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CALIFORNIA'S CROOKED CORRUPT COURTS |
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Written by Alex Alexiev
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Friday, 30 April 2010 |
Last Friday, April 23, the
Supreme Court of the United States denied the petition for "stay of execution"
(of coercive confinement for civil contempt of court) by attorney Richard I.
Fine in the case of Richard Fine v. Leroy Baca, Sheriff of Los
Angeles County
(09-1250).
In doing so, the highest court
of the land has refused to rectify a clear-cut case of judicial corruption in
the state of California.
So who's Richard Fine and how did he run afoul of the law? A distinguished
attorney with a doctor of law degree from the University of Chicago Law School
and a Ph.D. in international law from the London School of Economics, Mr. Fine
has practiced law in government service and private practice for 42 years and
achieved considerable distinction in both.
He has served in the antitrust
division of the Justice Department, founded the Anti-Trust Division in the Los
Angeles City Attorney's Office and was awarded the prestigious "Lawyer of the
Decades" award in 2006. He has also won numerous cases on behalf of California
taxpayers in state courts, including a 2003 California Supreme Court lawsuit
that stopped salary payments to the governor and the legislators if they were
unable to pass the budget.
Yet this distinguished 70-year-old
attorney in poor health has been sitting in solitary confinement in "coercive
incarceration" in the notorious Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail without
being charged, tried, or convicted of anything since March 4, 2009.
In effect, he was thrown in
jail for an indefinite period with no bail or hearing set for blowing the
whistle on judicial corruption in California.
The chain of events that led to his incarceration was set in motion in 2000,
when Richard Fine became aware that L.A.
superior court judges were receiving illegal "judicial benefits" payments from Los
Angeles County,
despite the fact that lawsuits against that county were often adjudicated by
these same judges, thus creating clear conflict of interest problems.
In other words, the Los Angeles
County Board of Supervisors, with taxpayer funds, was bribing superior court
judges to decide cases in favor of the county.
Between 2005-2009, for example, only three cases were ruled in favor of
plaintiffs against the County of Los
Angeles.
By 2007, these bribes amounted
to $46,436 per year on top of their state salary of $172,000, making L.A.
superior court judges among the highest paid in the country. Not only was this
a blatant conflict of interest but also unconstitutional, insofar as the California
constitution states clearly (in Article VI, Section 19) that "the legislature
shall prescribe compensation for judges of courts of record."
In Richard Fine's opinion, these payments were illegal if not criminal, and in
2000 he began challenging them in various appellate briefs and lawsuits against
several judges, thus making himself extremely unpopular with the superior court
bench and also with the county supervisors who had authorized the payments.
The usual justification the
supervisors give for extending these payments to the judges is the ostensible
need to attract qualified jurists in a high-cost-of-living area like Los
Angeles. Less well publicized is the possibility that
by granting the judges such payments, the supervisors may be voting themselves
a pay increase as well. Article II, Section 4 of the Los Angeles County Charter
states that the supervisors' compensation "shall be the same as that now or
hereafter prescribed by law for a judge of the Superior Court in and for the County
of Los Angeles."
Since the initiation of these "judicial benefits" in 1988, the cost to L.A.
taxpayers has been some $300 million to date. And now it appears that Los
Angeles County is
not the only California county
which provides such payments. According
to one estimate, 1,500 out of a total of 2,000 superior court judges in the
state are allegedly implicated in receiving the illegal payments, as are five
of the state's Supreme Court justices.
Mr. Fine's current misfortunes stem from his demand at a contempt hearing on March 4, 2009, that Judge David P.
Yaffe of the Los Angeles Superior Court, a recipient of such illegal payments,
recuse himself from the case in front of him, in which L.A.
County was a party.
Judge Yaffe had Mr. Fine
handcuffed and thrown in jail for civil contempt of court for an indefinite
period. Judge Yaffe was later to explain that "the intent of the (non-criminal)
solitary confinement was to coerce Richard Fine into submission."
Yaffe's unusually confrontational behavior was preceded by events that must
have given him and his colleagues assurance that they had nothing to fear on
account of these illegal payments.
The first such event,
paradoxically, was a decision by the California Court of Appeals for the Fourth
Appellate District in Sturgeon v. County of Los Angeles (BC351286,
filed 10/10/2008) that
payments to the judges were not permissible and that the legislation's
responsibility to prescribe compensation "is not delegable."
Alarmed by this decision's
implication of potential criminal liability for judges and politicians alike, California's
political and judicial powers moved quickly and quietly to rectify the
situation legislatively.
As California grappled with the
huge budget-deficit crisis afflicting the state in early 2009, the Judicial
Council of California, chaired by the Chief Justice of the California Supreme
Court, quietly drafted, the legislature approved, and Governor Schwarzenegger
signed a senate bill (SBX2-11, enacted February 20, 2009) giving retroactive immunity from criminal
prosecution, civil liability, and disciplinary action to "judges that had
received payments from a governmental entity prior to the bill's effective
date."
In doing so, the legislature
and the governor essentially admitted that the payments had indeed been illegal
and very likely criminal.
Emboldened by the granted immunity, the judicial machine moved to get rid of
Fine once and for all by having the California State Bar disbar him for "moral
turpitude," a course of action reminiscent of the Soviet Communist regime's
practice of declaring political dissidents criminally insane and locking them
up in psychiatric wards.
In the meantime, Mr. Fine's jailer, L.A.
county sheriff Lee Baca, has started releasing hundreds of convicted criminals
from Men's Central Jail because of overcrowding. Overcrowding is evidently not
an issue for Richard I. Fine, now serving his second year of an indefinite
solitary confinement term as an American political prisoner of conscience.
Note: There is a fascinating
in-jail video
interview with Richard Fine on the Full Disclosure Network I would
encourage you to see. He describes the
bribery of California judges as
"the greatest judicial scandal in American history." There is more information on the FreeRichardFine
website.
Alex Alexiev is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington,
D.C.
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