chewing, where does the case go after that when it is still left without a lawful conclusion, without due process?
 
Well, under our present system of "dispute resolution," THAT'S IT!  The "Final Judgment Rule" says that a final decision is eventually reached, and after that it's "res judicata" --the subject matter cannot be adjudicated further. That would make sense in an honest judicial system. However, in our system, whenever judges don't want to be bothered with a case, any ruling they make at that point is considered a "decision" --whether or not due process is given, material facts of the case addressed, the applicable law to those facts addressed, proper court rules applied, proper procedures allowed and followed, etc. The merits (substance) of the case need not be reached under the current system for there to be a "decision" as appellate and federal courts now rule. Judges call judicial rulings of lower courts "decisions" in order to fraudulently place the taint of "finality" to the case-- such as the common judicial abuse of the Rooker-Feldman doctrine which states that a litigant may not bring a state court DECISION to federal court for further adjudication. Then the appellate JUDGES simply rubber-stamp that closeout, regardless of the fact that the merits of the case were never reached due to lack of due process. But that's the end of the line! What lawyers are responsible for that?  --only the JUDGES-- they make the final ruling and bang the gavel, "Case Dismissed!  -- Next..."  You're left high and dry, without redress! That's it!
 
According to the Declaration of Independence, the "end of the line" is the People, not government. However, we failed to include in the Constitution an enforcement provision to specifically allow the following: "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce [People's rights] under absolute despotism, it is [the People's] right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. ..."  No provision was spelled out in the Constitution for the People to exercise that DUTY.  J.A.I.L. is now here to offer that provision-- to enforce the Constitution!
 
With that as an "introduction," read the following article which, by and large, is a good article-- but understand, IT LACKS FOCUS. That lack is a vital flaw when considering how to resolve the problem of government corruption.
 
-Barbie-
 

Sent to J.A.I.L. Legal Discussions group by  JOSEPHN126@...
 
Yale Law Professor on Lawyers and Law
With our huge collective personal experience of the similarly situated, we all know that something's rotten in Denmark, big time.

Some of us are beginning to see a clear picture, at least in part, of exactly what is rotten... I'd like to offer just a handful of quotations from Fred Rodell's book Woe Unto You, Lawyers! (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939) (New York: Pageant Press, 1939) (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1940) (New York: Pageant-Poseidon 1972) (New York: Berkley Pub. Corp., 1980)

Fred Rodell (1907-1980) was a Yale Law Professor for 41 years, and authored many books and articles, among them "55 Men: The Story of the Constitution: Based on the day-by-day notes of James Madison"
(Harrisburg, New York: The Telegraph Press,1936) (Harrisburg, New York: The Telegraph Press, 1975) (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books, 1986) (Costa Mesa, California: Noontide Press, 1986)

Here are the quotations. I hope you'd give them some thought, at your leisure:
-------------------------------------

In TRIBAL TIMES, there were the medicine-men. In the Middle Ages, there were the priests. Today there are the lawyers. For every age, a group of bright boys, learned in their trade and jealous of their learning, who blend technical competence with plain and fancy hocus-pocus to make themselves masters of their fellow men. For every age, a pseudo-intellectual autocracy, guarding the tricks of its trade from the uninitiated, and running, after its own pattern, the civilization of its day.

It is the lawyers who run our civilization for us - our governments, our business, our private lives. Most legislators are lawyers; they make our laws. Most presidents, governors, commissioners, along with their advisers and brain-trusters are lawyers; they administer our laws. All the judges are lawyers; they interpret and enforce our laws. There is no separation of powers where the lawyers are concerned. There is only a concentration of all government power - in the lawyers. As the schoolboy put it, ours is "a government of lawyers, not of men."

It is not the businessmen, no matter how big, who run our economic world. Again it is the lawyers, the lawyers who "advise" and direct every time a company is formed, every time a bond or a share of stock is issued, almost every time material is to be bought or goods to be sold, every time a deal is made. The whole elaborate structure of industry and finance is a lawyer-made house. We all live in it, but the lawyers run it.

And in our private lives, we cannot buy a home or rent an apartment, we cannot get married or try to get divorced, we cannot die and leave our property to our children without calling on the lawyers to guide us. To guide us, incidentally, through a maze of confusing gestures and formalities that lawyers have created.

The legal trade, in short, is nothing but a high-class racket. It is a racket far more lucrative and more powerful and hence more dangerous than any of those minor and much-publicized rackets, such as ambulance-chasing or the regular defense of known criminals, which make up only a tiny part of the law business and against which the respectable members of the bar are always making speeches and taking action.

The legal racket knows no political or social limitations.

Furthermore, the lawyers - or at least 99 44/100 per cent of them - are not even aware that they are indulging in a racket, and would be shocked at the very mention of the idea. Once bitten by the legal bug, they lose all sense of perspective about what they are doing and how they are doing it. Like the medicine men of tribal times and the priests of the Middle Ages they actually believe in their own nonsense. This fact, of course, makes their racket all the more insidious. Consecrated fanatics are always more dangerous than conscious villains. And lawyers are fanatics indeed about the sacredness of the word-magic they call The Law.

Yet the saddest and most insidious fact about the legal racket is that the general public doesn't realize it's a racket either. Scared, befuddled, impressed and ignorant, they take what is fed them, or rather what is sold them. Only once an age do the non-lawyers get, not wise, but disgusted, and rebel. As Harold Laski is fond of putting it, in every revolution the lawyers lead the way to the guillotine or the firing squad.

It should not, however, require a revolution to rid society of lawyer-control. Nor is riddance by revolution ever likely to be a permanent solution. The American colonists had scarcely freed themselves from the nuisances of The Law by practically ostracizing the pre-Revolutionary lawyers out of their communities - a fact which is little appreciated - when a new and home-made crop of lawyers sprang up to take over the affairs of the baby nation. That crop, 150 years later, is still growing in numbers and in power.

What is really needed to put the lawyers in their places and out of the seats of the mighty is no more than a slashing of the veil of dignified mystery that now surrounds and protects The Law. If people could be made to realize how much of the vaunted majesty of The Law is a hoax and how many of the mighty processes of The Law are merely logical legerdemain, they would not long let the lawyers lead them around by the nose. And people have recently begun, bit by bit, to catch on. The great illusion of The Law has been leaking a little at the edges.

Yet it will take a great deal more than a collection of happenings like these to break down, effectively, the superstition of the grandeur of The Law and the hold which that superstition has on the minds of most men. It will take some understanding of the wordy emptiness and irrelevance of the legal process itself. It will take some cold realization that the inconsistencies and absurdities of The Law that occasionally come into the open are not just accidents but commonplaces. It will take some awakening to the fact that training in The Law does not make lawyers wiser than other men, but only smarter.

Perhaps an examination of the lawyers and their Law, set down in ordinary English, might help achieve these ends. For, despite what the lawyers say, it is possible to talk about legal principles and legal reasoning in everyday non-legal language. The point is that, so discussed, the principles and the reasoning and the whole solemn business of The Law come to look downright silly. And perhaps if the ordinary man could see in black and white how silly and irrelevant and unnecessary it all is, he might be persuaded, in a peaceful way, to take the control of his civilization out of the hands of those modern purveyors of streamlined voodoo and chromium-plated theology, the lawyers.

As we point out, this article proposes a lot of theories, but no practical solution.  J.A.I.L. is that solution!

J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><

#847 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Thu Sep 16, 2004 11:47 pm
Subject: * * Implementation of Fully Informed Juries- Possible Only By J.A.I.L. * *
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                     September 16, 2004
 
Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L.  
                         FAQs                    What?MeWarden?
Implementation of Fully Informed Juries
Is Possible Only By The Passage of J.A.I.L.
 
Just as the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution are noble and inspiring in what they set forth, so is the below article titled "Why We Need Fully Informed Juries" received by J.A.I.L. from Martin H. Smith, Jr., stjoesapr@..., for which we thank him. It goes right to the heart of Liberty and what this country was meant to be when it was founded. Were that it was so today.
 
Those of us who realize what has happened to this country and to the People over the last 200+ years, mourn over the fact that these beautiful principles established by our Founding Fathers have been usurped by forces of evil that have overtaken what was intended to be our government, established to protect and secure the precious inherent rights of the People. Sadly, what the People have today is not government, but an evil force so powerful, operating under the guise of government, that the People are currently left with no recourse to recover the government protection that was designed when the Constitution was established. This force has overtaken us so stealthily and craftily that most people are not even aware that this terrible theft has happened to them.
 
Read the following article, and weep-- weep over the loss of our precious rights, especially the right to have fully informed juries in our courts. Realize that complaining about it won't help. Petitioning the powers that be --the very ones that usurped our rights-- won't help.
 
The only thing that will help is the People themselves take action: Create an independent means of enforcing the terms of the Constitution; and the only practical and effective way that can be done is by focusing on the judiciary and holding them accountable to the People. The sooner J.A.I.L. is passed, the sooner the People will be made whole. The sooner we will be able to have Fully Informed Juries! 
 
I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1789

Today, we need a New Anchor-- and it's called J.A.I.L. The People must "provide new guards [a new anchor] for their future security." (D of I)
 
-Barbie-
ACIC, National J.A.I.L. Administration
 


The first and foremost function of our jurors is to protect private citizens from a tyrannical and intrusive government when expressed through the enforcement of laws that usurp the rights of the people. Jurors protect against tyrannical laws by refusing to convict those being unjustly persecuted by government. Thus did our Founding Fathers plan for the jury to do, and expected that jurors would in fact exercise this power without question. Jurors are the last line of defense for liberty.
--Martin H. Smith, Jr.
 
http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2004/aug2004_report_juries_01.htm

Why We Need Fully Informed Juries

The American Jury Institute/ Fully Informed Jury Association (AJI/FIJA) is the national advocate for the right of individuals charged with a “crime” to be tried by a jury that is allowed to hear the “facts” of the case and determine whether the “law” itself is being applied justly. In other words, for government to deprive a citizen of his or her personal liberty, AJI/FIJA insists that a jury must be “fully informed” about all aspects of the case, and not be limited to a narrow, one-sided version presented solely by the prosecutors.

How important are these jury rights? An example of today’s broken jury system was reported recently in California, where the federal government convicted a man of selling marijuana for medical use. The problem with this conviction was that the man was working under the auspices of a new California law that permits the sale of marijuana for medical use. The jurors, however, were forbidden by the judge from learning that this man was conducting his activities in accordance with the new state law and under a license from the City of Oakland.

After the conviction, the media interviewed the jurors, and the jurors were appalled that they had wrongfully convicted someone of a “crime” when the state had specifically authorized the activity in question. This man was convicted because the jury was not allowed to hear the “fact” that this man’s activities were “legal under California law.” The federal prosecutor convinced the judge that the simple “fact” (that California permitted this activity) was not relevant to this case. Yet, according to the jurors, had they been “informed” that this man was operating under the auspices of California’s medical marijuana law, they would not have convicted him.

These kinds of atrocities are occurring every day in criminal courts, where “facts” are being wrongfully denied to jurors, resulting in flawed convictions. Even worse than being deprived of critical “facts,” juries are denied any opportunity to evaluate the merits of the “law.” An egregious example of this kind of unbridled prosecutorial power lies within the thousands of pages of “law” contained in the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. By arbitrarily citing any “law” out of this politically inspired albatross, the FDA can randomly incarcerate virtually anyone who falls under its vast regulatory umbrella. Even individuals who import lower-priced medications from Canada can be criminally prosecuted if the FDA so chooses.

The only barrier to convicting someone of a “bad law” is a fully informed jury. Today’s judges, however, are withholding critical information from juries at the behest of prosecutors. One result of these gross injustices is that there are more people imprisoned per capita in the US than in any other country in the world!

William Penn: Origin of Jury Rights

William Penn was a leader of the Quakers in seventeenth-century London. The sect was not recognized by the English government, which forbade it to meet in any building for the purpose of worship. In 1670, Penn held a worship service that was attended by a peaceful group of fellow Quakers. Penn and another Quaker, William Mead, were arrested on a charge of disturbing the King’s peace and summoned to stand trial.

When brought to court, Penn demanded to know under which law they were being charged. The court refused to supply that information and instead referred vaguely to the common law. When Penn protested that he was entitled to a specific indictment, he was removed from the presence of the judge and jury, and confined in an enclosed corner of the room known as the bale-dock. From there, he could neither confront the witnesses who accused him of preaching to the Quakers nor ask them questions about their charges against him. If convicted, Penn faced execution.

 The judge expected the jury to give the government an unequivocal guilty verdict. When the jury failed to convict Penn of practicing an “illegal religion,” the judge was beside himself. The judge then issued the following edict:

“Gentlemen, you shall not be dismissed until you bring in a verdict which the court will accept. You shall be locked up, without meat, drink, fire and tobacco. You shall not think thus to abuse the court. We will have a verdict by the help of God or you shall starve for it.”

Two days passed. The jury had no food, water, heat, tobacco, or bathroom facilities. Nothing. They did not change their minds.

Nine weeks passed. Conditions at the prison were more than deplorable. Jurors were often soaked in their own urine and smeared with their own feces. Finally, England’s high court became involved. A higher court eventually freed the jurors in response to a writ for habeas corpus. It was the first time that the High Court of Common Pleas had issued such a writ.

Penn’s case, and his jury, changed the law. In the future, jurors would not be required to rubberstamp the agenda of government officials. For the first time, government had encountered jurors whose “liberty was not for sale.”

William Penn never forgot this outrage. When he came to America and founded his colony, his laws became a model of freedom. Immigrants flocked to Pennsylvania. As an example of his approach to government compared to the Crown’s approach, Penn reserved the death penalty for murder and treason. At the time, Britain reserved such punishment for 200 separate offenses.

Penn was especially cognizant of the iniquity of Britain’s draconian laws. By calling religious dissent “sedition,” the British government had set up an enrichment program for itself. Sedition, a serious crime against the Crown, allowed the government to throw thousands of people into prison and seize their land and property. Penn’s wife and her family had lost their family estate through such “legal” shenanigans.

Thanks to William Penn, America’s founders had an exemplary legal model to follow when they wrote the US Constitution. Thanks to the members of Penn’s jury who endured imprisonment, today’s juries can reach a just verdict even when it is not the popular thing to do.

You Could Be the Next Victim

A flagrant example of prosecutorial misconduct occurred in 1995 when the US Postal Service initiated the arrest of a 72-year-old man and a 30-year-old woman who had ordered the supplement dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) from Europe. The postal employees decided that DHEA was illegal to import, even for personal use. They arranged for a local narcotics strike force to set up a sting operation to arrest these two Americans when they came to the post office to pick up their DHEA. The elderly man was handcuffed and forced to sit on the post office steps, where all his neighbors could see him. The young woman was held while her home was searched and her library of health and exercise books seized.

Both victims were members of the Life Extension Foundation and asked us for help. We retained an attorney to document that DHEA is not a controlled substance and had never been so named in the Federal Register. Since DHEA is not contraband, one would think that the charges would have been quickly dropped. The prosecutors, however, were willing only to “reduce” the charges and still wanted to prosecute these innocent people. Only a massive letter-writing campaign by Life Extension members and subscribers to Dr. Julian Whitaker’s newsletter forced the state’s governor to order prosecutors to drop the cases.

Were it not for Life Extension paying an expert attorney and tens of thousands of letters written to the state’s governor, these two people could have faced a jury that would have been told by the prosecutor that DHEA is an illegal substance, that irrefutable evidence shows that these people imported it, and that they should therefore be convicted and sentenced to jail. The jury may never have had the opportunity to learn the “fact” that DHEA is not an illegal substance or that no “law” prohibits its importation. The prosecutor could have censored this information from the jury, and the judge would have ordered the jury to consider only whether sufficient evidence was presented that these two people imported DHEA for their personal use. If the prosecutor proved these people imported the DHEA, then the judge would order the jury to find them “guilty.”

Under today’s flawed system, a prosecutor can present a one-sided story and gain a conviction based on the jury not being fully informed about the facts and not being allowed to judge the merits of the law. Jurors are put into a position whereby judges are ordering them not to consider all the facts or the law, but instead to base their decision on the government’s interpretation of events.

Jury Rights Rooted in US Constitution

The Declaration of Independence defines being deprived of the benefits of trial by jury as absolute tyranny. Having observed the tyranny imposed on Americans when deprived of trial by jury, the Founding Fathers took particular care to ensure this right no less than three times in the Bill of Rights.

The intent of the jury system is to do much more than allow citizens to mete out apt punishment to their neighbors. The jury system particularly provides citizens with the means to protect each other from tyrannical abuses of power by the government.

Thus did the authors of the Declaration of Independence see trial by jury “as the only anchor yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789.

AJI/FIJA
PO Box 5570
Helena, MT 59604-5570

Websites: www.fija.org and www.americanjuryinstitute.org
Phone: 406-442-7800
Fax: 406-442-9332

[Commentary by Martin H. Smith, Jr.]

Tyranny, no matter under what guise, has no place in an open society or in a country dedicated to the rule of law. The intent of trial by jury is that of a jury’s independence to judge the law as well as the facts in any case. 
Jurors have the absolute power to decide whether the law being applied is a just law, whether it is being properly applied in each case, and whether the defendant should be found innocent because of a bad law. Jurors have the right to understand the sentence that will be imposed by their verdict. The highest and best function of the jury is not, as many think, to dispense punishment to fellow citizens accused of breaking government-authored law, but instead to protect fellow citizens from the tyrannical laws imposed by power-crazed government.

Jurors have both a duty and responsibility to ensure that a just verdict is rendered, and they must take into account the facts of the case, any mitigating circumstances, and the merits of the law and its application in each individual case. They must examine the results of their verdict if they are to administer the law as an instrument of justice and of order. The power and right of jurors to assess the merits of the law was established in England before our Constitution was written.

Jurors, as the representatives of the people and the community, hold no agenda during any trial, and most certainly not the government’s agenda. Let us not forget that the prosecutors, judges, and arresting officers, as well as the forensic investigators in most cases, are all a part of, and paid by, the government, with their personal power bases to build and their personal careers to protect through the “productivity” of successful prosecutions resulting in convictions. Jurors are not at all vested and therefore far less arbitrary.

The first and foremost function of our jurors is to protect private citizens from a tyrannical and intrusive government when expressed through the enforcement of laws that usurp the rights of the people. Jurors protect against tyrannical laws by refusing to convict those being unjustly persecuted by government. Thus did our Founding Fathers plan for the jury to do, and expected that jurors would in fact exercise this power without question. Jurors are the last line of defense for liberty.

In Liberty,
Martin H. Smith, Jr.
stjoesapr@...
stjoesap@...


J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><
 

#848 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Sat Sep 18, 2004 4:08 am
Subject: What Part of "Just Pay Up" Do You Not Understand?
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
 
What Part of "Just Pay Up" Do You Not Understand
 
I have know Marve Bryer for many years. His first contact with me was via the telephone in which he shared with me that he had the goods on all the judges in Los Angeles County involved in an "official" bribery scandal. What he showed me were cancelled checks cashed by judges for such things as jewelry and elite Club memberships, etc., that had come from various attorneys throughout Los Angeles.
 
Marve told me that he was going to the District Attorney with his evidence. I told him that he was not, by any means, to take his original documentation to the D.A. because they would take the evidence and destroy it.
 
Indeed, the D.A. showed himself disposed to cover up for this judicial corruption of bribery. Marve took his evidence also to the City Attorney's Office, and to the newspapers, all showing the same type of indifference.
 
Marve is not one to sit still on his findings. He has caused very much embarrassment to the entire judiciary of both Los Angeles and Orange Counties in California.
 
Now Marve Bryer has received a parking ticket issued within the City of Glendale, an Incorporated and Chartered City. On his ticket he is instructed to send his money to another county some sixty miles away, to another Independent Chartered City at a location with no street address. (I guess he is should be thankful he does not have to send his money blindly out-of-state to a clandestine address.)
 
A little research on his part derives the fact that this P.O. Address is connected with private corporations such the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport and the University of San Francisco. Also he learned that he could wire his money payable to a private Michigan Corporation.
 
Upon inquiry as to what is going on here, he is basically told to just shut up and send his money blindly as he is told.
 
-Ron Branson
 

 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 6:31 AM
Subject: Re: We Must Focus on Specific Lawyers, i.e., on JUDGES

Dear Jail4judges.  Keep up the good work.

I would like to report a traffic ticket scam to you.  It is major. ....
I live in La Crescenta, a town in the City of Glendale. I went to my car and a ticket and an envelope was stuffed into the side of my driver's door.

I looked at the back of the ticket and the instructions were to mail
a payment by check or money order to the Glendale Parking Enforcement Center in
IRVINE to a P.O. Box.

1.  Irvine is in Orange County.
2.  Glendale is in Los Angeles County!
 
....

There was no street address to send the payment to!  I tried to look up the P.O. Box, and I found it was the same P. O. Box
used for MALIBU, ALHAMBRA, the UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO and EVEN DALLAS FORT WORTH AIRPORT!

I located a phone number 1-800-654-PARK.  I called the number on 9-15-2002.  There is a voice recording stating that I reached
the PARKING ENFORCEMENT CENTER.  There was 8 options and if the caller was not pleased with the 8 options, the instructions were to press the ZERO key on the phone.

I pressed zero.  A lady answered and said her name was KATY.  I asked for her last name and she refused to supply her last name.

I asked for her street address.  She said that was confidential.  I asked for her corporation name.  She said that was confidential.  She stated that they handle 300 clients.  She said she was a
customer rep.

I asked to speak to the manager, but the manager was not in.  Instead, I was given a lady who said her name was TINA.  I asked TINA her last name and she said it was "STREET".  Why do I not believe her?  Hmm?

Tina STREET also refused to give her real location and her corporation name!

I also discovered a cited "criminal" can pay by credit card to a corporation called EZPAY.  They turn out to be a MICHIGAN CORPORATION!  They charge about $3.96 per online pleading.  When you pay them they claim they will be the agent for your GUILTY PLEADING!

I called the company and they hung up on me when I asked for their license to do business in the STATE OF CALIFORNIA.

I am also finding records that appear this company handles CASINO BETTING!  Possibly offshore tax haven betting.  I am researching this.

I do not believe these guys can take pleadings in California because they are not registered to do business in California as far as I can tell.  I also want to see their STATE BAR LICENSE.  ....

According to legal information printed on the ticket, it states that a dispute of the ticket can be made within 21 days by taking the dispute to the POLICE STATION.  I went into the station and filed a PUBLIC RECORD ACT (gov code section 6250) to get a copy of the contract between Glendale and Irvine.

I also filed for an administrative hearing.  However, the police handed me a form that is primarily used to claim that the cited person is NOT THE OWNER OF THE CAR.  I drew a line through that legal garbage.  I did not sign their document under penalty of perjury because I am the legal owner ....

I asked for conforming stamped copies of what I filed, and a six-foot, six inch cop ordered me to leave the police station....

Another police officer came at me menacingly and tried to hand me back what I had submitted.  He ordered me to take the documents to the CITY ATTORNEY.  I was warned that I was being taped.  I refused to take back any documents.

I went and filed the same documents with some exceptions at Glendale City Hall.

The old GLENDALE POLICE STATION has been converted into a jail.  The new station is still being worked on.  There are signs outside the building that states loitering will be prosecuted.  These goons are dangerous as hell.

In looking at Malibu, their city has a different method with the same IRVINE secret corporation.... 
 
I believe this is a criminal enterprise that needs to be shut down.  I called EZPAY and spoke to two people including the CHAIRMAN.  He hung up on me.
 

J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><


#849 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Sat Sep 18, 2004 5:27 am
Subject: Hopeful Again
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
 
Hopeful Again
(By Stan Walter - swalt7@...)
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 9:31 AM
Subject: RE: * * Implementation of Fully Informed Juries- Possible Only By J.A.I.L. * *

Ron Branson:

 

Profoundly good work…  proud of what you’re accomplishing!

 

We should have some good news for you folks on turning the press around on this issue shortly (90 days).

 

Either way, the tide has finally begun to turn, we’re going to win thus war (defeat judicial corruption).  Now the problem is to get the right results (not having our movements highjacked – which is always a danger), and, when it comes to mapping the right direction, JAIL is definitely on the right track.

 

Really enjoyed reading the last three emails!   After a long dark decade, it makes my heart dare to be hopeful again…

 

 

Stan

 

(I was the one who contacted you from San Diego about a year and a half ago about the futility of changing laws as a counter to corrupted/criminal judges…  Just got back in touch with JAIL and I’m really proud of what you’ve accomplished since. 

 

Ron… please contact me, we need to open a link – there is a substantial prospect that some really profound breakthroughs are about to happen and we should work hand in hand to guide them.)

 

 


 

J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                     September 16, 2004

 

Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L.  
                         FAQs                    What?MeWarden?


Implementation of Fully Informed Juries

Is Possible Only By The Passage of J.A.I.L.

 

.....

#850 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Sat Sep 18, 2004 8:21 am
Subject: Correction of Miscredit Given in JNJ dated 9/16/04
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
 
AJI/FIJA Has Requested We
Publish The Following
(correction of miscredit unintentionally given in JNJ of 9/16/04 "Implementation of Fully Informed Juries
Is Possible Only By The Passage of J.A.I.L.")
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 1:19 PM
Subject: Commentary attribution

Sirs:
 
The commentary credited to Martin H. Smith in the article concerning FIJA is actually commentary authored by our Director, Iloilo M. Jones, and can be found on both of our web site home pages.  This language is also available by mail in our information packet.  Since all instances of the appearance of this language are signed by our director, there could not have been an "innocent mistake."
 
Please provide accurate and truthful attribution immediately.
 
Sincerely,
For Liberty and Justice for All,
Linda d'Arcy
American Jury Institute/Fully Informed Jury Association
Post Office Box 5570
Helena, Montana 59604
406-442-7800
406-442-9332 FAX
www.fija.org <http://www.fija.org>   web site
fijamail@...    AJI/FIJA email address

Our Apology
 
TO: Linda d'Arcy
American Jury Institute/Fully Informed Jury Association
 
FROM:  Barbie, ACIC National J.A.I.L. Administration
 
J.A.I.L. apologizes, as I do personally, to FIJA Director Iloilo M. Jones,
to Linda d'Arcy of AJI/FIJA, and to our readers for the unintentional miscrediting that was done in our recent J.A.I.L. News Journal dated September 16 regarding Fully Informed Juries which I published because of the excellence and importance of the article.
 
Please be assured that this miscrediting was not done intentionally, and for everyone's convenience, I paste in below the article exactly as we received it in its entire original form, without editing. As can be seen, the only name appearing at the end of the entire article is Martin H. Smith, Jr.  Nowhere does the name "Iloilo M. Jones" appear. At the end of the first portion of the article, printed in Arial style format, appears the following credits:
AJI/FIJA
PO Box 5570
Helena, MT 59604-5570

Websites: www.fija.org and www.americanjuryinstitute.org
Phone: 406-442-7800
Fax: 406-442-9332

which was included in full in our news journal exactly as shown. The second portion, printed in Times New Roman style, appears after the AJI/FIJA credits, and is ended with
===================
In Liberty,

Martin H. Smith, Jr.
stjoesapr@...
stjoesap@...

following a list of references which I eliminated for purposes of sending out the substance of the original article itself.  However, the only name shown is Mr. Smith's name and his email addresses. The final paragraph, just prior to the listed references (which we eliminated), is the portion that was excerpted and placed at the beginning of our news journal article and credited (or miscredited, as you say) to Martin Smith, since it was his name appearing at the end of the article received by J.A.I.L. (See below).
 
Please accept my sincere apology for my error which was caused as explained above. Mr. Smith's name was the only name appearing.  This unintentional error should not take away from the excellence of the article. 
 
Thank you,
-Barbie

(This is the entire article as J.A.I.L. received it in its original unedited form):
 
http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2004/aug2004_report_juries_01.htm


Why We Need Fully Informed Juries



The American Jury Institute/ Fully Informed Jury Association (AJI/FIJA) is the national advocate for the right of individuals charged with a “crime” to be tried by a jury that is allowed to hear the “facts” of the case and determine whether the “law” itself is being applied justly. In other words, for government to deprive a citizen of his or her personal liberty, AJI/FIJA insists that a jury must be “fully informed” about all aspects of the case, and not be limited to a narrow, one-sided version presented solely by the prosecutors.

How important are these jury rights? An example of today’s broken jury system was reported recently in California, where the federal government convicted a man of selling marijuana for medical use. The problem with this conviction was that the man was working under the auspices of a new California law that permits the sale of marijuana for medical use. The jurors, however, were forbidden by the judge from learning that this man was conducting his activities in accordance with the new state law and under a license from the City of Oakland.

After the conviction, the media interviewed the jurors, and the jurors were appalled that they had wrongfully convicted someone of a “crime” when the state had specifically authorized the activity in question. This man was convicted because the jury was not allowed to hear the “fact” that this man’s activities were “legal under California law.” The federal prosecutor convinced the judge that the simple “fact” (that California permitted this activity) was not relevant to this case. Yet, according to the jurors, had they been “informed” that this man was operating under the auspices of California’s medical marijuana law, they would not have convicted him.

These kinds of atrocities are occurring every day in criminal courts, where “facts” are being wrongfully denied to jurors, resulting in flawed convictions. Even worse than being deprived of critical “facts,” juries are denied any opportunity to evaluate the merits of the “law.” An egregious example of this kind of unbridled prosecutorial power lies within the thousands of pages of “law” contained in the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. By arbitrarily citing any “law” out of this politically inspired albatross, the FDA can randomly incarcerate virtually anyone who falls under its vast regulatory umbrella. Even individuals who import lower-priced medications from Canada can be criminally prosecuted if the FDA so chooses.

The only barrier to convicting someone of a “bad law” is a fully informed jury. Today’s judges, however, are withholding critical information from juries at the behest of prosecutors. One result of these gross injustices is that there are more people imprisoned per capita in the US than in any other country in the world!

William Penn: Origin of Jury Rights

William Penn was a leader of the Quakers in seventeenth-century London. The sect was not recognized by the English government, which forbade it to meet in any building for the purpose of worship. In 1670, Penn held a worship service that was attended by a peaceful group of fellow Quakers. Penn and another Quaker, William Mead, were arrested on a charge of disturbing the King’s peace and summoned to stand trial.

When brought to court, Penn demanded to know under which law they were being charged. The court refused to supply that information and instead referred vaguely to the common law. When Penn protested that he was entitled to a specific indictment, he was removed from the presence of the judge and jury, and confined in an enclosed corner of the room known as the bale-dock. From there, he could neither confront the witnesses who accused him of preaching to the Quakers nor ask them questions about their charges against him. If convicted, Penn faced execution.


The judge expected the jury to give the government an unequivocal guilty verdict. When the jury failed to convict Penn of practicing an “illegal religion,” the judge was beside himself. The judge then issued the following edict:

“Gentlemen, you shall not be dismissed until you bring in a verdict which the court will accept. You shall be locked up, without meat, drink, fire and tobacco. You shall not think thus to abuse the court. We will have a verdict by the help of God or you shall starve for it.”

Two days passed. The jury had no food, water, heat, tobacco, or bathroom facilities. Nothing. They did not change their minds.

Nine weeks passed. Conditions at the prison were more than deplorable. Jurors were often soaked in their own urine and smeared with their own feces. Finally, England’s high court became involved. A higher court eventually freed the jurors in response to a writ for habeas corpus. It was the first time that the High Court of Common Pleas had issued such a writ.

Penn’s case, and his jury, changed the law. In the future, jurors would not be required to rubberstamp the agenda of government officials. For the first time, government had encountered jurors whose “liberty was not for sale.”

William Penn never forgot this outrage. When he came to America and founded his colony, his laws became a model of freedom. Immigrants flocked to Pennsyl-vania. As an example of his approach to government compared to the Crown’s approach, Penn reserved the death penalty for murder and treason. At the time, Britain reserved such punishment for 200 separate offenses.

Penn was especially cognizant of the iniquity of Britain’s draconian laws. By calling religious dissent “sedition,” the British government had set up an enrichment program for itself. Sedition, a serious crime against the Crown, allowed the government to throw thousands of people into prison and seize their land and property. Penn’s wife and her family had lost their family estate through such “legal” shenanigans.

Thanks to William Penn, America’s founders had an exemplary legal model to follow when they wrote the US Constitution. Thanks to the members of Penn’s jury who endured imprisonment, today’s juries can reach a just verdict even when it is not the popular thing to do.

You Could Be the Next Victim

A flagrant example of prosecutorial misconduct occurred in 1995 when the US Postal Service initiated the arrest of a 72-year-old man and a 30-year-old woman who had ordered the supplement dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) from Europe. The postal employees decided that DHEA was illegal to import, even for personal use. They arranged for a local narcotics strike force to set up a sting operation to arrest these two Americans when they came to the post office to pick up their DHEA. The elderly man was handcuffed and forced to sit on the post office steps, where all his neighbors could see him. The young woman was held while her home was searched and her library of health and exercise books seized.

Both victims were members of the Life Extension Foundation and asked us for help. We retained an attorney to document that DHEA is not a controlled substance and had never been so named in the Federal Register. Since DHEA is not contraband, one would think that the charges would have been quickly dropped. The prosecutors, however, were willing only to “reduce” the charges and still wanted to prosecute these innocent people. Only a massive letter-writing campaign by Life Extension members and subscribers to Dr. Julian Whitaker’s newsletter forced the state’s governor to order prosecutors to drop the cases.

Were it not for Life Extension paying an expert attorney and tens of thousands of letters written to the state’s governor, these two people could have faced a jury that would have been told by the prosecutor that DHEA is an illegal substance, that irrefutable evidence shows that these people imported it, and that they should therefore be convicted and sentenced to jail. The jury may never have had the opportunity to learn the “fact” that DHEA is not an illegal substance or that no “law” prohibits its importation. The prosecutor could have censored this information from the jury, and the judge would have ordered the jury to consider only whether sufficient evidence was presented that these two people imported DHEA for their personal use. If the prosecutor proved these people imported the DHEA, then the judge would order the jury to find them “guilty.”

Under today’s flawed system, a prosecutor can present a one-sided story and gain a conviction based on the jury not being fully informed about the facts and not being allowed to judge the merits of the law. Jurors are put into a position whereby judges are ordering them not to consider all the facts or the law, but instead to base their decision on the government’s interpretation of events.

Jury Rights Rooted in US Constitution

The Declaration of Indepen-dence defines being deprived of the benefits of trial by jury as absolute tyranny. Having observed the tyranny imposed on Americans when deprived of trial by jury, the Founding Fathers took particular care to ensure this right no less than three times in the Bill of Rights.

The intent of the jury system is to do much more than allow citizens to mete out apt punishment to their neighbors. The jury system particularly provides citizens with the means to protect each other from tyrannical abuses of power by the government.

Thus did the authors of the Declaration of Independence see trial by jury “as the only anchor yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789.

Join the American Jury Institute/Fully Informed Jury Association (AJI/FIJA)

We invite all Life Extension supporters to join the American Jury Institute/Fully Informed Jury Association. A tax-deduct-ible donation of $25 buys a one-year membership, which incl-udes a quarterly newsletter. To join, send your check to:

AJI/FIJA
PO Box 5570
Helena, MT 59604-5570

Websites: www.fija.org and www.americanjuryinstitute.org
Phone: 406-442-7800
Fax: 406-442-9332

I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1789




Tyranny, no matter under what guise, has no place in an open society or in a country dedicated to the rule of law. The intent of trial by jury is that of a jury’s independence to judge the law as well as the facts in any case. Jurors have the absolute power to decide whether the law being applied is a just law, whether it is being properly applied in each case, and whether the defendant should be found innocent because of a bad law. Jurors have the right to understand the sentence that will be imposed by their verdict. The highest and best function of the jury is not, as many think, to dispense punishment to fellow citizens accused of breaking government-authored law, but instead to protect fellow citizens from the tyrannical laws imposed by power-crazed government.

Jurors have both a duty and responsibility to ensure that a just verdict is rendered, and they must take into account the facts of the case, any mitigating circumstances, and the merits of the law and its application in each individual case. They must examine the results of their verdict if they are to administer the law as an instrument of justice and of order. The power and right of jurors to assess the merits of the law was established in England before our Constitution was written.

Jurors, as the representatives of the people and the community, hold no agenda during any trial, and most certainly not the government’s agenda. Let us not forget that the prosecutors, judges, and arresting officers, as well as the forensic investigators in most cases, are all a part of, and paid by, the government, with their personal power bases to build and their personal careers to protect through the “productivity” of successful prosecutions resulting in convictions. Jurors are not at all vested and therefore far less arbitrary.

The first and foremost function of our jurors is to protect private citizens from a tyrannical and intrusive government when expressed through the enforcement of laws that usurp the rights of the people. Jurors protect against tyrannical laws by refusing to convict those being unjustly persecuted by government. Thus did our Founding Fathers plan for the jury to do, and expected that jurors would in fact exercise this power without question. Jurors are the last line of defense for liberty.


References
1. Available at: www.hcvinprison.org. Accessed June 7, 2004.

2. National Commission on Correctional Health Care. “The Health Status of Soon-to-be-Released Inmates: A Report to Congress.” March 2002.

3. Available at: www.hrw.org. Accessed June 7, 2004.

4. Treadway Robert (#10590-076), Request for Administrative Remedy, Bureau of Prisons document, issued January 20, 2004.

5. Available at: www.aclu.org. Accessed June 7, 2004.

6. Fazlollah M. Inmates will get care for hepatitis. Philadelphia Inquirer. October 31, 2002.

7. Available at: www.bop.gov. Accessed June 7, 2004.

8. Correspondence from Ralph Boyd Jr., assistant attorney general for New Mexico, to Jack Sullivan, county commission chairman.
March 6, 2003.

===================
In Liberty,

Martin H. Smith, Jr.
stjoesapr@...
stjoesap@...

Learn The Truth About The "Income Tax" Fraud!
http://www.861.info


DEATH TO THE NEW WORLD ORDER!!

WHY ARE THE BORDERS STILL WIDE OPEN??

NEVER, NEVER, NEVER GIVE UP YOUR FIREARMS!!!!!

It's time to face it: President Bush is no friend of liberty, and neither he is a friend to constitutional government nor national sovereignty. Four more years of a Bush administration could very well mean the death knell of freedom in these United States.
--- Chuck Baldwin, 1/13/04 www.chuckbaldwinlive.com


"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."
--  Ayn Rand, The Nature of Government

*****************************************************************************************
GET THE U.S. OUT OF THE U.N.--AND, GET THE U.N. OUT OF THE U.S.!!!
*****************************************************************************************

Did The Occupation Government Have Prior Knowledge Of 9/11?
Did They Let It Happen To Create An Excuse To Institute Police State Policies?
Did They Orchestrate It?
Check out: www.infowars.com and learn the Truth!!
THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND!!!!!!!!!


Additional Information Links:
www.prisonplanet.com
http://www.jackblood.com/
http://www.propagandamatrix.com/911_redux.html
http://www.propagandamatrix.com/archiveprior_knowledge
http://free.freespeech.org/americanstateterrorism/9-11/911MossadCIAffr.html
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/
http://www.public-action.com/
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/
http://www.policestate21.com/
http://www.devvy.com/
http://copvcia.com/
www.gulfwarvets.com
www.thepowerhour.com

Vote for Michael Peroutka,Constitution Party, for President
http://www.peroutka2004.com/








 
 
 
 
 
 
 

#851 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Wed Sep 22, 2004 6:29 pm
Subject: * * Taking A Police Poll * *
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                            September 22, 2004

Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L.                           FAQs                    What?MeWarden?

 
Taking A Police Poll
 
The Los Angeles Daily News for September 20, 2004, is conducting a poll asking "What do you think? Do you think the LAPD motel raids violate privacy?" and proceeds to cover on its front page a police story entitled, "Leaving no room for crime."
 
By way of background, our readers should know that there has been placed on our local ballot for November by law enforcement a measure to increase taxes for themselves. The police claim they are running out of money and need this sales tax increase in order to function properly.
 
Los Angeles already has the highest sales taxes in this state, and among all states of this nation. I have often reported that police in all jurisdictions need crime. Crime provides police job security, and if there is not enough crime to justify police security, we are guaranteed the police will generate it. Crime will always rise to the point to justify the existence of police 
expansion, and politicians will clamor over using these crime statistics to assure their re-election, i.e., being "tough on crime."
 
I realize that my statements may sound like I am against police, but this is not the case. Too many police officers cause disaster to society, and will bring it down. I have explained this principle in a booklet I once wrote entitled, "Three Reasons Why Police Increase Crime," with established crime statistics and documentation throughout. One of its points is that higher taxes imposed upon a community will result in a more depressed society, which in turn results in a less productive society, which in turn results in more crime in the community. This principle works the same every time in every community. While two aspirins are good for a headache, too many of those same aspirins will kill you. What is good in moderation is deadly in excess, such as police power.
 
It is unarguable that police action is the exercise of emergency powers, and one does not rate the health of a community by the number of emergencies it endures any more than one who has been rushed to the hospital six times in the past year can boast that they are healthier than one who has had only one hospital emergency during the same period.
 
While this newspaper poll encourages Los Angelinos to respond by calling Jason Kandel, Staff Writer of the article, (818) 713-3664, or writing him at jason.kandel@..., since we are also the media, we are going to do even more than Jason asks, to wit, report this cause to the entire nation for a response. We are sure Jason will receive some most surprising responses to his poll.
 
Jason writes, " 'Motel Six' squad scans guest activity," followed by his name and position with the newspaper. "Motel Six, LAPD-style, has made a name for itself by checking out who is checking in.
 
"A half-dozen officers assigned to a squad nicknamed Motel Six are credited with the arrests of more than 100 felony and misdemeanor offenders by raiding motels across the San Fernando Valley for the past seven weeks.
 
"They've picked up suspected sex offenders, parole violators and fugitives in crime-plagued motels lining Sepulveda and Ventura boulevards and other thoroughfares. The Valley operation has become a model program that Chief William Bratton might expand citywide.  ....
 
"The Motel Six patrol checks parking lots, running license plates through police car computer terminals and getting instantaneous information about the registered owners.
 
"They can check the information against guest registers and knock on doors ....
 
"The Motel Six program dovetails with efforts by the City Attorney's Office to shut down problem motels..."
 
If I were the upper management of Motel Six, a nationwide chain, I would contact our legal counsel about suing LAPD for using our name in a manner that implies that if anyone visits Los Angeles and checks into Motel Six, they run the risk of being harassed by the LAPD in the middle of the night.
 
Jason's article attempts to make such police action sound good for society, but I would like to reflect upon some inside information. First off, no one likes to be disturbed in the middle of the night by having someone uninvited pounding on their door, and especially the police. Not long ago at 2:30 a.m. in the middle of the night I heard loud pounding on my front door. Thinking there was some sort of emergency I opened the door only to find a police officer demanding that I come out and identify myself. Was I involved in a crime, or suspected that I was? No! Was there an accuser against me? No! Was there a warrant or Probable Cause to believe that I was about to commit some sort of crime? No! Well then why was I being demanded to come out at 2:30 in the morning and identify myself? Why, there was not even a common sense reason, much less a legal one.
 
Having personally taken fourteen cases to the United States Supreme Court, didn't I know that this unwarranted action was illegal? Certainly I did. But I also knew from experience in lawsuits against LAPD that the courts always covered for them no matter what. I was faced with either suffering the consequences of questioning their unlawful activity, or just complying with them. I have often said that a police state is not possible without the approval of the judiciary, and that is exactly why we need the judicial accountability of J.A.I.L.
 
Prior to turning my focus upon judges, over the years I collected more than a thousand newspaper articles (mostly L.A. Times) on police activity which documented everything from police murder for hire, rape, organized police burglaries, drugs, etc. I learned a great deal of unbecoming facts about the LAPD, such as 50% of the LAPD officers are or were involved in drugs, with the justification that if LAPD did not hire such persons, there would not be enough candidates to join the police force; that the ratio of police officers who committed suicide with their own side-arm is three times that of those officers killed in the line of duty, etc.
 
Having once questioned the police on constitutional grounds I got a fist in my face while I was handcuffed, and tazered by a tazer gun every time I said, "I stand on the Constitution." I was informed by one of the officers, "You have no rights under the Constitution." I responded that I thought I was in America and had rights protected by the Constitution. It turns out that none of these officers had a rudimentary understanding of the very document they had raise their right hand and sworn by oath to uphold and defend, and they violated every principle in my case, even to the extent of practicing law in making a unilateral post-arrest determination to drop the felony arrest charge, a discretion preserved uniquely to the District Attorney. In my observation, it is doubtful that these officers have ever read the Constitution.
 
Ultimately, these police officers defaulted in a Superior Court lawsuit for 13 million six-hundred and twenty thousand dollars. I went through a default and prove-up before the judge, with the judge submitting the matter for judgment. But then the judge later "unsubmitted" (the judge's word) the evidence and refused to enter the judgment. I sought a default judgment in both state and federal court systems by writ, as there was no appeal from a non-judgment, and all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court both times. To this day I have been denied that default judgment and am awaiting the passage of J.A.I.L. in California to pursue my remedy to the right of a default judgment, which by California law says in default matters,  the court shall hear the evidence and shall render judgment in plaintiff's favor for such amount as is shown by the evidence.
 
Jason talks about felony arrests. I know the LAPD modus operandi on this personally. Whenever the police cannot legally make an arrest, having not personally witnessed the commission of any crime, in 75 percent of the time they conveniently convert the matter into a warrantless felony arrest, and then later drop the felony charge. This is their game in doing indirectly that which cannot be done directly. Using this method, I have 
twice been arrested under the guise of having committed a felony, and both times felony charges were dropped without any felony process. The officers just could not explain or justify themselves when I knew what the process was and questioned them on it.
 
As I stated above, whenever there is not enough crime to justify police existence, they invent crime. Barbie and I were sitting at an "In-and-Out" hamburger joint on Ventura Boulevard, the boulevard mentioned above, and before us were two men and one woman sitting on a bus bench supposedly awaiting a bus. I then saw all three persons stand up, and the one man place his hands on top of his head, and the other man, who was wearing a doctor's white coat, give the other man a pat down, and bring his hands down behind his back and handcuff him. They then took the handcuffed man to a new unmarked car parked in a customer parking space of In-and Out, and placed him in the car. The officer then took off his outer cover and I saw his police badge on his belt.
 
I also recall the publicity of a man who took a short jaunt down to his local Seven-Eleven convenience store to buy a six-pack. It turns out that he was arrested outside the door on prostitution charges by a police woman. I am of the opinion that it is atrocious that LAPD hires pretty young women with our tax dollars to attempt to induce men on the street into agreeing to have sex with them, only to arrest them if they do.
 
In evil times governments hypocritically convert moral issues into victimless crimes, as in Christ's day. Then they drug a woman accused of adultery before Him and said Moses stated that such should be stoned, but what sayest thou. Was this because they truly wanted His opinion? No! Was it because they were concerned about this woman's act of adultery? No! Where was the man? Did she commit adultery alone? No!They just wanted to trap Christ, that was all! But He, knowing their hypocrisy, told them, he that is without sin, let him cast the first stone, and bent down and wrote in the sand. While we are not told what He wrote, we are told that they all began to leave in shame. I could guess that He wrote the names of each of the women they had serviced, and they thought they had better get out of there quickly.
 
Let's keep in mind that these tactics provide great media hype for public consumption regarding increasing taxes to pay for more police when that issue is on the ballot.   - Ron Branson
 


J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><

#852 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Fri Sep 24, 2004 12:54 am
Subject: If ya ain't havin' fun, ya ain't doin' it rite
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                       September 23, 2004

Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L.
                           FAQs                    What?MeWarden?

 
If ya ain't havin' fun,
ya ain't doin' it rite.
(By Ron Loeber - Valortoo@...)
 
We only need one good watch dog, and I have mine.
  His name is J.A.I.L.  He is still a puppy, but he is growing
and learning and developing.  And like all puppies,
he loves to learn.  I'm feeding him and training him and loving him.
He is already waiting to sink his teeth into someone.  And when he becomes mature, he is going to be the nastiest Junk Yard Dog
you ever saw.  Everyone will think more than twice before
they trespass upon my junk yard 'cause they know
I will turn J.A.I.L. loose upon them in a heartbeat. 
Shucks Bob, my "friendly legislators" already know about
 my puppy and he scares the hell out of them. 
They are afraid J.A.I.L. will bite them.
-- Ron Loeber
 

Two Saturdays ago I was given a FREE Ticket to the local annual Democratic chicken barbecue.  What the hell... a free meal is a free meal, so I went.  After all... its just a bunch of my neighbors... just the average Americans.  I was enjoying visiting with them when the politicians started arriving.  You know how they are.  "Heh... I'm so-and-so and running in the Democratic Primary for such-and-such", and pressing flesh.
 
But there was one who stood out from the rest.  He was dressed a little better then everyone else... casual, but nice.  He wasn't wearing a K-Mart shirt... that's for sure.  He wasn't running for office either, but he sure was pressing flesh.  Eventually he got to me.  The conversation went pretty much like this.
 
"Hello, I'm Judge Cardona.  I live over in Westerlo" he said as he extended his hand.
 
 
[Westerlo is a neighboring town in very rural Albany County.  The area is generally referred to a "the Hilltowns''.  Its actually the boondocks.  Cardona is the Presiding Justice of NYS Supreme Court Appellate Division Third Department in Albany.  That's the Court that released me from jail.  It is also the court that had to approve the censure of Teresi.  It was reported that Teresi was the first Supreme Court Judge in 20 years to be censured.  Don't know how true that is, but it was a big deal in Albany Politics.]
 
"Judge, its nice to meet you.  I'm Ron Loeber" I replied as I shook his hand. 
 
"Ron Loeber... Ron Loeber.  Lets see... I know you.  Did we meet at..." and he took a couple of guesses.
 
"Judge, What's your first name"?
 
"Tony", he replied.
 
"Well Tony, its really nice to meet you.  If I'm ever in your court it will be Judge Cardona.  But up here its just Tony and Ron."  And he took a couple more guesses....
 
"No Tony.  You know me because I'm the guy responsible for the censure of Joe Teresi.  I'm the guy Teresi threw in Jail."  Well... you would have thought I hit him in the face with a pail of ice water.  He wanted to terminate the conversation.  But I wouldn't let him go.  I continued with, "ya know Tony, when I walk into Traffic Court I expect to be screwed.  But when I walked into NYS Supreme Court I actually thought I was walking into a legitimate operation.  I would have never guessed it was Organized Crime of the first degree."  He just wanted to get out of there.  And then, over his objections, I gave him the nutshell of what Teresi did to me.  Please understand that I still tend to get a bit emotional when I talk about what happened.  Told him again how nice it was to make his acquaintance and wished him a great day at the picnic and let him go.
 
But that wasn't the end.  A little while later the speech-making started.  After Tony's speech, he was talking with a group of 4 big-wig politicians.  Well... they thought they were important.  Don't they all?  That was an opportunity I couldn't pass up.  And by now I had cooled off a bit and got hold of my composure.  I walked right up to the group, interrupted them, and said, "heh Tony.  Can I bend your ear for a few minutes before you go"?
 
"Uh... uum... yes.  But not right now", he said.
 
"I understand.  Just come and get me when you are ready.  I'll be hanging out here for the afternoon enjoying the picnic".
 
I'll be damned.  He did.  About a half hour later he came to me and suggested a distant picnic table where we could talk privately.
 
"What did you want to ask me Ron"?
 
"Tony, its not so much that I want to ask you anything as it is I want to tell you some things.  I'd like to tell all of your judges some things.  First... please understand, from my perspective, that under the form of government in which we live the Office of Judge SHOULD BE the most respected position in our society... above that of Kings, Presidents, and Emperors.
 
You know the law.  I don't have to tell you the due process involved in Civil Contempt and the opportunity to appeal a judge's decision.  That potlicker Teresi didn't follow due process.  He had 2 men with guns, clubs and badges waiting in the courtroom for me and told them to take me away.  They put me in a cell in the basement of the courthouse, then strip searched me, then shackled me in leg irons and chains.  Then... two hours later, they came back and asked me if I was ready to sign the deed now.  The Gulag Archipelago is alive and well right here.
 
Since the censure Teresi, and because of my affiliation with an organization advocating for judicial accountability, I know what's going on publicly in the judiciary from one end of the state to the other.  I know about the scandals, the bribery, the corruption.  I know what judges are in prison.  I get the newspaper reports E-mailed to me from all over the state.  I know what's happening in NYC, Middletown, all the way to Buffalo.
 
Not only that, but people from one end of the state to the other contact me and tell me their stories of woe and ask for my help and advice.  I'm not licensed to give advice.  But with what happened to me, and with everything I have learned, I advise them to invest in toilet paper and ammunition.
 
You got some serious problems, Tony.  I don't have the answers, but even if I did... I don't have the power to impose the solution.  But guys like you do have that power. [I just didn't think this was the time or place to explain J.A.I.L.  My purpose here was to plant the seed for future dialogue.]  But not you, nor Chief Judge Judith Kaye, nor anyone else is going to be able to solve the problems in the judiciary until you understand that courts are not just a way for lawyers to make money.  The courts are for the people too.
 
Until guys like me can walk into your courts with full confidence that our rights will be recognized, declared, and protected, and that our papers will be read for their substance instead of form, there is no reason for us to even go into your courts.  We would all be better off settling our disputes in the manner of the Old West.  At least we would feel we got some measure of justice."
 
"Ron, I cannot comment on that", he said.
 
"Tony, I know you can't.  But if Chief Judge Kaye is serious about cleaning up the mess, she has to know how the ordinary guy thinks and feels about you guys if she is gonna accomplish anything worthwhile.  The lawyers sure aren't gonna give it to you straight."
 
"I hear you, Ron.  I understand what you are saying", he said.
 
"Good.  Tony, I walked into Teresi's courtroom alone because I had three lawyers tell me they wouldn't touch my case with a ten foot pole because of the players involved.  Last year a lawyer was doing some work for my wife.  But he was talking to me because I had the technical knowledge of the problem he was trying to solve for her. 
 
After a half an hour he looked up at me and said, 'I know who you are.  You are the guy Teresi threw in jail.  That's what this mess is all about that I'm working on.  If you had come to me for help back then I would have turned you down.  If I had taken on Teresi I would have received nothing but adverse decisions from him and all his buddies.  I'd be spending all my time in the Appellate Division.  My clients can't afford it and I'd be run out of the law business'.  Tony, that is one hell of an indictment of your courts".
 
"I'm listening to you, Ron.  I hear what you are saying."  And he repeated it looking me right in the eye.
 
"Tony, I can't ask for more.  On second thought I can.  The day Judge Spain ordered my release from jail pending the hearing of the Article 78 Proceeding I wanted to write him a thank you letter.  But I was told it would be most inappropriate."
 
"Yes, it would have been... and still is", he said.
 
"Tony, because of the manner in which I was brought up, I owe Judge Spain a 'thanks'.  I know he was just doing his job.  But I still owe him a thanks.  But not a month goes by that I don't think of him.  You probably have coffee with him once in a while.  If there is any way you could express my sentiments to him for what he did for me, I would consider it a personal favor."
 
"I can do that for you, Ron", he said with a smile.  We shook hands and parted.
 
I don't know what will come of if... if anything at all.  But he is the Presiding Justice of the appellate court that covers my area.  There is no question he is a man of influence.  He may even be the biggest crook of the bunch for all I know.  But that Saturday he got a candid look at me... his neighbor... the real me... not just some dry legal papers he may have read three years ago.  I'm hopeful I will be able to "bump into him" again.  I'm hopeful that Saturday was the start of something.  I'm hopeful that one day I may be able to present J.A.I.L. to him under favorable conditions.
 
As a side note to this, two candidates for Family Court Judge introduced themselves to me.  One had the endorsement of the political machine for the primary.  The other didn't.  When I told them my name, bells rang.  Yeah... while they were searching their memory I told them who I was.  They remembered!  I told them both I hope they would get elected, and if they did we would be keeping them in our sights.  Told them that if they got elected I expected the first thing they would do is sign an Oath of Office and file it with the County Clerk.  If they didn't, June Maxam was coming after them and I would give her any help I could.  They didn't quite know how to take that, but they seemed to know what I was talking about.
 
If ya ain't havin' fun, ya ain't doin' it rite.
 
Ron Loeber
 


J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><

#853 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Sun Sep 26, 2004 3:02 am
Subject: * * MADD About Amendment A In South Dakota * *
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                     September 25, 2004
 
Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L. 
                          FAQs                    What?MeWarden?
 
MADD About Amendment A
In South Dakota
 
It is no secret that J.A.I.L. is about to embark on its campaign to get the Judicial Accountability Initiative Law on the ballot in South Dakota this coming election cycle in 2006. In the meantime on this current 2004 election, South Dakotans are faced with an Amendment A measure, sponsored by their legislature and lawyers, that would permanently take away the people's right to vote on judges.
 
J.A.I.L. strongly opposes any measure, including Amendment A, which takes away accountability of judges to the people. This Amendment is creating a stir in South Dakota focusing on the judiciary. Opposing this measure are state's attorneys, city council members, some legislators, as well as civic organizations such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD).  
 
The goal of defeating Amendment A is the springboard for an even more heated South Dakota J.A.I.L. campaign for the next ballot in 2006. South Dakota will become the beacon of this nation regarding accountability of judges to the people. It will be a subject debated throughout this nation, 
and will be a model of providing "new guards for our future security" as described in the Declaration of Independence.
 
MADD sets forth its position on Amendment A below:
-Ron Branson-

 
From: MADD
Subject: MADD against Amendment A "Merit Selection of Judges"

MADD takes a Stand against Amendment A in South Dakota

"Merit Selection of Judges"

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 25, 2004

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is worried by Constitutional Amendment A (Merit Selection of Judges) which is on the November 2004 ballot. MADD feels this change would potentially harm the victims of drunk driving and our justice system.

Right now, voters select their judges at the ballot box. Judges are accountable for their actions and they must convince us that they will do the best job of providing South Dakotans with justice. Judges have a lot of discretionary authority in sentencing and Amendment A would take away this check on the system.

By allowing the Governor to appoint judges, we cannot choose from a number of candidates. We can’t get to know who they are and what they stand for. Amendment A will end direct election of circuit judges and replace it with an appointment process that will be controlled by the governor and an unelected commission. There will be a retention vote three years after the appointment and then every eight years thereafter. MADD believes the retention vote is a sham because it does not allow the voters to have a say in the appointment. Essentially this means that circuit judges will be granted life terms in office.

In addition creating lifetime tenure, Amendment A could also be abused in the hands of future governors. The Judicial Qualifications Commission and Governor could appoint judges for political reasons rather than the quality of their jurisprudence. The commission will be made up mostly of lawyers, and Amendment A is written in such a way that it prevents the legislature from even having an "advise and consent" vote in the appointment of judges. The result could be that South Dakotans could be stuck with judges for life that do not believe in victims’ rights or in taking strong measures to deter drunk drivers. Or worse, we could be stuck with someone who is not a neutral, unbiased adjudicator, but someone who is beholden to the people who appoint him/her; this is the world that Constitutional Amendment A could create.

MADD believes that judges should be accountable to the people. The lack of accountability that would result from Amendment A would be a disaster for all South Dakotans, including victims of drunken driving.

MADD believes that .merit. needs to be determined by the people, not a governor or an unelected commission. We urge South Dakotans to vote "NO" on Amendment A in the November 2, 2004 election.

__________________________________

For more information contact:

Lila Doud, President, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD)--Pennington County Chapter,
maddpennco@...   605-343-5066


J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless
minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><

#854 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Fri Sep 24, 2004 5:31 pm
Subject: Another Attempt to Distance The Judiciary From The People
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                    September 24, 2004
 
Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L.
                           FAQs                    What?MeWarden?
 
Yet Another Attempt to Distance The Judiciary From The People
(This is happening in South Dakota)
 
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 2004 7:04 PM
Subject: Lawrence and Fall River State's attorneys opposed to Amendment A

Attached is a release from Lance Russell, the Fall River State's Attorney and John Fitzgerald, the Lawrence County State's Attorney. Both are opposing Amendment A ("Merit Selection of Judges"), which is on the November ballot in South Dakota. Feel free to forward this
 
South Dakota

CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT A:

THE ELIMINATION OF A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT

 

By Lance Russell, Fall River County State’s Attorney

and John Fitzgerald, Lawrence County State’s Attorney 

 

            Constitutional Amendment A will permanently take away the right of the people of South Dakota to elect Circuit Court Judges.  This is a right we have enjoyed since statehood.

 

            States have different methods of selecting judges.  Some have partisan elections, some have nonpartisan elections and some have nominating commissions with the governors making the final decision followed by retention elections.

 

            Why should South Dakotans care?  Well, there is a movement to amend the state constitution, eliminating contested nonpartisan judicial elections and allowing the governor to appoint circuit court judges from a list of two or more individuals selected by a commission consisting predominantly of lawyers.  Three years after the appointment, there will be a “retention” election, where the ballot will ask the voter, yes or no, if they want to retain the judge.   

 

            What’s the problem with that?  The amendment changes the intent of the framers of our state constitution and will make our judges unaccountable. 

 

South Dakota was founded on the principles of populism and accountability.  South Dakota was the first state to allow the people the power of initiative and referendum, and our constitution gave the people the right to elect our judges.  In fact, every state entering the Union between 1846 and 1912 provided for judicial elections.  This was a reaction to the feeling that the appointed judiciary had become “a bastion of unresponsive aristocracy” and that elected judges would be more independent and less apt to be influenced by the politics and cronyism of governors.   

 

            How will the amendment make our judges unaccountable?  Simply put:  the people of our state will have little say in who are their judges.  It will eliminate the check on the judiciary that the framers of our constitution put in place to keep elitists from having unfettered discretion to dictate their will on the people.  Proponents of the constitutional amendment will counter that the retention election will be an adequate check on the discretion of the judiciary; however, retention elections have proved to be nothing more than sham elections in other states.  Retention elections are just that—they retain incumbents.  In retention election states, almost 99 percent of the judges are retained.  We all know in countries where there are only one political party, they have essentially retention elections.  Those elections also allowed for only one choice, and just like retention elections, are noted for low voter interest, knowledge and turnout. 

 

            The bottom line is the proponents of Amendment A are attempting to take away a constitutional right—the right of the people to meaningfully participate in judicial selection. 

 

            Who are the proponents of retention elections?  Lawyers.  They have already raised in excess of $20,000 to secure its passage.  Why lawyers?  Because the lawyers will be selecting the pool of candidates from which judges will be appointed.  The proponents will say whom better than the lawyers to evaluate the abilities of judicial candidates?  We say the people.

 

We believe the people have the intelligence to evaluate the qualifications of judicial candidates, and more importantly, they don’t have an financial interest in who is chosen. 

 

The proponents will also say that the retention system will take the politics out of the judicial selections.  However, in Missouri, the first state to adopt the retention system, it has been asserted that the personal injury lawyers have succeeded in gaining control of the politics of the state, including the politics of the judicial nominating commission, and because of that Missouri is one of the favorite plaintiff’s venue in America.  If the retention system is adopted in South Dakota, the politics and power of judicial selection will simply go from the people to the lawyers, most likely the trial lawyers.  And, we all know the acrimonious role politics plays in the selection of Federal judges.  Politics will always be part of the process, the question is: who do you want making the decisions?  Politicians, lawyers or you?  We believe that the farther the people are removed from the decision making, the farther the courts spiral out of control and make poor decisions.

 

Judges have awesome power and authority.  If a judge decides to legislate law instead of interpret law the only way to hold them accountable is an election.  If Amendment A passes there will be no way for the people whom judges serve to hold their judges accountable. A whole branch of the government will be un-elected no checks and balances will exist in this branch. The only beneficiaries of the amendment will be un-elected judges.

 

The election process in South Dakota has produced fine judges who are both wise and courageous in their decisions.   We are public servants and we believe it is in South Dakota’s best interests to continue to elect and hold judges accountable the way the drafters of our constitution envisioned.

 

From a search on Google, I came up with the following:

Lance Russell   frcsa@...

John Fitzgerald   jfitzger@...



J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><

 


 

#855 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Sun Sep 26, 2004 9:56 pm
Subject: Backroom Selection of Judges
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 

J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                   September 26, 2004

Mission Statement            JNJ Library                  PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L.                  FAQs                    What?MeWarden?


Backroom Selection of Judges
Gun Owners of South Dakota Checking In On Amendment A

(September 22, 2004) – “Only lawyers and politicians should be able to select judges.  You, as a citizen, are no longer competent.”

This appears to be the basic position of the proponents of constitutional Amendment A, which will be on the ballot November 2.  Originally sponsored by numerous anti-gun politicians, this measure is based on the so-called “merit selection of judges” process.  It could be more accurately described, however, as the backroom selection of judges.

Currently, circuit-court judges are elected by the people of South Dakota.  If Amendment A becomes law, all state judges will be appointed by the governor from a pool of candidates chosen by a bureaucratic commission composed of five lawyers and two gubernatorial appointees. 

Proponents of backroom selection declare that recent federal court decisions make Amendment A necessary, claiming that the amendment will protect the judiciary from big money and special interest groups.  They imply that judges who are chosen by an unelected commission will be more impartial than those elected by the people. 

But Amendment A proponents fail to mention that five of the seven members of the commission must be members of the State Bar, and three of them are directly appointed by the Bar President.  In its structure and function, the State Bar is strikingly similar to a special interest group, and is arguably one of the most powerful entities in South Dakota. 

It should also be obvious that most special interest groups can exert at least as much influence on the governor’s office and a seven member commission as they can bring to bear upon the diverse population of South Dakota in a popular election.

Proponents also suggest that backroom selection is more “open” than the current elective process.  However, many voters must be wondering how a process governed by a small bureaucratic commission could be more open than a district-wide election. 

Amendment A has been hailed by proponents as the remedy for a “broken system.”  But the dangers of consolidating all judicial selection into the hands of a few unelected lawyers make their solution far worse than the supposed problem.  Under Amendment A, the governor may appoint only candidates selected by the commission, which is in turn heavily influenced by the State Bar.  In the words of one voter, “Amendment A turns a possible problem into a bona fide, guaranteed catastrophe” (Rapid City Journal, Sept. 21).

Passage of Amendment A could indeed spell disaster for any gun owner facing criminal charges under the current gun control laws.  Because judges chosen in the backroom selection system are far less accountable to the people, they are much more likely to be anti-gun and to prosecute innocent gun owners with greater zeal.

South Dakota Gun Owners
PO Box 3845, Rapid City, SD  57709
(605) 737-5583
LibertyTeeth@...


J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless
minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><

#856 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Tue Oct 5, 2004 6:11 am
Subject: * Lest We Forget, II *
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                           September 4, 2004

Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L.                           FAQs                    What?MeWarden?

 
Lest We Forget, II
 
Back on the 21st day of December, 2001, I published a J.A.I.L. News Journal entitled, "Lest We Forget." I find that such a fitting title that I believe it should also belong to following article, so I am now emailing what I have chosen to entitle, "Lest We Forget, II."
 
Many of us have had the past experience of suffering humiliation of being placed into a jail cell, and the treatment we received. I've experienced this to the point that I resolved that I was just going to make the best of it, and treat the experience as if I were on a vacation with all expenses paid, to wit, -- food, housing, clothing, etc. I figured that I may as well not fret because it was not going to change one thing. I would start documenting clogged toilets, feces and urine on the floor, no toilet paper, etc, and then report it to the County Grand Jury, recommending they send through  bogus arrestees to document my Grand Jury report.
 
I don't know, but sometimes I think the system was frustrated because I seemed visually to enjoy jail. One Superior Court Judge even commented on this in one of my lawsuits against a commissioner for kidnapping, holding me hostage, and demanding a ransom. He said, Mr. Branson, in all my twenty years on the bench I have never met anyone like you, 'Just keep me here in jail until you are finished with me.' I know he was thinking how the system would get entirely clogged if everyone took that attitude. It was because of my manifest attitude that both the trial court judge and the appellate court judges called to my attention that I was standing before them with a warrant for my arrest, but none would arrest me because my lawsuit was about the issuance by my defendant of this false warrant for my arrest without jurisdiction of which I was calling upon them to decide. They did not want to get into the legality of the warrant, but to just dismiss my case against the commissioner. Their problem - how do you intimidate and threaten a man who outwardly appears to enjoy jail.
 
While below, the victim views her situation as an overzealous punishment for her own wrong-doing. Rather, I viewed my own situation as a victim of power-hungry men showing off their muscle just because they can do it and get away with it. Far from justice, or something I deserved for crimes I committed.
 
-Ron Branson
 

 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, October 04, 2004
Subject: Spence's News & Views 10/4/04

Time Served

Another satisfied customer from the Harris County Jail
By Miss Mel

The shove was not the most upsetting or even humiliating thing that
had happened to me during my stay at the Harris County Jail.  It was
just the last in a long line of verbal abuse and physical neglect and was
almost the straw that broke this camel's back.

My jail time adventure started about 4:30 pm Monday when I was pulled over for expired stickers and then arrested for warrants I had with the City of Houston and Harris County.  It was upsetting, I'll admit, and I shed a few tears as I kissed my boyfriend goodbye and was handcuffed and driven away by the arresting officer. I tried to remain calm and accept my fate.
 
I was the one who had not taken care of my responsibilities and I was the one paying the price. My resolve lasted all the way until I was being searched at the City jail with a row of seven or eight leering men sitting on a bench directly behind me while a female officer lifted my shirt, grabbed my bra, and proceeded to shake it so roughly that my breasts fell out for all to see. I was totally humiliated and rushed to recover myself as soon as the lady officer finished her task.  How could she be so cold about exposing me like that?  Two more women she searched in this same fashion and both looked just as shocked and embarrassed as I felt.  

This was my first inkling of what was to come.  When I began to realize that those in charge saw us as nothing more than misbehaving animals, no matter what type of crime we had committed or whether we deserved such degradation or not. The officers at the City jail were mean and cruel.  I was kicked in the side my first night in the cellblock for falling asleep on two bed mats instead of one ( a rule I had not been informed of by anyone). Questions about court times and other information that related to why we were in jail were almost never answered.  We were told we could take showers in the one shower stall but no one would provide a towel or soap and there was no shower curtain.  Several women could not reach friends or family because the phones we had access to were collect calls only and couldn't connect with cellphones or anyone long distance, yet none of the guards would allow them to make a call on the regular phone or even call for them. The officers used profanity constantly in talking to each other and in talking to us.  If you missed your name being called the first time they would call you a"dumbass" and would yell at you about wasting their time for the next fifteen minutes.

The entire time I was in the City jail I was cold, tired, sore, and absolutely
disgusted by what I saw. Here were my hard-earned tax dollars at work
funding a bunch of bitter, mean spirited police officers to treat me like an
animal at the zoo.  It was true that I had broken the law and failed to pay my traffic tickets, or even go to court for them, but that did not make me less than a human being. On my third day at City jail my tickets were dismissed and I was transferred to the County jail in Downtown Houston.  If I had thought City was bad, County was much, much worse.  First came sixteen hours - sixteen long, exhausting hours - in the holding tank.  Sixteen hours in a maybe 20x30 room with 41 other women and no air conditioning.  Sixteen hours sitting on a hard cement bench or a hard cement floor with no place to lie down, no place to stretch my legs, and the smell of my sweaty, dirty body growing ever more nauseating (you do not change clothes at the City jail and so I had been wearing the same outfit without a shower for going-on four days). What was truly disturbing was that some of the ladies had been in that stinky, awful holding tank for almost 24 hours without even being booked in yet.  We asked several times to have the air conditioner turned on and were told it was broken, but the deputies wouldn't leave the door open to let cooler air circulate in for us.  We were given bologna sandwiches every seven hours and
all we had to drink was tepid water from a fountain off the back of the
toilet.  I developed a rash on my left arm from the heat and my dirty
sweat and felt sick and hungry.  One lady threw up several times and another had muscle spasms in her back from sitting for so long. The deputies at County proved to be just as rough and nasty as the officers at City.  One lady was called a"stupid bitch" because she did not respond to her name immediately when called.  Another tried several times to ask about her bond she was waiting on and was ignored and even had the door slammed in her face. At County we were treated as the lowest kinds of animals.  We were yelled at and mocked, locked away and forgotten.  Sixteen hours is an absolutely ridiculous amount of time to have to wait before being booked in to jail.  And there was no reason to have us locked away with no air conditioning or even a fan until we were all almost sick from the heat and smell.

Is this what our tax dollars are paying for?  Is this why we support
our law enforcement officers with charities and funds, so that they can treat people who have made some mistakes like dirty sewer rats? After sixteen hours in the holding tank, another two hours getting booked in, and another hour or so getting changed into my orange jumpsuit and assigned a cell block, I was taken down to court to receive time served.  I would be released that night after midnight and until then waiting in the cell block until the release process began. While I waited to be called for release I was told I had a visitor and that, ladies and gentlemen, was where the shove came in.  I was misdirected on what door to go through and ended up on the wrong side of the room where the visitors were.  I switched sides without anyone stopping me, thinking nothing of it. Fifteen minutes later the deputy comes roaring into the room yelling at me for being in the wrong place and shoving me - physically placing her hands upon me and pushing me - out the door without getting to say goodbye.  She didn't care that a mistake had been made or that it hadn't been my fault.  She shoved me out the door and told me I was a lucky idiot that was being released or I'd be in serious trouble. At the time I was so relieved to be going home that I didn't focus on that shove, but later on during the three hour release process I had time to think about it and get mad.  Since the moment the police officer arrested me I had been quiet and docile, doing as I was told and causing no waves. In return I had
been kicked and shoved and verbally abused.  I had been treated like a dog in a cage at the pound and it wasn't right.  Yes I had messed up.  Yes I had failed to take care of my responsibilities and I was paying for it.  But I still did not deserve what I got in those jails.

No wonder long term inmates have so much trouble functioning on the
outside of the jails and prisons.To be treated as an ignorant animal every day and be humiliated over and over in such a fashion would break most people until they truly believed they were that worthless. I was lucky I only had to serve four and a half days. Any longer and I don't know what might have happened to me. I wasn't even read my rights when I was arrested and that does not seem just to me. People should pay for their crimes, but they should be able to do it as human beings with their dignity intact or else justice is just not being served.
-----------------------
The above article was published in the September 1st-15th, 2004 issue of Free Press, a local newspaper available free at some news stands.
A website is now under construction-- www.freepresshouston.com  


J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless
minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><


#857 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Mon Oct 4, 2004 6:20 am
Subject: Re: Hundreds of ways to do things...
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
 
Dear Rich Stewart:
 
I am very impressed with the calm and reasoned tone of your below response to me, even though we differ upon approach. From my perspective, all is not lost here if a lesson can be learned from your  experience. I know it may amaze you of my certainty of your eventual outcome before these judges, but this is the result of my many years of experience in both state and federal courts. If you are allowed to reach first base in your cause, I will be amazed.
 
So assure me, Rich, that you will earnestly consider the option of J.A.I.L. should you find your petitioning for redress to these judges unsatisfactory. I think my request is reasonable. We are all victims together, and dealing with the same enemy. We just need to unite on one front, and I believe J.A.I.L. is that means of a single frontal assault.
 
When you say there are hundreds of ways to do things, I agree with you. In my illustration, we could fly over the North Pole and South Poll and still get to our next door neighbor's house as opposed to walking next door. However, my illustration breaks down in applying this to J.A.I.L. because I believe it will only be via J.A.I.L. we shall ever win our freedom this side of total anarchy and bloodshed. But then I am admitting that anarchy and bloodshed is another way. You've gathered my drift.
 
Thanks again for your reasoned response. I am oft not received in the spirit for which it is intended. You answer shows humbleness. God bless you.
 
-Ron Branson

 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, October 01, 2004 6:36 AM
Subject: Hundreds of ways to do things...

Ron -
 
Thanks for your response - I can see your point ... and at the same time, I believe that there are myriad approaches that merit attention.  When it comes to changes on the massive scales we're speaking of, history tells us that rarely if ever does one single approach produce results.  We live in a complex, changing and confoundingly diverse time and culture.  The more I am involved, the more I see that these individual efforts are building a cacophony of discontent, and I believe a day of change IS coming.  I like your bold assertion that J.A.I.L. is the only viable option - but each of us only have so much to go around, only so much time each of us can donate.  That being the case, we've each got to choose what patch of ground to defend, and what weapons we'll use in our defense. 
 
I watch the group "Fathers 4 Justice" in England and wonder if they are the beginning of a time of civil unrest where peaceful attempts to resolve issues such as these is no longer possible.  In hopes that it does not come to that, I am actively involved in several arenas in addition to this one in hopes of bringing peaceful change.  And I am glad that you are on my side, that our ultimate goals are the same - even if we choose different routes to the neighbor's house.
 
Best Regards -
 
Rich Stewart
4125 Oak Ferry Drive
Kennesaw, Georgia 30144
Home 770-852-2015
Cel 404-579-4857
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
Please visit these sites and consider getting involved.  The only way we can change the travesty of the so-called 'family justice' system that children and their parents face is to DO SOMETHING. 
Are YOUR children worth it? 
Mine are.
http://www.gachildsupport.org/
http://fapt.org/
http://www.indianacrc.org
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, October 01, 2004 2:21 AM
Subject: Two Ways To Do Things

J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                           September 30, 2004

Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L.                           FAQs                    What?MeWarden?

 
Two Ways To Do Things
 
It is often said that there are two ways to do things, "The Hard Way, or The Easy Way."  I have a number of times used the illustration of going to my next door neighbor's house one door east.
 
As one who lives in the San Fernando Valley (northern Los Angeles), I can either take a taxi traveling west to the FlyAway bus lines in Van Nuys, and buy a ticket to LAX Airport. From there I can begin my international flight with a layover in Hawaii. Then travel on with a stop-over in France. >From there, I can drop in Thailand. And after a couple other stops I will find myself landing at the JFK Airport in New York. From there, I can take an inner-continental flight to Burbank/Bob Hope Airport. Now, after 25,000 miles, I am getting very close to my destination. All I need to do now is flag a taxi and in a few minutes I will arrive at my neighbor's home. 
 
Or --
 
I can just simply walk next door and knock on my neighbor's door. One route is very expensive, and time-consuming, but admittedly both routes get me to the same destination.
 
Now by way of application, it is true that we are all facing major injustices in our courts across America, and that injustice is tearing our nation apart from inside from which we need redress of grievance.
 
To remedy this situation, we could bring multiply class-action lawsuits across America on behalf of some twenty-five million victims, and take our chances in the courts, Or,
 
We could just place J.A.I.L. on the ballot, and get it passed, and hold all  judges accountable. While hiring many attorneys to represent twenty-five million clients is a huge and very expensive task, passage of J.A.I.L., depending upon which state chosen, will cost us somewhere between $70,000 to 250,000.
 
Yes, millions of parents are being butchered via the courts, and "something" must be done. But what is that "something?" By bringing actions in courts, we are going to the very enemy from which our problems originate. But some will say, "It is the state court judges that are doing it to us, and we are going to the federal judges for relief." This is at best a naive statement of those ignorant of federal judges who are less accountable to the People than are state judges. But, as they say, "Experience is a good teacher." Once we learn our lesson -- where to then?
 
It all comes down to J.A.I.L. -- the only relief.
 
Please do not get me wrong. I do not intend to mock or make fun of those suffering their plights, but to instruct people by way of my own experiences. If federal courts were the answer, there would be no J.A.I.L. today, and I, as well as others, would have already turned the corruption around from which suffer. Anyone can learn from their own experiences, (I did), but a wise man will learn from another's. What's more, when I learned my lesson, I did not have benefit of the option of J.A.I.L.  It just simply did not exist. I could not have heard or considered it.
 
 
But now J.A.I.L. is an option, but not just an option, but the only means by which this nation is going to peaceably be turned around. Further, I say that even if violent action were considered as the means, and we were to live to talk about it, we would still be in the need for the passage of J.A.I.L.
 
Conclusion: Why fly all the way around the world to get to your next door neighbor's house when you just can walk there?
 
-Ron Branson
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: sacs1@...
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2004 8:22 PM
Subject: Parents File Class Action Custody Lawsuits All Across America
 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
 
Contact: Rich Stewart
Phone: 770-852-2015
Email: rich@...
http://www.indianacrc.org/classaction.html
 
Parents File Class Action Custody Lawsuits All Across America
 
(Atlanta, Georgia) September 30, 2004 – Over the past two weeks, advocate groups have been filing multiple federal class action lawsuits, on behalf of an estimated 25 million noncustodial parents, demanding that rights to equal custody of their children be restored by the federal courts. The suit was recently filed in Georgia and it has been filed in almost all states with only a handful left which are expected to follow soon.
 
Reminiscent to the start of the American Revolutionary War, groups in thirteen states fired the opening salvos on September 17, 2004 – the anniversary of the U.S. Constitution. Interestingly, groups in South Carolina were the very first, also strangely familiar with the opening sequences of the Civil War. The groups promise their resolve in obtaining victory on a national scale.
 
In what some are calling "the granddaddy of all lawsuits", the parents will challenge widespread practices by the states in determining care, custody, and support of children. "Parents are tired of being mistreated as second class citizens by state courts," according to Torm L. Howse, President of the Indiana Civil Rights Council, which is coordinating the national effort. “Most parents say they care about their children, their families, and the related unnecessary waste of their hard-earned tax dollars by the government, more than all other political issues combined.”
 
The coalition is comprised of various leaders from family rights, father’s rights, mother’s rights, and shared parenting groups, as well as political candidates, doctors, and other activists committed to dramatic social, taxation, and government reform in the area of family law. The effort is also backed by several prominent family rights organizations.
 
"We're trying to protect the right of all fit parents to share equally in the custody and care of their children," says Howse. “The time has come for a drastic reform of government practices that harm children and parents.” “Kids need both parents,” adds Rachel Forrest, a leader with the National Congress for Fathers and Children. "We hope that this landmark action will wake up the government and make it aware of the inequities in family courts and social services that prevent our children from having equal access to both of their parents."
 
According to attorney Garrett C. Dailey, who successfully obtained a recent landmark California Supreme Court decision, "children of divorced parents who have two primary parents in their lives do better in school, are better adjusted and happier than children raised by only one primary parent." Likewise, the American Psychological Association, the world’s largest such group, confirmed through an exhaustive study that children in joint custody arrangements have less behavior and emotional problems, higher self-esteem, better family relations, and better school performance than children who are subjected to sole custody arrangements. Agreeing in a decision long-touted by parental rights advocates, Judge Dorothy T. Beasley of the Georgia Court of Appeals ruled: “Inherent in the express public policy is a recognition of the child's right to equal access and opportunity with both parents, the right to be guided and nurtured by both parents, the right to have major decisions made by the application of both parents' wisdom, judgment and experience. The child does not forfeit these rights when the parents divorce."
 
When asked to elaborate on the amount of damages being sought, Howse clarified, "Oh, yes. I suppose the initial appearance of damages being sought seems staggering - even unbelievable. However, those numbers only reflect the fact that the sheer number of parents who have been wronged by family courts is equally staggering." He also added, "It has never been about winning large amounts of money from the states. That would hurt the innocent taxpayers, and as noncustodial parents, we are very familiar with suffering under backbreaking financial pressures. It's about restoring the lives of our children, and restoring our own lives, all in accordance with law. In fact, we are preparing, very soon, to offer proposed settlements that would alleviate the vast majority of these damages, among other things, in exchange for a quick restoration of equal custody rights, a few forms of tax abatements and credits to balance what custodial parents have enjoyed for years, and some other basic and related issues, like the setting up of neutral visitation exchange centers. We will encourage state governments to accept the overwhelming facts, and to thereby avoid any necessity for a prolonged court battle."
 
In addition to challenging standard practices pertaining to family law, the coalition also alleges that while nearly every state has recognized catastrophic budgetary failures, the states still recklessly refuse to consider the financial devastation involved with encouraging routine awards of sole custody, reminding that such patterns dramatically increase crime, poverty, drug use, suicides, dropouts, teenage pregnancies, and other forms of direct harm and costs against children, families, taxpayers, and society in general. Professor Stephen Baskerville, distinguished master of political science at Howard University, and one of the world’s foremost experts on various custody and child support issues, explains: “Politicians often spend money to avoid confronting problems. Yet marshaling the government to strengthen families seems especially pointless when it is government that weakened the family in the first place.”
 
The plaintiffs further allege that the relocation of children away from one parent radically increases the incidence of parental kidnappings, which dwarf all other types of kidnappings, and wastes additional tax dollars in the ensuing processes. An in-depth analysis, conducted in 1990 by the U.S. Department of Justice, confirmed that over 350,000 children were abducted that year by a family member – typically a parent involved in a custody dispute – while the number of stereotypical kidnappings of children for ransom amounted only to a few hundred nationwide.
 
The parents say that common inequities in state family courts are also directly and indirectly responsible for murders and suicides amongst the most estranged families. Every week, they note, approximately 300 fathers and 75 mothers commit suicide in this country, with the majority of these senseless deaths directly attributable to victimization by family courts. These suicides are often committed by passive parents, due to hopelessness in a system fraught with injustice, but the more aggressive parents occasionally snap at the weight of suffering such anguish, and violently take out their desperation on estranged partners, sometimes even murdering them, and possibly the children, before also killing themselves.
 
They also allege that the states are recklessly responsible for much of the abuse and neglect experienced by children in this country. The National Clearinghouse for Child Abuse and Neglect Information, a service of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, consistently reports that, year after year, single parents are responsible for almost two-thirds of all substantiated cases of abuse and neglect committed against children – more than all other classes of perpetrators combined. The national costs of these child abuse and neglect incidents surpassed $94 billion in 2001, according to Prevent Child Abuse America. “It’s painfully obvious that the majority of child abuse can be easily prevented, by simply ensuring the regular presence of both parents in the daily lives of children,” notes Howse. “Involving the eyes and ears of both parents creates a naturally self-balancing situation, wherein a child’s health and safety is automatically monitored by opposing sides that stand to gain if the other side fails.”
 
The Plaintiffs further charge that because parents are generally treated unfairly in family courts, the results are also directly or indirectly responsible for very large, and otherwise unnecessary, additional tax burdens upon every citizen, through increased welfare spending and self-serving enlargement of state family agencies and entities, and that such inequities are also indirectly responsible for vast numbers of personal and corporate bankruptcies, which are absorbed into even more future taxation. Additionally, they note a pattern of fraud and abuse being progressively reported about various state family bureaucracies, which they say are very costly in terms of tax dollars, and which violate the rights of American citizens on an unprecedented scale.
 
“It is high time for costly government to get out of the lives of most parents and children,” says Howse. “American taxpayers should no longer be forced to fund systematic violations against parents and children, and the needless progressive destruction of our society.”
 
While the current class actions deal exclusively with conventional aspects of child custody, leaders of related parents groups report they have already begun the processes for raising similar legal challenges in the near future, on behalf of alleged victims of CPS, paternity fraud, and the progressive institutional drugging of children in this nation.
 
###
 

For more information:
Contact: Rich Stewart
Phone: 770-852-2015
Email: rich@...
 


J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless
minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><


#858 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Fri Oct 1, 2004 6:27 am
Subject: Two Ways To Do Things
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                           September 30, 2004

Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L.                           FAQs                    What?MeWarden?

 
Two Ways To Do Things
 
It is often said that there are two ways to do things, "The Hard Way, or The Easy Way."  I have a number of times used the illustration of going to my next door neighbor's house one door east.
 
As one who lives in the San Fernando Valley (northern Los Angeles), I can either take a taxi traveling west to the FlyAway bus lines in Van Nuys, and buy a ticket to LAX Airport. From there I can begin my international flight with a layover in Hawaii. Then travel on with a stop-over in France. From there, I can drop in Thailand. And after a couple other stops I will find myself landing at the JFK Airport in New York. From there, I can take an inner-continental flight to Burbank/Bob Hope Airport. Now, after 25,000 miles, I am getting very close to my destination. All I need to do now is flag a taxi and in a few minutes I will arrive at my neighbor's home. 
 
Or --
 
I can just simply walk next door and knock on my neighbor's door. One route is very expensive, and time-consuming, but admittedly both routes get me to the same destination.
 
Now by way of application, it is true that we are all facing major injustices in our courts across America, and that injustice is tearing our nation apart from inside from which we need redress of grievance.
 
To remedy this situation, we could bring multiply class-action lawsuits across America on behalf of some twenty-five million victims, and take our chances in the courts, Or,
 
We could just place J.A.I.L. on the ballot, and get it passed, and hold all  judges accountable. While hiring many attorneys to represent twenty-five million clients is a huge and very expensive task, passage of J.A.I.L., depending upon which state chosen, will cost us somewhere between $50,000 to 250,000.
 
Yes, millions of parents are being butchered via the courts, and "something" must be done. But what is that "something?" By bringing actions in courts, we are going to the very enemy from which our problems originate. But some will say, "It is the state court judges that are doing it to us, and we are going to the federal judges for relief." This is at best a naive statement of those ignorant of federal judges who are less accountable to the People than are state judges. But, as they say, "Experience is a good teacher." Once we learn our lesson -- where to then?
 
It all comes down to J.A.I.L. -- the only relief.
 
Please do not get me wrong. I do not intend to mock or make fun of those suffering their plights, but to instruct people by way of my own experiences. If federal courts were the answer, there would be no J.A.I.L. today, and I, as well as others, would have already turned the corruption around from which suffer. Anyone can learn from their own experiences, (I did), but a wise man will learn from another's. What's more, when I learned my lesson, I did not have benefit of the option of J.A.I.L.  It just simply did not exist. I could not have heard or considered it.
 
 
But now J.A.I.L. is an option, but not just an option, but the only means by which this nation is going to peaceably be turned around. Further, I say that even if violent action were considered as the means, and we were to live to talk about it, we would still be in the need for the passage of J.A.I.L.
 
Conclusion: Why fly all the way around the world to get to your next door neighbor's house when you just can walk there?
 
-Ron Branson
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: sacs1@...
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2004 8:22 PM
Subject: Parents File Class Action Custody Lawsuits All Across America
 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
 
Contact: Rich Stewart
Phone: 770-852-2015
Email: rich@...
http://www.indianacrc.org/classaction.html
 
Parents File Class Action Custody Lawsuits All Across America
 
(Atlanta, Georgia) September 30, 2004 – Over the past two weeks, advocate groups have been filing multiple federal class action lawsuits, on behalf of an estimated 25 million noncustodial parents, demanding that rights to equal custody of their children be restored by the federal courts. The suit was recently filed in Georgia and it has been filed in almost all states with only a handful left which are expected to follow soon.
 
Reminiscent to the start of the American Revolutionary War, groups in thirteen states fired the opening salvos on September 17, 2004 – the anniversary of the U.S. Constitution. Interestingly, groups in South Carolina were the very first, also strangely familiar with the opening sequences of the Civil War. The groups promise their resolve in obtaining victory on a national scale.
 
In what some are calling "the granddaddy of all lawsuits", the parents will challenge widespread practices by the states in determining care, custody, and support of children. "Parents are tired of being mistreated as second class citizens by state courts," according to Torm L. Howse, President of the Indiana Civil Rights Council, which is coordinating the national effort. “Most parents say they care about their children, their families, and the related unnecessary waste of their hard-earned tax dollars by the government, more than all other political issues combined.”
 
The coalition is comprised of various leaders from family rights, father’s rights, mother’s rights, and shared parenting groups, as well as political candidates, doctors, and other activists committed to dramatic social, taxation, and government reform in the area of family law. The effort is also backed by several prominent family rights organizations.
 
"We're trying to protect the right of all fit parents to share equally in the custody and care of their children," says Howse. “The time has come for a drastic reform of government practices that harm children and parents.” “Kids need both parents,” adds Rachel Forrest, a leader with the National Congress for Fathers and Children. "We hope that this landmark action will wake up the government and make it aware of the inequities in family courts and social services that prevent our children from having equal access to both of their parents."
 
According to attorney Garrett C. Dailey, who successfully obtained a recent landmark California Supreme Court decision, "children of divorced parents who have two primary parents in their lives do better in school, are better adjusted and happier than children raised by only one primary parent." Likewise, the American Psychological Association, the world’s largest such group, confirmed through an exhaustive study that children in joint custody arrangements have less behavior and emotional problems, higher self-esteem, better family relations, and better school performance than children who are subjected to sole custody arrangements. Agreeing in a decision long-touted by parental rights advocates, Judge Dorothy T. Beasley of the Georgia Court of Appeals ruled: “Inherent in the express public policy is a recognition of the child's right to equal access and opportunity with both parents, the right to be guided and nurtured by both parents, the right to have major decisions made by the application of both parents' wisdom, judgment and experience. The child does not forfeit these rights when the parents divorce."
 
When asked to elaborate on the amount of damages being sought, Howse clarified, "Oh, yes. I suppose the initial appearance of damages being sought seems staggering - even unbelievable. However, those numbers only reflect the fact that the sheer number of parents who have been wronged by family courts is equally staggering." He also added, "It has never been about winning large amounts of money from the states. That would hurt the innocent taxpayers, and as noncustodial parents, we are very familiar with suffering under backbreaking financial pressures. It's about restoring the lives of our children, and restoring our own lives, all in accordance with law. In fact, we are preparing, very soon, to offer proposed settlements that would alleviate the vast majority of these damages, among other things, in exchange for a quick restoration of equal custody rights, a few forms of tax abatements and credits to balance what custodial parents have enjoyed for years, and some other basic and related issues, like the setting up of neutral visitation exchange centers. We will encourage state governments to accept the overwhelming facts, and to thereby avoid any necessity for a prolonged court battle."
 
In addition to challenging standard practices pertaining to family law, the coalition also alleges that while nearly every state has recognized catastrophic budgetary failures, the states still recklessly refuse to consider the financial devastation involved with encouraging routine awards of sole custody, reminding that such patterns dramatically increase crime, poverty, drug use, suicides, dropouts, teenage pregnancies, and other forms of direct harm and costs against children, families, taxpayers, and society in general. Professor Stephen Baskerville, distinguished master of political science at Howard University, and one of the world’s foremost experts on various custody and child support issues, explains: “Politicians often spend money to avoid confronting problems. Yet marshaling the government to strengthen families seems especially pointless when it is government that weakened the family in the first place.”
 
The plaintiffs further allege that the relocation of children away from one parent radically increases the incidence of parental kidnappings, which dwarf all other types of kidnappings, and wastes additional tax dollars in the ensuing processes. An in-depth analysis, conducted in 1990 by the U.S. Department of Justice, confirmed that over 350,000 children were abducted that year by a family member – typically a parent involved in a custody dispute – while the number of stereotypical kidnappings of children for ransom amounted only to a few hundred nationwide.
 
The parents say that common inequities in state family courts are also directly and indirectly responsible for murders and suicides amongst the most estranged families. Every week, they note, approximately 300 fathers and 75 mothers commit suicide in this country, with the majority of these senseless deaths directly attributable to victimization by family courts. These suicides are often committed by passive parents, due to hopelessness in a system fraught with injustice, but the more aggressive parents occasionally snap at the weight of suffering such anguish, and violently take out their desperation on estranged partners, sometimes even murdering them, and possibly the children, before also killing themselves.
 
They also allege that the states are recklessly responsible for much of the abuse and neglect experienced by children in this country. The National Clearinghouse for Child Abuse and Neglect Information, a service of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, consistently reports that, year after year, single parents are responsible for almost two-thirds of all substantiated cases of abuse and neglect committed against children – more than all other classes of perpetrators combined. The national costs of these child abuse and neglect incidents surpassed $94 billion in 2001, according to Prevent Child Abuse America. “It’s painfully obvious that the majority of child abuse can be easily prevented, by simply ensuring the regular presence of both parents in the daily lives of children,” notes Howse. “Involving the eyes and ears of both parents creates a naturally self-balancing situation, wherein a child’s health and safety is automatically monitored by opposing sides that stand to gain if the other side fails.”
 
The Plaintiffs further charge that because parents are generally treated unfairly in family courts, the results are also directly or indirectly responsible for very large, and otherwise unnecessary, additional tax burdens upon every citizen, through increased welfare spending and self-serving enlargement of state family agencies and entities, and that such inequities are also indirectly responsible for vast numbers of personal and corporate bankruptcies, which are absorbed into even more future taxation. Additionally, they note a pattern of fraud and abuse being progressively reported about various state family bureaucracies, which they say are very costly in terms of tax dollars, and which violate the rights of American citizens on an unprecedented scale.
 
“It is high time for costly government to get out of the lives of most parents and children,” says Howse. “American taxpayers should no longer be forced to fund systematic violations against parents and children, and the needless progressive destruction of our society.”
 
While the current class actions deal exclusively with conventional aspects of child custody, leaders of related parents groups report they have already begun the processes for raising similar legal challenges in the near future, on behalf of alleged victims of CPS, paternity fraud, and the progressive institutional drugging of children in this nation.
 
###
 

For more information:
Contact: Rich Stewart
Phone: 770-852-2015
Email: rich@...
 


J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless
minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><


#859 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Fri Oct 8, 2004 10:20 pm
Subject: Ron & Barbie Given Nationwide Coverage Starting Oct. 12th
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                          October 8, 2004
Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L. 
                          FAQs                    What?MeWarden?
 
Ron & Barbie Given Nationwide Coverage Starting October 12th
 
Mr. Strindberg, on behalf of The Fully Informed Citizen Association of America, has taken the time to carefully and professionally conduct a two-hour interview of both Barbie and myself, which will be broadcast to this nation via internet, satellite, short-wave, AM and FM Radio starting  Tuesday, October 12th at noon, PDT. 
 
-Ron Branson-
Author/Founder
JAIL4Judges
 
*   *   *
 
Ron,

I edited the recordings we did and it is in three parts. The total is about
1 1/2 hours. The first one is going to be played on October 12th at
Noon Pacific time.

Will you do a mass mailing to your loyal host of subscribers telling
them to tune in to hear Ron Branson and Barbie break down the judicial
system mystery and clarify the cause of JAIL4Judges in a three-part
series starting Oct 12.  The only place you can hear about the real
evil doers. 
 
Please direct them to  http://www.ficaa.com/

That will get them to the radio station the schedule and other interesting
tidbits for all true Americans. Together we can cure the disease of Judicial corruption Judge by judge.

Strindberg, de plume
 
The Fully Informed Citizen Association of America (www.ficaa.com) is proud to announce that we will be providing Bill Strindberg with his own weekly radio show.  
“Behind Every Problem... there's a Judge" can be heard weekly at 12 noon Pacific Time, Tuesdays on www.ficaa.com under Radio Network.

The Fully Informed Citizen Associations of America (FICAA.COM) is a consolidated national print, radio and video consisting of:
“The Discerning American Digest”
(The Discerning American Digest is a Pro American community participation publication that allows you to speak out to the people in your own community; providing to one another information they might not otherwise see or read.)
“The Fully Informed Citizen”
Our National Internet, Satellite, Shortwave AM and FM Radio Productions
(Featuring Americas Most Respected Defenders of Freedom on Audio) and
The United American Voice Video Magazines
(A Nationally Retail Distributed Monthly Video Magazine that
Features Americas Most Respected Defenders of Freedom on Video)
“We unite those who want the truth with those who've been making it known nationally for years.”
Unlike the "Established" media empire "we bring to light what some people want kept from sight"
Job Openings in Your Community
Please take note that FICAA.COM has job openings in every community across America.
So, for those of you who would like to be paid for spreading the truth go to our web site and learn how this is possible.
Our mission is to not only equip each of you with the tools you need in order to restore the truth in your own communities but also to pay you for your help in doing so.
So, if you would like to assist us in our mission and get paid for it- get involved today.
Go to
www.ficaa.com or call 1-970-963-8399 or email us at director@...
F-I-C double “A” dot com “Making Known What the Government FED Press won’t… nationally”


Our gratitude goes to Justin Plumlee, Director of the Discerning American Digest, and to Recording Artist, Mr. Strindberg, for making this J.A.I.L. promotion possible. All of you please tune in October 12th and every Tuesday at Noon, Pacific time. - R & B

J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless
minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><
 
 

#860 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Sun Oct 10, 2004 12:00 am
Subject: Good News / Bad News
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
To All JAILers:
 
Good News / Bad News
 
 
First, the good news:
 
It is always nice to receive good news. The good news is that J.A.I.L. has grown so big that normal emailing services are stretched thin, or cannot handle the volumes of email J.A.I.L. sends out, and we are having to go to an industrial email system.
 
J.A.I.L. has been using dial-up service to send out its emails, but it was slow and sometimes we are thrown off-line and cannot tell whether our emails were delivered or not.
 
Because of this drawback, we decided to "move up" to DSL service. However, the DSL company we hired has admitted that they cannot handle the volume of emails we send, and we had to terminate that service.
We are now limping back using our old dial-up service.
 
Further, we have found that we have to have at least a DSL level connection in order to network our computers of several keyboards into one common data base. (This is not possible using dial-up.) The software is called MS-Exchange.
 
I have made inquiry as to what we may be in for in order to support our current volume of sends, and to anticipate our ever-growing expansion of our outreach. It appears that we are in for approximately $60 per month, and we are open for other offers to handle our volume needs. We are very pleased to see J.A.I.L's growth, and anticipate that our email load will greatly increase with our active operations in the state of South Dakota.
 
Now for the bad news:
 
We made a mailing last month to all of our JAILers everywhere that it was September and everyone was due to send in their $10 support, which, of course, is twice annually. The fact is that in the last approximate month and a half we have received only a single donation of $20. Divided by the number of days, this means our daily support amounted to only 50 cents.
 
Obviously, our message failed to be delivered, which draws us back to the point that our email service is inadequate, and needs to be upgraded.
 
So, again, I am notifying all JAILers to send in their $10 support for September, to:
 
"J.A.I.L."  (Not Ron Branson)
P.O. Box 207
North Hollywood, CA. 91603
 
If the Lord has blessed you with the substance to send more, it is greatly needed. If J.A.I.L. cannot keep connected to the internet, it will lose its now effective voice. We have sent out nearly two million emails, and we are a very powerful and influential voice to this nation. So, folks, get out those check books and write a check in support of keeping J.A.I.L's voice heard.
 
As a suggestion, if anyone wishes to assume this project of keeping J.A.I.L. connected to the internet, it would be a worthy project. We are talking about $60 a month.  God bless.
 
-Ron Branson
 
 

#861 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Sun Oct 10, 2004 2:31 am
Subject: Amendment A -- Bad News For South Dakota
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                          October 9, 2004
 
Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L. 
                          FAQs                    What?MeWarden?

 
Amendment A -- Bad News For South Dakota
It must be opposed in November

Backroom Selection Plan Makes Judges Unaccountable to the People

South Dakota Gun Owners E-mail Alert
PO Box 3845, Rapid City, SD  57709
(605) 737-5583
LibertyTeeth@...        http://www.SDGO.org

(October 8, 2004) – Two State’s Attorneys have issued a statement revealing the truth about what Amendment A proponents call the “merit selection of judges,” but what is more accurately described as backroom selection.

 “Constitutional Amendment A will permanently take away the right of the people of South Dakota to elect Circuit Court Judges,” State’s Attorneys Lance Russell and John Fitzgerald said.  “It will eliminate the check on the judiciary...put in place to keep elitists from having unfettered discretion to dictate their will on the people.”  (Scroll down to read the entire statement.)

 Currently, circuit-court judges are elected by the people of South Dakota.  If Amendment A becomes law, state judges will be appointed by the governor from a pool of candidates chosen by a bureaucratic commission composed of five lawyers and two gubernatorial appointees. 

 Five of the seven commission members must also be members of the State Bar Association, and three of them are directly appointed by the Bar President.  In its structure and function, the Bar Association is strikingly similar to a special interest group, and is arguably one of the most powerful entities in South Dakota. 

Proponents are hailing Amendment A as the remedy for a “broken system.”  But the dangers of consolidating all judicial selection into the hands of a few unelected lawyers make their solution far worse than the supposed problem.  Under Amendment A, the governor may appoint only candidates selected by the commission, which is largely controlled by the Bar Association. 

Action:

The State Bar Association has raised more than $20,000 for the purpose of passing Amendment A.  The rumor is that they are planning a media blitz just before the election.

 Please consider writing a short letter to the editor.  You can use the facts given below, as well as the attached statement from State’s Attorneys Russell and Fitzgerald.  You may want to submit your letter to the Rapid City Journal and Sioux Falls Argus Leader, as well as to your local paper. 

 Rapid City Journal,

Box 450, Rapid City, SD 57709.

Fax: (605) 394-8463.

E-mail to: letters@...

Letters are limited to 200 words and must include full name, address and phone number. Phone: 394-8427. The deadline for election letters is Oct. 19.

 Argus Leader

Letters to the Editor
P.O. Box 5034
Sioux Falls, SD 57117-5034

Fax: (605) 331-2294
Email:  editor@...

http://www.argusleader.com/help/letter.shtml

Letters are limited to 200 words and must include full name, address and phone number.

Facts about Amendment A

**Amendment A will permanently destroy the right of the people to elect any circuit court judge.

 **If Amendment A is adopted, almost all state judge candidates will be selected by an unelected “judicial qualifications” commission and then appointed by the governor.

**The bureaucratic judicial commission is primarily controlled by the State Bar Association.  Five of the seven commission members must be members of the Bar Association, and three of those five must be appointed by the Bar president.  The State Bar Association is largely unaccountable to the people of South Dakota.

**The only safeguard Amendment A offers against internal corruption is the weak retention election.  Three years after appointment, each judge would be subject to an election in which he faces no opponent. 

**Retention elections are notorious for retaining the current judge.  In retention election states, almost 99 percent of the judges are retained.  In the unusual case that a judge is voted out of office, the replacement is chosen by the same bureaucratic commission.

**Currently in South Dakota, circuit court judge candidates run in an open public election every eight years.  Only when an office is vacated in midterm are candidates exclusively chosen by the bureaucratic judicial commission.

**Proponents claim that Amendment A will keep politics out of the judge selection process.  But in states like Missouri, the first state to adopt the backroom selection system, the politics and power of judicial selection have simply moved from the people to the lawyers.

**Politics will always play at least some part in judicial election.  The real question is whether they will be the open politics of public election, or the closed-doors, backroom politics of the bench and the bar.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT A:

THE ELIMINATION OF A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT

By Lance Russell, Fall River County State’s Attorney and

John Fitzgerald, Lawrence County State’s Attorney 

            Constitutional Amendment A will permanently take away the right of the people of South Dakota to elect Circuit Court Judges.  This is a right we have enjoyed since statehood.

             States have different methods of selecting judges.  Some have partisan elections, some have nonpartisan elections and some have nominating commissions with the governors making the final decision followed by retention elections.

             Why should South Dakotans care?  Well, there is a movement to amend the state constitution, eliminating contested nonpartisan judicial elections and allowing the governor to appoint circuit court judges from a list of two or more individuals selected by a commission consisting predominantly of lawyers.  Three years after the appointment, there will be a “retention” election, where the ballot will ask the voter, yes or no, if they want to retain the judge.   

            What’s the problem with that?  The amendment changes the intent of the framers of our state constitution and will make our judges unaccountable. 

South Dakota was founded on the principles of populism and accountability.  South Dakota was the first state to allow the people the power of initiative and referendum, and our constitution gave the people the right to elect our judges.  In fact, every state entering the Union between 1846 and 1912 provided for judicial elections.  This was a reaction to the feeling that the appointed judiciary had become “a bastion of unresponsive aristocracy” and that elected judges would be more independent and less apt to be influenced by the politics and cronyism of governors.   

             How will the amendment make our judges unaccountable?  Simply put:  the people of our state will have little say in who are their judges.  It will eliminate the check on the judiciary that the framers of our constitution put in place to keep elitists from having unfettered discretion to dictate their will on the people.  Proponents of the constitutional amendment will counter that the retention election will be an adequate check on the discretion of the judiciary; however, retention elections have proved to be nothing more than sham elections in other states.  Retention elections are just that—they retain incumbents.  In retention election states, almost 99 percent of the judges are retained.  We all know in countries where there are only one political party, they have essentially retention elections.  Those elections also allowed for only one choice, and just like retention elections, are noted for low voter interest, knowledge and turnout. 

            The bottom line is the proponents of Amendment A are attempting to take away a constitutional right—the right of the people to meaningfully participate in judicial selection. 

            Who are the proponents of retention elections?  Lawyers.  They have already raised in excess of $20,000 to secure its passage.  Why lawyers?  Because the lawyers will be selecting the pool of candidates from which judges will be appointed.  The proponents will say whom better than the lawyers to evaluate the abilities of judicial candidates?  We say the people.

We believe the people have the intelligence to evaluate the qualifications of judicial candidates, and more importantly, they don’t have an financial interest in who is chosen. 

The proponents will also say that the retention system will take the politics out of the judicial selections.  However, in Missouri, the first state to adopt the retention system, it has been asserted that the personal injury lawyers have succeeded in gaining control of the politics of the state, including the politics of the judicial nominating commission, and because of that Missouri is one of the favorite plaintiff’s venue in America.  If the retention system is adopted in South Dakota, the politics and power of judicial selection will simply go from the people to the lawyers, most likely the trial lawyers.  And, we all know the acrimonious role politics plays in the selection of Federal judges.  Politics will always be part of the process, the question is: who do you want making the decisions?  Politicians, lawyers or you?  We believe that the farther the people are removed from the decision making, the farther the courts spiral out of control and make poor decisions.

Judges have awesome power and authority.  If a judge decides to legislate law instead of interpret law the only way to hold them accountable is an election.  If Amendment A passes there will be no way for the people whom judges serve to hold their judges accountable. A whole branch of the government will be un-elected; no checks and balances will exist in this branch. The only beneficiaries of the amendment will be un-elected judges. 

The election process in South Dakota has produced fine judges who are both wise and courageous in their decisions.   We are public servants and we believe it is in South Dakota’s best interests to continue to elect and hold judges accountable the way the drafters of our constitution envisioned.


 

J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless
minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><

 

#862 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Thu Oct 14, 2004 2:58 pm
Subject: * * Ban From Courthouse Lifted * *
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                        October 14, 2004
 
Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L. 
                          FAQs                    What?MeWarden?
 
Ban From Courthouse Lifted
 
Although we aren't the first to post this article, we do so now, a week late due to our email overload. Our congratulations to Scott Huminski, one of our JAILers, who was fortunate enough to reach a court that has respect for the First Amendment-- a rare find today! Yes, we do acknowledge that there are still some honest judges out there, as this ruling shows. Even honest judges should welcome J.A.I.L. for the sake of constitutional integrity of the system.  -Barbie-
 
 
2nd Circuit: Vermont gadfly wrongly barred from courthouse

By The Associated Press
10.08.04

MONTPELIER, Vt. - In a decision that breaks new ground in declaring a First Amendment right for an individual to visit a courthouse, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday that Vermont officials violated the Constitution when they barred a gadfly from the courthouse in Rutland.

Scott Huminski, then of Bennington, parked his van outside the building that houses the Vermont District Court in Rutland on May 24, 1997, the van plastered with signs harshly criticizing Judge Nancy Corsones, one of the judges presiding that day. One of the signs called her a "butcher of the
Constitution."

Corsones and other officials had earlier received letters of outrage from
Huminski about her handling of a criminal case he had in Bennington County when she was presiding there.

"As it is the policy of the State of Vermont to encourage and allow crimes
to be committed against myself and my wife without fear of prosecution I
must take the law into my own hands and initiate activities that will get
national media attention," Huminski wrote in one letter. "When the smoke
clears, the nation will wonder what went wrong in Vermont."

Worried that Huminski might be planning violence, Corsones conferred with other courthouse officials, and another judge issued a no-trespass order against Huminski barring him from courthouses and their grounds throughout the state.

That triggered the more-than-seven-year legal battle that produced
yesterday's decision by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City.

The court, ruling in Huminski
<http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov:81/isysnative/RDpcT3BpbnNcT1BOXDAyLTYyMDFfb3BuL
nBkZg==/02-6201_opn.pdf> v. Corsones, reinstated a lower court's injunction that ordered the Vermont court officials to lift the no-trespass order, saying the order violated Huminski's First Amendment rights to free
expression.

It found that Huminski had never acted out in the courts before, and it
raised the suspicion that Huminski's exclusion from court property was less for security concerns than because the judges and court officials didn't want to hear what he had to say.

"There are facts on the record that might raise the concern that Huminski
was, at least in part, being punished for his political protests, or being
prevented from continuing them," by his exclusion from court property, the court said.

The appeals court said Rutland County Sheriff R.J. Elrick, Corsones and the judge who issued the no-trespass order, M. Patricia Zimmerman, were immune from paying damages. The court reasoned that judges need to be able to protect themselves from unhappy defendants.

"A judge cannot be expected regularly and dispassionately to make decisions adverse to overtly hostile parties if subsequent actions to protect herself, her staff, and those in her courthouse from such hostility may result in the rigors of defending against - and even the possibility of losing - lengthy and costly litigation," the three-member circuit court panel said.

But it said they were not immune from a court injunction ordering them to
lift the no-trespass order against Huminski.

Many of the court-access cases in the past have involved members of the
press complaining that they were improperly barred from courtrooms. But the appeals court said that even if he were not working for an established media outlet, Huminski had the same right of access as a citizen.

"We make no distinction in our analysis between those who can legitimately assert that they are entitled to protection under the First Amendment's press clause and those who cannot," the court said.

Robert Corn-Revere, a Washington lawyer who specializes in First Amendment cases and who has handled Huminski's case, said yesterday's decision "points out that all the previous decisions really relate to members of the press and to the right of the people on trial to have the public present."

A ruling that an individual has a First Amendment right to enter the
courthouse merely out of curiosity or because he wants to monitor the
activities of a judge he believes is unjust is "a new statement of law in
that regard," Corn-Revere said.

J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless
minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><


 

#863 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Sat Oct 16, 2004 2:21 am
Subject: * * * Splitting Up The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals * * *
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                             October 15, 2004

Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L.                           FAQs                    What?MeWarden?

 
Splitting Up The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
 
For a long time there has been an ongoing debate in Congress regarding  busting up the size of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. That debate has finally materialized with the passage in Congress of splitting up the Ninth Circuit into three parts, followed by passage of this Bill in the Senate.
 
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has controlled the entire western United States covering eleven states. In comparison to the other remaining Circuit Courts of Appeals throughout the United States, it was comparable to placing a single tractor wheel on the rear of a Volkswagen.
 
The Ninth Circuit was indisputably known, and generally accepted, as the most liberal of all Circuits in the United States, with the record of the most reversed decisions by far than any of the other federal Circuits. In a number of cases the Ninth Circuit ruled directly contrary to the other Circuit Courts of Appeals, causing the U.S. Supreme Court to have to settle such disputes between the Circuits.
 
In an appeal of one of this editor's appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court from the Ninth Circuit, the Ninth Circuit actually ruled according to one of its prior reversed decisions by Order of the United States Supreme Court who reversed the Ninth Circuit in favor of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and reprimanded the Ninth Circuit, saying that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision was "untenable." (to wit, unthinkable according to law.) This decision was actually an act of contempt for the direct decision of the Supreme Court against them.
 
While splitting up the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is a good move, it will do little to call to account these judges, who are accustomed to making up new "laws" and getting their own way.
 
Only through passage of the Federal J.A.I.L. Bill, will the Federal Circuit Courts of Appeals throughout this nation be brought into line. 
 
The Federal J.A.I.L. Bill can be read by clicking -  Federal J.A.I.L.
                                                                                 -Ron Branson
 
Schiff Speaks Out Against 9th Circuit Split
 
House Passes Amendment to Divide Western U.S. Court of Appeals into Three
 
WASHINGTON, DC – (October 5, 2004)  Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA) today argued forcefully on the Floor of the House of Representatives against a move to divide the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals into three circuits.  Under an amendment by Congressman Mike Simpson (R-ID) to the Bankruptcy Judgeship Act of 2003 (S. 878), Arizona, Idaho, Montana and Nevada would form a new 12th Circuit, and Alaska, Oregon and Washington would form a new 13th Circuit – leaving California, Guam, Hawaii and the Northern Marianas Islands in the 9th Circuit.

 

“First we had court stripping, and now we have court splitting,” Congressman Schiff said.  “The weakening of the independence of the Judiciary goes on, and we are going from bad to worse.”

 

A Founder and Co-Chair of the bipartisan Congressional Caucus of the Judicial Branch, Congressman Schiff noted that such a change to the Circuit’s composition is opposed by the U.S. Justice Department, American Bar Association (ABA), Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) and a large majority of the 9th Circuit’s judges.  Schiff also pointed out that there has been no effort to divide other circuits with similar caseloads, and that circuit division would likely diminish the ability of judges to deal with fluctuating caseloads.

 

Congressman Schiff also noted the findings of the Congressionally created Commission on Structural Alternatives – also known as the White Commission – which concluded that “Having a single court interpret and apply federal law in the western United States… is a strength of the Circuit that should be maintained.”  The Commission also stated, “There is one principle that we regard as undebatable: It is wrong to realign circuits (or not to realign them) and to restructure circuits (or to leave them alone) because of particular judicial decisions or particular judges.  This rule must be faithfully honored…”

 

Congressman Simpson’s amendment passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 205 to 194, and S. 878 passed by a voice vote.

 

Congressman Schiff is a member of the House Judiciary and International Relations committees.  He represents California’s 29th Congressional District, including the communities of Alhambra, Altadena, Burbank, East Pasadena, East San Gabriel, Glendale, Monterey Park, Pasadena, San Gabriel, South Pasadena and Temple City.

 

Pasadena
Braley Building
35 S. Raymond Ave. #205
Pasadena, California 91105
Phone: (626) 304-2727
Facsimile: (626) 304-0572

 

In Washington D.C.
Contact Gene Wilk: (202) 225-4176
Facsimile: (202) 225-5828

Or Email: http://www.house.gov/schiff/as_sub_contact.htm


J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless
minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><

#864 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Sun Oct 24, 2004 2:48 am
Subject: * * * To Enforce The Constitution * * *
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                         October 23, 2004
 
Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L. 
                          FAQs                    What?MeWarden?
 
To Enforce The Constitution
J.A.I.L. - the only means providing a spelled-out mechanism
for the People to do so
by Barbie, ACIC National J.A.I.L. Administration
 
The Fatal Omission
Law is only as effective as it can be enforced. Without enforceability, what good is it? Likewise, the Constitution --the Supreme Law of the Land-- is only as effective as IT can be enforced. Without enforceability, WHAT GOOD IS IT?  Is it any wonder that the Constitution is routinely ignored by the powers-that-be, and has been impotent since its inception?
 
Can there be any doubt that the omission of an enforcement provision in the Constitution when it was framed is, and has been for over 200 years, fatal to the enjoyment of our life and liberty? to the acquisition, possession and defending of property? to the pursuit of happiness, safety, and privacy? Can there be any doubt that the natural course leading to the fulfillment of these unalienable rights has been literally blocked through the usurpation of power by an evil and despotic occupying force in this country under color of law, fraudulently pretending to be "the government"?
 
Does it seem strange to you that what we read in the Declaration of Independence and in the U.S. Constitution reads like a fairy tale, (for instance:  "...deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...") and does not match the reality of what we are experiencing in this country today, nor even throughout our lifetimes? and that it is growing even stranger and further removed from reality at an ever-increasing pace as time goes on?  And does it seem strange to you that the more we hear about peace, health, and SAFETY, the less of it we actually have?  Do you really feel safer today than you did yesterday?
And most provocative-- do you feel helpless to be able to do anything about it?  Well folks, it's NOT going to get any better!
 
J.A.I.L. is needed regardless of all else
Although we have often said that the objective of J.A.I.L. is judicial accountability -i.e., We the People holding judges accountable to themselves under the standards set forth in the United States Constitution-we have, over time, become more enlightened to the fact that the ultimate objective is To Enforce The Constitution by holding judges accountable to the People under its standards. And to drive home the fact that "J.A.I.L. is the ONLY answer" to accomplishing that objective, J.A.I.L. is the ONLY proposal available providing a detailed, spelled-out method and process designed for the People to do so.
 
More and more people are realizing that the objective must be the enforcement of the Constitution by the People, however no one beyond J.A.I.L. has come up with the specific means by which to accomplish that task. Despite all other ideas, none offers an alternative to J.A.I.L. No, not one! Regardless of what others have suggested as a solution, all are inherently dependent upon the implementation of J.A.I.L. to stand guard in keeping government within the bounds it was designed to function. Yes, government must be leashed by the People, and that leash must be held firmly by the People on an instant and permanent basis to maintain our Constitutional Republic. Only J.A.I.L. provides such leash!
 
That's not to say that the People aren't free to pursue whatever project they deem appropriate. However it's vital to our ultimate freedom to choose our priorities-- to first put our resources into the cause that will best and most efficiently bring real security by the People to the People on a permanent basis.  Only J.A.I.L. provides such security! Government cannot, and will not, provide it on its own.
 
J.A.I.L. is rooted in the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Document of this country and the most logical place to begin in correcting the tyranny that has overtaken us. ("...to provide new guards for their future security.") We must go back to Square One which, for purposes of J.A.I.L., consists of two parts: first, the Declaration (the foundation); second, the U.S. Constitution read in light of the Declaration (the ground floor).
 
It is imperative that everything that has occurred since the ratification of the Constitution be cleared from your thinking --the slate must be wiped clean-- otherwise you will be distracted by the myriad of irrelevant events that have taken place since that ratification, inasmuch as they are in violation of the Constitution, and hence, null and void.
 
So forget them (I realize it's easier said than done) --but do so, at least for purposes of focusing on what we must now do to "get it right" albeit some 200-plus years later. All that the passage of time has done is allow the dung heap created by the powers-that-be (hereinafter "PTB") to pile higher and deeper and at a faster rate with each passing year, until the heap has gotten so huge over the past two centuries, that it is doubtfully  even possible to clean up at this point. But knowing that it is waste (wholly void) --not in compliance with the Constitution-- we have to by-pass it and start over at Square One in rebuilding our Constitutional Republic that has been stolen from us by this usurping, foreign, occupying force operating under color of law, the PTB.
 
In Volume 16, American Jurisprudence, 177, we find the following: "The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and name of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly void, and ineffective for any purpose; since unconstitutionality dates from the time of its enactment, and not merely from the date of the decision so branding it. An unconstitutional law, in legal contemplation, is as inoperative as if it had never been passed. Such a statute leaves the question that it purports to settle just as it would be had the statute not been enacted.

"Since an unconstitutional law is void, the general principles follow that it imposes no duties, confers no rights, creates no office, bestows no power or authority on anyone, affords no protection, and justifies no acts performed under it. . . .

A void act cannot be legally consistent with a valid one. An unconstitutional law cannot operate to supersede any existing valid law. Indeed, insofar as a statute runs counter to the fundamental law of the land, it is superseded thereby.

No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it. "
Our American Common Law by Howard Fisher and Dale Pond.
 
J.A.I.L.'s Reliance on the
Declaration of Independence:  (the foundation)
The Declaration of Independence (hereinafter "Declaration") describes government as the body of men (mankind) created by the governed (The People) for the purpose of protecting the rights of The People-- thusly:
...That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...
When government ceases to function in that assigned capacity as the protector of the People's rights, it ceases to be government.
 
This principle is ably taught by John Locke, prior to the Declaration, in
Of the Dissolution of Government by John Locke
This is demonstratively to reduce all to anarchy, and so effectually to dissolve the government: for laws not being made for themselves, but to be, by their execution, the bonds of the society, to keep every part of the body politic in its due place and function; when that totally ceases, the government visibly ceases, and the people become a confused multitude, without order or connexion. Where there is no longer the administration of justice, for the securing of men's rights, nor any remaining power within the community to direct the force, or provide for the necessities of the public, there certainly is no government left. Where the laws cannot be executed, it is all one as if there were no laws; and a government without laws is, I suppose, a mystery in politics, unconceivable to human capacity, and inconsistent with human society.
 
See also Fisher and Pond, supra, stating:
If any agency of the Federal, State or County government, including the court, would act as if it were Principal, and Freeman, against its true Principal, the People, this would be an inversion of the legal principle of Sovereignty of the People. By so acting, any agency of the government, including the court, would be a pretender to the power, and as a pretender, its acts would be a nullity and would not exist, at Law; that is to say, that it would be null and void, and of no force and effect, at Law. That, in fact, it would not be government at all, but would be a private, criminal operation, imposing a rule of force, fraudulently pretending to be government, since, in this country, the only legitimate function of government is to protect the Rights and freedoms of the People. Such acts are not unlike the privately owned and operated Mafia who demands our money (taxes, fees, etc.) in exchange for them not committing violence against us or our property. [emphasis theirs]
 
So, we can see that we do not have a legitimate, lawful government in power, and haven't had since shortly after the Constitution was ratified more than 200 years ago. Thus, instead of living under the Rule of Law by government, we are surviving as best we can under the rule of force imposed by the PTB. Although Frederic Bastiat says that "Law is Force," it must be a legitimate Force authorized by Law-- not an arbitrary power.
(All Law is Force-- if it is enforceable, but not all Force is Law).
Whosoever uses force without right, as every one does in society, who does it without law, puts himself into a state of war with those against whom he so uses it; and in that state all former ties are cancelled, all other rights cease, and every one has a right to defend himself, and to resist the aggressor. John Locke, supra
 
Along the same line, John Locke further states, when people's property is destroyed under arbitrary power of the PTB, the PTB are at war with the People who are absolved from further obedience:
The reason why men enter into society, is the preservation of their property; and the end why they chuse and authorize a legislative, is, that there may be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the properties of all the members of the society, to limit the power, and moderate the dominion, of every part and member of the society: for since it can never be supposed to be the will of the society, that the legislative should have a power to destroy that which every one designs to secure, by entering into society, and for which the people submitted themselves to legislators of their own making; whenever the legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience... ...  ...by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society.  Id.  (Although the above relates to "the legislative," it has full application to government in general, as the Declaration indicates.)
 
We have been told that we cannot rely upon the Declaration today because it applied only to the Thirteen Colonies when written. Well, J.A.I.L. wholly relies on the Declaration because it is based on the Law of Nature which is universal and ubiquitous. It applies as much today as it did then, and will apply throughout the future of human existence. As Dr. Alan Keyes stated:
 
http://www.renewamerica.us/keyes/readings/declartn.htm
I believe it can only be made rational to respect the original intention of the Framers if that intention somehow respects a permanent and transcendent principle of justice which was true then, and is true now, which applied then, and which applies now.... [I]f we accept that understanding, we are still part of a community with them. We still are part, as it were, of the same society, because we live in a universe governed by the same moral principles.... There is no common ground between us and our Founders if there are no transcendent principles of justice which allow us to understand that their painstaking effort to establish a government based upon consent was in fact a requirement of justice.
Presidents' Day lecture by Dr. Alan Keyes, Thomas Aquinas College, February 21, 1997.
 
While the Declaration contains wording that is superfluous to some, when taken to its lowest common denominator --based entirely on Nature-- it is certainly a document that can be relied upon by all people, just as J.A.I.L. is for all people in this country.

A Critique of the Declaration of Independence- by Paul Wakfer.  
"Laws of Nature" being entirely sufficient since nature - reality - is all that exists.  [T]hey meant that all men have equal "rights"...  They are unalienable specifically because they are a necessary consequence of the reality of the nature of human beings - i.e. a part of existence. They are essential and logically unalienable because their not being true would be contradictory to the immutable structure of reality. Nor, being true of reality, can valid rights ever be removed. All that can be done is to "break" them - i.e. to not allow them to take their natural course and to be fulfilled. Many people take "life" to include property and logically this has merit. [The pursuit of happiness] is logically derivable from the rights of Life, Liberty and Property. [Happiness] can rightly only be made by the individual himself under the circumstances of full freedom of life, liberty and property.
 
From The Virginia Declaration of Rights (a more accurate statement): That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
 
The California Constitution begins with, after the Preamble:
All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy. Art. I, Sec.1
 
In discussing the various schools of thought regarding the interpretation of the Declaration, the following site states, near the end of the article, the method to be used in evaluating the Declaration in terms of the universal laws of nature:
 
(On Interpreting the Declaration):
In the interest of efficiency, people should choose the school of thought that is most likely to answer their questions. For example, a person wanting to evaluate the Declaration's place in guiding principles for human life would look to universalism in history or to liberal originalism in political theory.
 
J.A.I.L.'s Reliance on the U.S. Constitution:  (the ground floor)
We have also been told that we cannot rely on the Constitution because it was drafted and signed by the elite for their own benefit and "the common man be damned." One source that would support that view is:
Settling the matter that, the common man never created the U.S. Constitution nor was the Bill of Rights for him. - By the Informer
Since 1990 I have been preaching that the Constitution was never mine and the People in "We the People" was not the common man on the street, but rather the aristocracy of Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Jay and others. Lysander Spooner is another man in the 1800's that had the same sentiments. He too showed that the constitution was not only NOT a contract with the people, but that none of the signers signed it with any conviction and it is evident that they only signed in a witness capacity, check it out
for yourself by looking at how they signed the constitution and bound no one unless they agreed to the terms in the alleged contract called a constitution that they drafted.   The following is from the Cases in Constitutional law.
 
An opposing view is shown by the following source, based on the Preamble:
We the People of the United States - The Framers were an elite group - among the best and brightest America had to offer at the time. But they knew that they were trying to forge a nation made up not of an elite, but of the common man. Without the approval of the common man, they feared revolution. This first part of the Preamble speaks to the common man. It puts into writing, as clear as day, the notion that the people were creating this Constitution. It was not handed down by a god or by a king - it was created by the people.

promote the general Welfare - This, and the next part of the Preamble, are the culmination of everything that came before it - the whole point of having tranquility, justice, and defense was to promote the general welfare - to allow every state and every citizen of those states to benefit from what the government could provide. The Framers looked forward to the expansion of land holdings, industry, and investment, and they knew that a strong national government would be the beginning of that.

and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity -Hand in hand with the general welfare, the Framers looked forward to the blessings of liberty - something they had all fought hard for just a decade before. They were very concerned that they were creating a nation that would resemble something of a paradise for liberty, as opposed to the tyranny of a monarchy, where citizens could look forward to being free as opposed to looking out for the interests of a king. And more than for themselves, they wanted to be sure that the future generations of Americans would enjoy the same.

do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States - The final clause of the Preamble is almost anti-climatic, but it is important for a few reasons - it finishes the "We, the people" thought, saying what we the people are actually doing; it gives us a name for this document, and it restates the name of the nation adopting the Constitution. That the Constitution is "ordained" reminds us of the higher power involved here - not just of a single person or of a king, but of the people themselves. That is it "established" reminds us that it replaces that which came before - the United States under the Articles (a point lost on us today, but quite relevant at the time).
 
Yet another view states that the Constitution was ratified by "the authoritative voice of the people":
The ratification process knowingly chose constitutional conventions instead of State legislatures as the authoritative voice of the people, the "we" of the Constitution. The goal was to allow the Constitution to rest on the people and not be at the mercy of the States. [emph. ours] Thus, the text became the embodiment of the people. The Declaration announced and created the people, and the Constitution cataphorically embodied or instantiated them. Though differences in the people can be identified during the process, one self-referential people began and consummated a creative act. The Constitution refers to the twelfth year of independence and links itself to the performative moment of the Declaration. The reference indicates the continuity of the "we" in both documents.
On Interpreting the Declaration, supra.
 
It is the position of J.A.I.L. that the Constitution must be read and understood in light of the universal principles set forth in the Declaration. As the above citation shows, the Constitution is intended to put into practice what the Declaration sets forth in fact. Stated more succinctly, the Constitution is the fulfillment of the Declaration. That is why I state that "Square One" consists of two parts: (1) the Declaration as the foundation, and (2) the Constitution as the ground floor (based upon the foundation). The two must go together --be connected as one purpose.
 
Thomas Paine, upon whose thoughts Thomas Jefferson greatly relied when authoring the Declaration, stated there must be some intermediate authority between the governed (the People) and the governors (the government) by which the law must be established. In fulfillment of the Declaration, the Constitution became that "intermediate authority."
 
But as there is a peculiar delicacy, from whom, or in what manner, this business must first arise, and as it seems most agreeable and consistent, that it should come from some intermediate body between the governed and the governors, that is between the Congress and the people. ... [T]hat a charter is to be understood as a bond of solemn obligation [between the governed and the governors], which the whole enters into, to support the right of every separate part, whether of religion, personal freedom, or property... The members of Congress, Assemblies, or Conventions, by having had experience in national concerns, will be able and useful counsellors, and the whole, being empowered by the people will have a truly legal authority.  ...  A government of our own is our natural right: [emphasis ours]   And when a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, he will become convinced, that it is infinitely wiser and safer, to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance. ... First, they had a king, and then a form of government; whereas, the articles or charter of government, should be formed first, and men delegated to execute them afterwards... [man existed before kings and would be the creator of government, by nature]   Common Sense by Thomas Paine (1776)
 
Only the People can Enforce the Constitution
The Jeffersonian Perspective
[excerpts]
There is no other mechanism in existence that can adequately and consistently protect our rights. Power quickly leads to corruption, and the power to protect the rights of the people can be trusted nowhere but with the people themselves. Therefore it is the responsibility of the citizens themselves to look after their own rights.
 
To say that our rights are protected by the Constitution is to rely on a piece of paper if we ignore the control of the powers of government exerted by the people. It is the people who are the ultimate guardians of the Constitution and the rights it guarantees...
 
A constitution alone cannot control government without republican forms, i.e., mechanisms that keep control of their representatives in the people's hands. Constitutions are not self-enforcing.... [W]ithout a sovereign people in control determining what shall be the constitution and the form of government functioning thereunder, that determination is made by the governors themselves. They function as a higher power, and that higher power then becomes the sovereign, dictating government and its policies to all others. 
 
The only check upon arbitrary power is the People:
It is the law, and the law only, which can successfully resist the encroachments of despotism. In the absence of defined laws, and an independent judiciary to enforce them, the only check upon arbitrary power is popular insurrection;... http://www.svpvril.com/comcivlaw.html
 
If there is a lesson in all of this it is that our Constitution is neither a self-actuating nor a self-correcting document. It requires the constant attention and devotion of all citizens. A Republic, If You Can Keep It - by Richard R. Beeman, Ph.D., Professor of History and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
http://www.constitutioncenter.org/explore/NCCScholarEssays/ARepublic,IfYouCanKeepIt.shtml
 
It's the People who must be the ultimate judge of constitutional behavior of government:
We need to emphasize the Principle of Nuremberg: that every individual has the responsibility to make an independent determination of the constitutionality of every law and official act, to support those that are constitutional and resist those that are not, and never to try to delegate that responsibility to public officials or superiors. Not even the Supreme Court. --Constitution Society, San Antonio TX
 
And it's the People who must provide the means required to enforce the Constitution!
It must be explained to people that many of the unconstitutional assumptions of power are in response to the demands from people to do something about real problems, but that they need to refrain from making such demands unless the Constitution is first amended to make such measures legal, and if they still insist that such action is needed, then involve them in proposing the constitutional amendments that might provide the necessary legal foundation. Id.
[emphasis ours]
 
YES, LET'S GET THE PEOPLE INVOLVED IN GETTING THE J.A.I.L. AMENDMENT PASSED IN EVERY STATE THAT WILL PROVIDE THE NECESSARY LEGAL FOUNDATION TO ENFORCE THE CONSTITUTION!
Our target state is South Dakota for 2006 --but we aren't limited to just one state. We have 49 more! We must especially concentrate on the Initiative States first- (about 26 of them).
 
Conclusion
 
J.A.I.L. is the means of self-defense for an oppressed people:
Must the people then always lay themselves open to the cruelty and rage of tyranny? Must they see their cities pillaged, and laid in ashes, their wives and children exposed to the tyrant's lust and fury, and themselves and families reduced by their king to ruin, and all the miseries of want and oppression, and yet sit still? Must men alone be debarred the common privilege of opposing force with force, which nature allows so freely to all other creatures for their preservation from injury? I answer: Self-defence is a part of the law of nature; nor can it be denied the community, even against the king himself...  John Locke, supra.
 
*   *   *

 
J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless
minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><

#865 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Mon Oct 25, 2004 2:04 pm
Subject: Preparing for the Challenge of Taking on South Dakota
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
 
Preparing for the Challenge
of Taking on South Dakota
(By JAILer-In-Chief Bill Stegmeier, South Dakota, rmsroll@... )
 
 
Friends:
 
As most of you know, J.A.I.L (www.jail4judges.org) is seriously considering South Dakota for a petition drive to get J.A.I.L. on the 2006 ballot as a SD Constitutional Amendment. 
 
Our chances of getting J.A.I.L. on the 2006 ballot are excellent, considering the relatively low number of signatures required and the ample time allowed to collect them.  The 64 million dollar question is what are our chances of getting it passed?   
 
South Dakota is not widely known for judicial corruption and injustice.  But what about the general unspoken perception of our court system and of South Dakota judges in particular?
 
I have hired the polling firm of Zogby International (www.zogby.com) to poll likely SD voters, starting this coming Monday.
 
The following is our question which will be posed to 800 registered voters.  
 

Question for SD poll:

1. Have you, or anyone you know, ever been treated unfairly by the court system or any particular judge?

1. Yes      2. No        3. Not sure 

Zogby tells me we should receive the results of the poll by Wednesday!   

Stay tuned.
Bill Stegmeier
 
 
Comments by Ron Branson
 
As we all know, should J.A.I.L. be successful in appearing on the up-coming South Dakota ballot (2006), the system is going to drag out its big guns and spend untold millions on its defeat, knowing that it will be the beginning of the end of their domination over the American People.
 
J.A.I.L. promises to be the hottest issue to appear on any ballot throughout this country. This was suggested by the largest legal newspaper in the country, the Los Angeles Daily Journal, when it wrote about the potential of J.A.I.L. in California, saying on its front page, "Ron Branson has picked a lot of fights with judges and lost. Now the vexed Los Angeles County litigant is going to voters with a proposed ballot initiative aimed at cracking down on a judicial system he regards as out of control.
 
You've heard of the "Three Strikes You're Out" law? The Judicial Accountability Initiative Law (J.A.I.L.) is Branson's version of "three strikes" for judges, allowing for special nonlawyer tribunals to criminally sanction and permanently remove jurists who repeatedly break the law. ....
 
The state's judicial establishment isn't exactly holding its breath.             "We're not going to be lying awake worrying about this," said Constance Dove, executive director of the California Judges Association. 'I think the voters have more sense than that.'
 
It was only five years ago that voters strengthened public oversight of judges with Proposition 190, which revamped the Commission on Judicial Performance to give majority control to nonlawyer "public" members and give the disciplinary panel more power to make up its own rules.
 
Civil Immunity Eliminated.
 
J.A.I.L. would go quite a bit further -- -- further, in fact, than any judicial watchdog agency in the nation."
 
The fact we must face is that we must gear up for the hottest, meanest, and dirtiest fight for the minds of the People respecting the future of America, all pushed by this nation's heaviest media everywhere.
 
J.A.I.L. will indeed be the "Second Shot Heard 'Round The World." The question is, are we all ready to face the challenge? Do we hear a "Rah, Rah" with a genuine willingness to make it happen? Let's let Bill Stegmeier hear from us.

 

 


#866 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Wed Oct 27, 2004 10:40 pm
Subject: Another JAILer-Lawyer With Righteous Principles
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                         October 27, 2004
 
Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L. 
                          FAQs                    What?MeWarden?
 
Another JAILer-Lawyer
 With Righteous Principles
 
People often ask us "why do we have lawyers on the J.A.I.L. team?" It is because J.A.I.L. is for everyone-- even lawyers AND JUDGES who want to see the legal system brought back to honesty and integrity. That is not a non sequitur nor an oxymoron-- such jurists do exist, some of whom we are happy to say have not only joined our email list, but have become JAILers such as Mr. Parkerson. We are indeed honored to have several lawyers as part of J.A.I.L. who put principle before profit. Our thanks to Mr. Parkerson for sharing his below message with J.A.I.L. which we now share with all of you for your enlightenment and appreciation for this humble and gracious man.  -Barbie-
 
JAILer Attorney Hardy Parkerson responding to:
Catherine V. Beane, Indigent Defense Counsel
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
1150 18th Street, NW --  Suite 950
Washington, DC 20036
(202)872-8600 ext. 224
fax (202)872-8690
catherine@...
www.nacdl.org

 
I have received about two hundred letters from inmates at Angola, many of them serving life sentences, some of whom tell me horror stories about how they met their court-appointed lawyers for the first time on the morning of their trials, or maybe the Friday before their trials on Monday, and such.  Almost 100 percent of them complain of having been inadequately represented by court-appointed attorneys. 
 
I am interested in seeing what can be done for them after the fact.  I gather the suit filed in Calcasieu Parish is aimed at improving what might happen in the future.  Of course, I am interested in this type of litigation, either type: a priori or a posteriori.  Frankly, I have not determined yet what I might be able to do to help the guys already in Angola serving life and other long sentences. 
 
I generally think of Class Actions as civil matters, not criminal matters; and I think a Class Action for damages for violation of civil rights might be a possibility; but just how to get those convictions reversed and get these guys a new trial or a dismissal, on such a large scale, I really am not sure how to go about it. 
 
I think the U.S. Constitution, not to mention the Louisiana Constitution, has been stomped in the mud by those who run the system.  In one case that the great Clive-Stafford Smith had something to do with here in Lake Charles, he filed a motion showing that one public "defender" lawyer had upwards of 700 felony cases assigned to just him. I have a copy of that motion naming all of those cases in one motion. 
 
Be all that as it may, I am just one lawyer trying to do my best, and that without even a secretary. Of course, if somebody better steps forward to help these guys in Angola, I will gladly step aside.  My only interest is if no one else does, then there is always me.  I am a bleeding-heart liberal, down-in-the trenches, junk-yard-dog, dog-eat-dog lawyer who has spent almost forty years fighting for the under-dog and for the guy who generally gets screwed (with metal screws) by the legal system. 
 
It's all about money! You got money, you get justice; no money, no justice! That's Louisianiraq.  In Louisianiraq the district judges even get a percentage of the money a defendant pays a professional bail-bondsman for a bailbond; so that the higher the bonds are set, the more money the judges get.  Also, this can be interpreted as a legal way for bailbondsmen to launder money to judges to set the bonds higher, for the higher the bonds are set, the more money the bailbondsmen get.  This is just the tip of the iceberg.
 
Also, just to bond out of jail, a defendant has to pay the sheriff a fee of $30.00, in addition to his bond. Even on an R.O.R. bond, the defendant has to pay the sheriff  $30.00.  I believe the judges even get a cut of that money, although I need to check that out to make sure.  Again this is just the tip of the iceberg. 
 
The D.A. will even reduce a felony to a misdemeanor and "jointly recommend" with defense counsel that the defendant be placed on D.A.'s Probation for up to two years, whereby the defendant pays the D.A. $1,200.00, over a two-year period under the guise of its being a monthly probation fee of $50.00 a month for doing little more than maintaining a file and collecting the $50.00 fee each month.  This is a type of "bribery", for a good defense lawyer can even recommend such to the D.A., and the D.A. gets $1,200.00. So why not reduce the felony to a misdemeanor and jointly recommend to the judge two years of D.A.'s Probation? And the judges always go along with such joint recommendations.  What good criminal defense lawyer would not be glad to have his client "legally" pay the D.A. $1,200.00 for reducing a felony to a misdemeanor and having his client be on D.A.'s Probation?  As I say, this is only the tip of the iceberg of what is going on in Louisianiraq. 
 
Thousands of men languish in jail awaiting trials which never seem to come, primarily because they do not have the money to make bond while awaiting trial.  ["In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, ..."  Sixth Amendment, U.S. Constitution -Ed.] A new practice has developed in the criminal "justice" system in Louisianiraq, and that is of defendants who plead guilty to get out of jail --not plead guilty and go to jail.  As I say, this is just the tip of the iceberg. 
 
Yes, I've got an attitude, but I got it honestly.  The criminal "justice" 
system has utterly broken down in Louisianiraq, and nobody seems to care-- not the leaders in the community, not the lawyers, not the judiciary, not law enforcement, not the newspaper-- nobody...nobody that is, but me and the thousands of men in jail awaiting a trial which never seems to come.  
 
Yes, I am interested in helping with your project.  Feel free to contact me again!  Thanks for your e-mail!
 
    Sincerely,
 
    Hardy Parkerson, Atty.
    Lake Charles, LA
 
P.S. There are over 1100 men in the two local parish prisons, most of them awaiting a trial which never seems to come; and, yes, they can only call out of the jail to their lawyers by very expensive collect local calls.  For years even the so-called Public "Defender" Office had a "block" on its phones so that prisoners could not even call from the jail to their public "defender" lawyers, until I raised so much cane that the P.D.O. and/or the Sheriff took steps to make it possible for a prisoner to call the Public "Defender" Office by a local toll-free call.  They can only call me, a private attorney, by these extremely expensive collect-only calls. The sheriffs make hundreds of thousands of dollars annually from these collect-only call systems.  As I say, it's all about money!  All they want is the money. Almost all of these Angola guys were subject to these collect-call-only phone systems, and their court-appointed lawyers almost all had "blocks" on their phones to block out all collect calls from the jails.  There is more to it all than this, but this is something to think about.
HMP
 


J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless
minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><

#867 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Thu Oct 28, 2004 6:24 am
Subject: South Dakota Rapid city Journal Opposes Amendment A
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                         October 27, 2004
 
Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L.
                           FAQs                    What?MeWarden?
 
The South Dakota Rapid City Journal Reports On Their Opposition to Amendment A
 
Amendment verdicts: No
By The Journal Editorial Board (10/26/04)

http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2004/10/26/news/opinion/top/opin01.txt

Amendment A

We may have been too hasty in our Sept. 12 editorial endorsing Amendment A, which replaces direct election of circuit court judges with a selection and retention process. We based our decision on a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down Minnesota's canon of ethics for judicial elections (Minnesota vs. White). We reasoned that the ruling could turn South Dakota's nonpartisan judicial elections into circuses and allow graft through special-interest contributions.

But the constitution shouldn't be amended frequently or lightly, and after further reflection - and listening to opposing viewpoints - we recognized that our reasoning was based on the flawed assumption that South Dakota's nonpartisan judicial elections could become contests frequented by partisan mudslinging.

Maybe they will, but probably they won't. And if judicial elections do degenerate into mudslinging circuses, and where candidates promise to make decisions in specific kinds of cases, South Dakotans quickly would become fed up with it and demand the kind of reform contained in Amendment A. But we shouldn't change the constitution based on what might happen.

Under Amendment A, elections would be replaced with a selection process that goes through the Judicial Qualifications Commission, which would forward candidates to the governor, who would appoint one. After three years, the judge would face a retention election, where voters would vote on whether to allow a judge to keep the position, and again every eight years, as Supreme Court justices are now.

Three-quarters of the state's 38 current circuit court judges got their jobs through selection by the commission and appointment by the governor. Amendment A would mean that every judge would be reviewed by the commission and picked by the governor. What happens to qualified candidates who aren't favored by the commission and governor? The amendment concentrates even more power with the governor, which may not be beneficial.

Amendment A removes direct election of judges by the people, which has been in place since 1921. That's something that shouldn't be done without a very good reason. Elections force corrupt or incompetent judges to defend their record from a direct challenge, something that probably would not take place in a retention election, and which would require voters to educate themselves about a judge's record. How many voters would go to the trouble of researching a judge's record to decide whether to keep him on the bench for another eight years?

Amendment A is a solution to a problem that does not exist in South Dakota. We shouldn't change the constitution to prevent something that hasn't yet taken place. We recommend that voters reject Amendment A.


J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless
minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><



#868 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Sun Oct 31, 2004 3:10 am
Subject: Updates on South Dakota Amendment A
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                        October 30, 2004
 
Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L. 
                          FAQs                    What?MeWarden?
 
Updates on South Dakota Amendment A
 
10/27/2004
Scientific Poll: Amendment A
 
 
You know the candidates, but how well do you know the ballot issues? There are a couple of the ballot issues some people may not have heard about, such as Amendment A which has to do with circuit court judges.

Right now circuit court judges are elected to eight year terms. But if you vote yes on Amendment A, you would support a change to the constitution that would allow the governor to appoint new judges. A no vote means you want citizens to elect judges. Like they currently are.

A recent change in the law, allows judges to advertise when they're up for election. Robert Amundson, who use to sit on the state Supreme Court fears it get too political with ugly attacks.

"Oh I just fear that everything I've read and studied, if you get special interest groups, they want to referee or umpire, they call the pitch before it leaves the pitcher's hand and that's not what a judge is suppose to do," said Amundson.

But opponents of Amendment A fear if it passes, the governor could install the good old boy system.

"Governor's by nature are going to want to select people they are familiar with that they've known, went to law school with that person, maybe that lawyer supported their campaign, worked on their campaign," said Sioux Falls attorney, Doug Hoffman.

According to our scientific poll, more than half would like to leave the law the way it is, while 30% say yes, judges should be appointed by the governor. 17% are still undecided.

"To date in the state of South Dakota there has been no indication of any problems with judicial elections," said Hoffman.

"Judges aren't like politicians they don't have any specific group that are suppose to represent or curry from, they're just suppose to follow the law," said Amundson.

Don Jorgensen
© 2004 KELOLAND TV. All Rights Reserved.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
MEDIA RELEASE
For immediate release
Contact 605/882-2822

SD Peace & Justice Center urges Vote NO on Amendment A

At their Fall Quarter meeting held in Sioux Falls, the board of directors of South Dakota Peace & Justice Center resolved to oppose Constitutional Amendment A, a ballot measure South Dakotans will face on November 2. Amendment A would provide that state circuit court judges be chosen by an appointed commission from among the Governor's nominations. South Dakota's constitution currently provides for a nonpolitical ballot within the circuit to select a judge for an eight-year term.

After review of the issue, the board concluded:

  • Amendment A curtails democracy in our state by making judges UNACCOUNTABLE, in practical terms, EXCEPT to the executive branch of the government and an elite appointed group. This lack of accountability under Amendment A would not even be mitigated by a legislative approval process such as exists on the federal level.

  • Amendment A violates the express intention of the original framers of our state constitution. Their care to assure responsiveness to the general populace is expressed not only in their provision for the selection of judges but also in the state motto, "Under God the people rule."

  • The retention election that Amendment A would provide after an appointee has served three years does not offer meaningful accountability, due to the bias-inducing weight of incumbency. In states using such retention elections, almost 99 percent of the judges are retained.

  • Amendment A is a needless curtailment of democracy, in that it responds to no actual problem in South Dakota's judicial selection process. The current system of electing circuit court judges on a nonpolitical ballot for eight-year terms works well in our state.

Board President Marletta Pacheco, Rapid City, sums up the disposition of the board by saying, "The conservative stance on this issue is the right stance. There is no good reason why South Dakotans should give over their constitutional power in this matter to an unaccountable group that is apt, over the years, to be influenced by cronyism and special interest. We urge Peace & Justice Center members and all South Dakota voters to vote NO on Constitutional Amendment A."



J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless
minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><

#869 From: <victoryusa@...>
Date: Tue Nov 2, 2004 8:54 am
Subject: Return of the Polls
jail4judges_...
Send Email Send Email
 
J.A.I.L. News Journal
______________________________________________________
Los Angeles, California                                        November 1, 2004

Mission Statement                  JNJ Library                     PayPal Support
Federal J.A.I.L.
                           FAQs                    What?MeWarden?

 
Return of the Polls
 
We realize that when we say "Return of the Polls," most of you will be thinking that we are talking about the national election, as that will be the hot-button tomorrow, November 2nd. But that is not what we are referring to.
 
We have received the results of our J.A.I.L. Poll question to the people of South Dakota, "Have you, or anyone you know, ever been treated unfairly by the court system or any particular judge?"
 
Before I give the South Dakota results, I would like to construct a perspective. Around the turn of the century ('2000), a poll was conducted by the California Judicial Council, the policy making body of the judiciary, which found that just over half of the people of the state are less that pleased with our state's judiciary.
 
Of course, their thinking was that the judiciary of California was not the problem, but rather people's perception was the problem. So they proposed a program should be implemented to try to familiarize people with the inner-workings of our judicial system. We laughed over this  because we knew that the more the people became familiar with the judiciary, the more their polls would show a decline in confidence in our judges. We have noticed that there seems to be no more polls conducted to evaluate people's opinion about our judiciary. The fact is, their poll has shown as good as it gets.
 
I might point out generally that of those qualified to registered to vote, only half actually register. Of that half who do register, only about half actually turn out at the polls to voted. Therefore, by-in-large, 13% of the voters decide the election on behalf of the other 87%. Sound shocking? Well welcome to the world of reality. We suppose this is because most people have concluded that there is little to nothing to vote for as far as options are concerned.
 
Now with that as a background, let's get into what our statistics have found. Keep in mind that this survey did not take into consideration whether one was a registered voter or not.
 
Among the Democrats, 8.9% answered in the affirmative as to knowing someone, or having themselves been treated unfairly by the courts, while the response from Republicans was 6%, and Independents 9.8%.
 
Rating by age, 18-24 was 4.6%, 25-34 was 6.5%, 35-54 as 9%. This tends to show that as one aged with experience, their attitude about the judicial system changed over the years to the worse. Thus, it might be concluded that youth gave the benefit of the doubt to trusting the integrity of the court system. However, as one moved out into the senior years, their attitude toward the courts stabilize at approximately 7%. This is probable due to the fact that they are no longer involved with kids, and they have forgotten some of their more unpleasant experiences that once caused them to roll sleeplessly on their pillows when they were younger. Further, fewer were driving, and thus less likely to be harassed by police.
 
Strangely, women seemed to be slightly more dissatisfied with the courts than were men, 7.9% to 7.5%.
 
Among the races, whites said "yes" 7.2% of the time, while blacks and Asians said "yes" 100% of the time, and natives said "yes" 27.9% of the time.
 
Overall, among all classes, parties, ages and races throughout South Dakota, the average was 7.7% to knowing or experiencing perceived injustice in the South Dakota courts. There is an acclaimed +/- 3.5% in this scientific poll.
 
Whatever conclusion one draws from these figures are up to the reader. What I gather from this is that judicial corruption is not a dead-letter issue in South Dakota, and that the people there are not greatly unfamiliar with the problem of bad judges.
 
Let's keep in mind that when J.A.I.L. does go on the ballot in South Dakota, of the prospective 25% who vote, 100% of those voters will either vote J.A.I.L. up or down. Thus, while maybe they do not know of anyone who has experienced injustice in the courts, they will be called upon to vote on the issue of whether they want judges to be accountable.
 
On the plus side, perhaps more people who either are not registered to vote, or who do not vote may be motivated to go to the polls and vote on this issue because it steams up their spirit to vote for something that actually means something. Thus, we can likely count on new registerees to vote affirmatively for J.A.I.L., and that a greater turnout of voters will profit it passage.
 
On the negative side, the people of South Dakota will be barraged with unending propaganda that if J.A.I.L. passes, a large earthquake will open up under the state of South Dakota, and the entire state will fall into the center of the earth along with the sky. Schools and libraries will close, police and fire departments will have to cut back or be closed down, and the boogieman will come to haunt them at night.
 
Hopefully, we will experience a kick-back of disgust at all those ads that will attempt to place lipstick and pretty bows on pigs in seeking to justify the lawyers and judges, and make them look good.
 
Our key punch will be at driving home our point that judges are not above the law. "Judicial Accountability Initiative Law: Because judges are not above the law."  Of course, our opposition is not going to want to debate us on that point, but try to emphasize that judges are already accountable. In any case, J.A.I.L. on the ballot will place our opposition on the defensive, and that is a bad position from which to argue.
 
Bill Stegmeier, rmsroll@..., has expressed his encouragement at this poll result, as it has surpassed his expectation. There is one more positive result that may be reasonable anticipated. Not only will this debate issue rebound throughout South Dakota, but throughout the nation as all kinds of authorities enter the fray over the potential passage of J.A.I.L. Governments at all levels, both state and federal, will stand stiff with eye-brows raised at the very thought that this just might pass.
 
-Ron Branson

J.A.I.L.- Judicial Accountability Initiative Law - www.jail4judges.org
Contribute to J.A.I.L. at P.O. Box 207, N. Hollywood, CA 91603
See our active flash, http://www.jail4judges.org/national_001.htm
JAIL is a unique addition to our form of gov't. heretofore unrealized.
JAIL is powerful! JAIL is dynamic! JAIL is America's ONLY hope!
JAIL is taking America like a wildfire! AddRemove@...
E-Group sign on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jail4judges/join
Get involved at JAIL_SALE_USA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless
minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." - Samuel Adams
 
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root."                         -- Henry David Thoreau    <><

Messages 840 - 869 of 1784   Oldest  |  < Older  |  Newer >  |  Newest
Add to My Yahoo!      XML What's This?

Copyright © 2010 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Privacy Policy - Terms of Service - Guidelines NEW - Help