Man Can't Sue Judge Who Had Affair With His Wife During Child-Support Case

 

That's the ruling of the Sixth Circuit Appeals court in a case brought by a Detroit man against disgraced Wayne County former judge Wade McCree Jr.

McCree, the son of the first black Justice to sit on the Sixth Circuit was disrobed and lost his judgeship for cute tricks like propositioning bailiffs, having sex in his chambers, trading sex for judicial rulings, sending inappropriate selfies and other misconduct was being sued by a Detroit man who the former judge slapped with outrageously high child support payments - while Judge McCree was having an affair with the other litigant in the case, the man's former wife. Mccree was sexting her from the bench, having sex with her in his judicial chambers and actively enjoying an affair that ultimately ended in an abortion.

 

The Michigan Supreme Court removed him from the bench and he was subsequently suspended without pay for 6 years, something the Michigan Supreme Court imposed because they honestly thought McCree could easily win reelection on racial grounds in Wayne County regardless of his carrying on.

But the Sixth Circuit held that Judge McCree couldn’t be sued civilly for any harms he caused while on the bench, regardless of his record.

According to the strict letter of the law, they're correct. Judicial civil immunity was upheld in Bradley v. Fisher, 80 U.S. 335, 348 (1871):

If civil actions could be maintained… against the judge, because the losing party should see fit to allege in his complaint that the acts of the judge were done with partiality, or maliciously, or corruptly, the protection essential to judicial independence would be entirely swept away.

Since then, courts have consistently ruled against plaintiffs attempting to sue judges.

There have been a few successful cases (In 1996 in Tennessee, a juvenile court judge who was accused of violating the civil rights of three women by sexually assaulting them and threatening to take their kids away if they reported it was denied judicial immunity by the same 6th Circuit) but not many.

Detroit attorney Joel Sklar, who represented the plaintiff in this case wants to take it to the Supreme Court.

“This conduct is absurd,” Sklar said. “It’s so beyond description. A judge uses his chambers to have sex with a litigant? ... If this isn’t too far, what is too far?”

There has been a movement, albeit a small one to waive judicial immunity in cases where a judge's misconduct has caused him to be removed from th ebench. We'll see if the Supremes hear this one.
 

Lawyer's Defense of Gang Rapists: 'She Didn't Affirmatively Say No"

 

Yes, this is what America's law schools are teaching their students these days.

A alleged gang rape by football players in Steubenville, Ohio of a passed-out-drunk 16-year-old girl shocked the entire country, especially after a video went viral of one of the boys who was at the party where it occurred laughing and joking about how the victim was 'so raped' and referring to her as a 'dead girl'.

The words 'dead girl' are indicative of the victim's condition. She was so intoxicated that she was unable to walk and had to be carried from one party to another. In fact, the entire episode was recorded on cellphones, and one screen shot even shows the girl being carried into a bedroom by the two perpetrators by her hands and feet.

So how does Walter Madison, the attorney of one of the alleged perpetrators respond?

"She didn't affirmatively say no."

"The person who is the accuser here is silent just as she was that night, and that's because there was consent," he said.

He claims that the sex was consensual...even though the girl is involved is underage and has no memory of what occurred. She and her parents only found out what happened after the cell phone videos surfaced on the internet some months later.

Because of the time lag between the crime and its discovery, there's also no way of knowing whether the victim was excessively drunk or whether her drink was spiked with Rohypnol, GHB or some of the other substances used for the purpose of rendering someone defenseless for this kind of assault.Nor does it matter, really.

Ohio Associate Attorney General Marianne Hemmeter said at an October hearing: 'The state doesn't have to prove that she was flat-lined.'

'Everybody agrees she's puking. She's puking on herself. People have to help her walk. She can't talk. She's stumbling,' Hemmeter added.

As one teen witness who was there testified, "I wouldn't say she was passed out but she wasn't there to say yes or no."

Those witnesses are another interesting aspect. Only two football players were charged, Ma'Lik Richmond, 16, and Trent Mays, 17. There may have been others involved, and at least 3 other boys were along for the ride, and rather than trying to stop it they pulled out their cellphones and took video and photos of what was going on.While the Steubenville police were able to confiscate the cell phones as evidence, a number of photos had been deleted and were not able to be recovered. Richmond and Hays are the only ones who are implicated in the ones that remain.

All of the other three boys agreed to cooperate and testify - provided they weren't charged with anything aside from being pretty sorry examples of manhood. Which fortunately for them isn't actionable.

The attitude of the attorney, Walter Madison particularly sickens me. I understand he has been hired to put on a defense, but to say the victim 'didn't affirmatively say no' in these circumstances is a new low.But very indicative of how far the standards of the legal profession have fallen.

Since Ma'Lik Richmond is black and the victim was not, I would not be at all surprised if the race card was played on appeal.

Fortunately, this trial has been played out before Judge Thomas Lipps, rather than a jury. Lipps is a visiting judge who has no ties to the community and extensive experience with juvenile crime.

The ruling is expected next week.

Serious About The Rising Cost Of Healthcare? Really?

As the Supreme court debates the constitutionality of forcing Americans to buy a product from a private company and forcing companies to sell to anyone whom applies, a great many arguments have been advanced for universal, government mandated healthcare.

The most frequent one, cited by the Obama Administration's solicitor general and a great many talking heads on the Left involves the idea that the key to controlling rising costs involves forcing people into the insurance market, because those 'free riders', mostly identified as 'young people' who don't buy insurance and force the cost up for everyone.

To help you cut through the verbiage and the nonsense, here's a simple test; if the person you're listening to doesn't include these four words as the main source of the problem of rising health care costs,you're listening to dishonest drivel.

The four words? Illegal aliens. Tort reform.

Let's examine what happens when a construction worker or busboy whose immigration status is,shall we say,not legal or a member of his family gets injured. And injured can mean anything from a broken arm to a case of the flu.

Assuming they haven't managed to get on the MedicAid rolls,they simply go to the nearest emergency room for treatment.

They get treated, because the hospitals are legally mandated not to turn them away (nor should they, out of common humanity). There's a brief conversation with the hospital admin staff about payment, a few smiles and shrugs and the hospital eats the cost. Which gets passed on to the rest of us as higher taxes and higher premiums, as hospitals attempt to balance the budget and raise costs to try and break even.

In my home city, ER rooms are closing and one facility that had been serving the urban community for years actually closed down because this scenario had become so common they simply couldn't afford to run anymore.

The Obama Administration isn't going to be honest with you about that, for political reasons, and would rather refer to a vague 'estimated 40 million Americans without health care', up sharply from an 'estimated 30 million' less than a year ago. But until the problem of illegal migration gets solved, even universal healthcare for every American citizen isn't going to lower costs.

Of course, we could ensure all non-citizens,legal or not. But that's simply another way to go broke as people flock across the border for this latest freebie.You see,there's an unlimited demand for free stuff.

Then,we have the other two words 'tort reform'.

The thing health professionals fear more than a stage five outbreak of a communicable disease is predatory lawyers.

We're not talking here about legitimate cases of blatant misdiagnosis or error, things like a surgeon leaving a sponge inside a patient after an operation or a doctor amputating the wrong body part. We're talking about lawyers ginning up things like large class action suits ( a John Edwards specialty)on the most spurious of causes, actively soliciting people mildly hurt in accidents or worker's comp cases to go to a doctor in cahoots with the lawyer to get unneeded treatment to 'build up the medical' for a settlement, and actively seeking out people who had no intention of engaging in legalities to encourage them to start tort suits on contingency against medical professionals, promising them a gold mine at the end of the trail.

How do these activities impact what you pay for healthcare? In many ways. The financial success of these legal tactics has meany a huge payday for lawyers at the expense of insurance companies. Like any other business,they pass on the cost to their customers.The premiums for health insurance increase, as do the premiums for malpractice insurance for medical professionals. In an effort to try and keep their costs down and avoid court,hospitals and medical professionals frequently perform tests and procedures that are largely unnecessary just on the off chance that some legal shark might use it as a loophole.It all costs money,which eventually winds up hitting the ultimate consumer, you, in the wallet.

Right now, the entire field of tort lawsuits is like a goldrush for anyone with a law degree. Unless limits are put on when tort suits can be filed and for what and unless the abuses are curbed, health care costs are going to continue to rise.With the added problem that as costs for tuition and things like malpractice insurance skyrocket,less and less people are going to find the healthcare professions attractive.

President Obama has never once let the words 'tort reform' cross his lips, and neith have the Democrat leaders who shoved ObamaCare through. It's a safe bet that the trial lawyer's associations are among the biggest Democrat donors have a great deal to do about that.

One final point...a great deal is made over people with pre-existing conditions who can't get healthcare insurance,and that's also been given as a reason to tear apart what is by and large a successful system.

Let's look at how that particular problem gets solved in a slightly different context.

In my home state, insurance or a cash bond posted with the state Department of Motor Vehicles is necessary if you wish to drive a vehicle.

Some people, because of their driving records, a pre-existing condition, are not desirable customers for insurance companies, who would just as soon turn them down and let them be some other company's problem.Recognizing this,and recognizing that these people still needed to be insured in order to comply with the law, what the state insurance commission did was to set up an assigned risk pool of these drivers require that insurance be written, and deal them out to the various companies. The end result is that anyone who drives who wants to be insured ends up being able to be insured.

As a final note, two strategies that have been mentioned that would cut the cost of healthcare significant are cracking down on medicare fraud and opening up the insurance market to interstate competition.

ObamaCare was never really a healthcare bill. It was always about increasing taxes and government control of one sixth of the economy.

You now have some idea of what a serious proposal to get the cost of healthcare under control ought to deal with. Anything else is sheer bolshoi, especially when it's hidden in a 2000 plus page piece of legislation no Democrat in Congress bothered to read before they voted it in.

-selah-

Lawsuit Accuses Iran Of Complicity in 9/11 Attacks

There's an interesting federal lawsuit that's been filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan by family members of the victims of 9/11.

It alleges that Iran had foreknowledge of the attacks, materially assisted al-Qaeda and the 9/11 hijackers and was complicit in the attacks.

This is by no means new material. Even the 9/11 commission said in its report that there was "strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of Al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11 hijackers." There's more than just strong evidence that Iran allowed members of al-Qaeda into Iran after we invaded their stronghold in Afghanistan, which is how so many of them got to Iraq so easily via Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran.

The 9/11 commission urged further investigation at the time, but neither the Bush Administration or the Obama Administration has seen fit to follow up.

Representing eight law firms from across the United States, the attorneys and their team of investigators have turned up some convincing evidence, including the testimony of two defectors from the Islamic regime's intelligence service as well as from members of the 9/11 commission and US intelligence agents and terrorism experts

The attorneys in the case claim to have taken sworn testimony former Iranian intelligence operatives describing the direct participation of top government officials of Iran in the planning of, and preparation for, the 9/11 attacks. These witnesses also describe the roles of top Iranian officials in assisting al Qaeda leadership and operatives to escape from Afghanistan after the U.S.-led invasion in the wake of 9/11.Iran then provided safe haven and support for these al Qaeda members inside Iran.

"There is an I-Spy aspect to all this," Dennis Pantazis, a partner at Wiggins Childs said. "But the information the defectors provided is direct and their documentation is direct."

"The big picture in a case like this is knowledge," he said. "We can't change history and we can't prosecute anyone, all we can do with a civil suit is reveal truth and knowledge."

According to the filing, Iran facilitated travel for the al-Qaeda members by directing border guards not to impede their ingress into Iran or to stamp their passports. If that's true ( and it likely is) Iran had foreknowledge of the attacks. And given that Iran has been in a state of war with America since 1979, it would hardly be out of character.

Another piece of the puzzle is our old friend, the late and unlamented Imad Mugniyeh.

Mugniyeh was one of the superstars of jihad. He was a Lebanese Shi'ite who started his career as a member of Yasser Arafat's Force 17 back when the PLO was trying to put together its own little reichlet there, and later became a founding member of Hezbollah.

He masterminded the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people and the truck-bomb attacks in Beirut that took the lives of 242 U.S. Marines and 58 French troops and personally tortured to death CIA agent William Buckley, recording the proceeds on video and sending it to the CIA HQ in Langley. He also made the FBI's most wanted list for ordering the murder of US Navy diver Robert Stethem during the June 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847.

Mugniyeh later joined al Qaeda as one of Osama bin-Laden's chiefs of operations while maintaining his connections with Hezbollah, the Palestinians and Iran, and was unique in that he was a trusted link between all the parties.

According to the lawsuit, Mugniyeh was the direct liaison between al-Qaeda and Iran,something that's entirely plausible given that he performed the same role in other operations like the Karina-A arms shipment the Israelis hijacked, which involved Iranian arms sent to Arafat via Hezbollah with a Palestinian crew.

There were already some tentative links to Mughniyeh by the 9/11 Commission, which cited evidence that "a senior Hezbollah operative visited Saudi Arabia to coordinate activities there" and that this senior Hezbollah operative and his associate were on the same flights as several of the future hijackers who were traveling to and from Iran between October 2000 and February 2001.

The lawsuit says it has what it describes as 'compelling evidence' in the testimony of the Iranian defectors that the senior Hezbollah operative described was Imad Mughniyeh.

Iran is not bothering to mount a defense and neither are the Iranian officials named in the suit. The plan will likely be to get a judgment and then pursue Iranian assets overseas in foreign courts that honor US judgments.

What other fall out happens from this will likely depend on how compelling a case the plaintiffs make. Establishing Iranian complicity in the 9/11 attacks will likely lead to a resurgence of the question some of us have been asking for a long time - exactly why did we go after Saddam Hussein and ignore the real threat in Iran?

As I told you a long time ago, it was about the Saudis.

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Al-Qaeda Embassy Bomber Acquitted Of All But One Charge In NY Civilian Court

The verdict is in for the trial of Ahmed Ghailani for his part in the 1998 bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. 224 people were murdered in those bombings. including 12 Americans.

The Ghailani case was something of a showpiece for the Obama Department of Justice, the first civilian trial of a Guantamano prisoner.

After 4 1/2 days of deliberation, the jury convicted him of conspiring to destroy US buildings and property, but acquitted Ghailani of more than 280 other counts, including the main charges of murder and murder conspiracy.

He'll likely end up with a 20-to-life sentence, with reductions for time served and good behavior.

"We respect the jury's verdict and are pleased that Ahmed Ghailani now faces a minimum of 20 years in prison and a potential life sentence," was the Justice Department's comment.

Rep. Pete King (R- NY) has been an outspoken opponent of civilian trials for Islamist terrorists and was not exactly pleased with the result. He called the mixed verdict "a disgraceful miscarriage of justice."

"It shows how totally wrong the Obama administration is to bring a case like this to civilian court," he said. "He was acquitted of 224 counts of murder."

"If this had been before a military tribunal, evidence that was blocked in this case would have been admissible," King said.

One instance of what Rep. King was talking about happened when Judge Lewis Kaplan barred a key witness from testifying because the man's name came up while Ghailani was held at a CIA camp where some suspects allegedly were 'tortured', although there was no allegation that Ghailiani was.

A military tribunal would have allowed that evidence.

Ghailani's lawyer Peter Quijano argued that Ghailani was a "dupe" who was kept in the dark about the embassy bombings. They didn't bother to call any witnesses to testify on his behalf in the month-long trial.

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American Traitor Lynne Stewart Resentenced To 10 Years In Prison

Sometimes you roll the dice and get more than you bargained for.

Lynne Stewart, described in the NY Post as a 'civil rights lawyer' was originally sentenced to two years, four months in jail back in 2006 for her activities as the attorney for Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, the so-called `blind Sheik'who was the mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing.

This 'civil rights lawyer' a member of the communist front National Lawyers Guild got her jail time for conspiring with two other defendents, Mohamed Yousry, an Arabic interpreter, and Ahmed Abdel Sattar, a U.S. postal worker to carry secret messages between the sheik and senior members of the fascist Muslim brotherhood and Rahman's al Qaeda-connected Islamic Group, in violation of the federal laws against providing material support to terrorists, rules of attorney client privilege and Federal rules she had agreed to designed to keep the blind cleric from inciting violence and plotting terrorist strategy with his followers as a prerequisite for representing Rahman.

Stewart used every legal trick she could to avoid being sent to jail, even to the extent of trying to have the court declare that Rahman's orders to his thugs were `protected speech'!

An appeals court finally ordered a new sentencing, saying the judge needed to consider whether she committed perjury. Federal Judge John Koeltl was happy to oblige..and since she did perjure herself, he's abided by the appellate court's order for new sentencing - 10 years in prison.

Once upon a time, we used to hang traitors.

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Judge Tosses Out Bulk of Evidence Against Gitmo Detainee In Civilian Court Trial

This is pretty much what we can expect from giving jihadis the same legal rights as American citizens and trying them in civilian court:

A federal judge has tossed out most of the government's evidence against a tarrorism detainee on grounds his confessions were coerced, allegedly by U.S. forces, before he became a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.

In a ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan also said the government failed to establish that 23 statements the detainee made to interrogators at Guantanamo Bay were untainted by the earlier coerced statements made while he was held under harsh conditions in Afghanistan.

However, the judge said statements he made during two military administrative hearings at the U.S. detention center in Cuba, where he was assisted by a personal representative, were reliable and sufficient to justify holding the detainee.

Musa'ab Omar Al Madhwani allegedly engaged in a 2 1/2-hour firefight with Pakistani authorities before his capture in a Karachi apartment in 2002.

The detainee says that after five days in a Pakistani prison, he was handed over to U.S. forces and flown to a pitch-black prison he believes was in Afghanistan. He says he was suspended in his cell by his left hand and that guards blasted his cell with music 24 hours a day.

He said that he confessed to whatever allegations his interrogators made and that harassment and threats continued after he was moved to a different prison in Afghanistan.

Al Madhwani said that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay on multiple occasions threatened him when he tried to retract what he now claims was a false confession.

The judge said he was particularly concerned that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay relied on or had access to the coerced confessions from Afghanistan made by Al Madhwani.

Needless to say, the allegations of abuse came after this particular jihadi got lawyered up for his civilian trial.

What's more, this judge was completely within his rights in this decision. Once the Obama Administration decided that Al Madhwani was to be Mirandized and sent through our court system to receive the same Constitutional protections due all criminal suspects who are US citizens, there's no way to put the toothpaste back in the tube without violating the Equal Protection provision of the Constitution.

That's exactly why the Bush Administration created military tribunals, to ensure basic fairness and rule of Law while still recognizing the difference between jihadis caught on the battlefield in Afghanistan and domestic criminals and resolving this quandary. Now that Obama has rejected the tribunals and insisted on getting civilian courts involved, he's going to be stuck with the results. Or rather, the rest of us without Secret Service protection will when some of these jihadis go free and return to their former pursuits.

Hoax n' change, suckahs!

Al Qaeda's Muliti-Million Dollar American Supporters

Want to know the identities of a group of American citizens who have contributed millions of dollars to al Qaeda and other Islamist radicals and terrorists?

Best selling author and national security expert Rowan Scarborough has the answer.

It's the lawyers:

Some of the nation's wealthiest and most powerful law firms have donated hundreds of millions of dollars in free legal services to terror suspects at the Guantanamo Bay prison.

Their work, bolstered by left-wing activists groups, has helped to free, or force the transfer, of hundreds of al Qaeda suspects to third countries. Some have gone back to terrorism and the job of trying to kill Americans. {...}

It was the constant pressure of activist defense lawyers, in the courts and in public debate, that helped persuade the Obama administration to bring KSM, as he is known, to Manhattan from his Guantanamo Bay prison cell for a civilian, rather than, a military trial.

Andrew McCarthy, a former U.S. attorney who led the prosecution of the Islamist who planned the first World Trade Center terror attack in 1993, told Human Events the American lawyers are not only helping individual detainees. They are helping radical Islam.

"They can't beat us on the battlefield so what they need to do strategically is move the battle to a place where they are more likely prevail," McCarthy said. "And it's a much more even playing field for them in the courts. By getting into the court, they've basically drained the resources and the public will necessary to wage the war effectively. It's been a propaganda coup for them to switch the debate from the atrocities that they have committed to the purported violations of law that have been committed by the United States."

A former U.S. government attorney told Human Events law firms have devoted "hundreds of millions of dollars" in pro bono, or free, legal services.

Said McCarthy, "I certainly think it's in the tens of millions. A lot, a lot of money."

Elsewhere in the article, Scarborough quotes Debra Burlingame, whose brother was the pilot of hijacked American flight 77, which al Qaeda crashed into the Pentagon:

"We're at war," she said. "We're a country at war. We have men and women that we've sent out into the world into some of the most dangerous places in the world. Iraq and Afghanistan. They are shedding blood. They are taking fire with the very people these law firms are defending. I find that an absolutely perversion. I can't think of a precedent in the history of our country in all the wars we fought where you would have civilian lawyers donating their time to help secure the freedom of our enemies so they can go back to the battlefield and kill more of our soldiers."

I would disagree with Ms. Burligame on one point - we're not at war. Only our enemies are. Which is why, eight years after 9/11, twice the time in which it took us to destroy a far more powerful Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire we are still no closer to victory.

Read the whole piece here

(hat tip and a commendation to Joshua's Army member Louie Louie for spotting this)

Multiculturism du jour - An interesting legal defense, to say the least!

Finsbury Park Jihad Imam Abu Hamza's new defense in his trial for hate speech and incitement is that he was merely praching his religion. Copies of the Qu'ran were handed to jurors in the trial yesterday as his defense argued that some of the cleric’s offensive statements were drawn directly from Islam’s holy book.
Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times - Times Online

Edward Fitzgerald, QC, for the defence, said that Abu Hamza’s interpretation of the Koran was that it imposed an obligation on Muslims to do jihad and fight in the defence of their religion.

He added: “It is said he was preaching murder, but he was actually preaching from the Koran itself.”

Not that there's anything wrong with that, right Mr. Fitzgerald?

I sincerely wonder where these people's common sense went to.

Multiculturism Uber Alles!