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Quite a Show in Denver

Posted by NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Thursday, February 22, 2007 5:20:04 PM
No, I'm not writing about the show yesterday in the legislature, but the one coming up this summer when the Democrats come to Denver.

It is unlikely to be a (Bill) Clinton love fest, and that will be refreshing to watch.  National Journal has a fun preview it calls "Clinton faces (not so) friendly fire."
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Rationale on Using the Retention System

Posted by NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Thursday, February 22, 2007 5:04:19 PM
 It may not obvious as to why I would want to seek the non-retention of each and every Colorado Supreme Court Justice (see the essay immediately below).  The reason is simple.  The Justices choose the Chief Justice and she serves at the pleasure of a majority of the court.

That system means that if the Chief Justice is responsible for creating a legal ethics system that can be charitably described as fraudulent, then each associate justice owns the problem.  Frankly, I don't think that even a fig leaf of an effort to reform the system will be made until one associate justice loses his/her job.

It might not seem legitimate to go after the two Republican justices as well as the Democrats, as they obviously have less impact on the selection of the Chief Justice.  Several months ago, when I began thinking about this strategy, I was inclined to exempt the Republicans.

The thing that changed my mind was watching former Justice Rebecca Love Kourlis operate since she formed her institute.  When it comes down to it, Amendment 40 was a good idea but she opposed it.  It was a good idea because it made these justices more accountable, and accountable more often.  I'm sorry, but appointing a justice and having him/her be able to submit to a single retention election in a 12 year career is not my idea of accountability.  It leads directly to the problem I am discussing.

Justice Kourlis appears to have too many Colorado legal friends to want to include Colorado in her reform efforts.  Yes, it is true that other states have systems that are far worse than the Colorado system.  Some, Nevada and Kentucky come to mind, may even be corrupted by the judicial selection process.  But does that mean that Colorado should get a pass?  I think not.

If friendship makes Justice Kourlis reluctant to rock the Colorado boat, I have to assume that the same friendship will make the two Republicans currently on the court reluctant to rock the boat.  The boat needs to be rocked!  Let the Republicans also think over the next few years about the possibility that they will have to defend themselves at retention time over the legal ethics system.

I'm interested in getting rid of bad policies and bad judges and justices, and I define bad justices as ones who resist changing the system.
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Twenty-Two Reasons Not to Retain a Colorado Justice

Posted by NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Thursday, February 22, 2007 4:08:13 PM
In the course of preparing for the testimony at the legislature, I created a list that I called "Are Justices Vulnerable to a Non-retention Recommendation."

Here it is:
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The State Supreme Court has created a legal ethics system that protects lawyers and judges from public complaints.  That makes them vulnerable to a non-retention recommendation if the case can be made.  The case can be made:

1. It publishes ethics rules that follow the ABA models but then establishes court rules that make it impossible or very expensive for citizens to make complaints.

2.  The rules require attorneys and judges to report misconduct by other attorneys and judges, but the modification is that the attorney making the complaint "must have no substantial doubt."

3.  There is no mechanism to stop misconduct that is ongoing.  Both Attorney Regulation and Judicial Discipline refuse to act claiming the Supreme Court has withheld jurisdiction.

4.  Through court filings, I know of an individual who has made a complaint against a District Judge for failing for two years to rule on a motion to recuse herself.  State law gives her 90 days.  Judicial Discipline refuses to act because it would be "interfering" with an active case.  Most citizens want policing agencies to stop lawbreaking and that includes lawbreaking by judges.

5.  Colorado was the last state in the nation to establish a fund to compensate people damaged by attorneys.

6.  The fund does not cover individuals who are intentionally damaged by opposing attorneys.  In my case, I have both a written admission and a judgment against an attorney involving attorney misconduct, but cannot collect from this fund.

7.  Two justices recently reported to the Bar Association that the fund has paid out an average of $120,000 each of the six years it has been in existence, or just over $5 per lawyer per year.

8.  This low payout protects the Bar Association to the degree that it was willing to spend $500,000 to defeat Amendment 40.  "Judicial independence" benefits the Bar Association by limiting the accountability of their protectors.

9.  Unlike other professions, attorneys have no requirement to carry liability or errors and omissions insurance, making members of the profession judgment proof.

10.  John Gleason of Attorney Regulation tells attorneys that they have little to fear from complaints but has a different story for the public.

11.  The two justices who wrote the report to the bar association assured attorneys that they have little to fear from complaints.

12.  Attorney Regulation publishes a quarterly report and provides it to the CBA for its lawyer only publication and web site.  It does not put it on its own web page for the general public.

13. Judicial Discipline does the same for its annual report.

14.  It is possible for an opposing attorney to stall a lawsuit for a year or more simply by not cooperating and then claiming that whatever happened was his fault and his client was blameless.  Nothing happens to the attorney and if he manages this scam correctly, it is cost free to his client while running up the opposing litigant's attorneys fees.

15. There is an ethics rule against dilatory practices, and has been for at least 14 years.  Court rules make it impossible to access that rule.  According to a Columbia Law School study, the Colorado Supreme Court has never defined the term or punished an attorney for dilatory practices.

16.  Attorney Regulation tells the public that it does not use public funds, apparently to keep the legislature from conducting oversight.

17.  If Attorney Regulation gets sued, it asks the Attorney General to defend it, meaning that it is using public funds.

18.  No individual in Attorney regulation is accountable to anyone but the Chief Justice and that includes the Presiding Disciplinary Judge, who serves at her pleasure.

19.  The Presiding Disciplinary Judge is the only judicial official in the state not subject to a retention election.

20.  No citizen can appeal an Attorney Regulation decision outside of Attorney Regulation.  John Gleason, head of Attorney Regulation has not granted any appeal in the last five years, making the appeal process meaningless.

21.  Attorney Regulation operates as a paperless office so that there is no easily audit-able paper trail.  They regularly refuse to send written confirmations of their decisions.

22.  In 2006, I learned that non attorneys could apply to be members of the court rule making bodies, but none ever had.  I applied directly to the Chief Justice.  I did not get the courtesy of a reply, indicating that she has no interest in fixing the legal ethics problems.
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That's the list, and it can, and will be added to.  I have a special plan as to how to deal with the Judicial Discipline secrecy issue so that the commissioners can also evaluate that.
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Habeas Corpus for Terrorists

Posted by NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Thursday, February 22, 2007 2:58:37 PM
It is hard to take issue with today's Denver Post editorial "Restoring Habeas Corpus," and except for one line, this blog won't.

This is an issue that should be settled in Congress, and that is what the Post is suggesting.  Reasonable men can differ as to how that argument should come out, and this blog does not agree with the outcome the Post proposes.

The line that is alarming in the editorial is this:

The decision is likely to be appealed to the Supreme Court . . .

The Constitution is quite clear that Congress has the power to limit jurisdiction on this or any other issue.  It has done so.  The Supreme Court has no jurisdiction to hear the matter and should ignore any appeal.

The new Congress has the authority to reverse the decision of the 109th to deny the Supreme Court jurisdiction, and will likely try to do so.  Under a Constitutional government, our officials have an obligation to obey all of the Constitution, not just the convenient parts.  If the Congress fails to restore jurisdiction, it would be lawless of the Supreme Court to take an appeal no matter how much the Post might wish otherwise.
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A Day at the Legislature Part 2

Posted by NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Thursday, February 22, 2007 12:26:00 PM
I always try to learn from my experiences.  Yesterday's testimony before the Colorado House Judiciary Committee was a learning experience.

The first thing I learned was that I didn't know the rules.  I didn't understand, and several of the witnesses did not understand that we would have only three minutes to speak.  Three minutes is a very short time.  One can only advocate in three minutes.  There is no hope of educating in three minutes.

I got several questions, but all were on advocacy issues.  No member of that committee sought to be educated.

That brings up a fundamental question.  How does an individual citizen actually educate the members of the legislature on issues that concerns him/her? 

Nothing that I heard yesterday indicates to me that ANY legislator understands how broken the legal ethics system is.  More importantly, they don't seem to care to explore the subject which is pretty amazing for a "judiciary" committee.

HB 1227 impacted my efforts to try to fix the system through the system.  All I was asking for was to be able to appear before a state retention commission that hadn't been stacked-stacked with the Chief Justice's appointees, stacked with members of one party, and stacked with lawyers whose goal is to protect the system.  It wasn't a perfect bill, but it would have gotten rid of part of the conflict of interest inherent in the current system-the Chief Justice's appointees. 

The second thing I learned is that legislators are quite willing to vote against their own constituents interests.  The legislators who voted against HB 1227 voted against their own constituents interests but very much in favor of the legal community's interest.  In the end, it was a vote against any meaningful attempt to hold judges accountable.  I wonder how thrilled their constituents will be to hear that tidbit.

The third thing I knew, but was driven home to other witnesses, was the importance of speaking to the bill.  It is a matter of formatting one's testimony.  I got some points in about the legal ethics system by couching them in terms of how that bill would have helped me try to fix the system.  I would call the Vice Chair who was running the hearing, Representative Morgan Carroll, unnecessarily intimidating to some of the citizen witnesses in an effort to keep them on the subject that the hearing was about.  When the lawyers appeared, she was completely polite and deferential.

In Representative Morgan Carroll's defense, I will point out that the hearing occurred late in the day, and one more followed ours, so she wanted witnesses to cut to the quick.  This offended some witnesses because she made it appear that an earlier animal "necromancy" bill (Chairman Terrance Carroll's word) on which an inordinate amount of time was spent was far more important than making an incremental fix to the retention commission system.

Witnesses need to be prepared to defend themselves against this kind of intimidation.  At one point Rep Morgan Carroll tried to truncate my testimony as to why I wanted an unbiased commission membership.  I was giving examples of the information I would present to the state commission about the legal ethics system, and she interrupted to tell me that she didn't want specific examples.  I simply told her that they were generic examples and proceeded.  Fortunately, they were generic.

Fourth, I am terrible about watching their little warning light system.  I ran over in time and realized I had never once looked at it.  The next time I testify, I plan to ask for a verbal warning when the yellow 30 second light comes on.

Fifth, don't take the vote personally.  The fact is that there could have been a hundred or a thousand witnesses in that room in favor of the bill and I doubt that the outcome would have been much different.  This seemed to be seen as a party line, rather than a good government issue. 

I find it quite telling that nationally the Democrats complain daily that the Republican Congress failed to provide oversight on a Republican President and yet the Colorado Democrats insist on stacking the membership of the one institution that potentially provides oversight over a Democrat dominated Supreme Court.  Does anyone else see the hypocrisy here?
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A Day at the Legislature

Posted by NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 10:00:03 PM
I went to the Colorado State House to testify in favor of HB 1227, a really minor change to how judicial performance commissions are nominated.  Among other things, equally minor, it would have prevented the Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court from naming three members of her own commission.

It was a Republican Bill with about ten folks testifying for it and one against it.  The one against was a Colorado Bar Association representative.  With the exception of Boulder Democrat Claire Levy, the Democratic members appeared uninterested in the proceedings.

Levy was obviously hostile to the bill, and I will be writing about her in a few days.  At one point, she tried to put words in my mouth in an attempt to discredit me.  I'm quite confident that I didn't say that I opposed any elected official appoint commission members, which would be rediculous.

I thought the bill was a good government bill, so I was more than  a little surprised that most of the junior Democrats, except Levy, were uninterested in the testimony.  When it came time to vote, they were lock step against it.

Today's exercise was good for several essays, but I need to troll the Denver papers, so that is all for tonight.

I almost forgot to mention that I met several loyal readers of this blog there.
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Political Blogging According to Wadhams

Posted by NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Tuesday, February 20, 2007 10:16:34 PM

A friend passed along a recent article on political blogging which appeared in the Denver Post.  It is titled "Net inspires politics up from roots" by Claire Martin.

Dick Wadhams has some interesting quotes:

"There's a growing conservative blogger network, but the more liberal sites have higher prominence," conceded Republican political strategist Dick Wadhams. The ratio is roughly 2- to-1 in favor of progressives, with conservative ColoradoRight .wordpress.com and ToThe Right.org outnumbered by progressives such as SquareState .net, Soapblox.net/Colorado, ColoradoConfidential.com and ColoradoMediaMatters.org. . .

A lot has changed since the 2004 presidential campaign, when party organizers and campaigns assigned bloggers to the equivalent of the children's table. Then, Democrat Howard Dean's blog and Internet fluency were the exception. Now, they're the rule.

"A blogger is an absolutely necessary part of the campaign staff," Wadhams said. . .

During his management of John Thune's successful 2004 campaign against Sen. Tom Daschle in South Dakota, Wadhams covertly hired two bloggers to spend the election season attacking the local media. He said they were so ruthless, they altered campaign coverage at the Sioux Falls Argus Leader.

The article is a rebuke to the editors of the Gazette Telegraph which seems to have an editorial policy of denial about the possibilities and the power of the net. 

It also explains why Colorado Media Matters has been so effective in making the coverage of the two Denver Papers so decidedly left wing.

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A "Devastating Attack"

Posted by NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Tuesday, February 20, 2007 9:02:39 PM
Because of my offline projects, which I promise to write about, I have been limited in both my reading and writing.  Much of my small amount of news intake came from NBC Nightly News which was hyping a "devastating attack on US Troops." 

Those words made me look up from my dinner.  I fully expected hundreds of casualties.  Two dead, and 17 wounded.  That's a devastating attack.

I was reminded of my days in Command and General Staff College when the curriculum included the Battle of Schmidt.  What, you've never heard of the Battle of Schmidt?  Neither had I, and I considered myself more than a little mildly interested in military history.

It turns out that there were three separate battles for Schmidt Germany.  The first two were bloody repulses that were the result of poor planning (non existent planning) by Division Commanders.  What happened to those Divisions was "devastating."

Yesterday's attack on a platoon was serious, but to the degree that there was devastation, it was limited to one platoon and a few families.  The division that platoon belonged to has many more than 250 platoons of all kinds. 

The reason I bring up the Battle of Schmidt is to point out the difference in news coverage between the WWII media which wanted to win the war and the present day media which wants us to lose it.
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Blogging Will be a bit Sparse this Week

Posted by NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Tuesday, February 20, 2007 11:26:55 AM
It is pretty neat when the one thing a grandson wants for his birthday is to spend the weekend with his grandparents without his siblings.  That's my excuse for not doing a lot of blogging this last weekend, and what a great excuse it was. 

This time it was my almost six year old grandson,  He is a pretty amazing kid.  He is just learning to read, but he has had his math skills down for a while.  On the car ride home he wanted to do multiplication drill because he didn't get any at school.  This kid could add, subtract, multiply, divide, do simple algebra and word problems, and do squares and square roots, and understand how the number line worked (positive and negative numbers) before he learned how to write the numbers.  He once asked me if math was a "game."

Anyway, having one's grandson over is a time sump, and a pleasant one at that.

I have other things going on this week that provide good blogging material, but which will take time away from my blogging.  I will be doing at least a post a day, and more than that some days until Sunday, when I can go back to full scale blogging.
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Jarad Polis Amendment in the News Again

Posted by NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Monday, February 19, 2007 2:16:14 PM
Well, the Rocky Mountain News is at it again.  They have written an editorial  "Bailing out Common Cause" on the Jarad Polis Amendment and blamed the whole thing on Common Cause.  Of course, they don't bother to mention that the State's MSM Paper, the Denver Post. endorsed the amendment, apparently without reading it.  Nor do they bother to put any blame on, or even mention the name of Jarad Polis, who expected that money and this amendment could buy CO 2 when Mark Udall ran for Wayne Allard's seat.

Now, I see that the authors of HB 1304, Rep. Rosemary Marshall, D-Denver, and Sen. Steve Ward, R-Littleton, justify their bill with lofty references to what "the voters intended."

Well, I have news.  The voters intended to vote for a bill whose title sounded good, and that is all.  They got much more than they bargained for, but Marshall and Ward are going to fix everything.  It is a shame that they have to tear up and throw away the principle of constitutional government to do it.

While the Rocky does not like HB 1304, it has a different opinion (and a different editorial-Following Voter Wishes) on SB 188.

Once again, Jarad Polis' name is missing from the editorial.  Millionaires who mess up as badly as Polis did deserves the maximum amount of exposure. It discourages them from doing it again.
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Same Old Same Old

Posted by NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Sunday, February 18, 2007 11:52:23 PM
It appears that State Senator John Morse and State Senator Brandon Shaffer like the legal system in Colorado just fine.

I hate to admit it, but SB 142 slipped past me.  John Andrews writes a column about it that was published in today's Denver Post.  It is called "Judges Coddled by Sweetheart Process".

In it he describes a bill that would have only slightly modified the judicial retention commission system.  Tame stuff.

My favorite paragraph was this:

How the bill could possibly politicize anything, committee chairman Brandon Shaffer and vice-chair John Morse did not ask attorney [Colorado Bar Association spokesman D.A. ]Bertram. But Morse did ask me (testifying next) why the eminence and respectability of our judges wouldn't naturally prompt them to step down "when they should," with no need for the tougher scrutiny and potential indignity promised by SB 142.

You may recall my lawsuit, and my judge.  Not only did Judge Larry Schwartz not step down when the 4th District Judicial Retention Commission confronted him with my 200 pages of documented misconduct, he thought himself eminent and respectable enough to apply to be a Supreme Court Justice when the Kourlis vacancy occurred.

It is hard to imagine how State Senator Morris could ask a dumber question, human nature being what it is.
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The 16 Slides From the Secret Briefing

Posted by NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Saturday, February 17, 2007 10:09:56 PM
Powerline has copies of the sixteen slides that were used in last week's secret briefing in Iraq.  You know, the one that reporters came away from suggesting that the evidence was manufactured.

It isn't funny that these same reporters fear to go out in the boonies and rely on Iraqi insurgents, err stringers for their news feed.

Has anyone noticed that there are no longer nightly reports on violence in the Iraq capitol?
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Two Pigs Shy of a Pigsty

Posted by NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Friday, February 16, 2007 12:51:04 PM
Maureen Dowd can turn a phrase, but I think I may have beaten her to this one.  My favorite bottle redhead babe did a piece on Obama that may knock him down a notch.

No, I can't prove that she is a bottle redhead, but it is hard to avoid the bottle as one goes up in age, and like all of us, she is going up in age.

I digress, but as I sit here, I am imagining Maureen Dowd as a Playboy centerfold.  Good looking, but not at all alluring. 

It is really hard to write a serious piece while laughing, so I am going to stop trying.
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Colorado Will Get More E85 Stations

Posted by NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Friday, February 16, 2007 12:19:55 PM
Today's Denver Post has a photo of Governor Bill Ritter pumping E85 into a GM demonstration vehicle while GM executive Al Weverstad looks on.  He was promoting the announcement of the establishment of E85 stations throughout Colorado.

On the surface, E85 sounds like a win-win situation for Colorado.  But is it?

1.  E85 cannot be pumped through pipelines because alcohol absorbs water making the fuel useless.  It must be transported by fuel tanker.  If Colorado were to become a big consumer of E85, you could expect to see hundreds of fuel tankers on the interstate shipping the stuff in.

2.  Without irrigation, Colorado would not be a corn producing state.  Ethanol made from corn requires a lot of water for its manufacture.  Coloradoans need to understand that Governor Ritter is allocating scarce Colorado water in ways that may not be wise, or even sustainable in the long term.

3.  The price of corn has doubled in the last two years because so much is being used in ethanol production.  That's great for corn growers, but not so good for cattle producers.  If you are looking forward to paying $5 a pound for hamburger, you probably don't have long to wait.

Before Ritter and his environmental buddies do all of these feel good things, they need to do an environmental impact study of their own.  The impact on roads, water, and wallets isn't all that positive.  But they will feel good.
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The Polis Amendment (41) Gets Raked Over

Posted by NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Friday, February 16, 2007 11:25:46 AM
The Denver Post promoted the Common Cause Jarad Polis Amendment because they thought it was good politics.  It kept the national Republican scandals in the news.  In the view of the Denver Post editorial board, good politics always trumps good government.  They also heavily promoted the DA Carol Chambers Show Trial, which was definitely not good government, but great pre-election politics.

Even though they haven't (to my knowledge) admitted their part in the Jarad's Joke debacle, they are at least printing guest editorials that lay bare how bad the Polis Amendment was.

Today, they published a guest editorial by Donnah Moody of the Colorado Association for Commerce and Industry.  The whole editorial is very much worth reading, but three paragraphs stand out:

The ultimate irony in the effort to address undue influence is that now Polis has hired a number of high-powered lobbyists to try to get the legislature to "fix" the "unintended consequences" of Amendment 41. A "fix" would require the legislature to unethically ignore the limits of its authority and instead rewrite part of the Constitution, which can be amended only by a vote of the people.

Polis defends himself by reminding us that the legislature "clarified" previous campaign-finance constitutional language. That is true; the difference here is that the legislature filled in the blanks where Amendment 27 was silent.

In this case, Polis wants legislators to read the intent of voters - as he is interpreting that intent - and change the amendment's specific language that voters approved "as is." I think we can all agree that such action would require a serious ethical gut check on the part of all Colorado lawmakers.

If you are not sure how bad the Polis Amendment really is, don't skip this editorial.

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