I sent an email to the Supreme Court today for distribution to the participants in the group I wrote about yesterday. It would be retrievable as part of the public record if someone were to know to ask for it, so it seems reasonable to publish it here:
xxxx
I want to take a moment to thank the chairs, the participants, and yourself for the very professional, courteous, and indeed friendly reception I got Monday evening.
Everyone has a handicap, and mine is that I am terrible at remembering names. I'll not single out the people who were extra courteous and kind, except to note that there were those.
I found the whole exercise, especially the preparation for it very valuable.
You will see me around in the future. I wish there were ten ordinary citizens like me who discover what appear to be systemic flaws and try to get them fixed. I could use the allies and the legal community needs the input.
I came away from the meeting very concerned that it had uncovered a disconnect but didn't have the time to resolve or even address it. Put simply, at the end of the meeting, it was stressed by others that the public wanted and deserved to have input. It was quite clear in the early going that most, if not all of the participants were hostile to allowing, let alone directing commissions to include input from the public outside the survey format. It was to be dismissed because it was uniformly from "unhappy losers who wanted to retry their case before the commission."
From my perspective, there is one common theme in this legal ethics mess. It is the cynical willingness by the legal community to extend promises to the public that no one intends to keep. Please don't promise the public that they are to have input if the input is to be systematically ignored.
The second concern I had is that system is already too opaque to serve the public well, and some people want to make it more opaque. I think it is too late to fix that, but it needs to be fixed. It would be a mistake to extend this law ten years and leave no prospect of a chance to fix the problem before expiration.
As I made clear at the meeting, the public wants fewer than four lawyers on the commission, and has said that in an unorganized way. Putting a fifth lawyer on is going the wrong way.
Where I go from here.
If I wasn't clear at the end of the meeting, I intend to exercise the system in an effort to make it work. I am a person who finds it difficult to hold personal animosity toward anyone. I actually have no personal animosity toward any of the people involved in my lawsuit, including the defendant. My lawsuit is aimed mostly at trying to document in the public record what he appears to have tried to do so that he can't do it to me or anyone else.
Both the CRCP and the ethics canons hold a promise out to the public that officers of the court will be in violation of their ethics rules if they fail to make ethics reports against judges and lawyers when they are faced with evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of an ethics violation. That standard is so tough that it is one more example of a cynical promise that it appears that no one intends to keep. Yet it is not so tough that it can't be met in certain circumstances, notably by members of a judicial performance commission who are likely to come into possession of strong documentation of apparent misconduct.
I have asked for, and have not yet received the names of the 2006 4th JD commission members. Now, you know why. It appears to me that each had a separate obligation to make a report that couldn't be negated by a vote of commission members. I don't care if any of these four receive more than a hand slap if found guilty by Attorney Regulation. Making a complaint against them will serve two purposes. It will make lawyers on other commissions more reluctant to overlook blatant documented judicial misconduct, if that is what they receive, and may make the commission reports at least translucent if not transparent.
The second thing I intend to do, again completely without any sense of animosity, is provide thorough input to the state commission this year and in 2010 justifying the non retention of each justice on the grounds that they have created a legal ethics system that not only does not protect the public, it is a system that has major elements that are intentionally and cynically designed not to protect the public. I think I can provide between 20 and 30 separate examples.
For example, It is not in the public interest that a litigant who is faced with an opposing attorney who blatantly ignores court and ethics rules and a judge who will take no action to have no mechanism to stop the misconduct, but that is the current situation.
Second example. Even when a judge will act and follow his rules, the court has made it very expensive for a litigant facing attorney misconduct to complain and uncertain that the complaint will not be watered down by the litigant's own attorney in the interest of professional courtesy.
Third example. The attorney's fund that the court was the last in the nation to establish is an abusive fraud on the public. It is intentionally restrictive in its coverage and so underfunded that if another profession tried to establish a similar scheme, the lawyers would be first in line at the legislature asking for relief.
My input will be completely non partisan and will be directed at Republican and Democrat justices alike.
While some of you may dislike what I intend to do, I think that everything I have mentioned is within not only the letter, but the spirit of the law and rules.
Again, I sincerely thank you for your exceptional courtesy and professionalism.
Comments