Associate Circuit Judge Barbara T. Peebles is under investigation for allegedly allowing her clerks to handle litigation matters as she vacationed in China last year. To make matters worse, there is a criminal investigation into the disappearance of a document related to the vacation. In the meantime, another judge, Margaret J. Walsh resigned after allegations that she ordered the handcuffing of an assistant city counselor and used inappropriate or abusive language as well as allegedly attempting to influence city officials when her son was rejected for a job.
The Missouri Supreme Court’s Commission on Retirement, Removal and Discipline is looking into Peebles vacation and the claim that she allowed clerks to carry out her functions. Her clerks reportedly handled a number of her cases while she was in China on vacation for 10 days in October, including issuing orders to dismiss five cases and issuing as many as 18 bench warrants and continuing more than 300. Some individuals were held in jail due to their actions.
What is interesting is that court officials say that there really was no change due to the vacation and that Peebles routinely allows clerks to do her job even when she is present. One clerk is known as “Judge Whitney” because she regularly dismissed cases and issued arrest warrants and continuances. One brave public defender finally objected in a motion that noted “The court clerk denied this motion without a judge present and without allowing defense counsel an opportunity to argue the motion.”
It would be a curious defense that I always use clerks as substitute judges so this had nothing to do with my vacation. Peebles could be removed on the basis of these allegations.
In the meantime, I assume inmates will get tee shirts reading “My Judge Went On Vacation and All I Got Was This T-shirt And A Bench Warrant.”
Source: STL Today and ABA Journal
Laws are designed and written like spider webs: to catch small insects but not large ones.
Hey Idealist, what’s on the sports channel? (You cannot have a half-corrupt system; contradiction in terms.)
Bad guys versus Good guys again? (Dismiss that case; it’s a lose-lose.)
Who’s winning? (See id., ipsa, ibid, a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury…)
Is it raining? Here it’s 97 degrees F and 60% humidity. “Heat advisory until ten p.m. tomorrow night.”
I had gotten used to the fact that cops are corrupt.
Gotten used to the lawyers are “sharp” dealers, to put it kindly—-shhh lawyers are reading.
But that the rest of the EFFing system was corrupt kinda upsets me. What do we have left. Every man for himself? Or buy your won jusice at ss dollars a whatever. Wonder where the day’s prices are posted.
This was not part of what they misinformed me with at school. Did I have to study law to learn this at college.
The disciplined silence here is amazing. No refutation. Nothing.
Is it raining, they ask?
What on the sport channel? Which one? Romans vs Huns.
There is a disciplinary committee in the District of Columbia called the “Board on Professional Responsibility.” The Chairman of that Board is Ray S. Bolze, an attorney who was previously a partner at Howry & Simon, a law firm that went under. He is licensed as an attorney in the District of Columbia but they will not give out any address for him, so nobody can write to him. Presumably if you needed to sue him, you could not serve him, except perhaps by publication. No phone listed; no address listed; no e-mail listed. He is the CHAIR of that Board on Attorney Ethics!!!!!!!!
Not only that, but if you make a complaint to the Bar Counsel (who are kind of the “prosecutors” for attorney ethics violations in the District), there is no time limit to how long they can hold it “under consideration” without giving a “YES we will report this as unethical” or “NO we will not consider this unethical” response. NO TIME LIMIT. So I said to to Elizabeth Branda, the executive attorney for that board, “So would, say, seven years be OK?” She wouldn’t answer!
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!
Y’all — are there standards for lawyers?
Are there standards for judges?
Are there standards for anyone in the judicial branch of govt, anywhere?
What do YOU think?
(Check back with me in seven years.)
Curious, I’m trying to research it. It is so strange that the RS is not easily done, of course. You have to dissect the body of a person who never existed to get a pathology report on a cause of non-death. THAT’S IT — the ZOMBIE COURT LIVES!!
CROSS POST CROSS POST
LeeJCarrol,
Guess we must conclude that that law is a form of guild, with those restrictions and binding internal rules.
I think it odd the silence which meets you, and others who I won’t name. Who speaks here for the lawyers when these tales of injustice are parleyed for hope for betterment? None is heard.
We get tales of judges, lawyers, officials from JT and even others. But nothing in terms of offering a solution to this evil. For it is a cancer, ie it is growing and deadly in the end.
Are there no lawyer organizations willing to challenge this sickness? Where is the equivalent of the ACLU.
Perhaps their are. Describe them.
Where is the federal law equivalent to the consumer financial protection laws which would offer a time unlimited appeal and prosecutorial path?
I am not a lawyer and here am I presuming to mention alternatives and needs. Where the hell are the lawyers here? And their fellow travelers? Why is it so quiet here?
Is baring your woes uncouth in this place. OK. Skip the personal. But letting the comments stand at just that, without mentioning the rare case when they get caught.
Where is the EFFing oversight???????
What in the world is one to make of the cited Urbina case? Will someone please offer some insight?
Good for her….case control is the number 1 issue facing judges……
Judges judging judges…how nice. Administrative law is sorely lacking in oversight. One judge decided I was not entitled to a statutory penalty because he heard I was retired and did not need the money. I appealed. The penalty was paid and the appeal panel lost the appeal petition. How convenient.
Mike S, the rule of law thing is, just as you say, a pretense that we believe we cannot live without. In 1986 I asked a lawyer (MINE) in Oregon, “So you’re saying that all this can be done to someone and although there is no law against it, she cannot ESCAPE?” He answered without hesitation: “Yes that’s what I’m saying.” I followed up: “WHY?” He came back again, without a second for thought: “Because we HAVE to have SOME SEMBLANCE OF LAW!”
When I argued, “This was not law!”
He agreed. He said “I did not say ‘LAW’ I said ‘SOME SEMBLANCE!'”
from waynemadsenreport.com
June 19-20, 2012 — Press Release on U.S. Judge Ricardo Urbina
RETIRING FEDERAL JUDGE MADE HISTORY BY FILING A WRITTEN DECISION ON A CASE THAT NEVER EXISTED
WASHINGTON, D.C., June 19, 2012 — Judge Ricardo Urbina, who recently announced his intention to retire from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia next year, made judicial history when he filed his decision in a case that never existed.
The case. Hurley v. Heilig, was never filed, according to John Edward Hurley, the supposed plaintiff in the lawsuit. Moreover, Hurley said, he has never appeared before Judge Urbina in any case. He did say, however, that Judge Urbina had been involved in another lawsuit where the Judge Urbina had filed an unsigned court order against him in a D.C. Superior Court case (CA 5211-88), when he had also never appeared before him.
When Hurley was asked why he thought Judge Urbina had taken this unprecedented step in the annals of jurisprudence to file an opinion in a totally fraudulent federal case, he said that it was obvious that Judge Urbina was irked at Hurley for exposing his unsigned filing in the D.C. Superior Court. Hurley had submitted testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing Judge Urbina’s appointment to the federal bench, citing his bogus court order in the D.C. Superior Court case.
Both cases had to do with U.S. domestic intelligence operations that forced the closing of the century-old Confederate Memorial Hall library and museum in Washington and revealed a massive money laundering operation that centered on Confederate Monument ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery.
Information that Hurley has discovered includes the origin of the litigation against him which began when he refused to sponsor a “Freedom Fighter Night” at the Confederate museum in 1986 to raise funds for the Contras and the Nicaraguan Freedom Fighters.
He since discovered that one of the main lawyers working against him had a wife who was receiving $15,000 per month from the white supremacist intelligence service of South Africa to devise ways to circumvent the congressional embargo against South Africa for uranium. The lawyer, Herbet Harmon was subsequently forced to return $21, 879.46 to Hurley which was originally obtained through a fraudulent legal bill that Hurley traced to the Confederate services at Arlington National Cemetery. The check was written after Hurley had been jailed for challenging the fraudulent legal bill.
The Washington Post has published a laudatory article on Judge Urbina’s retirement as the mainstreet media continues to ignore the obvious judicial corruption represented by this historic decision in a non-existant lawsuit.
—
Hurley is the director of the McClendon News Service, founded by the late White House correspondent Sarah McClendon.
While Mike S. is correct that the courts are underfunded and understaffed, this judge should be an ex-judge. I hope the clerks are also being investigated because they should have known that what they were doing was illegal.
Prof., how much for those T-shirts?? 🙂
Barkin Dog, you are a good dog. Not sure if you are good people or not….
I don’t know enuff of the legal matrix to Judge the Judges but I do find it odd that when ever there is a loud case with celebrities or lots of ‘drama’….well these things don’t seem to happen then do they?
Not sure I buy the underfundedness argument Mike, sometimes throwing $$$$ at a problem just serves to hide it till it grows bigger…..
Ridiculous as these instances are they ignore the real issue which is that our courts are underfunded, overworked and run by political appointments that have little to do with someone’s real qualifications for the position. For purposes of prevention of social chaos we pretend that we exist under a rule of law, where all are equal before it. The fact is, ours and most other judicial systems in this world are dysfunctional, except for the fact that at times they get things right.
TalkinDog here again: If more judges would travel to places other than the Lake of the Ozarks or Las Vegas we would have a better informed judicicary.
TalkinDog Judge Barbara Peebles is a very good, kind, thoughtful and intelligent judge. If she had gone to Lake of the Ozarks they would not make so much hay out of this. Many judges cede duties to clerks if they have voluminous dockets. Go beat up on somebody else.
When will it be leaked the news of the cause of this dementia? Is it epidemic now?
Some toxin?: Chemical, psychological, political.
The lady with the cold fries has my sympathy and I will gladly loan her my cell next time. Just hoping the cops will be hungry and answer the call hoping for a little bribing.
Some judges make you wonder. Several years ago in Mississippi, a judge cited a man for Contempt at a service station. I don’t remember the details of the argument, but I think it had to do with the fact either the judge or the other guy cut the other one off pulling into the gas pump. At any rate, the judge cited the guy for contempt on the spot and undertook to have him arrested. The police officer who responded refused, further enraging the judge. The whole affair ended up in front of the Judicial Review committee and judge was censured.
That judge seems to have been made from the same stuff as the woman who called 911 because her McDonald’s french fries were cold.
How dumb.
Meanwhile, I saw a court order entered in Maryland on January 1 of a certain recent year. It was not done by a clerk, even; it was done by a computer. The plaintiff (a corporation) had made a motion that had 16 days to answer, and the computer was set, and sixteen days later, the motion was granted; somebody must have forgotten to re-set the date for the automatic granting of the corporation’s motion, so…
January 1, the order was entered.
Never even bothered to appeal. Who cares, at this point, what the courts PRETEND TO DO when we know what they REALLY do?
These two judges are just DUMB. They could get away with whatever they wanted to get away with if they just weren’t so damn DUMB.
Another case of the tendency to become corrupted by power. Some public officials have more tolerance or immunity to it than others. But it usually gets to everyone exposed to it. That includes church power too.