Category: Justice

More Corruption in the Siegelman Case

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Now it appears that the US Attorney for the district, who was married to a Republican operative, and allegedly recused herself….Well, not so much:

It was those connections that led Ms. Canary, under pressure, to publicly withdraw from the Siegelman case in May 2002 — she “completely recused herself,” said the acting United States attorney, Louis Franklin — as proof that the prosecution of Mr. Siegelman would be free of partisan bias.

Yet in her complaint, the Justice Department employee, Tamarah T. Grimes, cited several instances suggesting Ms. Canary maintained a close watch on the case. Ms. Grimes said a legal aide in the office reported on Mr. Siegelman’s trial to Ms. Canary or her top deputy “every day, sometimes several times per day by telephone.” Once, she observed Ms. Canary “frantically pacing in the executive suite” after a courtroom blowup, “pleading with someone” to get on the phone to “tell Louis he has to control his temper.”

Ms. Grimes also disclosed an e-mail message written by Ms. Canary commenting on legal strategy in the case and suggesting to aides that Mr. Siegelman not be allowed to “comment on court activities in the media.” Ms. Grimes, who is also in a dispute with the department related to her accusations that the Siegelman prosecution team had harassed her, cited the affidavit of a former legal aide in the Montgomery office, Elizabeth Jane Crooks, who wrote that “the morning that the trial started, the U.S. attorney herself carried food and beverage over to the courthouse to support the ‘Trial Team.’ ”

Some more people who need to go to jail to show what’s wrong.

To quote Pat Boone, they “should be displayed publicly and have all of his fingers and toes broken, and then publicly executed so they who think [that] those like the
imprisoned Manson and Sirhan are glamorous — will think differently.”

Though to be fair to Mr. Boone, he was talking about a neo-Nazi murderer who went after children in a day care center, but the offense against society here is at least as corrosive.

Julie Amero, Innocent, But Prosecutors Still Extort a Guilty Plea

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You may remember the story.

She was substitute teaching, and because the sysop at her school turned off the spyware protections, her computer was innundated with sexually oriented popups.

They charged her with providing pornography to minors, and she faced up to 40 years in jail.

She lost a baby, and after a judge threw out the conviction:

In June of 2007, Judge Hillary B. Strackbein tossed out Amero’s conviction on charges that she intentionally caused a stream of “pop-up” pornography on the computer in her classroom and allowed students to view it. Confronted with evidence compiled by forensic computer experts, Strackbein ordered a new trial, saying the conviction was based on “erroneous” and “false information.”

The “false information” was the prosecution presenting a detective with a few hours of computer training as a forensic expert.

But the prosecutors have continued to pursue her, and finally, they managed to Well, coerce a guilty plea for disturbing the peace, and force her to give up her teaching license.

I’m not sure as to whether this is just hubris, or fear of a lawsuit, but it should be against the law….In fact, it may be, depending on how you read the law.

They took her baby, her career, and her health, she has been in and out of hospital since this all started, and they kept going after her, because they were unwilling to do the right thing.

If only she played Lacrosse, perhaps the DA’s license to practice law would be pulled.

The Arbitration Industry is Hopelessly Corrupt

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Normally, this is the sort of crap I don’t give a damn about, specifically Dov Charney, CEO of American Apparrel, and his raft of sexual harassment lawsuits, but the machinations of this specific case show just how unbelievably corrupt this system is.

You see, Mr. Charney settled with one of his victims, and part of the agreement was that in addition to the money and a non disclosure agreement, that they enter into a “special” arbitration:

Los Angeles’ 2nd District Court of Appeal revealed in an unpublished ruling Oct. 28 that attorneys for Charney, CEO of American Apparel Inc., a public company known for its racy ads, had conspired with lawyers for former sales manager Mary Nelson. Both sides had agreed, the ruling says, to enter into an arbitration whose outcome was preordained to favor Charney, and agreed to a press release stating that Charney “never sexualized, propositioned or made any sexual advances of any nature whatsoever toward Mary Nelson.” Nelson, in turn, would get $1.3 million if she kept the settlement secret, according to the ruling.

The 2nd District, in an opinion authored by Justice Paul Turner, said that settlement — which never went through — would have raised “considerations of illegality, injustice and fraud.” The court also held that the purpose of the proposed press release “was to mislead journalists and the public.”

Of course this raises the obvious question:

The attempted under-the-table agreement raised some questions about whether JAMS Inc. arbitrator Daniel Weinstein — a retired San Francisco Superior Court judge and co-founder of the 20-year-old JAMS — had gone along with the ruse.

The answer is that it would have been impossible for him not to have known, of course, because of the precedent that they wanted used:

The appellate decision lays out the sham arbitration of the settlement. It stipulated that the arbitrator would absolve Charney of the sexual harassment claims based solely on his consideration of a California case, Lyle v. Warner Brothers Television Productions.

In that case, the California Supreme Court in 2006 reversed a lower court’s finding that a writer’s assistant on the television show Friends did not come up with enough evidence for a “hostile work environment claim” by contending that the writer used sexually explicit language during the writing of the show.

Any arbitrator, particularly one who is a retired Superior Court Judge, would look at the filings and think that one side was deliberately throwing the case. At that point, they would be required by legal ethics to notify the bar.

5 Gitmo Detainees Ordered Released

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This ruling is significant for a number of reasons, not the least of which that the judge used very strong language to express his displeasure with the government:

Ruling from the bench, Judge Richard Leon of U.S. District Court in Washington said that the information gathered on the men had been sufficient to hold them for intelligence purposes, but was not strong enough in court.

“To rest on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with this court’s obligation,” he said. He directed that the five men be released “forthwith” and urged the government not to appeal.

Also note that Judge Leon is a major wingnut, so this is not some wild eyed liberal “legislating from the bench.”

Court of Appeals Invalidated Business Process Patents

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The decision reversing the 1998 case which allowed things like risk hedging strategies, the “U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in Washington, voted 9-3 that patents should be limited to ‘physical objects or substances’ and not be awarded to ‘abstractions’ like a bank’s risk-hedging strategy.”

Thiw will doubtless go to the Supreme Court, but this is fundamentally a good decision:

In its 132-page decision, the court said a patent can cover a “process that transforms a particular article to a specified different state or thing by applying a fundamental principle” but cannot cover the principle itself.

This is, I think, a response to the fact that the Supreme Court consistently reversing the court, and an understanding that they can no longer subscribe to the theory that everything should be patentable.

News Flash: When You Torture Someone for a Few Years, They Frequently Go Nuts

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A judge has determined that Aafia Siddiqui is mentally unfit for trial.

Not surprising, considering that she was apprehended by the Pakistani ISI, and, along with three children were handed over to American authorities about 5 years ago, and held with recourse to…anything. (JFGI)

I have no knowledge of what was done to her, but it is unquestionably clear that she was held by Pakistani and/or US authorities over that period, and I’m sure that it was not a tea party.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: The Don Siegelman Case

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Well, it now appears that in addition to the fact that Leura G. Canary, the U.S. Attorney in Montgomery, was having regular contacts with the prosecutors, despite having “recused” herself from the prosecution, it now appears that prosecutors had ex-parte communications with the jurors:

Next month in Atlanta, a federal court will hear the high-profile appeal of former Alabama governor Don E. Siegelman, whose conviction on corruption charges in 2006 became one of the most publicly debated cases to emerge from eight years of controversy at the Bush Justice Department. Now new documents highlight alleged misconduct by the Bush-appointed U.S. attorney and other prosecutors in the case, including what appears to be extensive and unusual contact between the prosecution and the jury.

(emphasis mine)

It does not get any more unethical and illegal in a case than this. There were contacts, which are generally unethical, and they went unreported to the judge and the defense, which is illegal.

We need to to reform our drug laws in order to make space for Bush and His Evil Minions&trade, because they all need to go to prison, and not a country club prison, but, to quote Office Space, a, “Pound me in the Ass.” prison.

Sanity in IP: Lego Trademark Edition

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Here is some sanity on trademark:

Lego has failed in its bid to register the shape of its play bricks as trade marks. A European court said that the brick shape was functional and that it had to be that shape to operate as it did, so could not be registered as a trade mark.

The Court of First Instance (CFI) of the European Communities backed a 2004 decision of the EU’s trade marks office the Office for the Harmonisation of the Internal Market (OHIM) to cancel Lego’s trade mark registration.

You heard right….The Lego Corporation was trying to trademark a brick.

Spocko Says…

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That we should forgive and forget the Republicans, just like the victorious powers in WWII forgave the war crimes of the Axis powers and saw no need for judicial activity.

It’s snark, and marvelous snark, and I’ll just leave you with this:

Remember, nobody is a villain when they are doing what they feel is right for the country. This isn’t like the movies where a short bald “Dr. Evil” laughs and holds the world ransom for 700 billion dollars.
__________

To attack them now, after we have won, isn’t helpful. Why?

One warning…Not only should you avoid drinking anything before reading, you should empty your bladder too….It’s that funny.

Hank Paulson Needs to Go to Jail

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Well, we already know that Hank Paulson is a big fan of large Wall Street banks taking over their smaller brethren, and now it appears that he broke the law to provide an additional subsidy for bank M&A activity.

Specifically, he “reinterpreted” an obscure section of the tax code, by tax code, I mean law as written by Congress, not regulations issued by the IRS, Section 382, which limits the amount of prior losses you can write down when you take over a company:

More than a dozen tax lawyers interviewed for this story — including several representing banks that stand to reap billions from the change — said the Treasury had no authority to issue the notice.

Several other tax lawyers, all of whom represent banks, said the change was legal. Like DeSouza, they said the legal authority came from Section 382 itself, which says the secretary can write regulations to “carry out the purposes of this section.”

Section 382 of the tax code was created by Congress in 1986 to end what it considered an abuse of the tax system: companies sheltering their profits from taxation by acquiring shell companies whose only real value was the losses on their books. The firms would then use the acquired company’s losses to offset their gains and avoid paying taxes.

(emphasis mine)

This is something that Hank Paulson and His Evil Minions&trade have been lobbying to get for years, and anyone who is not a paid shill of the bank is saying that this was illegal.

He broke the law, and he knowingly did so.

You can talk all you want about criminalizing official behavior, but his behavior is plainly criminal.

The Law is a Fool

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Well, it appears that police arrested 12 people, and cited them for indecent exposure, at the annual naked pumpkin run, in which the participants, “wearing nothing but pumpkins on their heads”, run through a mall.

While I think that stupidity should be a punishable offense, it now appears that if convicted, the defendants will be required to register as sex offenders.

This is nuts, and the police are nuts for charging them as such, particularly since they could have cited them for public indecency, which does not require registration.

While they are at it, perhaps they should fix the law in Colorado, because streaking is a class I misdemeanor, and public indecency is a class I petty offense, which does not require registration, so having sex in public is better in the eyes of the law than simply being naked.

Harry Reid Says Senate Will Refuse to Seat Stevens

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Let me make it clear, Stevens is an affront to the Senate, and while I find Lieberman to be repellant, they are not an affront to the Senate.

Reid is saying that the Senate will not seat a convicted felon, and I agree. What’s more, I think that he was right to slap down Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI), who chose personal friendship over his obligation as a Senator to protect that institution:

…

In a bluntly worded release from his office, Reid warned that Stevens would not only face an ethics investigation but also expulsion proceedings regardless of his efforts to appeal the convictions.

…

Reid also rebuffed comments made by Sen. Daniel Inouye (Hawaii), one of the chamber’s senior Democrats who had previously endorsed Stevens, and who has reaffirmed that sentiment since his conviction last month.

In a statement released by the Stevens campaign, Inouye argues that his longtime friend will be seated as a Member of the Senate next year if re-elected and that he believes the felony convictions will be overturned.

(emphasis mine)

In the House, they would simply refuse to seat him, but I’m not certain of the finer points of the procedures in the Senate.

Good for Reid, and very bad for Inouye, of whom I have fond memories (I was 11 years old) of from the Senate Watergate hearings.

Shorter Ted Stevens: I’m Insane or a Liar

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In the Senate debates in Alaska, Ted “Hulk Smash” Stevens let this whopper fly:

“I’m not going to step down. I have not been convicted. I have a case pending against me, and probably the worse case of prosecutorial … misconduct by the prosecutors that is known,” Stevens said.

Yes, you have been convicted.

You may expect a reversal on appeal, but you were convicted.

C=MI*

*Conservatism = Mental Illness