By
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
Dr.Richard.Cordero_Esq@verizon.net, RicCordero@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/
This open letter may be republished and redistributed, provided it is
in its entirety and without any addition, deletion, or modification,
and credit is given to its author, Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq.
[To each of the presidential candidates]
Dear Presidential Candidate,
This is a proposal for you to emerge as the leader who enlightens and reassures the national public when as a result of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino some presidential candidates have misled the public into thinking that terrorism is the main death risk that it runs. You can put terrorism in perspective by comparing it with other leading causes of death that have mortality rates indisputably and even surprisingly higher, e.g., hospital infections and lightning.
By thinking strategically, you can responsibly use the accompanying comparative statistics table in a novel way: to reassure and attract the public to your website through crowd fact-checking and posting.
To that end, you can reassuringly comment at rallies, debates, and interviews on the need to confront terrorism with a sense of proportion so as not to be unduly impressed by the day to day events or even exploited by demagoguery for political gain at the expense to the public peace of mind. Then you can unfold a paper and read its title aloud: Facts against Fear: a table comparing terrorism with other causes of death in America.
That table will be only the first of many on a wide spectrum of subjects and serves as a template for the presentation of verifiable data.
So you can invite the public to contribute to researching the incomplete entries of the table and submit their findings to your website for verification.
You can announce that the most prolific submitters of verifiable and enlightening statistics and analysis[1]* will be publicly recognized and invited to become members of the campaign’s virtual teams of enlighters. Their task will be to turn your website into the most trusted and visited source of presidential election information and the most reliable fact-checking entity. Their mission will be to provide the truth-in-fact foundation for your motto: An enlightening leader leads an enlightened people[2].
* All the square bracketed numbers are references to the endnotes below. They and the parenthetical references are keyed to my study of judges and their judiciary titled and downloadable as follows:
Exposing Judges’ Unaccountability and
Consequent Riskless Wrongdoing:
Pioneering the news and publishing field of
judicial unaccountability reporting*.
* http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf
or http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/jur/DrRCordero_jud_unaccountability_reporting.pdf
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’s search box, and press ‘Enter’. If the file, which has over 830 pages and is more than 57 MB in size, does not download, try using the other links and then the other browser:
Google Chrome: https://www.google.com/chrome/
or Mozilla-Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/firefox/download-and-install
You can portray the table(s) as your means of running a campaign based on facts, as opposed to fearmongering, that illustrates how you as president would run a transparent, honest administration based on facts verifiable by, and known to, We the People.
Naturally, the public that is attracted to your website to post and check facts will also find there information about your platform and upcoming rallies, and have the opportunity to donate to your campaign.
The above proposal further illustrates the potential of strategic thinking. Indeed, the latter has given rise to another proposal(ol:311):
You can draw electoral support from the huge[3] untapped voting bloc of people dissatisfied with the judicial and legal systems. Their dissatisfaction derives from judges’ self-disciplining authority, their abuse of it by systematically dismissing complaints against them[4], and secretive functioning[5], enabling their disregarding of the facts and the law applicable to cases to gain benefits risklessly.
You can tap the bloc’s support[6] by presenting at a press conference and rallies the evidence[7] thereof contained in my study Exposing Judges’ Unaccountability and Consequent Riskless Wrongdoing (see above).
You can invite the public to post on your website its judicial complaints so that it can analyze them for coordinated wrongdoing patterns[8], thus attracting Republicans and Democrats alike; and to join you in calling for nationally televised hearings (to be known as your hearings) on judges’ wrongdoing and journalistic and official investigations even as your teams of enlighters conduct their own(ol:194§E).
Judges who give “even the appearance of impropriety”[9] can be led to resign[10]. As president, you can fill their vacancies to secure your legislative agenda’s constitutionality[11].
By leading We the People’s “petition for a redress of grievances”[12], you can emerge as their Champion of Justice[13].
I offer to make a presentation[14] to you and your officers at a video conference or in person.
Dare trigger history!(jur:7§5)…and you may enter it.
Sincerely,
s/Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq.
Endnotes
[1]. You can post the accompanying table(ol:365) and ask people to use it as a template when submitting their research findings. The latter will be subject to an initial phase of vetting by the public. Findings that surmount such vetting will be posted as your campaign’s official facts.
[2]. After presenting to your audience the Facts Against Fear table, you can ask it and the rest of the American public poignant rhetorical questions to cause them to perform a balancing test:
a. Given the comparative statistics already presented, would you prefer to take your chances with falling victim to terrorism or becoming a victim of any of the other causes of death in America whose chance of occurrence is 10s, 100s, or 1,000s of time higher?
b. When a member of your family, a relative, a friend, a neighbor, a workmate or fellow American dies in a car accident, a house fire, a drive-by shooting, or by food poisoning, do you say that their deaths do not count because they did not die a victim of terrorism?
c. The federal government spends more than it collects in taxes, which explains why its borrowing limit has to be raised so often; otherwise, it would run out of funds and have to close down. Imagine that the government manages to gather $5 billion to reduce the mortality of one of the causes of death in America. If you could vote on how to allocate that money, would you vote to allocate it to fight terrorism or to combat any of the other causes of death with significantly higher mortality rates, such as cancer or car crashes?
[3]. In the federal and state courts, there are filed 50 million new cases(jur:8fn4, 5) annually. They involve at least 100 million parties, each of which may be constituted of two, ten, a hundred persons or the thousands of members of a class. In addition, every case affects the parties’ relatives, employees, clients, shareholders, similarly situated people, etc. To those cases must be added the scores of millions pending and those deemed by parties to have been wrongfully decided to take their property, liberty, and the rights and duties that determine their lives.
[4]. Official statistics cited in my study(jur:21§1) show that:
a. Federal judges dismiss 99.82% of complaints against their peers and deny up to 100% of petitions to review dismissals(jur:10-14). They cover for each other due to the principle of mutually dependent survival(Lsch:16§1).
b. In the last 227 years since the creation of the Federal Judiciary in 1789, the number of its judges –2,217 were in office on 30sep13(jur:22fn13)– impeached and removed is 8! So they not only are appointed for life “during good Behaviour”, but also know based on that historical record that they are in effect irremovable. Impeachment is a useless mechanism for judicial integrity.
c. They rely on the constitutional provision that prohibits diminishing their salary(jur:22fn12).
d. They dispose of around 75% of appeals to the circuit courts with reasonless summary orders, and of up to an additional 15% with decisions so “perfunctory” that they mark them “not for publication” and “not precedential”, turning them into arbitrary, ad hoc fiats of raw unaccountable power. They are in practice secret because hardly findable, but if found, they are useless since they do not establish a precedent; hence not worth looking for. They are anathema to a legal system based on precedent as a means of keeping judicial power in check and predictable.
If you were in their position, would you be irresistibly tempted to abuse your power for your benefit and that of your peers, other insiders, and your protectors since to do so was riskless?
[5]. The Federal Judiciary and its judges are the most secretive(jur:27§e) branch and public officers, holding all their policy-making, administrative, adjudicative, and disciplinary meetings behind closed doors. Wrongdoing festers in secrecy, which makes it infectious. This calls for ‘the best disinfectant, sunlight’, as Justice Brandeis put it(jur:158¶350b).
Today, the sun of information and knowledge shines through the Internet. A presidential candidate can out of principle or opportunism use his or her website, in addition to stump speeches and access to journalists, to shine light on judicial wrongdoing and cause an outraged national public to follow his or her bright lead.
[6] People feel offended by judges who took advantage of their ignorance of the law, inability to afford lawyers, lack of access to the media, and impotence before judges who abused them because they could get away with it. For them, vindicating their position is a driving personal matter. They make for passionate supporters of one who can help them in their quest for justice.
[7] Official statistics from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts and official reports, and statements from justices and judges are presented and their implication analyzed at jur:21§§1-3. Those sections contain the most compelling general evidence of judges’ wrongdoing. For evidence concerning specific justices, see jur:65§§1-4. For the enabling circumstances of wrongdoing, i.e., unaccountability, secrecy, coordination, and risklessness, see ol:191¶6.
[8] Judges can be unfair, partial, and dismissive of the rule of law because doing so does not constitute in practice a breach of their oath of office and dereliction of duty that carry adverse consequences; rather, it is merely an option.
Hence, they do wrong individually, and worse yet, engage in wrongdoing coordinated among themselves(jur:86§§4-c) and with other insiders of the judiciary and legal systems. Among the latter are the politicians who recommended, endorsed, nominated, confirmed, appointed, and co-opted them into their party list, and who protect them as ‘their men and women on the bench’.
Coordination renders their wrongdoing more secure, routine, capable of extension into more areas, able to develop the complexity of schemes, e.g., a bankruptcy fraud scheme and concealment of assets(jur:65§§1-3), and thus more profitable.
[9] Their Code of Conduct enjoins them to “avoid even the appearance of impropriety”(jur:68fn123).
[10] Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas failed to meet this standard and was led to resign on May 14, 1969, even though he had been nominated to the chief justiceship by Pres. Johnson(jur:92§d).
[11] Packing the courts due to vacancies is different from what P. Roosevelt tried to do(jur:23fn17a).
[12] Only a national figure with ample access to journalists can lead an enlightened and outraged(ol: 333§G) national public in successfully exercising its 1st Amendment right to “assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”(jur:130¶b) against judges who self-exempt from any responsibility, e.g., by invoking their unconstitutional doctrine of judicial immunity.
[13] This requires strategic thinking: being perceptive, nimble, and astute to quickly detect even slight developments, such as the above proposals, and react promptly to change one’s plan of action as required to turn those developments into opportunities to advance one’s interests.
[14] I offer to present also to groups interested in a multidisciplinary academic(jur:128§4) and business(jur:119§1) venture to research the nature, extent, and gravity of judges’ wrongdoing and expose it to outrage the national public and cause it to assert its status as We the People, the masters of ‘government, not of men and women, but by the rule of law’, where none of their public servants, such as judges, is above the law, so that all are accountable to the People and liable to compensate the victims of their wrongdoing. This calls for judicial reform(jur:158§§6-8).
