Auditing judges to expose their wrongdoing and advocate judicial reform as a reasonable alternative to flying outside the box of reality to talk about a suit at ICC, under RICO, in a class action, creating an organization, marching before a courthouse, or pursuing a personal local cases

By

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Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq.

Ph.D., University of Cambridge, England

M.B.A., University of Michigan Business School

D.E.A., La Sorbonne, Paris

Judicial Discipline Reform

New York City

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Dr.Richard.Cordero_Esq@verizon.net, RicCordero@verizon.net, CorderoRic@yahoo.com, Dr.Richard.Cordero.Esq@cantab.net, Dr.Richard.Cordero.Esq@outlook.com

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www.linkedin.com/pub/dr-richard-cordero-esq/4b/8ba/50/

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

1. ‘Outside the box of reality’: a suit in the International Criminal Court

 

1. The suggestion of a RICO suit against public officers comes from advocates with a box full of only good intentions

 

1. A well-meaning advocate lawyer made this statement:

 

2. A well-meaning layperson commented on it thus:

 

3. The need to think like a lawyer: attention to detail and stepping into the adversary’s head

 

1. Pragmatic considerations about a class action: very expensive and risky

 

1. Walking in front of a building will not chase away the wrongdoers inside

 

1. Advocates interested only in their personal local case cannot be expected to create an organization in the public interest

 

1. Thinking and proceeding strategically: auditing judges for patterns of wrongdoing and seizing the opportunity presented by presidential candidates desperate to stand out in an overcrowded field

 

1. 1. Victims of the same wrongdoing judge joining forces to audit him for patterns of wrongdoing

 

2. From auditing a wrongdoing judge common to the parties in a group to developing a civic movement for judicial accountability and reform

 

3. Taking advantage of presidential politics to turn presidential candidates into unwitting allies in exposing judges’ wrongdoing

 

1. It is time to take action: Plans of concrete, feasible, and realistic action proposed to victims and advocates

 

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1. ‘Outside the box of reality’: a suit in the International Criminal Court

 

1. Filing a suit in the International Criminal Court is not an ‘outside the box effort’. It is merely an effort outside reality:

 

2. The United States is not a signatory to the ICC. Therefore, a judgment of the ICC has no legal validity in a U.S. court. It is unenforceable. Consequently, the effort to seek such a judgment is an exercise in futility.

 

3. Moreover, the jurisdictional scope of the ICC is very limited. It only entertains suits concerning genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

 

4. Those are not crimes with which a reasonable, sober person would even consider charging the wrongdoers inside the courthouses and other federal buildings in front of which some advocates have proposed to walk with banners. By its own terms, the ICC was “established to help end impunity for the perpetrators of the most serious crimes of concern to the international community”; http://www.icc-cpi.int/en_menus/icc/about%20the%20court/Pages/about%20the%20court.aspx.

 

 

1. The suggestion of a RICO suit against public officers comes from advocates with a box full of only good intentions

 

5. It has been suggested that wrongdoing public officers, including judges, could be sued under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations provisions or RICO(jur:111fn249).

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NOTE: All (blue text references) herein are keyed to my study of the Federal Judiciary and its judges, the only national jurisdiction and the models for their state counterparts:

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Exposing Judges’ Unaccountability and Consequent Riskless Wrongdoing:

Pioneering the news and publishing field of judicial unaccountability reporting(jur:1)

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* http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf

or http://1drv.ms/1IkvhB8

or http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/jur/DrRCordero_jud_unaccountability_reporting.pdf

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If these links do not download the file in Internet Explorer, download either of the following browsers, install it, copy the first link above into the browser search box, and hit ‘Enter’. If the file, which has over 740 pages and is close to 50MB, does not download, try using the other links:

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Google Chrome:

https://www.google.com/chrome/

or

Mozilla-Firefox:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/firefox/download-and-install.

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1. A well-meaning advocate lawyer made this statement:

 

10. Thinking “outside the box” must not mean thinking outside the realm of reality. Nor can it involve a suit against public officers under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO), which is a highly technical law far beyond the scope of pro ses.

 

1. Do you have any idea of the elements of racketeering, not to mention racketeering enterprise, that must be proved to establish the charge? If you do not and your charge is found to be frivolous, the judge can impose sanctions (e.g. under FRCP Rule 11) and uphold the defendants’ request for reimbursement of attorney’s fees and even punitive damages. They can ruin you just to teach you a lesson. Think ahead at how things can go badly for you!

 

1. Do you have the money to search, find, and analyze the evidence, and argue it against the team of the best and the brightest lawyers to whom public officers have access?

 

1. Do you think that the judges who were recommended, endorsed, confirmed, given donations, appointed, and held unaccountable by politicians, who are the ones who can elevate them to a higher court, are going to allow a RICO suit against those politicians and their friends to stand?(ol:158)

 

2. A well-meaning layperson commented on it thus:

 

Would like to suggest that your comments about RICO are a bit off the mark.   While it is a complicated “civil procedure” [RICO is a criminal act, found in Title 18 of the U.S. Code, the title constituting the criminal code of the U.S.; its citation is 18 U.S.C. §1961 et seq.*; the fact that §1964(c) allows “any person” to sue for treble damages and attorney’s fees does not exempt that person from having to prove all the racketeering elements of the act and caselaw], the matter becomes a horse of a different color when defendants are “public servants” who have commandeered government office to commit crimes against citizens. When ‘government’ is the defendant, in my case, ‘state’ government defendants, there is a “contract” that comes into play — it is the “state constitution”. [The replier misses the point that RICO is a reference to the federal law, not to whatever may be its equivalent under state law.]

 

For example, the standard of pleading RICO, which is usually governed by Twombly and Iqbal, is replaced by state common law standards, as 28 USC 1652 requires. In our state, by the express language of our state’s Supreme Court, Twombly and Iqbal standards have been rejected. Furthermore, ‘federal rules of civil procedure – such as 12(b)(6)’ are NO LONGER operative as they are customarily applied. [This is statement is at odds with the very nature of federal law, which is national law that applies uniformly throughout the nation, lest ‘equal protection of the law’ be denied; that statement can only mislead other pro ses into disregarding the federal procedural rules.] Here again, state constitutions must be argued because this forms the “contract” between plaintiff and defendant. A court rule procedure “could” and in my case ‘would’ eviscerate a number of our state constitutional provision that specifically address “governments role with respect to the individual and the general government oversight of the people.” This prohibition in using ‘court rules to abridge, modify or to enlarge substantive rights’ is spelled out in 28 USC 2072(b).

 

These elements in the pleading of RICO when state officials are defendants, have not been fully addressed with respect to the state constitutional provisions and the Code’s noted above. [RICO is federal law; by definition it is not subject to the provisions of state constitutions. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the relation between federal and state law. In addition, the replier is failing to realize that he is unwittingly confirming the attorney’s point: RICO is too technical for pro ses to enforce; and those matter that “have not been fully addressed” only make it more difficult for pro ses to prosecute under it].

 

Sometimes lawyers are too handicapped by the indoctrination they receive from the very system that produces corrupt lawyers and judges. [A box empty of knowledge of the law always ‘unhandicaps’ pro ses, allowing them to become lighter and float into ‘fantastic’ statements of the law prompted by wishful thinking that only mislead other pro ses.]

 

3. The need to think like a lawyer: attention to detail and stepping into the adversary’s head

 

6. The lawyer above argued that non-lawyer pro ses do not have the necessary knowledge of the law to prosecute a RICO suit and illustrated his argument with three distinct points.

 

7. The layperson below responded with a general comment on how to sue public servants under some mismatch of federal and state law.

 

8. The layperson missed the point of the lawyer. This is a most frequent occurrence among well-intended pro ses who improvise themselves as lawyers:

 

1. They miss the points, or “elements of the cause of action”, that the law requires to be proved to make a case under the law in question.

 

1. They miss the fact that in addition to the code of civil or criminal procedure, there are also the rules of each particular court, which can add requirements and can differ from those general rules in reliance on a code rule authorizing variance by courts and even by “the judge in his discretion”.

 

1. They miss the implications of their own points, thus arguing inconsistently:

 

1. i) Pro ses accuse judges of being wrongdoers because they abuse their power to disregard the facts and the law of cases before them.

 

1. ii) Yet, in self-contradictory fashion, they expect those same judges to be fair and impartial in a suit where the defendants are precisely those public officers who sit in the legislature or in the executive branch and who are the very ones who recommended, endorsed, nominated, confirmed, appointed, campaigned for, donated to, the judicial candidates who are now the judges, whose turn it is to protect the defendant officers.

 

9. Being a victim of a wrongdoing judge is not a qualification for realistically challenging in court judges and the public officers with whom they connive.

 

10. A pro se’s wishful thinking about himself and the law, untrained legal research, and pinpointed legal knowledge riddled by logical gaps provide an inadequate basis for action in court.

 

11. Thinking like a lawyer begins with three years of training in law school after four years in college:

 

1. That training is necessary to force oneself to pay attention to the numberless, fastidious, and confusing details of the law and its procedural rules.

 

1. It also develops the indispensable habit of thinking as the opposing counsel to anticipate her arguments and maneuvers. Lawyering occurs in an adversarial context so that “A good lawyer carries his adversary on her left shoulder…when the lawyer is alone ‘on the right’, she talks crazy” Dealing with that adversary requires strategic thinking. That is shown in the two articles below.

 

 

1. Pragmatic considerations about a class action: very expensive and risky

 

12. A class action under Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure is not only highly technical –read the official comments on it(jur:47§79)– but also extremely expensive and fraught with risk.

 

13. A class action is prosecuted on a contingency basis, that is, the lawyers earn money only if they win and the sum that they may win is never certain, much less the sum that the judge may allow them to earn…after covering considerable out-of-pocket costs.

 

14. To begin with, class action lawyers have to define the common legal and factual characteristics of the members of the class. Then they must search for all potential members and compose, print and mail a statement to notify them of the purpose of the action; and give them the opportunity and means to opt in or out of the class. All that work can cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, depending on the size of the class.

 

15. Additionally, the members must be registered, whether they opt in or out; the in-members may have to be mailed several notifications during the course of the action; given access to pleadings and other relevant materials; afforded the opportunity to submit comments, objections, and other papers to determine their eligibility for any recovery and the amount thereof, if any; etc. Consequently, the costs of prosecuting the action add up very quickly for the lawyers.

 

16. Moreover, the lawyers must also convince the judge that they are capable of representing the legal interests of the class competently: They have to be certified as the lawyers for the class. If the judge does not certify them as such, whether based on fair or biased considerations, the lawyers are out of the action and out of the money that they have invested up to then.

 

17. Only people who indulge in wishful thinking can imagine a judge certifying pro ses as class action lawyers to represent the legal interests of all the members of the class even though pro ses cannot competently represent their own interests.

 

18. If you can provide at least $1 million as seed money and find lawyers willing to risk their time, effort, and livelihood suing wrongdoing judges and other public officers in a class action, you can sponsor the filing of such action.

 

19. To remain tethered to the ground, keep in mind the lawyers who took their 2,000,000 Walmart employee class action all the way to the Supreme Court only to be told by the justices that the class was improperly constituted by members with too divergent characteristics. The action was dismissed and they had to bear the loss.

 

 

1. Walking in front of a courthouse will not chase away the wrongdoers inside

 

20. Neither a few nor many people holding banners, chanting, and walking in circles in front of a courthouse or other federal building are going to achieve anything, for there will always be another group that will also walk for the opposite proposition. Indisputably, there will always be people in favor of, and against, Obamacare, gay marriage, elective abortion, bearing arms, police accountability, appointed guardians, NSA blanket collection of communication metadata, etc.

 

21. The public officers who abusively benefit from the system as it stands now are not going to give up those benefits simply because a group of their victims spend a couple of hours walking in front of a building with logos against them and thereafter go home to rest in their couch as they eat another bag of potatoes…and that’s it.

 

 

1. Advocates interested only in their personal local case cannot be expected to create an organization in the public interest

 

22. Only a sincere desire for honest judiciaries is not an adequate means to take on judges and their supporting public officers in the legislative and executive branches.

 

23. Mr. Andrew Kreig wrote insightfully:

 

Creating a brand new civic organization can be, as envisioned by the email I received, a very worthy effort. But a great deal of effort (as I’ve seen from leadership or membership in many groups) goes into the bureaucratic tasks of organizing, messaging, fund-raising, etc., with relatively little time and resources actually available to get the message out in effective ways.

 

24. There are more problems than just administrative and logistical ones. An organization cannot be set up and expected to function, never mind be effective, with advocates of honest judiciaries who only want to chat or debate ‘fantastic’ points of law against their background of sparse legal knowledge.

 

25. Nor can an organization be created by advocates who despite being 100% sincere only want to continue pursuing by rote in court their own personal, local case through the same failed method of suing judges(* >ol:158) and their conniving public officers.

 

26. The courts are the turf of judges, who there make rules as they go and disregard those in the books at will without fearing any adverse consequences. It is hardly the place where pro ses can force judges to hold other judges accountable.

 

27. What would be the winning record and survivability chances of an organization created to sponsor such suits? Moreover, no organization is needed, as shown in the Two-pronged Approach article(* >ol:248), to prosecute before the highest court of a state a test case requesting on grounds of due process and equal protection of the law that judges be officially and publicly supervised and held accountable and liable to compensate their victims. In the same vein, examine the template for properly arguing before an intermediate appellate court and, if need be, preserve the necessary issues to obtain leave to appeal to the highest state court(ol:244).

 

28. By the same token, it is wishful thinking for an individual victim or advocate to expect a lawyer to drop whatever he is doing to help her against the wrongdoing judge in her personal, local case and do so in another state and pro bono. That is outside the box of reason and reality.

 

29. Creating an organization in the public interest of exposing wrongdoing judges and advocating judicial reform can only be realistically envisaged after a group of victims and advocates have demonstrated by their sustained action that they are willing to contribute effort, time, and money to advancing the public interest rather than just their personal, local case.

 

30. By contrast, with people committed to advancing that public interest and who are able to think and proceed strategically(infra §F), even the termination of millennial impossibles(jur:xlv§§G,H) can be achieved.

 

31. With such people, I have proposed creating an organization: an institute of judicial unaccountability reporting and reform advocacy(jur:130§5). It is part of my study of the Federal Judiciary and its judges(supra ¶5 NOTE).

 

 

1. Thinking and proceeding strategically: auditing judges for patterns of wrongdoing and seizing the opportunity presented by presidential candidates desperate to stand out in an overcrowded field

 

1. Victims of the same wrongdoing judge joining forces to audit him for patterns of wrongdoing

 

32. A sincere advocate of honest judiciaries can advance her own interest in her personal local case by thinking and proceeding strategically(* >Lsch:14§3; ol:52§C; ol:8§E; jur:xliv¶C): She can identify other parties that have appeared or are appearing before the same wrongdoing judge as in her case so that together they can audit his decisions in search of patterns of wrongdoing running through their cases.

 

33. Such patterns can provide a group of similarly situated parties verifiable, solid evidence that can replace each individual party’s mere allegations of wrongdoing by the judge in his or her personal case. The audit of their common judge can show that his wrongdoing is widespread, routine, and coordinated. That can provide persuasive evidence for the disqualification of that judge or the vacancy of his orders and decisions and the remand of their cases to other judges or the reopening of their cases.

 

34. The method for identifying such other parties and detecting the judge’s pattern of wrongdoing is described in the Auditing Judges article below(also at * >ol:274).

 

2. From auditing a wrongdoing judge common to a group of parties to developing a civic movement for judicial accountability and reform

 

35. To audit their respective wrongdoing judge, their victims need not create an organization. They only need to join forces in a group to detect and expose their common judge’s patterns of wrongdoing.

 

36. Nevertheless, the victims’ successful effort to audit that judge can motivate them to broaden the scope of their initial interest from only prosecuting their personal local case to sharing their experience with other victims to help them audit their respective common judge in the same court. Progressively, they may join forces to help others in other courts in the same city audit their respective judge; and later on reach out to victims in the courts of other cities, and subsequently in other states.

 

37. That is how a civic movement for exposing wrongdoing judges and advocating judicial reform that holds them accountable and even liable to compensate their victims(* >jur:158§§6-8) can develop. The precedent for such unimaginable, unintended, and eventually unstoppable development is found in the people who had had enough of being taxed and little by little formed the single-issue, now national, and politically unavoidable Tea Party.

 

38. Thinking and proceeding ‘outside the box’ need not be done in a world of fantasy. It can be done strategically on the firm ground of precedent and sound reasoning.

 

3. Taking advantage of presidential politics to turn presidential candidates into unwitting allies in exposing judges’ wrongdoing

 

39. The judge-auditing groups can bring to light verifiable evidence of patterns of judges’ wrongdoing that can outrage the public. Only an outraged national(* >ol:191§§A,B) public can generate the political pressure necessary to force politicians to take a supportive stand, albeit opportunistic, on the issue and even call for official investigations of judicial wrongdoing by Congress, DoJ-FBI, and their state counterparts.

 

40. Indeed, this is the most propitious juncture to join forces to audit judges as proposed: There is a presidential election campaign underway and it has an overcrowded pack of candidates: 21 and counting! We can take advantage of each candidate’s need to stand out of the pack.

 

41. The candidates can realize from the depth and breadth of the public outrage at judges’ wrongdoing that those dissatisfied with the legal system, particularly the victims of wrongdoing judges, constitute a huge (see the Business Proposal below; also at * >ol:273¶4) untapped voting bloc in search of a political leader. That bloc grew larger after the Supreme Court’s decisions on Obamacare and gay marriage.

 

42. This justifies the application of two principles of strategic thinking and proceeding: ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’, applied by victims and advocates; and ‘He who needs my help is my friend’, applied by candidates.

 

43. Candidates who voice that bloc’s complaints and call for the investigation of judicial wrongdoing can become its leader. Thereby they can earn free publicity from the media covering Election 2016, mount in the polls, and attract donations, volunteers to their campaigns, and invaluable word of mouth support. They can become the unwitting allies of the victims of wrongdoing judges and of all other advocates of honest judiciaries.

 

44. That can generate a business opportunity(Business Proposal; ol:271) and lead to a multidisciplinary business and academic venture(jur:97§1), which can be the precursor to the creation of the proposed for-profit institute of judicial unaccountability reporting and reform advocacy(¶31).

 

 

1. It is time to take action: Plans of concrete, feasible, and realistic action proposed to victims and advocates

 

45. Therefore, to victims of wrongdoing judges and advocates of honest judiciaries who actually want to undertake an ‘outside the box effort’, I respectfully propose novel plans of action in the following two articles.

 

46. The action is concrete, feasible, and realistic. The plans are based on a strategy reasonably calculated to move forward our common cause of holding judges and conniving public officers accountable for their wrongdoing and even liable to compensate those whom they have wronged:

 

47. Recognizing the futility of suing judges in court, where judges will hold their defendant colleagues, peers, and friends harmless, an out-of-court strategy aims to inform the public about judges’ patterns of widespread, routine, and coordinated wrongdoing and to so outrage the public as to stir it up to force politicians when they are most vulnerable, while they are campaigning and desperately trying to survive politically, to investigate judges officially and hold them accountable and liable to their victims.

 

48. Hence, if you realize the importance of informing the public about, and outraging it at, judges’ wrongdoing, you can:

 

1. follow the steps in the Auditing Judges article below to identify other parties before the same wrongdoing judge that has victimized you; and join forces with them to detect instances of wrongdoing in your cases that form patterns of wrongdoing;

 

1. use the resulting verifiable pattern evidence and/or the evidence of judges’ wrongdoing contained in my study(* >jur:21§§A-B) to interest journalists and campaigning politicians in further investigating and exposing judges’ wrongdoing; meantime, share and post the article as widely as possible to induce many other victims and advocates to do likewise; and

 

1. network your way together with the other parties and through your and their colleagues and friends who have acquaintances who know people in any of the presidential campaigns, to put me in touch with their chiefs of staff so that I may offer to make a presentation, either at a video conference or in person, on how it is in the interest of their respective presidential candidate to stand out of the pack by voicing the complaints and thus becoming the leader of the huge untapped voting bloc (see the Business Proposal below) of dissatisfied users of the legal system, particularly the victims of wrongdoing judges.

 

49. The implementation of those plans calls for victims and advocates who are willing to pursue their cases reasonably and contribute their realistically assessed experience, skills, and knowledge to advancing the public interest; competent lawyers; and other professionals as well as students, especially those in law, journalism, business, and Information Technology(jur:128§4).

 

50. If we manage to join forces and think and proceed strategically, we can become nationally recognized by a grateful nation as We the People’s Champions of Justice.

So I look forward to hearing from you.

Dare trigger history(* >jur:7§5)…and you may enter it.

* http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf

Sincerely,

Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq.

Judicial Discipline Reform

New York City

Dr.Richard.Cordero_Esq@verizon.net, CorderoRic@yahoo.com, Dr.Richard.Cordero.Esq@cantab.net, Dr.Richard.Cordero.Esq@outlook.com

www.linkedin.com/pub/dr-richard-cordero-esq/4b/8ba/50/

NOTE 1: Given the interference with Dr. Cordero’s email and e-cloud storage accounts described at * >ggl:1 et seq., when emailing him, copy the above bloc of his email accounts and paste it in the To: line of your email so as to enhance the chances of your email reaching him at least at one of those addresses.

* http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf

NOTE 2: Watch the interview with Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq., by Alfred Lambremont Webre, JD, MEd, on the issue of exposing judges’ wrongdoing and bringing about judicial reform, at:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2362oh_dr-cordero-u-s-judiciary-goes-rogue-99-82-complaints-vs-judges-are-dismissed-u-s-justice-sonia-sotom_news

or

Dr. Cordero: U.S. Judiciary goes Rogue – 99.82% complaints vs. Judges are dismissed; U.S. Justice Sonia Sotomayor hides assets with impunity.

NOTE 3: All my replies are shared with the group that I am trying to form to expose wrongdoing judges and advocate judicial reform, and the national public that I am trying to inform thereof.

If you wish to engage in private communications with me, you must first retain my consulting services; otherwise, your communications are part of your contribution to advancing our common cause of judicial wrongdoing exposure and reform.

NOTE 4: For consulting services, I charge $350 per hour plus expenses and incidentals to be deducted from a retainer of $7,500-$10,000 paid in advance.

The fee for an appearance as an expert witness in a court in New York City is $1,500 per half a day in addition to preparation and any written statement for it, transportation, and any other expenses and incidentals. The fee for appearing in a court outside New York City is determined by the amount of time that it will require plus transportation, hotel, meals, and communication expenses and incidentals.

You can determine the quality of my legal research and writing by examining the articles that I post and my study of the Federal Judiciary and its judges, the models for their state counterparts(* >jur:1):

To evaluate my oral advocacy skills, please watch the interview referred to in NOTE 2 above.

* http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf

If you are seeking pro bono legal assistance, kindly see my suggestions for finding it(* >ol:131). I cannot afford to work for free for all the people across the U.S. who request my assistance.

I trust that I am helping all victims of wrongdoing judges and advocates of honest judiciaries with my analysis, strategy, and proposals for action in my articles. But attaining our objectives requires that we all join forces to implement those proposals. Will you join in your own as well as the national public interest? If so, please let me know.

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