Linden Municipal Court Judge Louis DiLeo has been accused of an extraordinary act of misconduct in New Jersey. Wendell Kirkland alleges that DiLeo convicted him of burglary without the use of a prosecutor and even allowed a police officer to question him as if he were the prosecutor.
DiLeo is also accused of refusing a public defense attorney to one of the men after he requested it in court. DiLeo reportedly ruled that the defendant had already waived that right by earlier claiming to have private counsel.
It is not clear where Nicholas Scutari, the local prosecutor, was at the time.
If true, that would be an extraordinary denial of due process for the defendants and a series allegation of judicial misconduct for the judge.
Source: ABA Journal
RE: MichellefromMadison, February 12, 2011 at 12:50 am
Execute them all!!! There appears no better option. 🙂
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This thread is as though an effort in proving the philosophical argument I have been putting forth in the interest of making the law actually lawful.
In contrast with hurling epithets as though smithereening the messenger will allay the message, I stay with the message itself, not having successfully been blown to smithereens by the pejorative words flung my way which, rather in the manner of Neo and bullets in “The Matrix,” never quite reach me.
There apparently is a working model of the basis principle of the adversarial system. I placed an order for one a few minutes ago, via the Internet:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z86V_ICUCD4&w=480&h=390]
Put into a working mechanism (e.g., the Anglo-American Adversarial System) this basis principle becomes its own adversary because it is inescapably adversarial to everything, including, when activated, even itself.
However, I disagree with the title on the YouTube video; for I observe the adversarial principle itself, when put to actual use, to plausibly be The Most Useful Machine Ever — for it just may quite perfectly model what it is wisely learned to cease doing — when the adversarial principle, through enough mistakes having been finally made that the adversarial principle has become both known and understood sufficiently — has been to be relegated to simple, demonstrable models of what it took humanity perhaps-hundreds-of-thousands of years to learn to successfully avoid.
It may have been already observed by those sufficiently astute, that I have never answered back a “swear word” with a “swear word” of my choosing. Rather, I use such humor as I can find to transform such words from “nasty to nice” — as with the need to recycle that of what local dairy cows eat that they do not digest and physically internalize.
Because I rather well know and understand the social use of “swear words” very well, I have made efforts to show that it is not necessary to “swear” to be truthful.
As “swear words” never really reach me, I really cannot give them out because I really do not have them to give.
What does reach me is an understanding of the notion of adversarial relationships as being, as though of a death spiral, being both the cause and the result of hatred.
A few years ago, I designed a “neurologically correct” model of the adversarial principle, without need for an electromechanical motor. The model I designed, but have yet to build, uses only resistors, capacitors, transistors, diodes, light-emitting diode(s), a dry cell, a sensitive surface, and appropriate hardware. I may yet build the electronic version of my design, only, I am first testing a word-form model of it through communicating with people.
Using only words, I touch the “sensitive surface” and a plethora of “swear words” erupt. That repeated process has beautifully informed me that the model of my design, put to use, actually works.
From the lyrics of a song performed by The Threshold Choir, director Kate Munger:
Copied from the lyrics as found on the Internet:
7. BY LOVE ALONE – Helen Greenspan/The Buddha
Hatred will never cease by hatred. By love alone,
By love alone, by love alone will it end.
The lyrics for the CD, Listening at the Threshold, were available, when I last checked, at:
www(dot)thresholdchoir(dot)org(forward slash)Listening%20at%20the%20Threshold%20liner%20notes%20and%20lyrics(dot)pdf
Believe me wrong? Look for yourself. There is a powerful irony in the “author” attribution, or is there?
If you have the will, read all the lyrics. If you have the courage, buy the CD, and listen to it until you truly understand it. Then go forth and live it. There are only ten printed pages as I observe, to the explanations and lyrics.
We, all of humanity, are, as I observe, at The Threshold for real. We may, as a species, continue to turn on that “most useful machine” until the “battery” dies and it stops working, or we may set the machine aside, but not throw it away, and do something constructive instead.
Oops. An analogy! The “battery” is all of living humanity.
We, present day humanity, have come upon the threshold across which is actually truthful living. “Threshold” and “wormhole” are functionally synonyms.
Given to be autistic as I have been given, I have actually lived all of my life in a world in which hatred never even entered, and have crossed the threshold as though between the world of the adversarial principle and the world of the affirmational principle, in mind and spirit, as with heart and strength, sometimes thousands of times every day of my life.
As it is impossible for me to learn the ways of adversarial hatred, for hateful and adversarial are functionally synonyms, so it is impossible for me to successfully be taught the ways of adversarial hatred.
The single step across the threshold?
In the affirmational world:
Whatever happens, as it happens, is both necessary and sufficient AND whatever does not happen, as it does not happen, is both unnecessary and impossible.
It is one step from the adversarial world to the affirmational world.
Whereas, in the adversarial world, the falsehood prevails that:
Whatever happens, as it happens, is neither necessary nor sufficient AND whatever does not happen, as it does not happen, is both necessary and unavoidable.
The paradigm of the adversarial world is, “NO, BUT…”
The paradigm of the affirmational world is, “Yes, and…”
I am a “Yes, and…” person.
Were the world in which I actually live, “my world,” I would welcome everyone into it.
It is not “my world,” and the Welcome and Welcome Mat have been ready and waiting for about two thousand years…
The Welcome is the life of Jesus, and the Welcome Mat is Christ.
As to my commenting on Jonathan Turley’s blawg, I watched him on TV news programs and on video I found via the Internet, and I, as I automatically do with every person I ever observe because I have no other way to connect with anyone, studied the relationship between his affective and cognitive aspects as such were observable by me, and formed a hypothesis-to-be-tested that Professor Turley, very much as I do, truly is in search of a system of law that is actually truthful and decent, one that respects life in its fullness, one that enhances rather than destroys people’s lives.
I have commented here in order that it may be possible for those who truly seek the rule of law to be effective, efficient, and economical to become the actual reality of law and not it parody.
I come, not in opposition to the rule of law; I come to embrace it with all the truthfulness I have to give.
Absent the rule of law, live is unbearable. Absent the cruel of law, life is beautiful beyond words yet made.
The rule of law, to be valid, need be its own affirmation, the rule of law speaks for itself, and always has, yet the cruel of law has infected the law as a virulent disease of hatred which, more than all else, addictively hates itself.
The cruel of law assigns to a person responsibility for situational factors not within the person’s actual control.
Do that often enough and long enough, and legal cases such as the one upon which this thread is based become impossible to avoid. Blame the judge instead of the cruel of law, and the cruel of law is strengthened.
There is something quite interesting about concrete. It is held together by water; a hydration process in which the polar bonding property inherent to the circa 105 degree bond angle of water molecules is the “glue” that gives concrete its strength.
However, concrete continues to become stronger indefinitely, for the hydration process is asymptotic and never quite “maxes out.”
However, as concrete becomes ever stronger in compression, the composite structure of concrete has many stress-concentrators, such that, as concrete strengthens more and more, the voids and other stress concentrators eventually become stressed in tension until, with sufficiently wide-ranging and repeated temperature cycling, concrete tears itself apart from within. The ever-increasing strength of concrete eventually becomes its greatest weakness.
Before someone castigates me for being in disrespect of the rule of law, I find it useful to mention that the possibilities of much of what I do as a bioengineer regarding the rule of law came to me from the writings of certain lawyers and law professors whose awareness of predicaments within the adversarial system led them to write of their awareness.
From the front inner flap of the dust jacket of Judge Harold J. Rothwax, “Guilty: The Collapse of Criminal Justice” (Random House, 1996):
Judge Harold J. Rothwax is renowned in legal circles for his sharp mind, candor, and tough rulings. (Quivering lawyers refer to him as “the Prince of Darkness.”) Now Rothwax has written a brilliant and controversial book that puts our criminal justice system on trial. His verdict, after twenty-five years as a judge and after close scrutiny of the O. J. Simpson trial: Guilty.
In contrast with the verdict of Rothwax, circa 1996, I find the criminal justice system, as I find the whole of the adversarial system, and all its ilk, Perfectly Innocent, and I so find because I have, using the methodologies of bioengineering, “reverse-engineered” the adversarial system to its footing-bedrock interface structural flaw, and furthermore, as a bioengineer, have “forward-engineered” its plausibly optimal repair.
Fifteen years ago, Rothwax observed and reported his recognizing that the criminal justice system was undergoing structural failure. I did not write the book that Rothwax wrote.
One book is not very meaningful by itself?
Richard A. Posner, “How Judges Think,” Harvard University Press, 2008.
Philip K. Howard, “The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America,” Random House, 1994
Philip K. Howard, “Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans From Too Much Law,” W. W. Norton, 2009.
Instead of finding too much law, as with Howard, or too little law, as with primitive anarchy, I find a simple error underlying the interpretation of law and laws to be the actual enigma, one my work has demonstrably solved.
Kill the messenger before the messenger can tell the message and both messenger and message are destroyed.
It may be unwise to kill messengers bearing good news.
Execute them all!!! There appears no better option. 🙂
No, I’m serious.
Do you have any idea what a systemic nightmare that suggestion would create? I’m all for facts. But here’s a fact about prosecution: often prosecutors go for a harsher charge than they think they can get for tactical reasons. This story here has noting to do with that though. This is simple abuse of judicial power. Actual serious prosecutors would be/are appalled by this judge circumventing their role in the due process. Not just because it’s their jobs he’s discounting, but that he’s doing a great disservice to the people of the state by letting an amateur act as prosecutor against their collective best interests.
Does something need to be done about malicious prosecutions? Absolutely. They do happen and they are a great injustice. However, your suggestion (I suspect made in jest) is a wee-bit overboard.
Thanks Buddha, the facts do scare a lot of people. 🙂
MFM,
That’s possibly the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said.
Still think that if the prosecution teams cannot get a “full” conviction on all the charges they impose against any defendant, then they themselves should have to do the time they are seeking against any defendant. Otherwise the system will continue to struggle and result in defeat.
I think that they get so used to the power that they do things “just because they can”.
I’ve wondered if people like that ever have any problems sleeping though it doesn’t seem to stop them. The ones who play the game get promoted up in the ranks and that makes it even harder to change things for the better.
Lotta,
Yep! Bloody good! 🙂
Blouise, At a certain point that just seems so reasonable and appropriate doesn’t it? 🙂
It’s good to be Queen.
Oh the hell with it … “Off with their heads!” (Queen of Hearts … let’s celebrate Valentine’s Day)
Semi related:
The judge, Mark Ciavarella, that took kickbacks for sending teens to a privately owned jail has gone to trial. Judge Ciavarellas’ partner in crime, Robert Powell has also fallen on hard times.
Both judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael T. Conahan in the kickback scheme pleaded guilty in 2009 in a plea deal with Federal prosecutors for seven years in prison but the plea was rejected by the Senior US District Judge in the matter and Ciavearella is now facing a 48 count racketeering case. I’m hoping the verdict is guilty and the Judge spends the rest of his life in jail.
http://www.wnep.com/news/countybycounty/wnep-luz-ciavarella-trial-mistrial-denied-mcgarry-moran-corruption,0,2589924.story
http://thetimes-tribune.com/news/mired-in-debt-powell-no-longer-a-lawyer-or-wealthy-1.1103331#axzz1Dg8j9nXR
Gyges, LoL, I think that’s called ‘life imitating art’ even if ‘art’ is used loosely.
If this doesn’t get the Judge removed we may as well kiss any pretense to the rule of law goodbye.
Is three Judge Dredd Refrences in one week too much?
The Judge and every one of the prosecutor’s office that had knowledge of this event needs to serve the full maximum sentence the defendant was facing with no time off for any “good” behavior, be disbarred, and never be allowed to practice in any position in the criminal justice field for the remainder of their lives imo.
Remember this?:
“20 Responses to “Constitutional Nightmare: New Jersey Town Bars Sleeping in Public”
1.
1 eniobob 1, November 17, 2010 at 7:57 am
In Roselle,Rahway and Linden New Jersey there are quite a few large parks which I would imagine is tempting for a homeless person to sleep in.
But why should a person or family be homeless in America in the first place?
People complain of being shoeless till they see the person with no feet.”
The courts aren’t to “user friendly”
I think the technical term to answer your question is “screwed”, Mike.
The hits keep coming and the judicial system keeps disintegrating. Without a juduciary without legal knowledge, or integrity, what are we as a country?
“DiLeo is also accused of refusing a public defense attorney to one of the men after he requested it in court.”
And probably denied it with a straight face.
“Louie, Louie, Lou-ahaaa”
Gotta move that docket ……..
However, a song comes to mind…..One step over the line sweet Jesus….