Sen. Lindsey Graham appeared to confirm this week one of the greatest fears for civil libertarians in the aftermath of the burning of the Qu’ran (Koran) by Rev. Terry Jones. With Muslims murdering innocent people as a protest to the book burning, Senator Graham has called for Congress to go hold people accountable for such acts. The message is clear and predictable: if someone’s exercise of free speech has caused problems, limit the free speech.
In the video above, Graham states “I wish we could find a way to hold people accountable.” He stresses “[f]ree speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war.” Of course, neither he nor his colleagues ever bothered to declare war. Likewise, Obama did not even consult with Congress before going to war in Libya.
Fortunately, the Constitution still exists to bar such impulses against free speech. Notably, however, China is arresting people who are viewed as destabilizing the country with their art and ideas. Now some members of Congress want to join countries in a type of criminal blasphemy law — an idea that Obama appeared to accept in supporting a resolution under pressure from Arab allies on protecting religion from critics.
Free speech is designed to protect us against our own leaders — like Sen. Graham. It is not enjoyed at the whim of the U.S. Senate. And, by the way, the diaper genie is a “great idea.” Free speech is what defines us as a people.
Jonathan Turley
SO Kay,
You did have an attorney….right? When did this one come into being…How can you be Pro Se if you have an attorney? I love train wrecks….I really do….don’t you?
@ Anonymously
The judge didn’t ask for me to be mentally evaluated. My lawyer suggested that I get a written evaluation to deflect character assassination. That was good advice from my lawyer who was at that time Sandra Gardner. She is now a judge in Moffat County Colorado.
@ Mike
Which is why it is important that judges stand up for public rights now before they are afraid that they will be killed for standing up against a totalitarian society.
First They came… – Pastor Martin Niemoller
First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
——
And I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a pro se litigant …..
“Can you find a reference indicating that the Courts in Germany or Russia tried to prevent mass incarcerations and genocide?”
no I can’t and that was the point of my comments. Expecting the German courts under Hitler, or the Soviet Courts under Stalin to stand up to genocide is simply silly.
Kay,
I am curious, because I do like to watch train wrecks and other peoples drama….I don’t do too well with my own drama….but why did the judge ask for you to be mentally evaluated?
Still don’t care.
Still want you to STFU and move your spam to your own blog.
b) Whoever knowingly uses intimidation, threatens, or corruptly persuades another person, or attempts to do so, or engages in misleading conduct toward another person, with intent to—
(1) influence, delay, or prevent the testimony of any person in an official proceeding;
(2) cause or induce any person to—
(A) withhold testimony, or withhold a record, document, or other object, from an official proceeding;
(B) alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal an object with intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding;
(C) evade legal process summoning that person to appear as a witness, or to produce a record, document, or other object, in an official proceeding; or
(D) be absent from an official proceeding to which such person has been summoned by legal process; or
(3) hinder, delay, or prevent the communication to a law enforcement officer or judge of the United States of information relating to the commission or possible commission of a Federal offense or a violation of conditions of probation [1] supervised release,,[1] parole, or release pending judicial proceedings;
shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
TWENTY YEARS! That shows that it is a significant crime.
@ Bil
You actually really helped me in pushing me to find the Diane Wood judgment “We read § 401 to permit either a fine, or imprisonment, or both, as a penalty for criminal contempt, but not to permit any other penalty.” which I have just pasted into my new draft complaint.
Thank you for that.
@ Mike
Can you find a reference indicating that the Courts in Germany or Russia tried to prevent mass incarcerations and genocide?
@ Bil
I have come to grips with the fact that Judge Nottingham did not use published court procedure in my case. He used contempt powers for facts outside the court room without a criminal charge. He deprived me of my right to confrontation, my right to a defense lawyer, my right to a written statement of charges, and my right to an evidentiary hearing. Nottingham deprived me of my right to a memorandum opinion and he burdened me with judgments that were not based on any published procedure. He didn’t do that because I irritated him because prior to that I never met him. The best explanation I know is that he was bribed or maybe he has some irrational hatred of pro se litigants. Do you know another reason?
As far as I am concerned, what happened to me is similar to rape. It is common for rape victims to continue resentment especially when the perp is unpunished.
There is absolutely no way that I would ever “accept” what Nottingham and his associates did to me.
AY,
“SL,
You are the backbone, ears, feet, nose, all the appendages of a human body….
Lol – sorry, you can’t suck up now, the damage has been done!
“but aren’t you glad when the Asshole goes to court….”
Yes! In fact, the asshole’s in court now … but at least he’s a nice asshole 😀
“Yes, I think that if German courts were better that the oppression of Jews, Homosexuals etc. would have stopped at the taking of property stage before the extermination stage.”
Kay,
That statement is unbelievable in what it says for your lack of historical knowledge. Hitler’s Germany was a dictatorship. Jews had no rights before the law. Judges who didn’t comply with NAZI policy (and a few didn’t)were
arrested by the Gestapo, killed and/or sent to concentration camps. That’s like saying if soviet courts were better they wouldn’t have allowed Stalin to kill 10 million of his own people. Meaningless drivel on your part and an indication of your self-centered obsessions.
See, kay, but that’s where you are wrong.
You are a self-destructive fool for not coming to grips with the fact that the attorney fee shifting judgments were valid, for not declaring bankruptcy and you would realize that you are indeed a vexatious litigant. Almost everyone who loses in court thinks they deserved to win. That’s not how it works.
Learn when to walk away and rebuild.
Until you do, your obsession is going to work to destroy what you have left and can possibly retain. How long do you think this obsession is going to go on before it takes a toll on your marriage? Even Job had a limit to his patience. And since you’ve expressed suicidal tendencies, your loses could include your life if (and when) you lose in court again. Seek professional help. To be clear, I mean professional mental health help.
BIL
If I were a self destructive fool then I would claim that the attorney fee shifting judgments were valid and give up my assets by declaring bankruptcy and I would admit to being a vexatious litigant. I am not a self destructive fool so I will NOT affirm attorney fee shifting judgments that were made without a Rule 11 c 6 order or an order to show cause; and since I had a valid cause of action that can be proven by government records I will not refute that.
The 7th Circuit ruling would give me grounds to file a motion for en banc rehearing or Supreme Court hearing if DOJ were to assert that 28 USC 401 allows summary incarceration for documents written outside of court and filed in a different court.
If I were unable to get a hearing from the S.C. or the Circuit Court if the D of Columbia rules in the case that I haven’t yet filed that 28 USC 401 allows summary incarceration for documents written outside of court then I will do my best to publicize that.
OT but …
Huckabee Hearts Secrecy
Melissa Lyttle/ZumaThe enduring mystery surrounding the former Arkansas governor’s M.I.A. records.
— By Siddhartha Mahanta
Fri Apr. 1, 2011 11:35 AM PDT
There’s a Mike Huckabee mystery that won’t go away.
Send a public records request seeking documents from his 12-year stint as Arkansas governor, as Mother Jones did recently, and an eyebrow-raising reply will come back: The records are unavailable, and the computer hard drives that once contained them were erased and physically destroyed by the Huckabee administration as the governor prepared to leave office and launch a presidential bid.
In 2007, during Huckabee’s campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, the issue of the eradicated hard drives surfaced briefly, but it was never fully examined, and key questions remain. Why had Huckabee gone to such great lengths to wipe out his own records? What ever happened to a backup collection that was provided to a Huckabee aide?
Huckabee is now considering another presidential run, and if he does enter the race, he would do so as a frontrunner. Which would make the case of the missing records all the more significant. These records would shed light on Huckabee’s governorship—and could provide insight into how a President Huckabee might run the country. Meanwhile, observers of Arkansas’ political scene—including one of Huckabee’s former GOP allies—say the episode is characteristic of a politician who was distrustful and secretive by nature.
In February, Mother Jones wrote to the office of Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe seeking access to a variety of records concerning his predecessor’s tenure, including Huckabee’s travel records, calendars, call logs, and emails. Beebe’s chief legal counsel, Tim Gauger, replied in a letter that “former Governor Huckabee did not leave behind any hard-copies of the types of documents you seek. Moreover, at that time, all of the computers used by former Governor Huckabee and his staff had already been removed from the office and, as we understand it, the hard-drives in those computers had already been ‘cleaned’ and physically destroyed.”
He added, “In short, our office does not possess, does not have access to, and is not the custodian of any of the records you seek.”
“Huckabee just absolutely doesn’t trust anybody,” says one former high-ranking Arkansas Republican. “In my experience, if you don’t trust people, it’s because you’re not trustworthy.”The person who may know the most about Huckabee’s records—or lack of them—is Jim Parsons. A self-described gadfly, Parsons is a former Green Beret turned good-government crusader who has filed dozens of Freedom of Information requests targeting Arkansas politicos on both sides of the aisle, including the Clintons. Shortly after Huckabee left office, Parsons went to battle with the state over his records.
In January 2007, Parsons requested “a copy of all information” on the Huckabee administration’s computers the day he left office. Beebe’s office provided Parsons with a January 9 memo addressed to Huckabee from the Arkansas Department of Information Systems, reporting that all of the gubernatorial hard drives had been “crushed under the supervision of a designee of [Huckabee’s] office.” That is, a Huckabee aide had made sure all this information was destroyed.
The memo included another tantalizing piece of information: The information stored on the drives had been saved on a backup, which was handed over to Huckabee’s then-chief of staff, Brenda Turner. The history of the Huckabee administration, then, was locked away, under the watchful eye of a former aide. What did she do with this information? Where is it now? Turner, who now runs the PR shop for a Arkansas-based purveyor of Christian-themed greeting cards, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. (Contacted via his political action committee, Huckabee didn’t respond to questions about his records.)
Parsons requested the backups and eventually filed a lawsuit against Huckabee and Beebe, alleging that the new governor had siphoned taxpayer money from an emergency fund to pay to replace the destroyed hard drives. Altogether, the new equipment cost over $335,000. Huckabee countered that the information on the hard drives included private details, such as social security numbers, that shouldn’t be released to the public. In the end, Parsons’ suit was dismissed—largely because he didn’t name Turner, who apparently possessed the records, as a plaintiff.
What do the Huckabee files hold? The records could provide details on any number of unsettled controversies involving a governor that faced at least 15 ethics complaints concerning, among other things: his failure to report gifts and outside income, his alleged use of state funds and resources for political and personal purposes, and the pardon of a convicted murderer and rapist who went on to kill again once released.
A former high-ranking Arkansas Republican who was once close to Huckabee and who requested anonymity told Mother Jones that the destruction of the hard drives puzzled him. “I don’t know what that was about, if they had things to hide or not,” he says. But, he adds, the episode fits with Huckabee’s general reticence when it comes to public disclosure. “Huckabee just absolutely doesn’t trust anybody. In my experience, if you don’t trust people, it’s because you’re not trustworthy. We see the world through our own eyes.”
Huckabee’s aversion to public disclosure extends beyond his gubernatorial papers. He and his handlers have also taken steps to block access to videotapes of his sermons, spanning his 12 years as a Southern Baptist minister before he entered politics. During the 2008 campaign, Mother Jones reported that Huckabee’s campaign had refused to make the sermons public—and that, according to an official at one of the churches he’d led, much of the archival material relating to Huckabee’s tenure had been destroyed.
Despite the opacity surrounding Huckabee’s political and pastoral record, he has at times fashioned himself as a staunch advocate of government transparency. Running for president in 2007, Huckabee put forth a bold open-government proposal. “There’s an old rule that says that when the sun shines, the germs disappear,” he said in one video clip (watch it below). “Well you know, frankly, there are a lot of germs in government.” So he proposed disclosing every federal government expenditure online within 24 hours. “You could find out exactly where every dollar of the federal budget goes, down to what it cost to mow the courthouse lawn in your hometown at a federal courthouse,” he said. Discussing this plan at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (better known as CPAC) in February 2008, he said, “We should demand transparency and accountability from our government.”
Yet Huckabee’s calls for transparency did not extend to his own records. “There were twelve years of information there, of dealings of the executive branch,” marvels Jim Parsons, referring to the hard drives. “And that bit of history is just lost. I thought it was wrong, physically and financially and historically and educationally wrong to just destroy them.” He adds, “I probably would vote for him. It’s just that he did a bad thing there.”
Some of Huckabee’s gubernatorial papers do still exist, records that were selected by his office and handed over to his alma mater, Ouachita Baptist University. Due to funding hang-ups and other delays, a spokeswoman for the university says the records won’t be accessible to the public for another two years. That is, after the conclusion of the 2012 presidential contest.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t33EtFQRA6E&w=640&h=390]
Siddhartha Mahanta is an editorial fellow at Mother Jones. Got story ideas? Email him at smahanta (at) motherjones (dot) com. For more of his stories, click here. Get Siddhartha Mahanta’s RSS feed.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/04/huckabee-arkansas-destroyed-records
1) I really and truly do not care about your personal legal problem, 2) that case does not help you – if you were competent, you’d know why (hint: what are the only two courts in the land that can overrule circuit court judgments?), and last but not least 3) you’re a self-destructive fool.
Seek professional mental health help is the only advice I am going to give you.
@ BIL
In re Troutt, 460 F.3d 887 (7th Cir. 08/21/2006)
In the United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit The opinion of the court was delivered by: Wood, Circuit Judge.
“If it is criminal contempt, punishable under 18 U.S.C. § 401, certain consequences will follow;”…” this proceeding was (or should have been, as we shall see) governed both by § 401 and FED. R. CRIM. P. 42″ See they don’t recognize 18 USC § 401 as a basis for civil contempt incarcerations.
“[s]section 401 recognizes two types of contempt: direct and indirect. Direct contempt is contumacious conduct committed in the actual presence of the court, . . . and may be punished summarily.” 741 F.2d at 135 (internal citation omitted). See also United States v. Wilson, 421 U.S. 309, 316 (1975). All other contempt must be treated as indirect contempt. Bearing in mind the principle that only “the least possible power adequate to the end proposed should be used in
contempt cases,” Anderson v. Dunn, 6 Wheat. 204, 231 (1821), the Supreme Court said in Wilson that “[w]here time is not of the essence, . . . the provisions of [FED. R. CRIM. P.] 42(b) may be more appropriate to deal with contumacious conduct. 421 U.S. at 319. Other factors distinguishing direct from indirect contempt include whether the act was committed in the presence of the judge and whether extrinsic evidence will be needed to prove the contempt.”
“It is worth underscoring, in this regard, that criminal contempt is a crime, like all other crimes. See Bloom v. Illinois, 391 U.S. 194, 201 (1968). It is for that reason that the Supreme Court has held that a person accused of criminal contempt enjoys the normal range of procedural rights. See Int’l Union, United Mine Workers of America v. Bagwell, 512 U.S. 821, 826-27 (1994) (referring to In re Bradley, 318 U.S. 50
(1943) (double jeopardy); Cooke v. United States, 267 U.S. 517, 537 (1925) (rights to notice of charges, assistance of counsel, summary process, and to present a defense); Gompers v. Bucks Stove & Range Co., 221 U.S. 418, 444 (1911) (privilege against self-incrimination and right to proof beyond a reasonable doubt);”
“Rule 42 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure implements these principles. Rule 42(a), in effect, addresses indirect contempts, while Rule 42(b) recognizes the power of the court to take summary action against “a person who commits criminal contempt
in its presence if the judge saw or heard the contemptuous conduct and so certifies.”
“Time was not of the essence. No trial was being disrupted by a failure to comply with a court order,
compare Wilson, 421 U.S. at 316, nor was any other immediate function of the court threatened by Troutt’s conduct”
“Rule 42(a) sets forth three basic requirements: adequate notice; the appointment of a prosecutor; and trial and disposition. …. The requirement in Rule 42(a)(2) to appoint a prosecutor is spelled out in mandatory language: “The court must request that the contempt be prosecuted by an attorney for the government, unless the interest of justice requires
the appointment of another attorney. If the government declines the request, the court must appoint another attorney to prosecute the contempt.” (Emphasis added) The record does not reflect the appointment of any prosecutor filing an appearance for the November 12, 2004, hearing.”
“If the criminal contempt involves disrespect toward or criticism of a judge, that judge is disqualified from presiding at the contempt trial or hearing unless
the defendant consents.”
“In a situation like this, right at the borderline between direct and indirect contempt, the
judge should err on the side of providing the procedural safeguards assured by Rule 42(a). Only if he concluded that time was of the essence, or that failure to act would leave the contempt unpunished, or that some other equally powerful reason compelled
the use of Rule 42(b) summary procedures, should he act summarily.”
“We read § 401 to permit either a fine, or imprisonment, or both, as a penalty for criminal contempt, but not to permit any other penalty.”
Thus the 7th Circuit interpreted 28 USC § 401 differently than you presented it last night when you said it allows incarceration without a criminal charge or a finding of contempt in the presence of the court that disrupts a trial.
Judge Diane Wood is supposed to be on a short list as a potential S.C. Justice.
SL,
You are the backbone, ears, feet, nose, all the appendages of a human body….but aren’t you glad when the Asshole goes to court….
Sorry…couldn’t resist…
OS,
My thoughts are with you and your family – Peace
AY,
“Bankruptcy Attorney’s have no shame”
Hey! I’m a bankruptcy paralegal and I have lots of shame!! 😀
A statement by a fruit loop that they are not a fruit loop does not mean they are not a fruit loop.
A statement by an anonymous blogger that someone is “simply nuts” is not an indication of mental illness of other people.
What I don’t understand is how you can assert that the contempt power of federal judges overrides the Limits on Detention Act.