Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Friday, September 01, 2006 11:59:41 AM
OK, so the last post wasn't all that funny. I thought about deleting it this morning, but then I decided to tell more of the story:
I took great care when I prepared my judicial retention commission public input on this judge, not only to state to the commission that he wasn't protecting the public, but to also provide to it the both cut and paste versions of the rules that required him to do so, and documentary proof that he wasn't following those rules.
For example, I told the commission that the combination of court rules and ethics rules made it impossible for a litigant who faced unethical conduct from an opposing attorney to stop that conduct without active intervention from a trial judge.
I told them that I couldn't sue the attorney for misconduct or the damages he had caused me; that if my attorney made an accurate complaint to the judge, he could be sued for doing so; that ethics rules actually attempted to keep an attorney from informing the judge of alleged misconduct; that Attorney Regulation has no jurisdiction; and that no action the judge had taken over a three year period had convinced the opposing counsel that he had an obligation to act ethically.
I told them that the judge had difficulty making decisions; that he had appointed a special master to make a decision he should have made; that he failed to supervise that master over a many month period; that he had been told at least twice in court documents that the master wasn't doing his job; that the judge then claimed in a later ruling that no one had told him that the master wasn't doing his job.
I told them that the judge had for two years failed to rule on a motion to strike; that he had been told in court documents not only that he had failed to do so, but that the defense was using his failure as an excuse not to provide discovery; that when the defense finally admitted 27 months later that it indeed using the judge's failure to rule as a shield, the judge tried to dispose of the matter in with a two sentence comment when he granted the motion to set aside the default; and that even that comment had not been sufficient to cause the defense to provide discovery two months after the ruling.
If I didn't flat out tell them that I thought I had been the victim of what I am calling "A Low Risk Attorney Scam," I certainly implied it; that both the attorney and the Defendant had participated from the beginning in making claims to be out of town to avoid providing discovery; that the claims were not believable (a 40 plus day Florida vacation at a time when Defendants children would have missed three weeks of school); that the court had evidence that made it appear the Defendant was probably never in Florida at that time; that the legal arguments covering this period of the lawsuit did not match the affidavits provided by the defendant; that the Defendant's two affidavits conflicted with each other; that the defendant's second affidavit didn't match with the legal arguments his attorney was making in 2003; that the attorney had appeared to file a false affidavit claiming to remember paying a $150 judgment when he had not, and still has not; and that the attorney's second affidavit did not in any way support the defendant's second affidavit, probably because it wasn't believable given the court record.
I provided the commission court papers that laid out in gruesome detail the unethical stunts that this attorney had pulled, including trying to file a "secret," misleading motion; trying to run up my bill with a late filing of a motion for protective order that he had prepared the day before, and much more. In 2003, the judge "fined" the defense $150, for one of their early stunts, but defense appeared to take it is a signal that the judge would tolerate anything, and to date, the judge has not even enforced payment of this "fine" despite being told three times that it has not been paid; and much, much more.
I told the commission that I was concerned that it would be easy for someone to claim that I had made but not proven allegations against this judge, so I provided them with almost 200 pages of court documents to support these allegations.
A judicial retention commission which receives this kind of input, and chooses to take no action because they consider the judge to be "an asset to the community" isn't attempting to protect the public. Rather it is simply a social club with a title.