No Science to Support Mandatory Face Masks! What does it take to make the sheeple mad enough to wake up?

There Is No Science to Support Mandatory Face Masks. A Symbol of Social Submission?

As the distraction of BLM/Antifa riots and the coronavirus have consumed much attention and energy, the social engineering agenda of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset has taken a giant step forward in establishing the mandatory face mask as a symbol of submission to their dehumanizing agenda.  Beyond Orwellian, the face mask is being used as a guise to re shape our perception of reality in acceptance of a scientific dictatorship as an integral part of a looming totalitarian globalist agenda.

As Democratic Governors have played a leading role in advancing the myth that face masks will save lives, Colorado Gov Jared Polis announced his decision on July 16th to mandate face masks to be worn in all public places in Colorado; thus codifying a medical tyranny world view.

In a July 12th Facebook page, Polis stated that “The emerging scientific data is clear” that wearing a mask protects others and reduces the risk of contracting Coronavirus.  Polis then referred to those resistant to a face mask as a “selfish bastard.”

During Polis’s four page Executive Order issued on July 19th, there is not one mention of the ‘emerging science’ as support for his decision to mandate face masks; nor does Polis discuss how health effects will improve with masking except as “mitigating effects of the pandemic.” In announcing the mandate, Polis declared that “Wearing a mask is not a political statement. I don’t know how, in anybody’s mind, this became a game of political football.”

If the Governor is truly at a loss as to how masking or other lockdown requirements became a political football, he has not been paying attention.  Consider the following: on March 20th, California became the first state in the country to order a Lockdown which was quickly followed by other States with Democratic Governors. To date, a majority of those Governors (21 out of 24) have all approved the mandatory wearing of face masks, albeit without applying any science.  It is the arbitrary ‘shutdown’ of business as well as onerous personal requirements (such as social distancing) with a State adopting  oppressive dictatorial behavior as if they have the right to make personal decisions about any one life.

Only four states with Republican Governors, some of which may be considered RINOs, have also adopted similar Executive Orders (Alabama, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Maryland).

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If CV is merely a variation of an infectious virus, sunshine and warm weather should have already limited its impact; reducing its spread and exposure.  Instead, as Red States attempt to re open  (ie Texas and Florida), sudden intense  CV ‘hot spots’ flare which forces the State to delay and increase its shut down requirements.  Given an advanced radio frequency weapon ability, those ‘hot spots’ may have been generated by 5G at the millimeter level on the electro magnetic Spectrum.

If, in fact, science is not the prime reason for mandatory face masks; that is, if face masks do not provide safety from contagion, then why mandate face masks at all?  What other purpose does a face mask have but to protect the wearer or to inhibit spreading  the virus?  Without evidence that masks have positively reduced exposures and thereby fatalities, then the true purpose of the mandate becomes a more nefarious political and partisan gesture of psychological manipulation and control.

New England Journal of Medicine

On April 1st the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published its Universal Masking Report including the following highlights:

  • We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection.
  • The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal.
  • In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.
  • The extent of marginal benefit of universal masking over and above these foundational measures is debatable.“
  • “What is clear, however, is that universal masking alone is not a panacea.
  • It is also clear that masks serve symbolic roles. Masks are not only tools, they are also talismans that may help increase health care workers’ perceived sense of safety, well-being, and trust in their hospitals. Although such reactions may not be strictly logical, we are all subject to fear and anxiety, especially during times of crisis. One might argue that fear and anxiety are better countered with data and education than with a marginally beneficial mask

No Scientific Support for Mask Wearing

Renowned nutritionist Dr. Joseph Mercola has recently reversed his earlier support of face masks and interviewed Dr. Denis Rancourt, PhD who examined the issue on behalf of the Ontario Civil Liberties Association.  Rancourt conducted extensive research with an emphasis on masks and did a thorough review of science literature concentrating on whether any evidence exists that masks can reduce infection risk of viral respiratory disease.  As a result of examining many controlled trials with verified outcomes,  he found no statistical advantage to wearing a mask or not wearing a mask and that masks do no inhibit viral spread.

Rancourt asserted that “there is no evidence that masks are of any utility for preventing infection by either stopping the aerosol particles from coming out, or from going in. You’re not helping the people around you by wearing a mask, and you’re not helping yourself avoid the disease by wearing a mask. In addition, Rancourt explained that “Infectious viral respiratory diseases primarily spread via very fine aerosol particles that are in suspension in the air.  Any mask that allows you to breathe therefore allows for transmission of aerosolized viruses.”

In conclusion, Rancourt stated

we’re in a state right now where the society is very gradually evolving towards totalitarianism.  As soon as you agree with an irrational order, an irrational command that is not science-based, then you are doing nothing to bring back society towards the free and democratic society that we should have.”

While the ACLU remains absent, OCLA (Ontario Civil Liberties Association) recommends Civil Disobedience against Mandatory Mask Laws.  If you are not comfortable with civil disobedience  and  your local food markets all require a face mask, don’t deny yourself the healthy food you and your family need – but DO find ways to  register your dissent against being forced to wear a face mask. Write a Letter to the Editor and contact all of your elected political leaders.  Be sure they understand  your objections that you will not comply with their unconstitutional and immoral behavior.

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Renee Parsons served on the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and as president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and a staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found at reneedove3@yahoo.com.

Featured image: A woman wearing a face mask is seen in the subway in Milan, Italy, March 2, 2020. (Photo by Daniele Mascolo/Xinhua)


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Federal lawsuit calls Tulsa’s mask ordinance unconstitutional and unhealthy for citizens

Federal lawsuit calls Tulsa’s mask ordinance unconstitutional and unhealthy for citizens
First amended complaint attached  –  read my www.Virus-Lies.com for more info
http://tulsabeacon.com/mask-lawsuit/
(Masks cause hypoxia by reducing Oxygen below 19.5% – in violation of OSHA directions – causes headaches, dizzyness, etc)
Doctor Robert Zoellner, Clay Clark, Doctor James Meehan, MD, and several Tulsa-based business owners have filed a federal lawsuit against Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum, the Executive Director of the Tulsa Health Department, Bruce Dart and the Tulsa City Council to immediately repeal the mask mandates that they claim are causing healthy people to become sick while trying to prevent the spread of a disease that is not a deadly threat to children and the vast majority of the general population.
According to the lawsuit, “The Court should invalidate and repeal Ordinance No. 24408 of the City of Tulsa (the ‘Tulsa Mask Mandate’) because face coverings create an ‘oxygen-deficient atmosphere,’ which the United States Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) defines as an ‘atmosphere with an oxygen content below 19.5% by volume.’  Doctors, scientists, and other medical professionals will line up in this court to demonstrate and testify that face-covering lower oxygen levels in the immediate atmosphere of someone wearing face coverings to less than the Department of Labor’s required 19.5%, normally within less than ten (10) seconds.”
The Tulsa businessmen and doctors cite OSHA’s website that reads, “…rulemaking record for the Respiratory Protection Standard clearly justifies adopting the requirement that air breathed by employees must have an oxygen content of at least 19.5 percent.  A lesser concentration of oxygen in employees’ breathing air could endanger them physiologically and diminish their ability to cope with other hazards that may be present in the workplace.”
Zoellner and Clark cite U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, who recently stated, “If you look at under age 18, the mortality rate is about one in a million, if you look at age 18-45, the mortality rate is about 10 in 100,000. Above that, it increases, but interestingly, it is still pretty small, and the vast majority – even people up to 65 years of age, it may well be between 95 and 99 percent have a very mild case of this.
“So I’m not saying it’s a benign disease, people do get sick and die from this. But your chances are good.  We shouldn’t live in fear forever.  We should take normal precautions, we should assess the risks.  People who are older should take more precautions, but we shouldn’t, you know, cover the faces of our children and say you’re gonna have to live your whole life with your mask on.
“We shouldn’t do that, and the government definitely shouldn’t mandate it.”


Other Lawsuits:
1.      When informed that mandatory masking was a fraud, and therefore a felony, the Orange County board of Supervisors abandoned their mandatory mask policy, back on June 9th, 2020. www.thehealthyamerican.org
2.    The Florida Civil Rights Coalition has filed a lawsuit against Palm Beach County, citing the county’s mask mandate is “unlawful” and “infringes upon the well-settled constitutionally protected freedoms of over a million Palm Beach County residents.”
www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/lawsuit-filed-against-palm-beach-county-for-mask-mandate/ar-BB16aw3o
3.      Leon County Florida was sued over Mask Mandates:
https://tallahasseereports.com/2020/06/25/lawsuit-filed-to-stop-leon-county-mask-mandate/
4.      Georgia Governor Kemp sued Atlanta to stop them from illegally enforcing a local mask mandate, then changed to issue an executive order to stop them:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/georgia-governor-drops-lawsuit-against-atlanta-mayor-over-mask-mandate
5.      A lawsuit filed in federal court challenges the constitutionality of Minnesota’s mask mandate by a group of Republican lawmakers and voters, including the watchdog group Minnesota Voters Alliance:
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/08/04/lawsuit-challenges-state-mask-mandate
6.      Conservatives sue Gov. Abbott to stop Texas’ mask mandate from being enforced:
https://www.star-telegram.com/news/politics-government/article243987762.html
7.     Lawsuit seeks to stop Ocala Florida face mask ordinance.  https://www.ocala.com/story/news/local/2020/08/14/lawsuit-seeks-to-stop-ocala-face-mask-ordinance/113192692/
8.     Harris Co. judge sued over mandatory mask order.  abc13.com/lina-hidalgo-sued-mask-houston/6125071/

  1. Lawsuit filed against the city of St. Augustine for Jeffrey Nager. who has asthma issues, which are aggravated by wearing a mask.   https://www.staugustine.com/story/news/coronavirus/2020/07/09/mask-mandates-spark-political-debate-in-st-johns-county/112699758/

masks

The facts I present in my www.Virus-Lies.com with links to evidence by Doctors, etc
Masks don’t stop tiny Viruses & small moisture: Link12345pdf
Masks make you sick: rebreathing CO2 & germs: Dr BlaylockLink2
Tests give false positives and test wrong thing: Link123
HydroxyChloroQuine HCQ best cure, not used so more Deaths:Link
If HCQ not used, Ventilators don’t work, but KILL: Link
Lockdowns only ruin Economy – more suicides & failed businesses.
CDC Director admits Lockdown Suicides More Threat than Covid 1
Deaths down & are lower than normal Flu

Deaths from Chlamydia Pneumonia Bacteria, not Virus: Link1,Link2
CDC admits 94% of Reported Deaths not “from” Covid19: Info
No Pandemic or Epidemic – only about 10,000 deaths “from” Covid19 now alleged (not 2 million or even 180,000), but deaths really from bacteria not treated with HCQ, usually Ventilator deaths

CovidDeaths_EthicalSkeptic-Just-Chart

More Tests give More “Cases” – So What?
Tests give false positives and test wrong thing: Link123

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Prominent Baltimore defense lawyer indicted for allegedly aiding crimes of marijuana kingpin By Debra Cassens Weiss

marijuana-gavel
(Image Shutterstock)

Prominent Baltimore defense lawyer indicted for allegedly aiding crimes of marijuana kingpin
By Debra Cassens Weiss
September 20, 2019, 10:50 am CDT
https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/prominent-baltimore-defense-lawyer-indicted-for-allegedly-aiding-crimes-of-marijuana-kingpin

Prominent Baltimore defense lawyer Ken Ravenell has been indicted on federal charges based on allegations he helped a Jamaican marijuana kingpin and his crew members launder drug proceeds and avoid detection.

The indictment returned Wednesday charges Ravenell, 60, with racketeering conspiracy, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and narcotics conspiracy, according to the Baltimore Sun and a press release.

The indictment alleges Ravenell instructed crew members to “utilize certain drug couriers, to utilize specific modes of transportation and to transport shipments of drugs and money at particular times of day, all for the purpose of evading law enforcement.”

The indictment also claims Ravenell told crew members they should use payphones and prepaid phones, and should remove batteries from their phones when meeting to discuss illegal activities.

Prosecutors say Ravenell used the law firm where he was a partner in furtherance of the conspiracy, which took place between 2009 and 2014.

Some of the drug crew’s meetings were held at the law firm, and Ravenell used law firm bank accounts to launder drug money and pay lawyers representing other members of the conspiracy, according to the indictment.

Prosecutors also say Ravenell found lawyers who refused to represent cooperating witnesses to represent crew members, and required the crew members to sign retainer agreements that allowed their lawyers to withdraw from the case if the client tried to cooperate.

Ravenell obtained information about the status of the cases and whether the defendants were cooperating, and then relayed that information to other conspirators, prosecutors say. Ravenell also met with defendants in jail without permission of their lawyers and encouraged them to accept plea deals that did not include cooperation, according to the indictment.

The Baltimore Sun identified Ravenell’s former firm as the Murphy Law Firm. Since leaving the firm, Ravenell has emerged as a top defense lawyer who has handled high-profile murder cases, according to the Sun.

A Timeline—Pandemic and Erosion of Freedoms Have Been Decades in the Making

05-21-20-Erosion-of-Freedoms-Featured-Image-1536x801

MAY 21, 2020
A Timeline—Pandemic and Erosion of Freedoms Have Been Decades in the Making

A Timeline—Pandemic and Erosion of Freedoms Have Been Decades in the Making

By the Children’s Health Defense Team

From the moment of “COVID-19’s” naming—and particularly since the imposition of unprecedented restrictions on “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—some people have smelled a rat. And with each passing week, the smell becomes worse. A growing chorus of ordinary citizens and world-renowned medical and scientific experts is raising questions about matters ranging from the coronavirus’s origins to the rationale for continued lockdowns (see here, here and here).

The mainstream media have shown themselves only too ready to lob ad hominem attacks against any and all such non-conformists. However, one does not have to be insensitive to the illness and deaths associated with COVID-19 to recognize that powerful agendas are riding on the coattails of SARS-CoV-2. Citizens are waking up to the fact that the countries, officials and public figures who embrace draconian interventions such as immunity certificates, microchipping, forced vaccination and the removal of children from their homes also approve of making our sovereign rights—whether to earn a living, maintain bodily integrity, congregate to practice our spirituality, enjoy the arts or protect and educate our children—contingent upon our acceptance of these Big Brother measures and technologies.

To make it easier for the public to assess what is happening and what is at stake, Children’s Health Defense has put together the following timeline of selected events. We invite readers to consider how these events—some of them seemingly unrelated—and the network of partnerships and relationships that they illustrate have contributed to the unfolding set of circumstances in which we now find ourselves.

While the lockdown is a cataclysm for the world economy, it is an opportunity for Gates” and his billionaire brotherhood…

Notes/Explanatory Context

Gain-of-function research: COVID-19 has prompted renewed questioning about a long-debated branch of virology that, around 2012, scientists benignly rebranded as “gain-of-function” (GOF) research. GOF experiments seek to generate viruses “with properties that do not exist in nature” or, stated another way, “alter a pathogen to make it more transmissible or deadly.” One of the leading proponents of GOF work is Dr. Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC), a “legend in coronavirology” and “trailblazer of synthetic genomic manipulation techniques” who specializes in engineering lethal coronaviruses from “mail-order DNA.” Baric and other GOF enthusiasts argue that this type of viral tinkering is “critical to the development of broad-based vaccines and therapeutics,” but critics, such as Dr. Thomas Inglesby (director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security), dispute this putative benefit.

Big Data and Big Telecom: Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dafna Tachover (director of CHD’s “Stop 5G and Wireless Harms Project”) wrote on May 8: “5G has almost nothing to do with improving your lives; it’s all about controlling your life, marketing products, and harvesting your data for Artificial Intelligence purposes. The 21st century’s ‘black gold’ is data.” They note that Bill Gates, along with a number of other players and companies, is helping set up a “microwave radiation-emitting spider web [that] will allow Big Data/Big Telecom and Big Brother to capture what happens inside and outside every person at every moment of life” using a sinister brain-machine interface and other technologies, many financed by Gates. In short, “While the lockdown is a cataclysm for the world economy, it is an opportunity for Gates” and his billionaire brotherhood, ably assisted by an unadmirable fleet of medical and scientist yes-men.

Timeline of selected events
1998
May 18: The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and 20 states file antitrust charges against Microsoft.

bill_collage
2000
2000: Bill Gates steps down from his position as Microsoft CEO, and Bill and Melinda Gates launch their eponymous foundation.

Bill-Gates-deadly-vaccines
2000: The Gates Foundation (along with other partners) launches the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI), known today as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. The foundation has given $4.1 billion to Gavi over the past 20 years.

2001
November: After initially losing the antitrust lawsuit and appealing the decision, Microsoft settles its case with the DOJ out of court.

2002
November 2002: University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC) researcher Ralph Baric publishes a “breakthrough work” in gain-of-function research (studies that alter pathogens to make them more transmissible or deadly, see Notes above), describing the creation of a synthetic clone of a natural mouse coronavirus.

November 2002: China’s Guangdong province reports the first case of “atypical pneumonia” (later labeled as SARS).

The speed of the Baric group illustrates how quickly a qualified team of virologists can create a synthetic clone from a natural virus, and therefore make genetic modifications to it.
2003
October 28: A paper by the Baric research group at UNC describes their synthetic recreation of the “previously undescribed” SARS coronavirus. (Writing in 2020, a scientist states, “The speed of the Baric group illustrates how quickly a qualified team of virologists can create a synthetic clone from a natural virus, and therefore make genetic modifications to it. Moreover, that was back in 2003. Today, a qualified laboratory can repeat those steps in a matter of weeks.”)

2005
December: Congress approves the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act, which authorizes the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “to issue a PREP Act Declaration . . . that provides immunity from liability for any loss caused, arising out of, relating to, or resulting from administration or use of countermeasures to diseases, threats, and conditions determined in the Declaration to constitute a present or credible risk of a future public health emergency.”

bill-gates-philanthropy-vaccine
2009
2009-present (and earlier): The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awards millions of dollars in global health funding to Imperial College London; funding covers areas such as polio, HIV, family planning, malaria, health care delivery, agricultural development, information technology and “public awareness and analysis.”

download
2009: The Gates Foundation funds human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine trials in India, administering the vaccine to 23,000 young girls in remote provinces. Seven die and approximately 1,200 suffer autoimmune conditions, fertility disorders or other severe reactions. Ethical violations include forged consent forms and refusal of medical treatment for the injured girls.

October 2009: Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), goes on YouTube to declare that serious adverse events for the H1N1 influenza vaccine are “very, very, very rare.” Months later, serious adverse events such as miscarriages, narcolepsy and febrile convulsions explode in multiple countries.

gates2
2010
January: Bill Gates pledges $10 billion in funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) and announces “the Decade of Vaccines.”

May 18: Senator and physician Tom Coburn calls out Dr. Fauci for misleadingly touting “significant progress in HIV vaccine research”—research that has ushered millions into NIAID’s coffers. Dr. Coburn stated, “Most scientists involved in AIDS research believe that an HIV vaccine is further away than ever.”

2011
December 30: Dr. Fauci promotes gain-of-function research on bird flu viruses, arguing that the research is worth the risk. The risks worry other “seasoned researchers.”

2012
April 20: Baylor College researchers publish their evaluation of four vaccine candidates for SARS, concluding that “Caution in proceeding to application of a SARS-CoV vaccine in humans is indicated.”

vaccine_bill_gates_india_polio-575x350
May: The 194 Member States of the World Health Assembly endorse the Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP), led by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in collaboration with NIAID, WHO, Gavi, UNICEF and others. Dr. Fauci is one of five members on the GVAP’s Leadership Council.

2014
2014: Dr. Deborah Birx takes the helm of PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), which Dr. Fauci helped launch (in 2003) and which benefits from generous Gates Foundation support. Birx and Fauci are long-time allies, having worked together during the early years of AIDS and sharing overlapping career paths.

October 7: National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins announces a “new phase of cooperation” between NIH and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, including partnering for vaccine development.

October 17: Under President Obama, the NIH halts federal funding for gain-of-function (GOF) research (see Notes) and asks federally funded GOF researchers to “agree to a voluntary moratorium.” The funding hiatus applies to 21 studies “reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.” NIH later allows 10 of the studies to resume.

[T]hese data and restrictions represent a crossroads of [gain-of-function] research concerns; the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens.
2015
2015: NIAID, under Fauci, awards a five-year, $3.7 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance (whose director gets credit on subsequent publications for “funding acquisition” rather than scientific work) to conduct gain-of-function studies on the “risk of bat coronavirus emergence.” Ten percent of the award goes to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which does “the bulk of the on-the-ground sample collection and analysis.”

48000kids
January: In a public appearance, Bill Gates states, “We’re taking things that are genetically modified organisms and we’re injecting them into little kids’ arms; we just shoot ‘em right into the vein.”

September 24: UNC’s Ralph Baric is granted a patent for the creation of chimeric coronavirus spike proteins.

November 9: Baric and the Wuhan Institute’s Shi Zheng-Li (the leading GOF coronavirus researcher in China) publish what some refer to as “the most famous gain-of-function virology paper” (in Nature Medicine), describing their creation of a synthetic chimeric coronavirus. The authors state: “[T]hese data and restrictions represent a crossroads of GOF research concerns; the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens [emphasis added]. In developing policies moving forward, it is important to consider the value of the data generated by these studies and whether these types of chimeric virus studies warrant further investigation versus the inherent risks involved.”

2016
2016: The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity states that “very few government-funded gain-of-function experiments [pose] a significant threat to public health.”

…researchers blame the Gates-funded polio vaccination campaign for almost half a million cases of childhood paralysis.
2017
February 8: The Modi administration in India severs ties with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, after researchers blame the Gates-funded polio vaccination campaign for almost half a million cases of childhood paralysis.

November 30: Shi Zheng-Li and coauthors publish a paper in PLoS Pathogens describing the creation of eight new synthetic coronaviruses.

December 19: The NIH and Dr. Fauci’s NIAID restore federal funding for gain-of-function research, ending the moratorium that began in October 2014.

December 19: Dr. Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard School of Public Health tells the New York Times that the type of gain-of-function experiments endorsed by Dr. Fauci’s NIAID have “done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics, and yet risked creating an accidental pandemic.”

NIAID awards a six-year renewal grant of $3.7 million to EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology to continue their gain-of-function studies on bat coronaviruses.
2019
2019: NIAID awards a six-year renewal grant of $3.7 million to EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology to continue their gain-of-function studies on bat coronaviruses. The renewal is approved “unusually quickly,” receiving a “really extremely high priority for funding.”

August 14: Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) records show that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation owns 5.3 million shares of Crown Castle International Corp., representing the Foundation’s second largest tech holding after Microsoft. Crown Castle dominates ownership of 5G infrastructure throughout the U.S., including cell towers, small cell nodes and fiber.

October: A report released by NBC News in May, 2020 declares, “The analysis of commercial telemetry data in Wuhan suggests the COVID-19 pandemic began earlier than initially reported” and “supports the release of COVID-19 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” NBC’s May 8 summary states, “there was no cellphone activity in a high-security portion of the Wuhan Institute of Virology from Oct. 7 through Oct. 24, 2019, and that there may have been a ‘hazardous event’ sometime between Oct. 6 and Oct. 11.”

October 6: On May 5, 2020, British and French researchers publish a study estimating that COVID-19 could have started as early as October 6, 2019.

October 18-27: Wuhan hosts the Military World Games (“Wuhan 2019”), held every four years. More than 9,000 athletes from over 100 countries compete. The telecom systems for the Athletes’ Village constructed for the event are powered by 5G technology, “showcas[ing] its infrastructure and technological prowess.”

October 18: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security convene an invitation-only “tabletop exercise” called Event 201 to map out the response to a hypothetical global coronavirus pandemic.

November-December: General practitioners in northern Italy start noticing a “strange pneumonia.”

December 2-3: Vaccine scientists attending the WHO’s Global Vaccine Safety Summit confirm major problems with vaccine safety around the world.

December 18: Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report the development of a “novel way to record a patient’s vaccination history,” using smartphone-readable nanocrystals called “quantum dots” embedded in the skin using microneedles—this work is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

December 31: Chinese officials inform the WHO about a cluster of “mysterious pneumonia” cases. Later, the South China Morning Post reports that it can trace the first case back to November 17.

Dr. Peter Hotez of Baylor College … tells a Congressional Committee that coronavirus vaccines have always had a “unique potential safety problem”
2020
January 7: Chinese authorities formally identify a “novel” coronavirus.

January 10: China makes the genome sequence of the new coronavirus publicly available.

January 11: China records its first death attributed to the new coronavirus.

January 20: The first U.S. coronavirus case is reported in Washington State.

January 23: Shi Zheng-Li releases a paper reporting that the new coronavirus is 96% identical to a strain that her lab isolated from bats in 2013 but never publicized.

January 30: The WHO declares the new coronavirus a “global health emergency.”

Jan. 31, 2020: A group of Indian scientists publishes a study finding HIV sequences in the 2019-nCoV coronavirus. The scientists withdraw the study within 24 hours, presumably under some pressure.

February 4: Sixty-seven year-old scientist Dr. Frank Plummer, head until 2015 of Canada’s level-4 National Microbiology Laboratory, dies under mysterious circumstances while in Nairobi, Kenya. During the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s, Plummer told the New York Times that 60% of “probable” and “suspected” SARS cases had failed the test needed to confirm a link between coronavirus and SARS: “[W]hether it is the entire explanation for SARS I am just not sure yet.”

February 4: With just 11 people in the U.S. who are confirmed to have COVID-19, HHS issues a Declaration, published on March 17 in the Federal Register, that places the new coronavirus under the umbrella of the 2005 PREP Act, making medical countermeasures (including vaccines) immune from liability.

February 5: Bill and Melinda Gates announce $100 million in funding for coronavirus vaccine research and treatment efforts.

February 10: French and Canadian scientists publish a paper about the new coronavirus describing an “important” anomaly—12 additional nucleotides—not observed in previous coronaviruses. They suggest that the distinct feature “may provide a gain-of-function . . . for efficient spreading in the human population.”

February 11: The WHO gives the disease thought to be caused by the new coronavirus a name: “COVID-19.” WHO’s Director-General explains, “We had to find a name that did not refer to a geographical location, an animal, an individual or group of people, and which is also pronounceable and related to the disease.”

February 24: Moderna, Inc. sends the first batch of its experimental coronavirus vaccine, mRNA-1273, to its research partner, NIAID.

February 25: Moderna stock shares trade 15% higher.

February 29: The U.S. reports its first COVID-19 death.

March 5: Dr. Peter Hotez of Baylor College (who has previously tried to develop a SARS vaccine) tells a Congressional Committee that coronavirus vaccines have always had a “unique potential safety problem”—a “kind of paradoxical immune enhancement phenomenon.”

March 6: President Trump signs an $8.3 billion emergency coronavirus spending package, much of which “directly benefit[s] the drug industry.”

March 10: Dr. Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia expresses concerns about the push to “rush [a vaccine] through,” particularly in the absence of “any history of making a coronavirus vaccine.”

March 10: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome and Mastercard commit $125 million to identify, assess, develop and scale up COVID-19 treatments, forming the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator. The $50 million in Gates Foundation funding is part of the $100 million in COVID-19 funding announced by Gates on February 5.

March 11: The WHO declares COVID-19 a pandemic.

March 13: Bill Gates steps down from the Boards of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway to “dedicate more time to philanthropic priorities.”

March 16: Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, scientific advisor to the UK government, publishes his computer simulations warning that there will be over two million COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. unless the country adopts “intensive and socially disruptive measures.”

March 16: Dr. Fauci tells Americans that they must be prepared to “take more drastic steps” and “hunker down significantly” to slow the coronavirus’s spread.

March 16: NIAID launches a Phase 1 trial in 45 healthy adults of the mRNA-1273 coronavirus vaccine co-developed by NIAID and Moderna, Inc. The trial skips the customary step of testing the vaccine in animal models prior to proceeding to human trials.

March 17: The Nation publishes an analysis covering conflicts of interest in the Gates Foundation’s charitable giving, describing “close to $2 billion in tax-deductible charitable donations to private companies,” including GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), and “close to $250 million in charitable grants . . . to companies in which the foundation holds corporate stocks and bonds,” including Merck, GSK, Sanofi and other pharmaceutical corporations. A critic states that the foundation has “created one of the most problematic precedents in the history of foundation giving by essentially opening the door for corporations to see themselves as deserving charity claimants at a time when corporate profits are at an all-time high.”

March 22: U.S. bioweapons expert Dr. Francis Boyle repeats earlier statements that the purpose of Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) labs such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology “is the research, development, testing and stockpiling of offensive biological weapons” and that the new virus is a “weaponized” SARS coronavirus that leaked out of the Wuhan BSL-4 lab.

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Bill Gates announces significant funding for a company, EarthNow, that will blanket Earth with $1 billion in video surveillance satellites.
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March 24: Bill Gates announces significant funding for a company, EarthNow, that will blanket Earth with $1 billion in video surveillance satellites.

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March 26: Microsoft announces that it is acquiring Affirmed Networks, a company focused on 5G and “edge computing.”

March 26: Dr. Fauci publishes an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine (with senior NIAID official H. Clifford Lane and CDC director Robert Redfield), stating that “the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza,” with a case fatality rate of perhaps 0.1%.

March 27: President Trump signs the $2 trillion CARES Act into law.

March 27: Children’s Health Defense publishes its video and article, “Dr. Fauci and COVID-19 priorities: therapeutics now or vaccines later?” Shortly thereafter, Mailchimp deactivates CHD’s account with no advance notice and no violation of Mailchimp’s rules.

March 29: President Trump extends nationwide social distancing guidelines until April 30.

March 31: White House coronavirus advisors Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Fauci cite models showing a potential 100,000 to 240,000 coronavirus deaths “even if the country keeps stringent social distancing guidelines in place.” Fauci describes social distancing and lockdowns as “inconvenient” but “the answer to our problems.”

April 2: Bill Gates states that a coronavirus vaccine “is the only thing that will allow us to return to normal.”

April 3: Forbes reports that Moderna’s CEO has become an overnight billionaire after the company ended 2019 with a net loss.

April 6: Dr. Fauci describes a COVID-19 vaccine as a “showstopper” and states, “I hope we don’t have so many people infected that we actually have . . . herd immunity.”

April 9: Dr. Fauci states that the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus “looks more like the 60,000 [range],” adding the “models are really only as good as the assumptions that you put into the model.”

April 9: The Gates-funded Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) reports that 115 COVID-19 vaccines are in the pipeline.

April 9: Children’s Health Defense publishes “Gates’ globalist vaccine agenda: a win-win for pharma and mandatory vaccination.”

April 11: Children’s Health Defense publishes “Here’s why Bill Gates wants indemnity… Are you willing to take the risk?”

April 15: Bill Gates pledges another $150 million to coronavirus vaccine development and other measures. He states, “There are seven billion people on the planet. We are going to need to vaccinate nearly every one.”

April 16: Moderna announces up to $483 million in funding from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) to speed up the mRNA-1273 vaccine’s development.

April 18: Professor Luc Montagnier, recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of HIV, appears on French television and states that SARS-CoV-2 has been “manipulated” to include “added sequences” from HIV. Professor Montagnier asserts that this “meticulous” insertion could only have been carried out in a laboratory. Others raise similar questions about the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

April 18: News outlets report that the country’s first coronavirus tests are ineffective due to CDC lab contamination and the CDC’s violation of its manufacturing standards.

April 21: Washington State announces plans to have a 1,500-person contact tracing team in place by mid-May.

April 23: Researchers issue a preprint reporting “direct evidence” of at least 30 different SARS-CoV-2 genetic variants.

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April 23: News outlets report that American billionaires’ wealth increased by 10% during the first few months of COVID-19.

April 23: Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. publishes “The Bill Gates effect: WHO’s DTP vaccine killed more children in Africa than the diseases it targeted.”

April 24: The NIH cancels the funding awarded to EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology for gain-of-function research on coronaviruses (funding awarded continuously since 2015). The NIH and Dr. Fauci decline to comment.

April 27: Former FDA head Scott Gottlieb (now with Pfizer) and former Medicare/Medicaid official Andy Slavitt urge the Trump administration to dedicate $46 billion to contact tracing and isolation.

April 28: A Newsweek article reports, “Dr. Fauci backed controversial Wuhan lab with U.S. dollars for risky coronavirus research.” Fauci does not respond to requests for comments.

April 29: Bloomberg publishes a story about President Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed,” a planned pharmaceutical-government-military collaboration to shrink the development time for a coronavirus vaccine.

April 30: Bill Gates writes that “the world will be able to go back to the way things were . . . when almost every person on the planet has been vaccinated against coronavirus.” Gates also states that “Governments will need to expedite their usual drug approval processes in order to deliver the vaccine to over 7 billion people quickly.”

April 30: Dr. Fauci states that it is “doable” to have hundreds of millions of doses of a coronavirus vaccine available by January 2021.

May 1: Dr. Thomas Inglesby (director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security), discussing gain-of-function research, states that “laboratory systems are not infallible, and even in the greatest laboratories of the world, there are mistakes.”

May 1: Democratic Representative Bobby Rush of Illinois introduces the TRACE Act (“HR 6666: COVID-19 Testing, Reaching, and Contacting Everyone”). The conspicuously vague Act would allocate $100 billion to CDC-hired entities for contact tracing and “other purposes,” including family separation. (See also May 15.)

May 4: Bill Gates pledges another $50 million toward COVID-19, for a total of $300 million in commitments.

May 4: President Trump states that the U.S. will have a coronavirus vaccine by the end of 2020.

May 5: British and French researchers publish “Emergence of genomic diversity and recurrent mutations in SARS-CoV-2,” suggesting that the recurrent mutations detected “may indicate ongoing adaptation of SARS-CoV-2 to its novel human host.”

May 5: Neil Ferguson resigns from the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) after flouting his own social distancing rules. The married lover with whom Ferguson has his trysts works for an organization “loosely connected with Bill Gates, through the World Economic Forum.”

May 5: Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. publishes “Redfield and Birx: can they be trusted with COVID?”

May 6: An anonymous software engineer (ex-Google) pronounces Neil Ferguson’s COVID-19 computer model “unusable for scientific purposes.”

May 6: New York governor Andrew Cuomo announces that the state will partner with “visionary” Bill Gates to restructure education by placing “technology at the forefront.” Cuomo appoints former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to lead a blue-ribbon committee for this purpose. Critics push back, describing past Gates-Foundation-funded educational fiascos that amassed “detailed personal information about millions of students” in the cloud.

May 7: Business Insider reports that over 33 million Americans have filed for unemployment over the seven-week period since COVID-19 restrictions began.

May 7: NPR reports that 44 states and the District of Columbia have plans to deploy a contact tracing workforce of over 66,000 workers.

May 8: NBC News releases a private report describing an unconfirmed shutdown of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in October 2019.

May 8: Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dafna Tachover (director of CHD’s “Stop 5G and Wireless Harms Project”) publish “The brave new world of Bill Gates and Big Telecom.”

May 11: UK chief medical officer Dr. Chris Whitty (an insider who has received millions in malaria research funding from the Gates Foundation and who endorses stigma as a useful public health intervention) states that COVID-19 is “harmless to [the] vast majority.”

May 13: Australian researchers report that “SARS-CoV-2 is uniquely adapted to infect humans, raising important questions as to whether it arose in nature by a rare chance event or whether its origins might lie elsewhere.”

May 14: Microsoft announces that it is acquiring UK-based Metaswitch Networks “to expand its Azure 5G strategy.”

May 15: The House passes the 1,815-page, $3 trillion HEROES Act (“Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act”), sneaking in portions of the TRACE ACT that would funnel $75 billion to the CDC for “coronavirus testing, contact tracing and isolation measures.”

May 18: Moderna announces interim results from the Phase 1 trial of its mRNA-1273 coronavirus vaccine. The company reports that three out of 15 healthy participants (20%) experienced Grade 3 systemic adverse events following a second dose. (The Merck Manual defines Grade 3 as “severe or medically significant but not immediately life-threatening; hospitalization or prolongation of hospitalization indicated; disabling; limiting self care.”)

May 18: Discussing the interim results from Moderna’s Phase 1 trial of its mRNA-1273 vaccine—co-developed with NIAID—Dr. Fauci states: “I must warn that there’s also the possibility of negative consequences, where certain vaccines can actually enhance the negative effect of the infection.”

May 18: After describing its interim Phase 1 results as “promising,” shares of Moderna stock soar 25%, closing at a “record high.” The company’s stock has gained 241% since the beginning of 2020.

May 19: Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. publishes “How Bill Gates controls global messaging and censorship.”

May 20: Microsoft announces its new supercomputer intended to create “human-like” artificial intelligence.

Stop the conveyor belt
Around the world, many people are understandably reeling in shock at the rapid economic, social and cultural changes that have followed in the wake of the phenomenon called “COVID-19.” Many of these changes involve ever-tighter restrictions on our rights and freedoms, accompanied by inexorable messaging—both public and subliminal—that a “vaccine for all” and 24/7 tracking and surveillance are the only way out. Increasingly, however, there are hopeful signs that more members of the public are recognizing the duplicity and self-interest of those offering false salvation. Each of us needs to do our part to expose these issues, standing up for individual sovereignty and working to halt the transition “to a totalitarian singularity more despotic than Orwell ever imagined.”

Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. CHD is planning many strategies, including legal, in an effort to defend the health of our children and obtain justice for those already injured. Your support is essential to CHD’s successful mission.

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Judge is removed from bench after asking woman whether she closed her legs to prevent rape

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(judge and gavel Image from Shutterstock.com.)

Judge is removed from bench after asking woman whether she closed her legs to prevent rape
BY DEBRA CASSENS WEISS
https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/judge-is-removed-from-bench-after-asking-woman-whether-she-closed-her-legs-to-prevent-rape
MAY 28, 2020, 11:05 AM CDT

The New Jersey Supreme Court on Tuesday removed a judge from the bench who asked a woman whether she had tried to close her legs to stop a sexual assault.

The court ordered the removal of Judge John Russo in a May 26 decision.

The woman was in Russo’s Ocean County courtroom in 2016 to seek a final restraining order against her alleged assailant. Russo took over questioning after cross-examination by defense counsel. The judge asked the woman whether she had tried to block her body parts, close her legs, call police or leave.

The questions were unwarranted, inappropriate and discourteous, the supreme court said in an opinion by Chief Justice Stuart Rabner. “No witness, alleged victim or litigant should be treated that way in a court of law,” the court said.

Russo claimed the woman was a demoralized witness, and he was trying to help her get reengaged in the hearing. But that explanation “does not square with the record,” the court said. “The plaintiff plainly testified that defendant forced her to have sexual intercourse against her will. She also described other acts of alleged domestic violence. And she did so without needing any assistance from the trial judge to express herself.”

“Beyond that,” the court said, Russo’s “coarse questions about how the plaintiff responded during the alleged assault were not relevant.” Sexual assault in New Jersey turns on the use of physical force by the alleged assailant, not the victim’s state of mind or resistance.

Just as problematic were Russo’s comments to court staff after the hearing, the court said. Russo asked whether staffers heard “the sex stuff” and said he was the master of “being able to talk about sex acts with a straight face.”

“Judges set the tone for a courtroom,” the court said. “Especially when it comes to sensitive matters like domestic violence and sexual assault, that tone must be dignified, solemn and respectful, not demeaning or sophomoric. [Russo] failed in that regard.”

The court said Russo also committed misconduct in three instances.

• Russo ruled in a hearing even though he stated at the outset that he knew both the defendant and his wife since high school. The defendant was arrested after failing to comply with a judge’s order to pay. $10,000 out of nearly $145,000 in past-due child support. Russo vacated the arrest warrant and lowered the purge amount from $10,000 to $300 based on the defendant’s uncorroborated financial information.

• Russo made an ex parte call to a mother in a paternity matter who failed to appear in court. When Russo asked for the woman’s address, she said she didn’t want to disclose it because she was afraid. She said the putative father had molested her daughter, and she feared for her son’s safety. Russo threatened the woman with financial penalties and said she wouldn’t be able to keep her address secret. “He’s going to find you, ma’am,” Russo told the woman. “We’re all going to find you.”

• Russo asked the family division manager in his courthouse to intercede in another vicinage to reschedule a guardianship hearing in a personal matter involving himself, his ex-wife and his son. Russo should have worked through his lawyer rather than the manager, the court said.

“The series of ethical failures that [Russo] committed are not errors of law, innocent missteps or isolated words taken out of context,” the court said. “Viewed as a whole, they are flagrant and serious acts of misconduct.”

Russo is a former mayor of Toms River, New Jersey. Law360, Courthouse News Service, Law.com, NJ.com and the Legal Profession Blog had coverage of the decision.

California Throws The Books At Undercover Reporter Who Exposed Baby Body Trafficking

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California Throws the Books at Undercover Reporter Who Exposed Baby Body Trafficking

California Throws the Books at Undercover Reporter Who Exposed Baby Body Trafficking


Thomas BrejchaBy Thomas Brejcha
MARCH 10, 2020
From the time of its founding and fight for independence, America has been synonymous with the idea of freedom – freedom to speak your mind, pursue your own dreams, worship as you want. The American press has often been called the “Fourth Estate” or referred to as the fourth branch of government for its ability to hold leaders to transparency with the ability to expose wrongdoing. Today, that cherished Freedom of the Press is at risk. Why? Because of the power of the abortion lobby and its insistence that the rules are different when it comes to the business of selling death.

Federalist
The Federalist

Read The Federalist article by Tom Brejcha, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Society, on how the rights of all journalists are at risk because a California federal court deemed David Daleiden’s undercover work – exposing baby body parts trafficking by abortion vendors – a crime.

“What does it tell you that the Daleiden case may have been the first time that any journalist has been criminally charged with violating the California recording law in the many years it has been on the books?” from California Throws The Books At Undercover Reporter Who Exposed Baby Body Trafficking by Tom Brejcha.

California Throws The Books At Undercover Reporter Who Exposed Baby Body Trafficking
Even those who disagree with David Daleiden and his techniques but care about how the legal actions against him could define press freedom need to follow this case.

Thomas BrejchaBy Thomas Brejcha
MARCH 10, 2020
https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/10/california-throws-the-books-at-undercover-reporter-who-exposed-baby-body-trafficking/

An undercover reporter has been arraigned in California and charged with ten felonies for secretly recording conversations, and it’s time to revisit how the judiciary and the law can stifle the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press.

The accused, David Daleiden, used standard media undercover techniques to investigate and expose Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted fetus body parts. While the use of undercover techniques like Daleiden’s is a controversial practice even within journalism circles, Daleiden’s upcoming jury trial has far wider implications for journalists.

Namely, can and should government criminalize undercover reporting, which historically has revealed otherwise hidden wrongdoing of all kinds?

Being Pro-Life Is Not a Crime
Let’s first put aside that Daleiden, as director of the Center for Medical Progress, is a pro-life activist—which is not a crime. He should have the same right to penetrate the practices of America’s abortion providers and report his findings just as other reporters and publications investigate other matters.

Consider the multitude of covertly conducted investigations exposing threats to public health and safety, racism, and various other injustices, dating back to the dawn of our republic. To mention a few: In a classic case of disguised reporters using hidden cameras, ABC “Prime Time Live” outed Food Lion’s alleged unsanitary food handling practices. “Dateline” NBC deployed decoys and hidden cameras to expose men who solicited sex with minors on the Internet. Vanity Fair had a clandestine reporter join a tour group to the Holy Land to probe then-President George W. Bush’s alleged ties to religious right leaders.

Undercover Chicago Tribune reporters, working from the inside as employees, exposed life-threatening conditions in nursing homes. Another Tribune reporter worked undercover in the city’s election board to reveal widespread election fraud. Chicago Sun-Times reporters, working inside, turned up dangerous practices at abortion clinics. The paper also opened a bar, the Mirage, in a sting using hidden cameras to bare shakedowns by city inspectors.

Jerry Thompson of the Nashville Tennessean infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan to provide a first-person account of its racist practices and beliefs. BBC used clandestine students to describe a “sex for grades” scandal. In Los Angeles, CBSN’s David Goldstein regularly goes undercover.

The Washington Post captured a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service by disclosing disgusting and unsanitary conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The reporters never identified themselves as such, which, according to Brooke Kroeger, a New York University law and journalism professor, defines their action as investigative reporting. It is, she argued, yet another demonstration of how deception in investigative reporting is not only permissible but a necessary tool regularly exposing wrongdoing that can’t be found any other way.

Attacking Whistleblowers Who Exposed Crime
Instead, Daleiden faces a legal system that has unleashed both criminal and civil actions against him for a variety of supposed violations of law, including criminal trespass, fraud, and breach of contract, even federal civil racketeering. A jury in the civil trial awarded the plaintiffs more than $2.2 million in damages, enough to permanently silence Daleiden’s small pro-life and nonprofit operation. We are appealing.

The criminal case, the one more likely to chill undercover work, was the product of then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris. A judge threw out six of 15 criminal charges against Daleiden and co-investigator Sandra Merritt but ruled that the other counts can go to a criminal trial. Thus, the arraignment. Never mind that Harris violated shield laws protecting reporters by raiding Daleiden’s home and capturing previously unpublished raw journalism materials.

How ironic, because about the time that Daleiden published his findings, animal rights activists were praised for ­documenting abuse in the poultry industry. Unlike in Daleiden’s case, Harris launched probes of the poultry industry and didn’t charge the reporters.

That Harris received campaign donations from, and touted her support for, pro-choice groups suggests she was motivated by political bias. Same for the judge in the civil case, who was affiliated with an organization that had a joint venture with a Planned Parenthood affiliate whose successor is now one of the entities suing Daleiden.

No one can be blamed for thinking that the legal actions were inspired and carried out by pro-choice organizations to punish and silence their opponents. What does it tell you that the Daleiden case may have been the first time that any journalist has been criminally charged with violating the California recording law in the many years it has been on the books?

Putting Reporting Under Government Threat
Even if the government’s action were bias-free, Daleiden’s pursuit still jeopardizes quality journalism. The California accusations are based on the claim his targets had an expectation of privacy even when the conversations were conducted in a public place, like a restaurant or hotel convention hall, where bystanders could hear them. It’s a ludicrous assertion, a gross misinterpretation, and an undue and overbroad extension of the law.

I refer to two pro-choice law professors, Sherry F. Colb and Michael C. Dorf, who support Planned Parenthood’s work but warned that the criminal pursuit of Daleiden “follows a troubling pattern in American constitutional jurisprudence” to cripple investigative journalism. In a CNN opinion article, they wrote, “Whatever the precise facts of this case prove to be, the prosecution has broader implications, and not just for abortion and anti-abortion speech. Undercover exposés play a vital role in informing the American public of important facts that would otherwise remain hidden.” The Los Angeles Times deemed the prosecution “disturbingly aggressive” and an “overreach.”

Possible prison sentences and burdensome fines attached to criminal conduct cannot be ignored in this debate. They are more than a disincentive to expose wrongdoing; they give the upper hand to criminal enterprises, powerful corporations, avenging politicians, ideologues, and special interests to protect themselves from public condemnation and costly penalties for misconduct. This is not a loophole that the Founding Fathers had in mind when they crafted the constitutional protection of freedom of the press.

Even those who disagree with Daleiden and his techniques but care about how the precedent-setting legal actions against him that could define press freedom in the future need to follow this case as it winds through the legal system, possibly all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Thomas Brejcha is founder, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Society, a national public interest law firm defending life, family and religious liberty. It represents David Daleiden.
Photo kambodza / Flickr

Fact, Not Advice!

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Too, whenever you file a case, you need to do everything, as if you plan to appeal. Every case goes to appeal, unless it is so shitty a case that it don’t warrant an appeal. Everything you do in your case should prepare for an easy appeal, you have to be diligent, as if you are the one being sued, and you have to do plenty of discovery if you want anything from the opposing party, and the most important thing, is you have to follow the Rules of Civil Procedure, Uniform Superior Court Rules, the Court’s Rules and all Orders.
If any of the above things have not been followed to a “t” then you have made it hard for yourself, and will most likely loose the case. If you have planned to appeal, which should always be done, then it will be easier and less costly to appeal.

Damn, that’s good, I am going to post.

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Duty To Warn: Drug-Induced Iatrogenic Disorders – The Third Leading Cause Of Death In The US And Britain

Dr-Peter-Goetzsche

Duty To Warn: Drug-Induced Iatrogenic Disorders – The Third Leading Cause Of Death In The US And Britain
January 16, 2018
Duty to Warn

Drug-Induced Iatrogenic Disorders – The Third Leading Cause of Death in the US and Britain

By Gary G. Kohls, MD
https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/duty-to-warn-drug-induced-iatrogenic-disorders-the-third-leading-cause-of-death-in-the-us-and-britain/

Definition of an “iatrogenic” disorder: A disorder inadvertently induced by a health caregiver because of a surgical, medical, drug or vaccine treatment or by a diagnostic procedure.

In last week’s column I wrote that iatrogenic disorders (a doctor-, drug-, vaccine-, surgery- or other medical treatment-caused disorder) were the third leading cause of death in the US. That revelation may have ruffled the feathers of some readers, particularly if they were employed in the medical professions, so I am enlarging on that statement in this week’s column.

In 2000, a commentary article was written by Dr Barbara Stanfield, MD, MPH. It was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA, July 26, 2000—Vol 284, No. 4).

The article was titled “Is US Health Really the Best in the World? It has been posted at https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/192908?redirect=true.

Statins
In the article, Stanfield included the following statistics from her research about iatrogenic deaths. (Note: these numbers do not include out-patient iatrogenic deaths):

• 12,000 deaths/year from unnecessary surgery in hospitals
• 7,000 deaths/year from medication errors in hospitals
• 20,000 deaths/year from other errors in hospitals
• 80,000 deaths/year from nosocomial infections in hospitals
• 106,000 deaths/year from non-error, adverse effects of medications in hospitals

Combining these five groups gives us a total of 225,000 in-patient deaths. The 225,000 number does not include out-patient deaths or disabilities. In any case, this number easily constitutes the third leading cause of death in the United States, behind heart disease and cancer (see the official list for 2015 below).

The CDC’s Mortality and Morbidity Report for 2000, said that cancer caused 710,701 US deaths in 2000 and heart disease caused 553,080. For comparison purposes, the CDC’s report said that heart disease caused 606,401 deaths in 2017 and cancer caused 594,707.

Below are the US death statistics for 2015 (apparently the last year that the CDC has published the complete list).

1 Heart Disease . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 633,842

2 Cancer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 595,930

3 Chronic lower respiratory diseases . . . . . . . 155,041

4 Unintentional injuries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146,571

5 Cerebrovascular diseases . . . . . . . . . . . . . .140,323

6 Alzheimer’s disease . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110,561

7 Diabetes mellitus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . …. . . . . .79,535

8 Influenza and pneumonia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57,062

9 Nephrosis, nephrotic syndrome . . . . . . . . . . . 49,959

10 Suicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44,193

It is obvious that “Inpatient Iatrogenic Deaths” of 225,000 would easily come in 3rd, if the CDC would ever start collecting such data and publishing it as a separate category. Something fishy is going on, particularly in view of the fact that there have numerous requests that the CDC change its traditional data collection methods.

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One also wonders – if more accurate figures were available – if combining in-patient and out-patient iatrogenic deaths together (a rational approach) would cause heart and cancer deaths to drop to # 2 and # 3.

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One only has to consider tabulating psychiatric drug-induced suicides and homicides as iatrogenic; or logically regarding deaths from neuroleptic drug-induced diabetes and obesity to be classed as iatrogenic; or regarding the deaths from the aluminum-adjuvanted, vaccine-induced autoimmune diseases that cause so much morbidity and mortality as iatrogenic; or regarding a portion of the SIDS deaths at 2, 4 and 6 month of age, when infants are routinely injected with dangerous, untested-for-safety cocktails of mercury-containing, aluminum-adjuvanted and live virus-containing intramuscular vaccines as iatrogenic.

Or one could add in last year’s 50,000 opioid overdose deaths – most of which were prescribed by health caregivers but which were probably added to the “Accidental Death” category; or adding in the 50,000 heart attack deaths from Merck’s arthritis drug Vioxx (also iatrogenic deaths, but included in the “Heart Disease” category); or the premature chemotherapy drug-induced deaths that are invariably included in the “Cancer Death” category.

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And the list of potential iatrogenic deaths goes on and on.

A decade after her article was published (in a December 2009 interview), Dr Stanfield re-affirmed the veracity of her earlier data by saying:

“106,000 people die (annually, in US hospitals) as a result of CORRECTLY prescribed medicines…Overuse of a drug or inappropriate use of a drug would not fall under the category of ‘correctly’ prescribed. Therefore, people who die after ‘overuse’ or ‘inappropriate use’ would be IN ADDITION TO the 106,000 (these numbers do not count out-patients killed by prescription drugs!) and would fall into another or other categories.” – (https://therefusers.com/is-us-health-really-the-best-in-the-world-barbara-starfield-md-mph/)

And then there is the research done by Dr Peter Goetzsche.

Dr Peter Goetzsche

Dr Stanfield’s 2000 and 2009 statistics holds true for the UK and for Europe as well, according to the co-founder of The Cochrane Collaboration, Dr Peter Goetzsche. In his powerful 2013 book “Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma has Corrupted Healthcare.”

Dr Goetzsche boldly states that iatrogenic deaths should be listed as # 3 in both Europe and the US. In his 2015 companion book, Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial, Goetzsche makes the same points about psychiatric drug-induced deaths. Below are some quotes from his 2013 book, where he points out the many similarities between Big Pharma and the mob:

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“It is scary how many similarities there are between the drug industry and the mob. The mob makes obscene amounts of money…The side effects of organized crime are killings and deaths, and the side effects are the same in this industry. The mob bribes politicians and others, and so does this industry…

“Otherwise good citizens, when they are part of a corporate group, do things they otherwise wouldn’t do because the group…validate(s) what there’re doing as OK…

“The difference is that all these people in the drug industry look upon themselves as law-abiding citizens, not as citizens who would ever rob a bank. However, when they get together as a group and manage these corporations, something seems to happen. It’s almost like when soldiers commit war crime atrocities. When you’re in a group, it’s easy to do things you otherwise wouldn’t do.” – An unnamed whistle-blowing ex-vice president for Pfizer’s global marketing department.

“In contrast to the drug industry, doctors don’t harm their patients deliberately. And when they do cause harm, either accidentally, or because of the lack of knowledge, or by negligence, they harm only one patient at a time.”

“In the drug industry, bribery is routine and involves large amounts of money. Almost every type of person who can affect the interests of the industry has been bribed: doctors, hospital administrators, cabinet ministers, health inspectors, customs officers, tax assessors, drug registration officials, factory inspectors, pricing officials and political parties.”

“There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature citation too biased or too egoistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print.” – Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of JAMA.

“What makes Big Pharma unique in the US is that it outspends all others in laying down cold hard cash into its lobbying efforts (another word for bribing governments that includes not only US Congress but its US federal regulator, the bought and sold Food and Drug Administration).” – Joachim Hagopian

“(As a drug rep) “it’s my job to figure out what a physician’s price is. For some it’s dinner at the finest restaurants, for others it’s enough convincing data to let them prescribe confidently and for others it’s my attention and friendship…but at the most basic level, everything is for sale and everything is an exchange.” – Retired Drug Sales Rep Shahram Ahari

“Before the approval process, the (Big Pharma-connected) sponsor sets up the clinical trial – the drug selected, and the dose and route of administration of the comparison drug (or placebo). Since the trial is designed to have one outcome, is it surprising that the comparison drug may be hobbled – given in the wrong dose, by the wrong method?

“The sponsor pays those who collect the evidence, doctors, and nurses, so is it surprising that in a dozen ways they influence results? All the results flow in to the sponsor, who analyses the evidence, drops what is inconvenient, and keeps it all secret – even from the trial physicians. The manufacturer deals out to the FDA bits of evidence, and pays the FDA (the judge) to keep it secret. Panels (the jury), usually paid consultant fees by the sponsors, decide on FDA approval, often lobbied for by paid grass-roots patient organizations who pack the court (the trick is called ‘astro-turfing’).

“If the trial, under these conditions, shows the drug works, the sponsors pay sub-contractors to write up the research and impart whatever spin they may; they pay ‘distinguished’ academics to add their names as ‘authors’ to give the enterprise credibility, and often publish in journals dependent on the sponsors for their existence.

“If the drug seems no good or harmful, the trial is buried and everyone is reminded of their confidentiality agreements. Unless the trial is set up in this way, the sponsor will refuse to back the trial, but even if it is set up as they wish, those same sponsors may suddenly walk away from it, leaving patients and their physicians high and dry.”

“We have a system where defendant, developers of evidence, police, judge, jury, and even court reporters are all induced to arrive at one conclusion in favour of the new drug.”

“More than 80 million prescriptions for psychiatric drugs are written in the UK every year. Not only are these drugs often entirely unnecessary and ineffective, but they can also turn patients into addicts, cause crippling side-effects – and kill.”

If any reader has any doubt about the veracity of the Stanfield and Goetzsche claims, below are a couple of other courageous researchers that have delved into the issue. In 2016, a group of Johns Hopkins medical school researchers, led by Dr Martin Makary, published supporting information in the British Medical Journal. (BMJ 2016; 353).

In the introduction of the publication, Makary and his co-authors wrote about how flawed is the CDC system of data collection and analysis:

“The annual list of the most common causes of death in the United States, compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), informs public awareness and national research priorities each year. The list is created using death certificates filled out by physicians, funeral directors, medical examiners, and coroners.

“However, a major limitation of the death certificate is that it relies on assigning an International Classification of Disease (ICD) code to the cause of death. As a result, causes of death not associated with an ICD code (including many iatrogenic disorders), such as human and system factors, are not captured.

“…communication breakdowns, diagnostic errors, poor judgment, and inadequate skill can directly result in patient harm and death. We analyzed the scientific literature on medical error to identify its contribution to US deaths in relation to causes listed by the CDC.

Death From Medical Care Itself

“Medical error has been defined as an unintended act (either of omission or commission) or one that does not achieve its intended outcome, the failure of a planned action to be completed as intended (an error of execution), the use of a wrong plan to achieve an aim (an error of planning), or a deviation from the process of care that may or may not cause harm to the patient. Patient harm from medical error can occur at the individual or system level. The taxonomy of errors is expanding to better categorize preventable factors and events. We focus on preventable lethal events to highlight the scale of potential for improvement.”

Makary’s group published data that supports iatrogenic deaths as the # 3 cause of death.

In a 2016 open letter to the CDC, Makary’s group urged the agency to add medical errors to its annual list of common causes of death.

The letter said, in part:
“We are writing this letter to respectfully ask the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to change the way it collects our country’s national vital health statistics each year. The list of most common causes of death published is very important – it informs our country’s research and public health priorities each year. The current methodology used to generate the list has what we believe to be a serious limitation. As a result, the list has neglected to identify the third leading cause of death in the U.S. – medical error.”

As a partial defense of over-busy, over-booked, sometimes mentally and physically exhausted health caregivers in the US, another researcher, Dr John James, has published an article in the Journal of Patient Safety. Dr James makes similar claims urging the CDC to evaluate death statistics more logically.

The title of his 2013 article is “A New, Evidence-based Estimate of Patient Harms Associated with Hospital Care”. (Journal of Patient Safety: September 2013 – Volume 9 – Issue 3 – p 122–128)

Below are excerpts from that article:
Objectives

Based on 1984 data developed from reviews of medical records of patients treated in New York hospitals, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimated that up to 98,000 Americans die each year from medical errors. The basis of this estimate is nearly 3 decades old; herein, an updated estimate is developed from modern studies published from 2008 to 2011.

Results

Using a weighted average of the 4 studies, a lower limit of 210,000 deaths per year was associated with preventable harm in hospitals…the true number of premature deaths associated with preventable harm to patients was estimated at more than 400,000 per year. Serious (but non-lethal) harm seems to be 10- to 20-fold more common than lethal harm.

Conclusions

The epidemic of patient harm in hospitals must be taken more seriously if it is to be curtailed. Fully engaging patients and their advocates during hospital care, systematically seeking the patients’ voice in identifying harms, transparent accountability for harm, and intentional correction of root causes of harm will be necessary to accomplish this goal.

“Medical care in the United States is technically complex at the individual provider level, at the system level, and at the national level. The amount of new knowledge generated each year by clinical research that applies directly to patient care can easily overwhelm the individual physician trying to optimize the care of his patients.”

“Because of increased production demands, providers may be expected to give care in suboptimal working conditions, with decreased staff, and a shortage of physicians, which leads to fatigue and burnout. It should be no surprise that preventable adverse events that harm patients are frighteningly common in this highly technical, rapidly changing, and poorly integrated industry. The picture is further complicated by a lack of transparency and limited accountability for errors that harm patients.”

“There are at least 3 time-based categories of preventable adverse events recognized in patients that are or have been hospitalized. The broadest definition encompasses all unexpected and harmful experience that a patient encounters as a result of being in the care of a medical professional or system because high quality, evidence-based medical care was not delivered during hospitalization. The harmful outcomes may be realized immediately, delayed for days or months, or even delayed many years.”

“There was much debate after the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report about the accuracy of its estimates. In a sense, it does not matter whether the deaths of 100,000, 200,000 or 400,000 Americans each year are associated with PAEs in hospitals….one must hope that the present, evidence-based estimate of 400,000+ deaths per year will foster an outcry for overdue changes and increased vigilance in medical care to address the problem of harm to patients who come to a hospital seeking only to be healed.”

Dr. Kohls is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug, mental health care for the last decade of his forty-year family practice career. He is a contributor to and an endorser of the efforts of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and was a member of Mind Freedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.

While running his independent clinic, he published over 400 issues of his Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter, which was emailed to a variety of subscribers. (They have not been archived at any website.) In the early 2000s, Dr Kohls taught a graduate level psychology course at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Itwas titled “The Science and Psychology of the Mind-Body Connection”.

Since his retirement, Dr Kohls has been writing a weekly column (titled “Duty to Warn”) for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly published in Duluth, Minnesota. He offers teaching seminars to the public and to healthcare professionals.

Many of Dr Kohls’ columns are archived at http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2; http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls; or https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles

Some Red Flags About ‘Red Flag’ Laws

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Some Red Flags About ‘Red Flag’ Laws
Beth Alcazar – 09/24/2019

Some Red Flags About ‘Red Flag’ Laws

A terrible tragedy occurred in my home state of Alabama last month. As reported by the local news, a father and his son were involved in an argument that led to the 70-year-old father shooting his 45-year-old son in the chest in what he claims was self-defense.

Soon afterward, the Alabama chapter of Moms Demand Action shared the news — along with a comment — on social media. They posted:

’Investigators said James Adams and his son, Alfred Dewayne Adams, were involved in an argument Sunday night. They further stated they believe James told Alfred he was going to bed. Alfred then walked into the bedroom and James shot him in the chest. Some of the neighbors and some other family members can tell us about stuff that was happening through [sic] the years.’ This life could have been spared by utilizing a red flag law.

Some Questions

“This life could have been spared by utilizing a red flag law?” That’s quite a statement. And I wanted to post a few questions to Moms Demand Action. First of all, I wanted to ask: If the father truly used a weapon in self-defense, would a “red flag” law have disarmed him … and then spared the life of his violent son? Would the father be dead, then, in this particular situation? Beyond that, do “red flag” laws cover all weapons in the home? What if the suspect had decided to use a knife? Or what about prescription drugs or poisons? Does it cover a person’s bare hands and/or body? Could we confiscate those weapons, as well, whenever we feel there’s “some stuff that was happening through the years?”

Some Examples

And what about the terrible case in which a son killed his father and wounded his mother with a knife? Two months ago, in Arizona, the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office reported that when the older couple returned home, “they noticed their 33-year-old son had consumed a large amount of beer. The parents argued with him over their drinking concern. He threw his phone at them and then went into the kitchen and grabbed two large knives. When he tried to stab his mother, his father intervened and attempted to restrain him while he was still in the kitchen. The son began attacking his dad. As the struggle moved from the kitchen into the living room, the son was able to stab his dad in the chest. The father collapsed to the floor.”

Or there’s this recent horror story from Illinois: A man in a Chicago suburb was arrested by local police after killing his own mother by stabbing her repeatedly with a samurai sword in the chest. Park Ridge Police had removed the murderer’s firearms two times, with the last time being in July 2019. So the suspect didn’t have a gun … but he still had evil intent. And he used whatever weapon he could find.

There’s also the atrocity from Nevada a few weeks ago in which a 36-year-old man bludgeoned a woman to death with a sledgehammer in what Las Vegas police said was a random attack at a laundromat.

I could go on. But I won’t. Perhaps you see the point.

Some Red Flags

Beyond the fear of just anyone pointing out someone else with a gun for no good reason or people wrongly having their firearms taken from them because of mistaken identity or possibly just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, there are so many red flags about “red flag” laws. Undoubtedly, we’d love to be able to stop crimes and keep bad people from harming or killing others. But this is not the movie Minority Report, in which police can employ some sort of psychic technology to arrest and convict murderers before they commit their crimes. Ultimately, we have to ask: Will “red flag” laws actually target violent people … or just people with guns? Because as the above examples (and countless others) show, the problem isn’t the firearms.

About Beth Alcazar

Author of Women’s Handgun & Self-Defense Fundamentals, associate editor of Concealed Carry Magazine and creator of the Pacifiers & Peacemakers column, Beth Alcazar has enjoyed nearly two decades of teaching and working in the firearms industry. She holds degrees in language arts, education and communication management and uses her experience and enthusiasm to share safe and responsible firearms ownership and usage with others. Beth is certified through the NRA as a Training Counselor, Chief Range Safety Officer and Certified Instructor for multiple disciplines. She is also a Certified Instructor through SIG Sauer Academy, ALICE Institute, DRAW School, TWAW and I.C.E. Training and is a USCCA Certified Instructor and Senior Training Counselor.


How many times have we heard about someone running over a bunch of people too. Even the car or truck can be a deadly weapon. If someone is dead set that they are going to kill, for whatever reason, they will find the tool to kill others with!

These gun grabbers want any possible way to take our protection from us. And these same gun grabbers are socialists/communists.

Impeachment can go more ways than one. These politicians that want to do away with the Second Amendment, work for us. When they were sworn in, they swore to honor and uphold the Constitution. Trying to do away with any of the Amendments to the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, is not honoring and upholding the Constitution. Violating one’s Oath of Office is usually grounds for them to be removed.

I say let’s remove their asses!
(Please note, I usually don’t comment on my own posts).

“The Fraud Squad’s” Ilhan Omar Now Facing Up To 40 Years In Prison & Deportation If Steinberg’s Allegations About Her Past Are Proven To Be True In Court

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“The Fraud Squad’s” Ilhan Omar Now Facing Up To 40 Years In Prison & Deportation If Steinberg’s Allegations About Her Past Are Proven To Be True In Court
POSTED BY: DEAN JAMES JULY 18, 2019
https://rightwingtribune.com/2019/07/18/the-fraud-squads/
Posted by Dean James at Right Wing Tribune

David Steinberg released his latest report on controversial Rep. Ilhan Omar on Thursday, it can be read in its entirety at PowerLineblog.com.

Jim Hoft’s, The Gateway Pundit suggests that: According to Steinberg there is credible evident that Ilhan Omar and her family changed their name to illegally enter the United States back in 1995.

There are also allegations that suggests that Ilhan Omar, from that time forward, through her time as an adult, has continued to break United States law. Steinberg believes Rep. Omar committed perjury at least eight times, beginning as early as 2009. If proven in a court of law, the charges against the Muslim Democrat Rep could mean up to 40 years of prison time and/or even forced deportation.

If Steinberg’s research and allegations prove to be true, it would sure seem that Ilhan Omar has no regard for US law and yet there she is, “serving” in Congress representing Minnesota, voting on what becomes the law of the land in the greatest nation on Earth and is even a sitting member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

This story is developing quickly and David Steinberg has reported today on Ilhan’s alleged criminal activity.

Again, if the allegations are proven, it would sure seem that the Minnesotan Rep has no qualms about lying on federal documents. I’m not an attorney and I could be wrong, but that sounds like the “F” word to me … FRAUD.

Powerline.com Reported: Please read the verified evidence below — and read it alongside the three years of verified evidence published by Scott Johnson, Preya Samsundar, and myself (our work is linked here https://twitter.com/realDSteinberg/status/1095789152589754377). The answers to those questions about 2009 appear to give probable cause to investigate Omar for eight instances of perjury, immigration fraud, marriage fraud, up to eight years of state and federal tax fraud, two years of federal student loan fraud, and even bigamy.
To be clear: The facts describe perhaps the most extensive spree of illegal misconduct committed by a House member in American history.

David Steinberg wraps up his article with the following list of possible crimes Ilhan Omar may have committed:

Consider the disturbingly inadequate evidence used to obtain FISA warrants on members of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Consider that Democratic representatives have demanded that Attorney General William Barr release grand jury testimony — itself an illegal act.

Yet here we have:

Verifiable UK and U.S. marriage records

Verifiable address records

Time-stamped, traceable, archived online communications (Convictions and settlements based upon social media evidence are commonplace, Anthony Weiner being a notable example)

Background check confirmations of SSNs and birthdates

Archived court documents signed under penalty of perjury

Photos which can be examined to rule out digital manipulation

The 2019 Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board investigation, which found Omar filed illegal joint tax returns with a man who was not her husband in at least 2014 and 2015

Three years’ of evidence published across many articles — none of which has been shown to be incorrect, or have even been challenged with contradictory evidence from Rep. Omar or any other source

Perjury evidence that stands on its own — regardless of whom she married:

Long after June 2011, she was clearly in contact with the only man in either the U.S. or the UK with the same name and birthdate as the man she married. She was clearly in contact with several people who were in contact with him.

Further, Preya Samsundar did contact him, published how she managed to contact him, and published his email admitting to being photographed with Omar in London in 2015. To be clear: Omar was legally married to an “Ahmed Nur Said Elmi” at the time she was photographed next to a man who admits his name is Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, and that he is in the photo.

Samsundar published all of this information on how to contact Ahmed Nur Said Elmi a few months before Omar swore to that nine-question court document.

Rep. Omar has refused all inquiries from her constituents, elected officials, and media outlets to provide any specific evidence contradicting even a single allegation suggested by three years of now-public information.

In fact, Omar has responded by making information less available:

In August 2016, after Scott Johnson and Preya Samsundar posted the allegations, Omar’s verified social media accounts were taken offline.

Ahmed Nur Said Elmi’s social media accounts were also taken offline.

When the accounts returned, a large amount of potentially incriminating evidence had verifiably been deleted.

I found and published at least ten additional “before and after” instances of evidence still being deleted in 2018.

Omar has released carefully worded, Clintonian statements that denigrate those seeking answers from her as racists. Yet she has repeatedly refused to answer questions or issue anything other than public relations statements.

I have a large amount of information that we have not published for reasons including the protection of sources.

Sources have expressed fear regarding published video and photo evidence (https://twitter.com/realDSteinberg/status/1102349426771853312 confirming threats from Omar’s campaign team. These sources have shared other evidence of threats. I have contacted the federal authorities to share this and other unpublished information. Providing knowingly false information to the DOJ is a serious crime.

I believe Scott Johnson, Preya Samsundar, and me, with our three years of articles, columns and posts, have provided more than enough evidence to give law enforcement authorities probable cause to open an investigation. Now would be the chance for law enforcement, and especially for Rep. Ilhan Omar’s House colleagues, to make a sincere stand against corruption and for the uniform application of the law.

The Gateway Pundit Reported: Once Again… It should be noted that by American law — When a marriage fraud is discovered, not only might the immigrant face severe immigration consequences, but both members of the marrying couple may face criminal penalties… An immigrant who is found to have committed marriage fraud would likely be removed from the United States (deported).

Please read this incredible report written by David Steingberg at Power Line today
Join us at SPREELY if you want REAL NEWS without the leftist censorship!

Dean James at Right Wing Tribune

God Bless.

Please take a moment and consider sharing this article with your friends and family. Thank you, we appreciate it!
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I Don’t Think They Ever Even Looked for Richard Merritt, While the Victims That Testified Against Him Remain in Fear

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Ex-Lawyer Supposed to Be In Prison for Cheating Clients, But Now He’s Wanted in His Mom’s Murder
by Alberto Luperon | 5:51 pm, February 3rd, 2019

Disbarred lawyer Richard Merritt, 44, was due in prison Friday for swindling his clients. Yet it’s two days later and he’s now wanted for allegedly killing his mother. Cops in Dekalb County, Georgia said that officers responded to a local home on Saturday morning regarding a dead person, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. They found Shirley Merritt was fatally stabbed. Cops blame this on her son.

Cops said Richard Merritt might be driving his mom’s brown 2009 Lexus RX350. It features the Georgia license plate CBV6004.

The suspect shouldn’t even be out, whether or not there was a murder. The suspect was convicted of settling lawsuits without clients’ knowledge, and keeping the cash. He was sentenced last month to 15 years in prison, to be followed by an equally long stint on probation. Prosecutors say he took advantage of the elderly, and those alleging medical malpractice. This scheme affected 17 former clients. He’d lie to them about the settlements, and claim their cases were ongoing, authorities said. Prosecutors claim he forged their signatures and checks, and notary seals.

Merritt surrendered his law license last year. From the Supreme Court of Georgia in a filing dated January 29, 2018:

In his petition, Merritt, who has been a member of the Bar since 2000, admits that in February 2017 he settled a client’s personal injury matter for $75,000, but failed to promptly disburse those funds to his client or her medical providers and failed to render a full accounting of the funds to his client.

The judge in his sentencing gave him time to prepare for prison, and turn himself in by 5 p.m. on February 1. The defendant had to deal with what was described as family medical issues before serving his sentence, according to a Fox 5 Atlanta story.

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Georgia: Disbarred Lawyer Richard Merritt Jailed on Theft, Elder Abuse Charges
http://www.barcomplaint.com/attorney-theft/georgia-disbarred-lawyer-richard-merritt-jailed-on-theft-elder-abuse-charges/

The problems of Richard Merritt have come to a head with his arrest. This has been long coming has his behavior has been in question for several years.
Georgia: Disbarred Lawyer Richard Merritt Jailed on Theft, Elder Abuse Charges
Attorney Richard Merritt was disbarred Monday for pocketing a client’s $75,000 settlement and jailed Wednesday on multiple felonies.

Richard Vinson Merritt

Former Smyrna attorney Richard V. Merritt, who was disbarred Monday after admitting to settling a client’s suit for $75,000 and then pocketing the money, woke up in the Cobb County Jail Thursday after being arrested on separate felony elder abuse, theft, exploitation and check fraud charges.

The spokesperson for the Cobb County Sheriff’s Office said he had no further information on the charges, which were apparently filed by the Smyrna Police Department. The booking report includes a notation that Merritt is to be held for the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office, where a press liaison said they received a bench warrant for “indirect criminal attempt.”

He provided no further information, and there was no immediate response from Smyrna police.

On Friday, Cobb County District Attorney Vic Reynolds said there was little he could offer concerning Merritt’s case so far.

“We have yet to receive the complete investigative file from the Cobb Sheriff’s Department,” said Reynolds via email. “When we do, our White Collar Unit will begin the process of determining what charges we will proceed to the grand jury with. In addition, our Investigators will begin reviewing the file upon receipt to see if there are any additional victims or charges which need to be pursued.”

Merritt remained in jail on Friday afternoon.

Merritt is the subject of multiple civil suits in Cobb County, including one filed by a woman who claims he forged her name on a $150,000 settlement agreement and check without her knowledge. She claims Merritt never turned over any funds.

He also faces several legal malpractice and fraud lawsuits in Cobb County from clients claiming he agreed to handle their cases and then never filed them and never pursued any actions.

Merritt has represented himself in each of the lawsuits.

The attorney for a plaintiff in one case, Sapp & Moriarty partner Daniel Moriarty—interviewed before word of Merritt’s arrest was known—said he was surprised at the mild tone in the state Supreme Court’s disbarment opinion, which only said Merritt “settled a client’s personal injury matter for $75,000 but failed to promptly disburse those funds to his client or her medical providers and failed to render a full accounting of the funds to his client.”

“That’s a euphemism for stealing money,” said Moriarty. “I talked to an investigator who has seen his bank records and determined that he had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars. It just blows my mind what he’s gotten away with.”

According the bar complaint reviewed by the Daily Report, Merritt was retained to handle a personal injury matter in December 2016 and settled it last February, cashing the forged check Feb.7. On Feb. 10, he filed a lawsuit “and continued to lead me on until late May 2017 when I learned what he had done,” the confidential complaint said.

“I have never seen a dime of the $75,000,” said Merritt’s former client.

Another civil suit filed in Cobb County State Court last year said Merritt forged a husband and wife’s signature on a settlement and check in a medical malpractice case and never told them.

Another complaint said Merritt accepted a med-mal case and continually told his client that he was investigating it. Merritt sent emails saying “All is well and we are moving forward on your case,” and “No worries I’m on it!”

Then he stopped accepting the woman’s calls, and the filing deadline passed.

In that case, Judge Maria Golick struck Merritt’s answers and ordered a damages-only trial after finding he “willfully failed to respond” to hearing notices. Golick scheduled a show-cause criminal contempt hearing, and the decision is apparently still under advisement, according to court records.

In the case Moriarty is handling, Merritt also allegedly claimed to be conducting discovery and searching for experts, even scheduling bogus depositions for his clients, only to cancel them at the last minute.

Merritt was the principal for the Smyrna-based Merritt Firm, whose offices were the subject of several dispossessory actions between 2015 and 2017, according to court records.

Last August, Merritt sued two attorneys on behalf of spine surgeon and frequent medical expert James Chappuis. At the time, Merritt said he vice president and general counsel of Chappuis’ Orthopaedic & Spine Surgery of Atlanta.

That case settled confidentially shortly after it was filed.

Source: Professional Legal Blog
Doctor Claims Patient, Lawyers Stiffed Him After Winning $700K at Trial
The doctor, who claims he’s owed more than $200,000, also testified as an expert witness at his patient’s trial.

An Atlanta spine surgeon who sometimes works as an expert witness in personal injury cases has sued a former patient and his lawyers, claiming they stiffed him on $200,000 in medical bills after netting a $700,000 jury award.

The complaint filed Monday by Dr. James Chappuis, founder and CEO of Orthopaedic & Spine Surgery of Atlanta, said he’s owed $205,323 for more than two years of treatment provided to Shin Cho. Chappuis also testified as an expert witness at Cho’s trial.

The complaint was filed by the surgery’s vice president and general counsel, Richard Merritt, and named Cho as well as his attorneys in the personal injury action, James Rice Jr. and Thomas Schaefer.

It accuses Cho of using “pressure and misrepresentation” to convince a clinic staffer to accept just $7,500 as full payment of the debt and said the lawyers paid themselves and disbursed Cho’s net award from their trust account despite knowing Chappuis was still owed.

Even the debt Cho purportedly satisfied was “erroneous” and allegedly constituted less than a quarter of the actual sum owed to the doctor, according to the complaint.

Rice denied the suit’s allegations, pointing to a May 31 letter from Chappuis’ practice, saying Cho’s $7,500 payment satisfied his “current outstanding patient balance of $43,871.01.”

“Shortly after they sent that, they contacted us to say there was a ‘bookkeeping error’ and that Mr. Cho owed more than $205,000,” Rice said. “I retained outside counsel to get advice on what to do, and we told their office we were going to disburse the funds in two weeks, and that’s what we did.”

“I also contacted the Georgia bar, and they confirmed that that was the proper way to handle it, so we did all our due diligence before we distributed the money,” Rice said.

Rice said the doctor and his practice were already paid more than $100,000 by Cho’s insurer, and “Mr. Cho candidly feels that he doesn’t owe them anything.”

Schaefer said he was out of town and had not had a chance to review the complaint but was “not really sure why I’ve been named as a party.”

“Our official quote is that we stand by the complaint as drafted,” said Merritt, declining to discuss the case further.

On May 22, Cho was awarded $700,000 for claims that he developed back pain following a minor car wreck in Gwinnett County.

Rice told the Daily Report at the time that Cho drove away from the scene. He argued Cho, who already suffered at least three previous back injuries, was an “eggshell plaintiff” for whom even a low-impact wreck was dangerous.

Last year, Cho signed a “letter of protection” with Chappuis and his practice, agreeing to pay or have his attorneys pay “all outstanding medical bills” from funds accruing from the legal action, the complaint said.

The lawyers had previously worked with Chappuis on other cases and “knew the critical importance of the medical care being provided by [Chappuis], as it related to satisfying the burden of proof in proving causation and damages, and in the effectiveness of Plaintiff Chappuis’ testimony, as both a treating physician and a medical expert,” according to the complaint.

In fact, Rice sent Chappuis a congratulatory text message after the trial, saying the jury “liked you a lot and coming across as objective helped,” while they did not “buy” the defense expert’s “nonsense.”

But on May 31, Cho went to Orthopaedic & Spine Surgery’s main office and “through deliberate pressure and misrepresentation of the facts, convinced a clerical employee to accept $7,500 in satisfaction and payment in full of an alleged $43,871.01, which was erroneous, as the amount due and owing is $205,323.70,” according to the complaint.

The complaint said that, on June 17, Chappuis’ attorney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Rice “specifically instructing him not to disburse any funds” until he and his practice had been paid. On June 30 a satisfaction of judgment was filed with the court, but Rice and Schaefer “intentionally disregarded their obligation to compensate” the plaintiffs.

The suit, filed Aug. 21, names Cho, Rice, Schaefer and the lawyers’ practices as defendants, and includes counts for fraud, negligent misrepresentation and breach of contract.

Rice said it is “unfortunate that the plaintiffs have chosen to bring both my firm and Mr. Shaefer’s firm into a matter that is moot,” and is also moot regarding Cho.

“To say the least, the lawsuit is disappointing, but in any event we will vigorously defend it, including seeking fees and costs,” Rice said.

Source: Daily Report

Name Of The Attorney: Attorney Richard Merritt
Name Of The Law Firm: Cobb County District Attorney Vic Reynolds
State: Georgia
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Judge Issues Ruling In Pubic Housing Gun Battle The case centered around a woman who was threatened with eviction from public housing if she kept a firearm in her own home.

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Judge Hagedorn had zero chance of winning election to the state Supreme court less than four weeks ago, but a grass-roots effort helped galvanize voters.
50 States
PUBLISHED: 1:15 PM 14 Apr 2019
UPDATED: 5:05 PM 14 Apr 2019
Judge Issues Ruling In Pubic Housing Gun Battle
The case centered around a woman who was threatened with eviction from public housing if she kept a firearm in her own home.
Georgette by Georgette

One Tiny Election Shows Americans Fed Up With Liberal Manipulation, Assaults

It is no longer legal for the state to prohibit gun ownership for low-income people.
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In East St. Louis, if a person lives in public housing, they are not allowed to own or have a firearm on the property. That is… that was the previous ‘policy.’

Now, a judge has ruled the action is a violation of the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

The Belleview News-Democrat reported:

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the East St. Louis Housing Authority cannot deny, through rules and regulations, a tenant’s right to lawfully own a firearm.

“Among whatever else, the Second Amendment protects the rights of a law-abiding individual to possess functional firearms in his or her home for lawful purposes, most notably for self-defense and defense of family,” US District Court Judge Phil Gilbert said in the ruling.

A lawsuit filed in federal court was brought by Second Amendment Foundation and the Illinois State Rifle Association, who argued that firearm bans in government-subsidized housing is unconstitutional.

Their case focused on an East St. Louis woman, identified as N. Doe, who was beaten and sexually assaulted in her home.

The assault ended only when one of her children pulled a gun on the attacker.

Doe alleged in the suit that the East St. Louis Housing Authority threatened to terminate her lease unless she could prove she did not have a gun at home.

She said she was told the building was safe and that she didn’t need a gun after she protested to housing authorities, the lawsuit states.

The ban applies only to people of low-income who live in public housing and denies them the right to keep and bear arms because they can’t afford private housing, the lawsuit states.

The Belleville News-Democrat reported that Doe’s lease says “residents are not to display, use or possess or allow members of (Doe’s) household or guest to display, use or possess any firearms, (operable or inoperable) … anywhere in the unit or elsewhere on the property of the authority,” according to the lawsuit.

Violating the lease can lead to its termination, something Doe feared.

The East St. Louis Housing Authority did not respond to a request for comments.

ISRA Executive Director Richard Pearson said of the ruling:

“The right to defend your life and your property is a right for everyone regardless of where they live …” Pearson said. “It is sad that this woman had to go to these lengths just to defend herself. The threats to her are real.”

“Thankfully, she will be able to legally own a firearm and defend herself, but it is truly sad that it takes a federal judge to do what should have been done a long time ago,” he added.

But many people point out that the Second Amendment is not solely designed for the use of self-defense.

Scholars agree that the Founding Fathers placed that right early because 1.) without the power to defend your other rights, they can be taken away, and 2.) the people must have the power to dispossess an unjust government.

Thankfully, this judge understands the rule of law and upheld one of the most basic rights Americans have.

The fact that the liberal public housing authority tried to derive this woman of her right is unconscionable.

Of course, such as asinine policy has not stopped the gun violence and deaths plaguing the projects in East St. Louis. A few months ago, six people were shot in ‘unrelated’ incidents in one night, and the deaths continue to rise.

Perhaps now that decent people who are living in public housing have the ability to defend themselves from the liberal filth that has been perpetuated, deaths will decrease.

Ex-wife of Georgia lawyer fears for her safety after he allegedly killed his mother

190211-jenine-merritt-richard-merritt-cs-259p-949dfa65a7dfe1c5b8
“We’re tired of looking over our shoulder and we’re looking for closure and to move on with our lives,” Jenine Merritt says of herself and their two children.
Feb. 11, 2019, 4:56 PM EST
By Janelle Griffith
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/after-georgia-lawyer-allegedly-killed-his-mother-ex-wife-fears-n970281

The former wife of a disbarred Georgia attorney who allegedly stabbed his mother to death said she is scared for her and her children’s safety.

A nationwide manhunt is underway for Richard Merritt, who police said removed his court-ordered ankle monitor before allegedly killing his mother Feb. 2 and stealing her 2009 silver Lexus. He has been on the run since, according to DeKalb County police.
Image: Richard Merritt and his ex-wife, Jenine.
Richard Merritt and his ex-wife, Jenine.Courtesy of Jenine Merritt

“We’re terrified,” Jenine Merritt told NBC News on Monday, referring to herself and their two children, who are 12 and 14. “We’re terrified because of what we know he’s capable of now.”

Richard Merritt, 44, was scheduled to surrender to authorities Feb. 1 in Cobb County, after he was sentenced to 15 years behind bars and 15 years on probation for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from elderly clients between 2014 and 2017. After the conviction, he had been given until Feb. 1 to “get his affairs in order.”

On the eve of the date he was supposed to report to jail, Jenine Merritt said he threatened her life in a late-night phone call.

He was “clearly drunk,” she said, saying her ex-husband “is a serious alcoholic.”

Richard Merritt was verbally abusive on a regular basis, but had never before physically threatened her, she said.

The Merritts divorced in 2018 after 19 years of marriage.

Jenine Merritt added that she is “horrified” by the death of her former mother-in-law, Shirley Merritt, describing her as “a good mother and grandmother.”

“That part does not feel real to us,” she said. “And maybe, once we move on to the point where we’re not scared for our safety, we can really begin the grieving process, which we need to do.”
190211-shirley-merritt-cs-301p-949dfa65a7dfe1c5b80a4a16a46f2e6e
Image: Shirley Merritt
Shirley Merritt Courtesy of Jenine Merritt

Richard Merritt is now the subject of a nationwide search, Frank Lempka, an inspector with the U.S. Marshals Service, said.
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He may have shaved his head in an attempt to change his appearance and should be considered armed and dangerous, the Marshals Service said. The agency is offering a $5,000 reward for information that leads to his arrest.

Richard Merritt filed multiple medical malpractice claims for his clients and later admitted in court that he pocketed much of what they had won. He used the settlements on personal expenses including vacations, authorities said.

“We lost our home, we lost everything we had,” Jenine Merritt said of her ex-husband’s conviction. “I had no idea that he had done these things to these poor people that trusted him and needed him.”

She also said she had no idea her then-husband was paying for their vacations with stolen money and would not have participated if she had known.

She believes it is only a matter of time before he is caught.

“We’re tired of looking over our shoulder, and we’re looking for closure and to move on with our lives,” she said.

I have a problem with all this. He and his wife divorced to tie up the money Rich had been stealing. She still has money from the people Rich stole the money from.
And since when does someone go and cut off the ankle monitor? The story that I heard was that after he killed his mom, he went to Cartersville and cut the ankle monitor off and hopped on a plane at the Cartersville airport (very small airport). That’s just what I heard.
I also can’t imagine why he was still out walking around anyway.
The other thing that I heard was that Rich and the Cobb County DA were really good friends.
One thing that is fact for sure, Rich Merritt was asst attorney general in GA for about 15 years, thus why he had so many friends in the legal world. The victims were afraid that he would get no time for his crimes. Everyone was shocked at the stiff sentence he got. They give murderers that length of time.
No matter, they obviously had not planned on Rich killing his Mama…

New York’s Lawyers and Judges Behaving Badly, From New York Law Journal

https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/2018/12/30/lawyers-judges-behaving-badly/
Tara-Lenich-Article-201612051956
Tara Lenich, admitted to forging judicial orders to run illegal wiretaps on a fellow prosecutor and a New York City Police Detective, sentenced to one year in prison in early 2018.

Edmund-Duffy
Edmund Duffy’s five-decade legal career, during which he rose to prominence as the former heard of the China practice at Skadden, officially ended 02/08/2018, when he was automatically disbarred after he pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography.

AP-Robert-Cicale-web
A Suffolk County District Court Judge was suspended from the bench after he was arrested and charged with burglary. He was caught with women’s underwear that he allegedly stole from a private residence.

Evan-Greebel-Article-201710202147
Evan Greebel, a former partner at Kaye Scholer and Katten Muchin Rosenman, was sent to prison for working with disgraced pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli to defraud investors.

ravelo-keila-Article-201810091948
Keila Ravelo was sentenced to five years for conspiring to defraud her former law firms and clients out of $7.8 Million, using bogus litigation vendors. Prosecutors said that the former Hunton & Williams and Willkie Farr & Gallagher partner used the money to fuel a lavish lifestyle.

Frank-Aquila-Article-201809281858
Prominent M&A partner Frank Aquila deleted his Twitter account after tellling White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders she should “Rot in Hell You Bitch” for defending Sen. Lindsey Graham amid the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.

Aaron-Schlossberg-Article-201805171926
Manhattan attorney Aaron Schlossberg’s rant against employees speaking Spanish at a Mexican Restaurant provoked a firestorm on social media.

Anna-Lushchinskaya-Article-201812142118
Another viral video captured a second New York City lawyer who directed racially charged comments at bystanders.

Gavel-and-Book-Article-201710162142
“Egragious and outragesou” conduct by ex-Mintz Levin associate Anthony Jacob Zappin during his pro se legal war with his former wife, also an attorney, led to his disbarment.

Judicial-Robe-Article-201712011528
New York’s high court unanimously said that Civil Court Judge Terrence O’Connor’s “intemparate” and “inappropriate” behavior in the courtroom were bad enough, but his decision to not cooperate with an investigation into his actions also contributed to his removal from the bench.

From Our Friends at Livinglies, Neil Garfield

https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/95852/posts/2112751964

How to Use and Oppose Judicial Notice

One of the biggest bluffs used by claimants in foreclosure and eviction proceedings is the request for judicial notice. If unopposed, this results in myths being propagated as facts. Just because a document exists or has been uploaded to SEC.GOV or any other site doesn’t mean the source or the content is credible or reliable.
If I manage to record a deed purporting to transfer title that doesn’t mean that title is transferred nor that my ownership is to be presumed. The same is true if I upload the same fabricated deed to SEC.gov or any other site on the internet.
Judicial notice is erroneously applied as a vehicle for shifting the burden of proof. The basic rule of evidence is simple: the proponent of evidence must prove the truth, credibility and reliability of that evidence, even if it is admitted into evidence. Otherwise the evidence is admitted with zero weight.
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THIS ARTICLE IS NOT A LEGAL OPINION UPON WHICH YOU CAN RELY IN ANY INDIVIDUAL CASE. HIRE A LAWYER.
==========================
Most states essentially have the same statute in their laws of evidence, like this one from Florida:

90.202 Matters which may be judicially noticed.A court may take judicial notice of the following matters, to the extent that they are not embraced within s. 90.201:

(1) Special, local, and private acts and resolutions of the Congress of the United States and of the Florida Legislature.

(2) Decisional, constitutional, and public statutory law of every other state, territory, and jurisdiction of the United States.

(3) Contents of the Federal Register.

(4) Laws of foreign nations and of an organization of nations.

(5) Official actions of the legislative, executive, and judicial departments of the United States and of any state, territory, or jurisdiction of the United States.

(6) Records of any court of this state or of any court of record of the United States or of any state, territory, or jurisdiction of the United States.

(7) Rules of court of any court of this state or of any court of record of the United States or of any other state, territory, or jurisdiction of the United States.

(8) Provisions of all municipal and county charters and charter amendments of this state, provided they are available in printed copies or as certified copies.

(9) Rules promulgated by governmental agencies of this state which are published in the Florida Administrative Code or in bound written copies.

(10) Duly enacted ordinances and resolutions of municipalities and counties located in Florida, provided such ordinances and resolutions are available in printed copies or as certified copies.

(11) Facts that are not subject to dispute because they are generally known within the territorial jurisdiction of the court. (e.s.)

(12) Facts that are not subject to dispute because they are capable of accurate and ready determination by resort to sources whose accuracy cannot be questioned. (e.s.)

(13) Official seals of governmental agencies and departments of the United States and of any state, territory, or jurisdiction of the United States.

History.s. 1, ch. 76-237; s. 1, ch. 77-77; s. 1, ch. 77-174; ss. 3, 22, ch. 78-361; ss. 1, 2, ch. 78-379.

A quick review of this statute, essentially the same as all others, reveals that it is not intended to be used as proof of contested facts. The fact that a document obviously exists may not be subject to contest unless the objection is that the document was prepared expressly for trial and not as part of whatever transaction is being contested.

Courts often overstep by becoming the lawyer for the claimant in foreclosure or eviction. As an example of the court stepping into the shoes of the claimant, there is the issue of judicial notice. You should research this. Because judicial notice is intended to be used as follows:
  1. For judicial economy — i.e., acceptance of facts that are virtually incontrovertible and not requiring proof. VERSUS your objections to the content of those documents. The requirement of absolute credibility is essential for judicial notice. There is no prejudice to any party by requiring actual proof of the documents and its contents. Judicial economy does not trump the rules of evidence which are designed to ferret out the truth not to assume facts that are untrue or that could easily be untrue because they came from an interested party.
  2. For documents, the only application of the judicial notice doctrine is that the documents exist and are maintained on a completely trusted site and not that what is written on them is true.
  3. In the case of government documents prepared by government with no interest in making any claims or defending any claims but simply in the ordinary course of record keeping, the record is subject to judicial notice and the content is generally presumed to be true unless disproven by the the opposing party.
  4. Judicial notice is completely inappropriate where the documents were prepared by parties with an interest in the outcome of litigation and claims and are not inspected, reviewed or scrutinized as to accuracy.
  5. Verifying facial validity of a document is NOT the same as verifying the statements contained on the document.
  6. For documents the source must be an independent third party source with no interest in the outcome. So if a fabricated assignment of mortgage is recorded in the county records, then the the existence of the document may be judicially noticed without any presumptions of the veracity or sufficiency of the statements contained in the assignment.
  7. Failure to object to the introduction of the document MIGHT be grounds for admission of both the document and its contents. The ability of the opposing party to present evidence that the document had been fabricated and that the statements contained within it are untrue or misleading is not barred by failure to object.
  8. The fact that it is admitted in evidence does not mean that should be given great weight by the trial court. Any evidence submitted by a party who has a direct interest in the outcome of litigation is to be viewed skeptically and requiring corroborative proof.
  9. Judicial notice is NOT appropriate for the PSA or anything else if the request for notice directs the court’s attention to SEC.GOV. This is an effort at misdirection.
  10. SEC.GOV is merely a repository for uploading documents with no more official capacity than box.com or dropbox.com. The fact that a document is there is NOT an indication that the document is an official document. The SEC has not reviewed it or approved it in any way, manner shape or form.
  11. BEST Evidence: Only the original document produced in court would be sufficient evidence of the document’s existence and then only if it was complete and signed — which means that the mortgage loan schedule is attached as the original mortgage loan schedule attached the trust instrument, the prospectus and the servicing agreements when they were originally executed.
  12. It is a common ploy to upload documents to SEC.Gov and then request judicial notice. This is wrong.
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The entire West Virginia Supreme Court was just impeached. By True Pundit


The entire West Virginia Supreme Court was just impeached. Here’s everything you need to know.
By Editor August 15, 2018 No Comments
http://www.theeventchronicle.com/news/north-america/the-entire-west-virginia-supreme-court-was-just-impeached-heres-everything-you-need-to-know/
By True Pundit

West Virginia lawmakers made a historic decision Monday: They voted to impeach the state’s entire Supreme Court of Appeals, the highest court in the state.

The West Virginia House of Delegates Judiciary Committee approved 14 articles of impeachment against the court’s four sitting justices last week. Their alleged grievances ranged from misusing taxpayer money for office renovations to using state-owned property, including a historic desk, for personal use.

The full House of Delegates considered the articles of impeachment on Monday, ultimately approving 11 of them through a series of votes that fell along party lines, the New York Times reported.

Eight of the articles targeted the court’s chief justice, Allen Loughry, who, according to the Times, has been suspended since June. Among other accusations, he is accused of lying to lawmakers and using state property for his personal use, including vehicles and gas cards.

The remaining justices — acting Chief Justice Margaret Workman and Justices Robin Davis and Elizabeth Walker — were impeached on three articles. Workman and Davis were impeached for overpaying senior status judges on lower courts, while Davis was impeached for misusing $500,000 in taxpayer funds on office renovations.

All four justices were charged with neglect of duty, abusing their power, and failing to reign in the spending of the others, according to NBC News.

The court’s fifth justice, Menis Ketchum, resigned last month before impeachment proceedings began. He has also pleaded guilty to a federal charge of defrauding the state of West Virginia. He faces 20 years in federal prison.

Meanwhile, Loughry, who was already on administrative leave prior to Monday’s developments, is facing a 22-count federal indictment for fraud, witness tampering, lying to federal investigators, and obstruction of justice. His criminal trial is set to begin in October. If found guilty, he faces a maximum sentence of 395 years in prison and a $5.5 million fine. – READ MORE

West Virginia Senate President Mitch Carmichael claims the Republican party is responsible for the state’s economic turnaround and believes the election of President Donald Trump has only added to their prosperity.

“For the first time in over 83 years the people of over West Virginia selected the Republicans to lead the state in 2014,” Carmichael told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Both houses have been Democrat for 83 years and that leadership brought us the lowest income per capita in the country.”

Carmichael blamed Democratic leadership for a loss in population and manufacturing jobs, then accused them of selling out to special interest groups.

Carmichael then praised Trump’s leadership and said the state was economically liberated when he was elected to the White House in 2016.

“Trump was an immediate relief to the energy sector,” Carmichael declared. “The night of the election it felt like the boot of the fed government had been lifted off our necks. President Trump has made a tremendous difference.”

One of the main issues still lingering for West Virginia is the opioid crisis, but Carmichael believes it can be tied to the state’s lack of economic prosperity.

“The most prominent area of opioid abuse are the places with the poorest economic climate,” he said. “Even in West Virginia, the specific areas hardest hit with addiction are the ones hardest hit economically with high unemployment.” – READ MORE

This article (The entire West Virginia Supreme Court was just impeached. Here’s everything you need to know.) was originally published on True Pundit and syndicated by The Event Chronicle.

Same Old Story: Paper Trail vs, Money Trail (Freddie Mac) Posted on May 15, 2018 by Neil Garfield

Same Old Story: Paper Trail vs, Money Trail (Freddie Mac)
Posted on May 15, 2018 by Neil Garfield
Payment by third parties may not reduce the debt but it does increase the number of obligees (creditors). Hence in every one of these foreclosures, except for a minuscule portion, indispensable parties were left out and third parties were in reality getting the proceeds of liquidation from foreclosure sales.
The explanations of securitization contained on the websites of the government Sponsored Entities (GSE’s) clearly demonstrate what I have been writing for 11 years and reveal a pattern of illusion and deception.

The most important thing about a financial transaction is the money. In every document filed in support of the illusion of securitization, it steadfastly holds firm to discussion of paper instruments and not a word about the actual location of the money or the actual identity of the obligee of that money debt.

Each explanation avoids the issue of where the money goes and how it was “processed” (i.e., stolen, according to me and hundreds of other scholars.)

It underscores the fact that the obligee (“debt owner” or “holder in due course” is never present in any legal proceeding or actual transaction or transfer of of the debt. This leaves us with only one conclusion. The debt never moved, which is to say that the obligee was always the same, albeit unaware of their status.

Knowing this will help you get traction in the courtroom but alleging it creates a burden of proof for you to prove something that you know is true but can only be confirmed with access to the books, records an accounts of the parties claiming such transactions ands transfers occurred.

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THIS ARTICLE IS NOT A LEGAL OPINION UPON WHICH YOU CAN RELY IN ANY INDIVIDUAL CASE. HIRE A LAWYER.

For one such example see Freddie Mac Securitization Explanation

And the following diagram:

Freddie Mac Diagram of Securitization

What you won’t find anywhere in any diagram supposedly depicting securitization:

Money going to an originator who then lends the money to the borrower.
Money going to a named REMIC “Trust” for the purpose of purchasing loans or anything else.
Money going to the alleged unnamed beneficiaries of a named REMIC “Trust.”
Money going to the alleged unnamed investors who allegedly purchased “certificates” allegedly issued by or on behalf of a named REMIC “Trust.”
Money going to the originator for sale of the debt, note and mortgage package.
Money going to originator for endorsement of note to alleged transferee.
Money going to originator for assignment of mortgage.
Money going to the named foreclosing party upon liquidation of foreclosed property.
Money going to the homeowner as royalty for use of his/her/their identity forming the basis of value in issuance of derivatives, hedge products and contract, insurance products and synthetic derivatives.
Money being credited to the obligee’s loan receivable account reducing the amount of indebtedness (yes, really). This is because the obligee has no idea where the money is coming from or why it is being paid. But one thing is sure — the obligee is receiving money in all circumstances.
Payment by third parties may not reduce the debt but it does increase the number of obligees (creditors). Hence in every one of these foreclosures, except for a minuscule portion, indispensable parties were left out and third parties were in reality getting the proceeds of liquidation from foreclosure sales.
Spread the word

Attorneys of the Month for January thru March 5th, 2018.


The following Georgia attorneys were disciplined and/or disbarred for the month Of March, 2018:

March 5, 2018
S18Y0348. IN THE MATTER OF SAM LOUIS LEVINE

Sam L. Levine
S18Y0350. IN THE MATTER OF CHRISTOPHER AARON CORLEY
S18Y0383. IN THE MATTER OF ANDRE KEITH SANDERS
S18Y0559. IN THE MATTER OF WALTER LINTON MOORE

Februry 19, 2018:
S18Y0315. IN THE MATTER OF NATALIE DAWN MAYS
S18Y0434. IN THE MATTER OF CHERYL JOYCE BRAZIEL
S18Y0511. IN THE MATTER OF DONALD EDWARD SMART

February 5, 2018:
S18Y0484. IN THE MATTER OF ADAM LORENZO SMITH

Adam L. Smith

January 29, 2018:
S17Y1329. IN THE MATTER OF RICKY W. MORRIS, JR.
S17Y1918. IN THE MATTER OF CLARENCE R. JOHNSON, JR.
S17Y2016. IN THE MATTER OF CAMERON SHAHAB
S18Y0142. IN THE MATTER OF ROBERT JUTZI HOWELL
S18Y0256. IN THE MATTER OF LARRY BUSH HILL
S18Y0264. IN THE MATTER OF CHRISTOPHER MARK MILLER
S18Y0269. IN THE MATTER OF LORNE HOWARD CRAGG
S18Y0387. IN THE MATTER OF RICHARD V. MERRITT

Rich Merritt

If you want to know more, go to Supreme Court of Georgia, 2018 Opinion sand Summaries
The number on the left hand side above, is the case number for the attorney. The Attorney discipline is at the end of each section. If you click the case number, you can read the Order,

From Our Friends at Living Lies Weblog: CitiMortgage Must Face Class Action for False notarization of Documents in Foreclosures


CitiMortgage Must Face Class Action for False notarization of Documents in Foreclosures
https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/95852/posts/1614247594
Oct 3, 2017

Where is the prejudice in requiring the foreclosing party to prove its case with facts raather than presumptions?

There are two big takeaways: (1) Courts are getting more curious about what really happened in the mortgage meltdown and (2) this is one more example of how the TBTF banks are not entitled to any legal presumptions regarding their documents.

Research always shows that a fact is presumed in certain cases — but only in the absence of questions about the credibility of the party who proffers a document from which the legal presumption arises.
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THIS ARTICLE IS NOT A LEGAL OPINION UPON WHICH YOU CAN RELY IN ANY INDIVIDUAL CASE. HIRE A LAWYER.
—————-
see https://www.reuters.com/article/citimortgage-foreclosures/9th-circuit-revives-lawsuit-over-citimortgage-foreclosure-records-idUSL2N1MD245

What the banks have done is (1) create self-serving documents and then (2) fabricate other documents that rely upon the facts stated or implied in prior fabricated documents. The “greater weight” (piles of false documents) of the evidence falsely leads judges to presume that all that paper must mean something even when it is all trash.

Like other objections or motions in limine practicitioners should strive for a ruling that the foreclosing party must actually prove the facts that they want to be presumed. That includes the funding of the loan, the payment for the loan, and whether any so-called “transfers” were anything more than some words scratched on a piece of paper. They must prove facts not receive the benefit of a legal presumption or factual assumption.

Transfer documents (e.g., assignment of mortgage) and endorsements imply that a purchase took place. Whether such a purchase took place or not, the documents read the same. The error is in assuming the transaction took place when the source of the document has at least questionable credibility. Credibility questions arise whether it is Wells Fargo in creating fake financial accounts and then charging fees for them, Citi fabricating signatures and notarization, BofA or US Bank appearing as the injured party, or Chase claiming to own WAMU loans that not even WAMU had on its books. It’s obvious that the players are

Credibility questions arise whether it is Wells Fargo in creating fake financial accounts and then charging fees for them, Citi fabricating signatures and notarization, BofA or US Bank appearing as the injured party, or Chase claiming to own WAMU loans that not even WAMU had on its books. It’s obvious that the players are allin on the same “game,” to wit: keeping ivnestors and homeowners in the dark while the banks trade “paper.”

That includes the funding of the loan, the payment for the loan, and whether any so-called “transfers” were anything more than some words scratched on a piece of paper. They must prove facts not presume them. Transfer documents and endorsements imply that a purchase took place

Transfer documents and endorsements imply that a purchase took place because it is obvious that nobody goes around giving mortgage loans away. The “presumption” that the foreclosing parties want to use is that there must have been a purchase transaction in real life — facts — as opposed to the presumption that a transaction occurred in which one party purchased a loan from another party.

The presumption to the contrary in the context of hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of cases in which documents were fabricated, forged, robo-signed, and falsely notarized leads the courts to a false conclusion and the denial of the homeowner’s basic defense: this foreclosing party has no right, title or interest in my loan and doesn’t represent anyone who does have a right, title or interest in the debt, note or mortgage.

It is wrong for a court to ignore the 50 state settlement, the consent orders and the many cases in which borrowers were successful in undercutting the claim that the foreclosing party had legal standing.

Consider this: if the foreclosing parties really were acting legally, why wouldn’t they want to prove it? That would certainly discredit borrower defenses and send a message to foreclosure defense lawyers that these loans are real and the transfers were in fact purchases. Where is the prejudice in requiring the foreclosing party to prove its case with facts raather than presumptions?

GA BlackRobe Mafia Strikes Again! This time, they cut the cases they have to rule on more than 50%. Ask yourself, just what does GA Supreme Court do?

Ga. Appellate Practice § 12:4Georgia Appellate Practice With Forms
November 2016 Update
Christopher J. McFaddena0, Charles R. Shepparda1, Charles M. Cork IIIa2, George W. K. Snyder, Jr.a3, David A. Webstera4, Kelly A. Jenkinsa5

Chapter 12. Overview of the Appellate Process§ 12:4. Selecting the proper court—Particular types of cases
Before the Appellate Jurisdiction Reform Act of 2016, the Georgia Supreme Court had appellate jurisdiction over 10 categories of cases specified in the Georgia Constitution,(fn1) and the Court of Appeals had jurisdiction over the rest. The limits of each category were interpreted in numerous decisions, many of which are discussed in the remainder of this section, and many of which are obscure or debatable. The Appellate Jurisdiction Reform Act will change that allocation of appellate jurisdiction significantly, by shifting several categories of cases over to the Court of Appeals. This transfer will take effect for notices of appeal or applications to appeal that are filed on or after January 1, 2017. (fn2)

Constitutional questions.
The Supreme Court has exclusive appellate jurisdiction over cases calling for the construction of the Georgia Constitution (fn3) and cases in which the constitutionality of a law has been drawn in question. (fn4) This jurisdiction, which the Appellate Jurisdiction Reform Act does not alter, expressly extends to cases involving the constitutionality of ordinances. (fn5) Administrative regulations, however, are not laws within the meaning of the Constitution, and thus, the Court of Appeals has jurisdiction to resolve whether a particular regulation is constitutional.(fn6) In order to invoke the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction a constitutional question must be distinctly raised and ruled on by the trial court,(fn7) but an oral ruling is sufficient. (fn8) The question must also be timely raised; the Supreme Court will transfer cases involving constitutional questions that are untimely raised even if the trial court rules upon them.(fn9) The ruling must address the merits of the constitutional challenge; a ruling that the constitutional challenge was untimely does not confer jurisdiction upon the Supreme Court.(fn10) However, if the trial court also rules on the merits of the challenge as an alternative basis for its judgment, the Supreme Court has jurisdiction. (fn11) If a constitutional question is raised and ruled upon below, the Supreme Court has exclusive jurisdiction on appeal even if, upon consideration of the entire case, the Supreme Court determines that the case can be properly resolved without deciding the constitutional issue and declines to decide the constitutional issue.(fn12) The Supreme Court has jurisdiction over an appeal raising such constitutional questions even if appellate jurisdiction is based on a non-constitutional ruling, so long as the constitutional question is within the scope of pendent appellate jurisdiction under O.C.G.A. § 5-6-34(d). (fn13)

Mere mention of a constitutional principle will not bring a case within the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. “The Court of Appeals has jurisdiction to decide questions of law that involve the application, in a general sense, of unquestioned and unambiguous provisions of the Constitution.” (fn14) After one challenge to the constitutionality of a statute has been considered and rejected by the Supreme Court, subsequent challenges on the same point are relegated to the Court of Appeals. (fn15) Different constitutional challenges to the same statute will be within the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction if the other criteria discussed above are met. (fn16)

The Supreme Court has overruled a line of cases that had interpreted transfers of cases to the Court of Appeals as implied holdings that there is no meritorious constitutional issue in the case.(fn17) For instance, the Court of Appeals may consider whether the evidence in the case should lead to a result different from the case in which the Supreme Court decided the constitutional point. (fn18)

Election contests.
The Supreme Court has exclusive appellate jurisdiction in all cases of election contest. (fn19) This jurisdiction, which the Appellate Jurisdiction Reform Act does not alter, extends to challenges to candidates for and results of elections. (fn20) It does not extend to other election-related issues, such as the qualifications of a voter.

Title to land.
After January 1, 2017, the Court of Appeals will have jurisdiction over appeals involving title to land. (fn21) Until then, the Supreme Court has jurisdiction over these cases. The Supreme Court’s jurisdiction over cases involving title to land has been described as limited to actions “such as ejectment and statutory substitutes, in which the plaintiff asserts a presently enforceable legal title against the possession of the defendant for the purpose of recovering the land.” (fn22) Other cases have conceived that jurisdiction more broadly so as to include actions to remove encumbrances from title. (fn23) These two understandings of the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction over cases involving title to land have yet to be reconciled. (fn24) Cases in which the right of possession and not title to land are in dispute are for the Court of Appeals. (fn25) Cases in which the issue on appeal does not involve a dispute over title, though the underlying case is entirely about title, belong in the Court of Appeals. (fn26)

A suit to cancel a deed or to declare it void for lack of valid consideration is not within the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction. (fn27) Likewise, a suit seeking to set aside a conveyance on grounds of fraud is not within the Supreme Court’s “title to land” jurisdiction. (fn28) A suit for specific performance of a real estate contract is not a suit concerning “title to land.” (fn29) A suit for reformation of a deed is not a case involving title to land. (fn30) An appeal calling for the court to construe a deed belongs in the Court of Appeals if the present title to the property does not turn on that construction. (fn31) Because easements do not affect title to property, the Court of Appeals has jurisdiction of cases concerning them. (fn32) Boundary-line cases are likewise within the province of the Court of Appeals, notwithstanding that such cases usually involve incidental issues relating to equitable relief. (fn33) In cases involving lis pendens, where the underlying issue is a legal question which does not involve title to land and which can be resolved without resort to equity, the Court of Appeals has jurisdiction. (fn34) Appeals involving foreclosure proceedings do not involve title to land. (fn35) The Supreme Court has transferred to the Court of Appeals an appeal of an action seeking to set aside a tax sale. (fn36) Likewise, the Court of Appeals has jurisdiction over appeals in suits seeking to set aside fraudulent conveyances. (fn37) The Court of Appeals has jurisdiction over condemnation cases in which “a recovery of land is not being sought” and the only issue “for determination is the amount of just and adequate compensation that must be paid for that condemned property.” (fn38)

However, partitioning does involve title to land, and appellate jurisdiction in such cases rests in the Supreme Court.(fn39) Appeals on the merits of suits seeking to remove clouds on title belong in the Supreme Court. (fn40) A suit to establish priority among the liens on property, though, lies within the jurisdiction of the Court of Appeals. (fn41)

Equity cases.
After January 1, 2017, the Court of Appeals will have jurisdiction over appeals in all equity cases “except those cases concerning proceedings in which a sentence of death was imposed or could be imposed and those cases concerning the execution of a sentence of death.” (fn42) Until then, the Supreme Court has jurisdiction over these cases. The Supreme Court has jurisdiction where the issue on appeal involves the legality or propriety of equitable relief. (fn43) If the appeal raises questions about the scope of equitable relief granted below or how the superior court molded the relief, the appeal is within the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction. (fn44) It has jurisdiction over an injunction that is entered upon the application of equitable principles (fn45) and an action to obtain the equitable relief of virtual adoption. (fn46)

The Supreme Court has drawn a “distinction between an equity case and a case wherein equitable relief was sought.” (fn47) An appeal is not an “equity case” for purposes of the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction if the award of injunctive or other equitable relief is or would be merely ancillary to the determination of legal rights, and the only substantive contentions relate to issues of law; in such cases, appellate jurisdiction belongs in the Court of Appeals.(fn48) Similarly, a trial court’s ruling on an equitable issue does not bring a case within the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction unless the equitable ruling is appealed.)fn49) Raising an equitable defense in a case otherwise within the jurisdiction of the Court of Appeals does not bring the case within the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.(fn50) Thus, a claim that the superior court should have exercised equitable discretion not to grant equitable relief that would otherwise follow upon resolution of the underlying legal issue belongs in the Court of Appeals. (fn51)

Accordingly, the Supreme Court has transferred to the Court of Appeals actions for declaratory judgments,(fn52) boundary-line cases,(fn53) actions to enforce non-compete provisions in employment agreements,(fn54) actions by homeowners to enforce restrictive covenants, (fn55) actions to impose an implied or constructive trust on real or personal property,(fn56) actions calling for an interpretation of trust terms,(fn57) actions seeking to enforce equitable subrogation,(fn58) actions to reform deeds or contracts,(fn59) actions to set aside or cancel deeds,(fn60) and actions for specific performance of a real estate contract.(fn61) By a 4-3 vote, the Supreme Court transferred to the Court of Appeals a “dispute involving the imposition of a constructive trust on certain real property” in which it appeared to the Court of Appeals “that all the issues here are equitable in nature.” (fn62) In dissent, three justices have expressed doubt whether any cases at all remain within the Supreme Court’s equity jurisdiction.(fn63)

Cases involving wills.
After January 1, 2017, the Court of Appeals will have jurisdiction over appeals involving wills. (fn64) Until then, the Supreme Court has jurisdiction over these cases. The Supreme Court has narrowly construed the constitutional provision assigning it jurisdiction of “all cases involving wills.” (fn65) That provision refers only to “those cases in which the will’s validity or meaning is in question.” (fn66) An appeal from the dismissal of a caveat to a will on grounds that it was untimely does not come within the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction. (fn67) Cases involving the appointment of an executor belong in the Court of Appeals. (fn68) The Supreme Court has transferred a case to the Court of Appeals involving the characterization of assets of the estate as coming within the meaning of a term of the will, even though that characterization would necessarily involve deciding the meaning of the term as an ancillary matter. (fn69)

Extraordinary remedies.
After January 1, 2017, the Court of Appeals will have jurisdiction over appeals in all cases involving extraordinary remedies “except those cases concerning proceedings in which a sentence of death was imposed or could be imposed and those cases concerning the execution of a sentence of death.” (fn70) Until then, the Supreme Court has jurisdiction over these cases. Cases involving the grant or denial of writs of mandamus or prohibition differ from other topics under the Supreme Court’s constitutional jurisdiction in that the Supreme Court has jurisdiction over such cases without regard to the underlying subject matter or the legal issues raised. (fn71) However, where the plaintiff has sought relief in addition to mandamus relief, and the appeal relates only to the non-mandamus relief, the Court of Appeals has jurisdiction over the appeal. (fn72) If the extraordinary remedy sought is not an appropriate remedy in the case, the Supreme Court does not have jurisdiction on that basis. (fn73) If the ruling alleged to be a denial of mandamus relief is more properly characterized as a denial of a motion in a criminal case, jurisdiction lies in the Court of Appeals.)fn74)

Divorce and alimony cases.
After January 1, 2017, the Court of Appeals will have jurisdiction over appeals involving divorce and alimony cases. (fn75) Until then, the Supreme Court has jurisdiction over these cases. The provision assigning “all divorce and alimony cases” to the Supreme Court (fn76) uses different, narrower language than the provision that subjects all “domestic relations cases” to the discretionary appeal procedure. (fn77) The Court of Appeals has jurisdiction over all domestic relations cases other than “divorce and alimony” cases. (fn78) Most notably, appeals involving child custody are to the Court of Appeals unless the appeal also involves a judgment for divorce and alimony. (fn79) The same is true of child support appeals: they belong in the Supreme Court if they arise in the context of a divorce or alimony case, but the appeal goes to the Court of Appeals otherwise. (fn80) Appeals in modification cases will go to the Supreme Court if the original award was a “divorce or alimony” case. (fn81) Suits to domesticate a foreign divorce decree or to enforce child support provisions in foreign divorce decrees, even by contempt, are deemed suits on foreign judgments, not divorce or alimony cases within the meaning of the Constitution, and jurisdiction of such appeals is in the Court of Appeals. (fn82) Jurisdiction over appeals from orders under the Family Violence Act lies in the Court of Appeals. (fn83)

In cases where a complaint for divorce is combined with a tort, contract or other claim, if an interlocutory appeal “involves only a contract or tort claim or any matter other than divorce or alimony, then the appeal does not constitute a divorce or alimony case within the meaning of our state constitution” and appellate jurisdiction is in the Court of Appeals. (fn84) Contempt actions that are ancillary to the underlying divorce action and that involve issues other than custody fall within the divorce and alimony jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. (fn85) Resolution of property disputes between divorced spouses that were unresolved in an earlier divorce suit is not within the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction. (fn86)

Murder cases.
Where murder and other charges are brought in a single indictment, but severed for trial, they remain severed on appeal. In such a case, jurisdiction over convictions on the murder charge is in the Supreme Court, and jurisdiction over convictions on the other charges is in the Court of Appeals.(fn87) On the other hand, where murder and other charges are to be tried together jurisdiction over a pre-conviction appeal is in the Supreme Court. (fn88) Where murder and other charges have been tried together an appeal relating only to the non-murder charges will be in the Supreme Court if the murder count remains pending in the court below. (fn89)

Footnotes
a0Judge, Georgia Court of Appeals. Member of the Atlanta and DeKalb Bars.
a1Member of the Augusta Bar.
a2Member of the Macon Bar Association.
a3Judicial Staff Attorney. Member of the DeKalb Bar.
a4Member, State Bar of Georgia.
a5Assistant District Attorney, Middle Judicial District.
1 Ga. Const. 1983, Art. VI, § VI, ¶¶II, III.
2 Williford v. Brown, 299 Ga. 15, 785 S.E.2d 864 (2016).
3 State Dept. of Corrections v. Developers Sur. and Indemn. Co., 295 Ga. 741, 763 S.E.2d 868 (2014).
4 Ga. Const. 1983, Art. VI, § VI, ¶II.
5 Willis v. City of Atlanta, 285 Ga. 775, 684 S.E.2d 271 (2009).
6 Georgia Dept. of Community Health v. Northside Hosp., Inc., 324 Ga. App. 326, 750 S.E.2d 401 (2013), judgment rev’d on other grounds, 295 Ga. 446, 761 S.E.2d 74 (2014). Contrast State v. International Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc., 788 S.E.2d 455 (Ga. 2016) (Supreme Court has jurisdiction over a constitutional challenge to denial of a permit for roadway sign under agency regulations).
7 Jones v. State, 292 Ga. 656, 740 S.E.2d 590 (2013); Kendrick v. State, 335 Ga. App. 766, 782 S.E.2d 842 (2016); Dailey v. Abdul-Samed, 319 Ga. App. 380, 736 S.E.2d 142 (2012).
8 Jenkins v. State, 284 Ga. 642 (1), 670 S.E.2d 425 (2008).
9 Brinkley v. State, 291 Ga. 195, 728 S.E.2d 598 (2012); Barrow v. Mikell, 331 Ga. App. 547, 771 S.E.2d 211 (2015), rev’d on other grounds, 298 Ga. 429, 782 S.E.2d 439 (2016).
10 Rooney v. State, 287 Ga. 1, 690 S.E.2d 804 (2010).
11 Rooney v. State, 287 Ga. 1, 690 S.E.2d 804 (2010).
12 Harrison v. Wigington, 269 Ga. 388, 497 S.E.2d 568 (1998).
13 Malloy v. State, 293 Ga. 350, 744 S.E.2d 778 (2013).
14 Pollard v. State, 229 Ga. 698, 194 S.E.2d 107 (1972); Kroupa v. Cobb County, 262 Ga. 451, 421 S.E.2d 283 (1992).For a case in which the Supreme Court held that Court of Appeals overstepped that authority, see City of Decatur v. DeKalb County, 284 Ga. 434, 668 S.E.2d 247 (2008). For a commentary criticizing both the substance and the tone of City of Decatur see Kenneth A. Hindman, Supreme Court Muddles Rules for Exclusive Constitutional Jurisdiction: A Comment on City of Decatur v. DeKalb County, The Appellate Review, Vol. 8, No. 1, Winter 2008, available at http://www.gabar.org/sections/section_web_pages/appellate_practice_section/section_newsletters/.
15 Williams v. State, 273 Ga. 848, 546 S.E.2d 522 (2001). Although the transfer of an appeal by the Supreme Court to the Court of Appeals is not a rejection on the merits of a constitutional question, it is often “a final determination that no constitutional question was in fact properly raised.” Nahid v. State, 276 Ga. App. 687, 624 S.E.2d 264 (2005); Hughes v. State, 266 Ga. App. 652, 598 S.E.2d 43 (2004); Schmidt v. Feldman, 230 Ga. App. 500, 497 S.E.2d 23 (1998).
16 Zarate-Martinez v. Echemendia, 788 S.E.2d 405 (Ga. 2016).
17 Atlanta Independent School System v. Lane, 266 Ga. 657, 469 S.E.2d 22, 108 Ed. Law Rep. 1297 (1996). But see Braden v. Bell, 222 Ga. App. 144, 473 S.E.2d 523 (1996), as to the extent of the jurisdiction of the Court of Appeals over constitutional questions and as to the practical effect of the Atlanta Independent ruling. Notwithstanding the Atlanta Independent ruling, the net effect of these transfers is very often that the only written appellate opinion as to a constitutional issue is from a court whose only authority is to reject the argument. See Braden v. Bell, 222 Ga. App. 144, 473 S.E.2d 523 (1996) (Beasley, C.J., concurring).
18 Head v. State, 303 Ga. App. 475, 693 S.E.2d 845 (2010).
19 Ga. Const. Art. VI, § VI, ¶II.
20 Cook v. Board of Registrars of Randolph County, 291 Ga. 67, 727 S.E.2d 478 (2012).
21 O.C.G.A. § 15-3-3.1(a)(1).
22 Graham v. Tallent, 235 Ga. 47, 218 S.E.2d 799 (1975) (surveying cases excluded and included within the “title to land” provision and providing the focus on ejectment-like actions); Navy Federal Credit Union v. McCrea, 337 Ga. App. 103, 786 S.E.2d 707 (2016); Cole v. Cole, 205 Ga. App. 332, 422 S.E.2d 230 (1992).
23 Hunstein v. Fiksman, 279 Ga. 559, 615 S.E.2d 526 (2005) (action to invalidate liens on property); Tharp v. Harpagon Co., 278 Ga. 654, 604 S.E.2d 156 (2004) (action to remove cloud from title).
24 In Stearns Bank, N.A. v. Dozetos, 328 Ga. App. 106, 761 S.E.2d 520 (2014), the Supreme Court transferred to the Court of Appeals the appeal of a case in which the plaintiff sought to invalidate an encumbrance on land, pursuant to the standard established Graham v. Tallent, 235 Ga. 47, 218 S.E.2d 799 (1975), but not apparently addressing its own rulings in Hunstein v. Fiksman, 279 Ga. 559, 615 S.E.2d 526 (2005), and Tharp v. Harpagon Co., 278 Ga. 654, 604 S.E.2d 156 (2004).
25 Jordan v. Atlanta Neighborhood Housing Services, Inc., 251 Ga. 37, 302 S.E.2d 568 (1983) (appeal of a dispossessory proceeding filed after a foreclosure under a deed to secure to debt); Hall v. Hall, 303 Ga. App. 434, 693 S.E.2d 624 (2010) (distinguishing ejectment actions and dispossessories).
26 Boyd v. JohnGalt Holdings, LLC, 290 Ga. 658, 724 S.E.2d 395 (2012) (appeal from an order dismissing an appeal of title-related claims is not an appeal in which title is in dispute); DOCO Credit Union v. Chambers, 330 Ga. App. 633, 768 S.E.2d 808 (2015) (appeal deciding whether a quiet title action should be abated or dismissed for failure to state a claim, rather than title to land itself, belongs in the Court of Appeals).
27 Slaick v. Arnold, 307 Ga. App. 410, 705 S.E.2d 206 (2010); McCall v. Williams, 326 Ga. App. 99, 756 S.E.2d 217 (2014).
28 Holloway v. U.S. Bank Trust Nat. Ass’n, 317 Ga. App. 452, 731 S.E.2d 763 (2012).
29 Decision One Mortg. Co., LLC v. Victor Warren Properties, Inc., 304 Ga. App. 423, 696 S.E.2d 145 (2010).
30 Kim v. First Intercontinental Bank, 326 Ga. App. 424, 756 S.E.2d 655 (2014).
31 Wilkes v. Fraser, 324 Ga. App. 642, 751 S.E.2d 455 (2013).
32 Lovell v. Rea, 278 Ga. App. 740, 629 S.E.2d 459 (2006); Krystal Co. v. Carter, 256 Ga. 43, 343 S.E.2d 490 (1986); Roberts v. Roberts, 206 Ga. App. 423, 425 S.E.2d 414 (1992); Davis v. Foreman, 311 Ga. App. 775, 717 S.E.2d 295 (2011); Sermons v. Agasarkisian, 323 Ga. App. 642, 746 S.E.2d 596 (2013).
33 Beauchamp v. Knight, 261 Ga. 608, 409 S.E.2d 208 (1991); Hall v. Christian Church of Georgia, Inc., 280 Ga. App. 721, 634 S.E.2d 793 (2006); Fendley v. Weaver, 121 Ga. App. 526, 174 S.E.2d 369 (1970).
34 Everchanged, Inc. v. Young, 273 Ga. 474, 542 S.E.2d 505 (2001).
35 Graham v. Tallent, 235 Ga. 47, 218 S.E.2d 799 (1975); Arrington v. Reynolds, 274 Ga. 114, 549 S.E.2d 401 (2001).
36 Edwards v. Heartwood 11, Inc., 264 Ga. App. 354, 355, 590 S.E.2d 734, 736 (2003).
37 Kent v. White, 279 Ga. App. 563, 631 S.E.2d 782 (2006).
38 Georgia Dept. of Transp. v. Meadow Trace, Inc., 278 Ga. 423, 424, 603 S.E.2d 257, 258 (2004).
39 Wallace v. Wallace, 260 Ga. 400, 396 S.E.2d 208 (1990).This applies to both statutory and equitable partition actions. Ononye v. Ezeofor, 287 Ga. 201, 695 S.E.2d 234 (2010); Contrast Davis v. Davis, 287 Ga. 897, 700 S.E.2d 404 (2010) (appeal of partitioning of personal property is not within the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction).
40 Hunstein v. Fiksman, 279 Ga. 559, 615 S.E.2d 526 (2005); Tharp v. Harpagon Co., 278 Ga. 654, 604 S.E.2d 156 (2004). But see Stearns Bank, N.A. v. Dozetos, 328 Ga. App. 106, 761 S.E.2d 520 (2014), in which the Supreme Court transferred such a case to the Court of Appeals, taking a narrower view of its jurisdiction over title to land.
41 915 Indian Trail, LLC v. State Bank and Trust Co., 328 Ga. App. 524, 759 S.E.2d 654 (2014).
42 O.C.G.A. § 15-3-3.1(a)(2).
43 Williford v. Brown, 299 Ga. 15, 785 S.E.2d 864 (2016) (availability of novel equitable relief); Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, Inc. v. Ichthus Community Trust, 298 Ga. 221, 780 S.E.2d 311 (2015) (lifting stay against dispossessory action); Abel & Sons Concrete, LLC v. Juhnke, 295 Ga. 150, 757 S.E.2d 869 (2014) (appeal of injunctive relief based on procedural impropriety in granting it without notice); Alstep, Inc. v. State Bank and Trust Co., 293 Ga. 311, 745 S.E.2d 613 (2013) (challenge to propriety of appointing a receiver); Kemp v. Neal, 288 Ga. 324, 704 S.E.2d 175 (2010); Lamar County v. E.T. Carlyle Co., 277 Ga. 690, 594 S.E.2d 335 (2004).
44 Danforth v. Apple Inc., 294 Ga. 890, 757 S.E.2d 96 (2014); Kemp v. Neal, 288 Ga. 324, 704 S.E.2d 175 (2010).
45 Tunison v. Harper, 286 Ga. 687, 690 S.E.2d 819 (2010).
46 Morgan v. Howard, 285 Ga. 512, 678 S.E.2d 882 (2009).
47 Saxton v. Coastal Dialysis and Medical Clinic, Inc., 267 Ga. 177, 179, 476 S.E.2d 587 (1996). The purpose of the distinction is to narrow the Supreme Court’s equitable jurisdiction without narrowing the range of cases directly appealable pursuant to O.C.G.A. § 5-6-34(a)(4). See §§ 12:6 to 12:7 infra.
48 Kemp v. Neal, 288 Ga. 324, 704 S.E.2d 175 (2010), finding jurisdiction in the Supreme Court—by a vote of 4-to-3, over vigorous dissent – because determination of “precisely how the trial court should have molded the equitable relief … does not flow directly or automatically from the legal conclusion that [Appellants were entitled to relief]. Review of that equitable issue would require examination of the trial court’s exercise of discretion and depends upon equitable considerations.” See also Sentinel Offender SVCS., LLC v. Glover, 296 Ga. 315, 766 S.E.2d 456 (2014) (finding jurisdiction when permanent injunction “was not a ‘matter of routine once the underlying issues of law were resolved’”); Durham v. Durham, 291 Ga. 231, 728 S.E.2d 627 (2012); Trotman v. Velociteach Project Management, LLC, 311 Ga. App. 208, 715 S.E.2d 449 (2011); Reeves v. Newman, 287 Ga. 317, 695 S.E.2d 626 (2010); Pittman v. Harbin Clinic Professional Ass’n, 263 Ga. 66, 428 S.E.2d 328 (1993); Krystal Co. v. Carter, 256 Ga. 43, 343 S.E.2d 490 (1986); Beauchamp v. Knight, 261 Ga. 608, 409 S.E.2d 208 (1991). Cf. Electronic Data Systems Corp. v. Heinemann, 268 Ga. 755, 493 S.E.2d 132 (1997) (acknowledging “that the meaning of equity jurisdiction remains subject to confusion and frustration”). See further Johns v. Morgan, 281 Ga. 51, 635 S.E.2d 753 (2006). But see Sparks v. Jackson, 289 Ga. App. 840, 658 S.E.2d 456 (2008) (arguing that transfer from the Supreme Court eliminated issue of whether proceeds were divided equitably).
49 Clay v. Department of Transp., 198 Ga. App. 155, 400 S.E.2d 684 (1990). See also Strickland v. McElreath, 308 Ga. App. 627, 708 S.E.2d 580 (2011) (Smith, J., concurring) (observing seeming inconsistency in Supreme Court’s transfer of case to the Court of Appeals where the issue on appeal required characterizing the case as equitable for purposes of special venue provision).
50 Capitol Fish Co. v. Tanner, 192 Ga. App. 251, 384 S.E.2d 394 (1989).
51 Decision One Mortg. Co., LLC v. Victor Warren Props., Inc., 304 Ga. App. 423, 696 S.E.2d 145 (2010).
52 Wilkes v. Fraser, 324 Ga. App. 642, 751 S.E.2d 455 (2013).
53 Beauchamp v. Knight, 261 Ga. 608, 409 S.E.2d 208 (1991).
54 Pittman v. Harbin Clinic Professional Ass’n, 263 Ga. 66, 428 S.E.2d 328 (1993); Drawdy CPA Services, P.C. v. North GA CPA Services, P.C., 320 Ga. App. 759, 740 S.E.2d 712 (2013).
55 Redfearn v. Huntcliff Homes Ass’n, Inc., 271 Ga. 745, 524 S.E.2d 464 (1999).
56 Davis v. Davis, 287 Ga. 897, 700 S.E.2d 404 (2010); Reeves v. Newman, 287 Ga. 317, 695 S.E.2d 626 (2010).
57 Durham v. Durham, 291 Ga. 231, 728 S.E.2d 627 (2012); Rose v. Waldrip, 316 Ga. App. 812, 730 S.E.2d 529 (2012).
58 Kim v. First Intercontinental Bank, 326 Ga. App. 424, 756 S.E.2d 655 (2014).
59 Kim v. First Intercontinental Bank, 326 Ga. App. 424, 756 S.E.2d 655 (2014); First Chatham Bank v. Liberty Capital, LLC, 325 Ga. App. 821, 755 S.E.2d 219 (2014).
60 McCall v. Williams, 326 Ga. App. 99, 756 S.E.2d 217 (2014).
61 Decision One Mortg. Co., LLC v. Victor Warren Properties, Inc., 304 Ga. App. 423, 696 S.E.2d 145 (2010); Lee v. Green Land Co., Inc., 272 Ga. 107, 527 S.E.2d 204 (2000).
62 Troutman v. Troutman, 297 Ga. App. 62, n.1, 676 S.E.2d 787 (2009).
63 Lee v. Green Land Co., Inc., 272 Ga. 107, 527 S.E.2d 204 (2000) (Carley, J., dissenting, joined by Hunstein J.; Thompson, J., dissenting, joined by Hunstein, J.); Redfearn v. Huntcliff Homes Ass’n, Inc., 271 Ga. 745, 524 S.E.2d 464 (1999) (Carley, J., dissenting, joined by Hunstein, J.). But see Agan v. State, 272 Ga. 540, 533 S.E.2d 60 (2000), in which the majority did not address jurisdiction but appears to have exercised equitable jurisdiction and two justices dissented on the basis that jurisdiction was properly in the Court of Appeals.
64 O.C.G.A. § 15-3-3.1(a)(3).
65 Ga. Const. 1983, Art. VI, § VI, ¶III(3).
66 In re Estate of Lott, 251 Ga. 461, 306 S.E.2d 920 (1983).
67 In re Estate of Loyd, 328 Ga. App. 287, 761 S.E.2d 833 (2014).
68 In re Estate of Farkas, 325 Ga. App. 477, 753 S.E.2d 137 (2013).
69 Simmons v. England, 323 Ga. App. 251, 746 S.E.2d 862 (2013), judgment aff’d, 295 Ga. 1, 757 S.E.2d 111 (2014).
70 O.C.G.A. § 15-3-3.1(a)(4).
71 Goddard v. City of Albany, 285 Ga. 882, 684 S.E.2d 635 (2009); Mid Georgia Environmental Management Group, L.L.L.P. v. Meriwether County, 277 Ga. 670, 594 S.E.2d 344 (2004); Griffin v. State, 278 Ga. 669, 604 S.E.2d 155 (2004); Bynum v. State, 289 Ga. App. 636, 658 S.E.2d 196 (2008).But see more recent cases holding that the Court of Appeals has jurisdiction when the claim for an extraordinary remedy is disposed of without reaching the merits. Liberty County School Dist. v. Halliburton, 328 Ga. App. 422, 762 S.E.2d 138, 307 Ed. Law Rep. 1135 (2014) (claim dismissed because of immunity, without the grant or denial of mandamus); City of Stockbridge v. Stuart, 329 Ga. App. 323, 765 S.E.2d 16 (2014) (denial of mandamus as moot).
72 City of Tybee Island, Georgia v. Live Oak Group, LLC, 324 Ga. App. 476, 751 S.E.2d 123 (2013).
73 Richardson v. Phillips, 285 Ga. 385, 386, 677 S.E.2d 117, 118 (2009) (action seeking the remedy of quo warranto).
74 MacBeth v. State, 304 Ga. App. 466, 696 S.E.2d 435 (2010).
75 O.C.G.A. § 15-3-3.1(a)(5).
76 Ga. Const. 1983, Art. VI, § VI, ¶III(6).
77 O.C.G.A. § 5-6-35(a)(2).
78 Eickhoff v. Eickhoff, 263 Ga. 498, 499, 435 S.E.2d 914 (1993).
79 Ashburn v. Baker, 256 Ga. 507, 350 S.E.2d 437 (1986); Higdon v. Higdon, 321 Ga. App. 260, 739 S.E.2d 498 (2013). At one time, jurisdiction of child custody cases was in the Supreme Court pursuant to its jurisdiction of habeas corpus cases; the Supreme Court no longer has jurisdiction over child custody cases, as such, because child custody cases can no longer be brought as habeas cases. Munday v. Munday, 243 Ga. 863, 257 S.E.2d 282 (1979).
80 Parker v. Parker, 293 Ga. 300, 745 S.E.2d 605 (2013).
81 Spurlock v. Department of Human Resources, 286 Ga. 512, 690 S.E.2d 378 (2010); Williamson v. Williamson, 293 Ga. 721, 748 S.E.2d 679 (2013).
82 Davis v. Davis, 287 Ga. 897, 700 S.E.2d 404 (2010); Lewis v. Robinson, 254 Ga. 378, 329 S.E.2d 498 (1985).
83 Schmidt v. Schmidt, 270 Ga. 461, 510 S.E.2d 810 (1999).
84 Walker v. Estate of Mays, 279 Ga. 652, 619 S.E.2d 679 (2005) (action by former wife and children against estate for decedent’s failure to maintain life insurance policy as required by divorce decree, held to be a “domestic relations case [ ]” and therefore subject to the discretionary appeal procedure, but not a “divorce or alimony case” and therefore within the jurisdiction of the Court of Appeals, rather than the Supreme Court); Gates v. Gates, 277 Ga. 175, 176, 587 S.E.2d 32, 33–34 (2003) (appeal involving immunity from tort claim); Rutter v. Rutter, 316 Ga. App. 894, 730 S.E.2d 626 (2012), rev’d on other grounds, 294 Ga. 1 (2013); (appeal involving suppression of evidence); Lacy v. Lacy, 320 Ga. App. 739, 740 S.E.2d 695 (2013) (appeal involving rulings on custody and recusal); Stearns Bank, N.A. v. Mullins, 333 Ga. App. 369, 776 S.E.2d 485 (2015) (setting aside a security deed, regardless of contempt of divorce decree); Robertson v. Robertson, 333 Ga. App. 864, 778 S.E.2d 6 (2015) (setting aside a transfer pursuant to a divorce).
85 Horn v. Shepherd, 292 Ga. 14, 732 S.E.2d 427 (2012); Morris v. Surges, 284 Ga. 748, 750, 670 S.E.2d 84, 86 (2008); Griffin v. Griffin, 243 Ga. 149, 253 S.E.2d 80 (1979).
86 Davis v. Davis, 287 Ga. 897, 700 S.E.2d 404 (2010).
87 Cain v. State, 277 Ga. 309, 588 S.E.2d 707 (2003).
88 Sanders v. State, 280 Ga. 780, 631 S.E.2d 344, 345 (2006).89Langlands v. State, 280 Ga. 799, 633 S.E.2d 537 (2006) (The trial court had granted a new trial as to the murder charges, but not the other charges).
§ 12:4.Selecting the proper court—Particular types of cases, Ga. Appellate Practice § 12:4

2 million phony accounts Wells Fargo!

Together we'll go far Wells Fargo Home Page

5,300 Wells Fargo employees fired over 2 million phony accounts

Everyone hates paying bank fees. But imagine paying fees on a ghost account you didn’t even sign up for.

That’s exactly what happened to Wells Fargo customers nationwide.

On Thursday, federal regulators said Wells Fargo (WFC) employees secretly created millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts — without their customers knowing it — since 2011.

The phony accounts earned the bank unwarranted fees and allowed Wells Fargo employees to boost their sales figures and make more money.

“Wells Fargo employees secretly opened unauthorized accounts to hit sales targets and receive bonuses,” Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said in a statement.

Wells Fargo confirmed to CNNMoney that it had fired 5,300 employees over the last few years related to the shady behavior. Employees went so far as to create phony PIN numbers and fake email addresses to enroll customers in online banking services, the CFPB said.

Related: Who owns Wells Fargo? You, me and Warren Buffett

The scope of the scandal is shocking. An analysis conducted by a consulting firm hired by Wells Fargo concluded that bank employees opened over 1.5 million deposit accounts that may not have been authorized.

The way it worked was that employees moved funds from customers’ existing accounts into newly-created ones without their knowledge or consent, regulators say. The CFPB described this practice as “widespread.” Customers were being charged for insufficient funds or overdraft fees — because there wasn’t enough money in their original accounts.

Additionally, Wells Fargo employees also submitted applications for 565,443 credit card accounts without their customers’ knowledge or consent. Roughly 14,000 of those accounts incurred over $400,000 in fees, including annual fees, interest charges and overdraft-protection fees.

The CFPB said Wells Fargo will pay “full restitutions to all victims.”

Related: ATM and overdraft fees top $6 billion at the big 3 banks

Wells Fargo is being slapped with the largest penalty since the CFPB was founded in 2011. The bank agreed to pay $185 million in fines, along with $5 million to refund customers.

“We regret and take responsibility for any instances where customers may have received a product that they did not request,” Wells Fargo said in a statement.

Wells Fargo has the highest market valuation among any bank in America, worth just north of $250 billion. Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA), the investment firm run legendary investor Warren Buffett, is the company’s biggest shareholder.

Of the total fines, $100 million will go toward the CFPB’s Civil Penalty Fund, $35 million will go to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and another $50 million will be paid to the City and County of Los Angeles.

“One wonders whether (the CFPB) penalty of $100 million is enough,” said David Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor and former director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “It sounds like a big number, but for a bank the size of Wells Fargo, it isn’t really.”

Wells Fargo confirmed to CNNMoney that the 5,300 firings took place over several years. The bank listed 265,000 employees as of the end of 2015.

Related: Barclays fined $109 million for trying to hide a deal with rich clients

“At Wells Fargo, when we make mistakes, we are open about it, we take responsibility, and we take action,” the bank said in a memo to employees on Thursday.

The CFPB declined to comment on when the investigation began and what sparked it, citing agency policy. “We don’t comment on how we uncover these matters,” a spokesman said.

As part of the settlement, Wells Fargo needs to make changes to its sales practices and internal oversight.

Customers are fuming. Brian Kennedy, a Maryland retiree, told CNNMoney he detected an unauthorized Wells Fargo account had been created in his name about a year ago. He asked Wells Fargo about it and the bank closed it, he said.

“I didn’t sign up for any bloody checking account,” Kennedy, who is 57 years old, told CNNMoney. “They lost me as a banking customer and I have warned family and friends.”

“Consumers must be able to trust their banks,” said Mike Feuer, the Los Angeles City Attorney who joined the settlement.

Feuer’s office sued Wells Fargo in May 2015 over allegations of unauthorized accounts. After filing the suit, his office received more than 1,000 calls and emails from customers as well as current and former Wells Fargo employees about the allegations.

Wells Fargo declined to say when it hired a consulting firm to investigate the allegations. However, a person familiar with the matter told CNNMoney the bank launched the review after the L.A. lawsuit was filed.

Even though the Wells Fargo scandal took place nationally, the settlement with L.A. requires the bank to specifically alert all its California customers to review their accounts and shut down ones they don’t recognize or want.

“How does a bank that is supposed to have robust internal controls permit the creation of over a half-million dummy accounts?” asked Vladeck. “If I were a Wells Fargo customer, and fortunately I am not, I’d think seriously about finding a new bank.”

–To reach the author of this article email Matt.Egan@cnn.com

Massachusetts churches sue over transgender bathroom bill

The U.S. Supreme Court, file. REUTERS Gary Cameron
10/12/16 REUTERS 00:22:49
REUTERS
Copyright (c) 2016 Thomson Reuters
October 12, 2016

Massachusetts churches sue over transgender bathroom bill

Curtis Skinner
(Reuters) – Four Massachusetts churches on Tuesday filed a lawsuit asking to be exempted from a state law that requires public places to allow transgender people to use bathrooms in line with their gender identity.
Access to public bathrooms has become a flashpoint in the battle over transgender rights in the United States, after North Carolina earlier this year enacted a measure mandating that bathrooms and locker rooms be restricted according to a person’s biological gender.
The Horizon Christian Fellowship, the Swansea Abundant Life Assembly of God, the House of Destiny Ministries and the Faith Christian Fellowship of Haverhill filed the federal civil rights lawsuit in Massachusetts, arguing the law violates their constitutional rights to freedom of religious expression and free speech.
“The Churches’ policies and practices regarding access to their changing rooms and restrooms flow logically and directly from their religious beliefs concerning God’s design for biological sex,” the lawsuit said.
The law did not provide exemptions for religious organizations, with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office saying on its website that “houses of worship” are public places.
The lawsuit is seeking an injunction from the law for religious organizations and attorneys fees.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination were named as defendants in the case. Neither could be reached for comment on Tuesday night.
Jillian Fennimore, a spokeswoman for Healey’s office, told the MassLive news website the office would not comment on the lawsuit as they are still reviewing it.
Fennimore added however, “We are pleased that we finally have a law in place that protects transgender people from discrimination in public places. This law is about civil rights and is critical for people who were without full protection and equality under the law for too long.”
The lawsuit makes Massachusetts the latest battleground for transgender rights.
A U.S. judge in August blocked an Obama administration policy that public schools should allow transgender students to use the bathrooms of their choice, granting a nationwide injunction sought by 13 dissenting states.
Meanwhile, lawmakers elsewhere have moved to expand protections for transgender people. Late last month California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill opening single-stall public restrooms to anyone, regardless of gender. The state already bars discrimination against transgender people, including in public bathrooms.
—- Index References —-
Company: CITY OF HAVERHILL MASSACHUSETTS
News Subject: (Civil Rights Law (1CI34); Gay & Lesbian Issues (1GA65); Intellectual Freedoms & Civil Liberties (1IN08); Legal (1LE33); Social Issues (1SO05))
Region: (Americas (1AM92); Massachusetts (1MA15); North America (1NO39); U.S. New England Region (1NE37); USA (1US73))
Language: EN
Other Indexing: (Destiny Ministries; Jillian Fennimore; Lucy NicholsonA; Jerry Brown; Lucy Nicholson; Maura Healey)
Keywords: (MCC:a); (N2:US); (N2:AMERS); (N2:NAMER); (N2:USA); (MCCL:OVR)
Word Count: 433
Massachusetts churches sue over transgender bathroom bill

JPMorgan Chase Bank Fines Do Nothing to Them

I was working on something today, and saw that I needed to add some references (footnotes) to support what I was saying. It had to do with JPMorgan Chase Bank, and the fines for violations concerning robo-signing, lying, cheating, stealing homes, and the like. All related to foreclosures of course.

When I began adding the references for my allegations, I almost fell off my chair. I could not believe the fines and the violations, and yet, they continue on, to this very day. The only thing that Chase has learned from all the fines for violations, is that they make enough money, that the fines don’t matter. If anything else had come of it, as in, it hurt them financially, they would have quit with all the violations.
As it turns out, attorneys for these banks have gotten worse. It is ruining the legal profession. If the courts would stand up and make those that should be held accountable, accountable, the foreclosures would have ended. So, it has also ruined the court system for their failure to the citizens of the states and country.
http://s25.postimg.org/ze1twuhu7/is_CDBx_Oy_Hkyno_GSsgx_Oz_TCmykgo7_D_Dsbu_N6nx_ELu_AK48_h.jpgForeclosure hell has only taught the people that have lost their homes. And what pray tell did those people learn other than they will never be able to purchase another home? That you cannot trust attorneys, you cannot trust the courts, and by God you had better never trust the lender. In other words, the world around you is corrupt as hell, and no one, except you, the borrower is accountable for anything.

Just a sampling of fines levied against JPMorgan Chase Bank:
2008: Unpacking the JPMorgan Chase scandals; $30 billion in fines and counting — and this monster bank still got off lightly!: http://www.socialism.com/drupal-6.8/articles/unpacking-jpmorgan-chase-scandals
June 2011: Misleading CDO Investments: http://www.dividend.com/dividend-education/a-brief-history-of-jp-morgans-massive-fines-jpm/;
July 7, 2011: Conduct in Municipal Bonds $228 Million: http://www.dividend.com/dividend-education/a-brief-history-of-jp-morgans-massive-fines-jpm/;
February 9, 2012: Foreclosure Abuses and “Robo-Signing” $5.29 Billion: http://www.dividend.com/dividend-education/a-brief-history-of-jp-morgans-massive-fines-jpm/;
November 16, 2012: $269.9 Million: More Mortgage Misrepresentations: http://www.dividend.com/dividend-education/a-brief-history-of-jp-morgans-massive-fines-jpm/;
January 2013: $1.8 Billion: Improper Foreclosures: http://www.dividend.com/dividend-education/a-brief-history-of-jp-morgans-massive-fines-jpm/;
October 25, 2013: $5.1 Billion: Fannie and Freddie Fines: http://www.dividend.com/dividend-education/a-brief-history-of-jp-morgans-massive-fines-jpm/;
Nov. 2013: JPMorgan agrees $13 billion settlement with U.S. over bad mortgages; http://www.reuters.com/article/us-jpmorgan-settlement-idUSBRE9AI0OA20131120;
November 15, 2013: $4.5 Billion: Mortgage Securities: http://www.dividend.com/dividend-education/a-brief-history-of-jp-morgans-massive-fines-jpm/;
January 2014: JPMorgan Chase Fines Exceed $2 Billion: http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/chase-a-6356;
January 06, 2014: Madoff Scandal: $1.7 Billion: http://www.dividend.com/dividend-education/a-brief-history-of-jp-morgans-massive-fines-jpm/;
November 11, 2014: Currency Manipulation (stock price): $1.34 Billion: http://www.dividend.com/dividend-education/a-brief-history-of-jp-morgans-massive-fines-jpm/;
March 2015: Chase has paid $38 Billion in 22 settlements from 2009 through March of 2015: http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/business/2015/07/16/fine-despite-fines.html;
July 2015: JPMorgan Chase fined $136M over how it collects debts: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/08/421277881/jpmorgan-chase-fined-136m-over-how-it-collects-debt;
July 8, 2015: Chase fined $216M over debt collection: http://www.bankrate.com/financing/credit-cards/chase-fined-216m-over-debt-collection/;
December 2015: JPMorgan Admits It Didn’t Tell Clients About Conflicts $300M: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-18/jpmorgan-pays-267-million-to-settle-conflict-of-interest-claims;
January 2016: JPMorgan Chase Fined $48Million for Failing to Comply With Robosigning Settlement: https://consumerist.com/2016/01/05/jpmorgan-chase-fined-48-million-for-failing-to-comply-with-robosigning-settlement/;

And it goes on. There are many that I missed, in my hurry to get this done.
And in the end, the buck stops with the Courts, U.S. Attorneys and District Attorneys for not throwing the lot of their asses in the clink!

OPINION: The heightened pleading standard established in 2009 is based on faulty propositions. Arthur H. Bryant, The National Law Journal


National Law Journal
http://www.nationallawjournal.com/printerfriendly/id=1202758245088

‘Iqbal’ Brings Seven Years of Bad Luck for Plaintiffs

OPINION: The heightened pleading standard established in 2009 is based on faulty propositions.
Arthur H. Bryant, The National Law Journal
May 23, 2016

The seventh anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Ashcroft v. Iqbal was May 18. It’s a date that should live in infamy.
A 5-4 decision, Iqbal ignored reality — and the fact that truth is stranger than fiction. It flouted the process for amending the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. And it particularly limited access to justice for civil rights, employment discrimination and individual plaintiffs.
Seventy years before Iqbal, in 1938, the Federal Rules were adopted to get rid of “fact” pleading, which the rule-makers thought “led to wasteful disputes about distinctions that … were arbitrary or metaphysical, too often cutting off adjudication on the merits.” Under the new Rule 8, to start a lawsuit, the plaintiff had to file a complaint with “a short and plain statement of the claim showing the pleader is entitled to relief.”
As the court later explained in Conley v. Gibson, the complaint did not have to “set out the facts in detail.” It just had to give the defendant “fair notice of what the plaintiff’s claim is and the grounds upon which it rests.” A motion to dismiss would only be granted if “it appears beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of his claim which would entitle him to relief.” Then, the plaintiff could take discovery, to find out what the defendant and other relevant people knew and when they knew it. After that, the court would determine whether there was sufficient proof to require a trial.
In Iqbal, the court rejected a complaint alleging that high-level U.S. officials had a Pakistani Muslim and thousands of other Arab men illegally arrested and detained after the 9/11 attacks because of “their race, religion, and national origin … and not because of any evidence” of their “involvement in supporting terrorist activity.”
To do so, the court changed the rules. It held that, from now on, to “survive a motion to dismiss, a complaint must contain sufficient factual matter, accepted as true, to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.” Dismissal no longer turned on whether the complaint provided “fair notice” to the defendant; it turned on whether the claim was “plausible on its face.” How were judges to determine that? By drawing on their “judicial experience and common sense.”
Motions to dismiss were immediately filed throughout the federal courts. Judges’ and lawyers’ workloads increased enormously. The lower courts and lawyers are still struggling to figure out how the new system is supposed to work — and, if they can, make it fair.
For three reasons, however, it’s become increasingly clear that Iqbal was a mistake.
First, whatever one thinks about the allegations in the case, the Iqbal pleading standard is based on a proposition — allegations probably aren’t true if they’re not plausible on their face — that is false. Reality keeps teaching us that. None of us, including federal judges using their “judicial experience and common sense,” would have believed that any of the following was plausible a few years ago:
• Donald Trump would be the presumptive Republican Party nominee for president of the United States of America.
• A prominent candidate for president would propose banning all Muslims from entering America or call women “fat pigs,” “dogs” and “disgusting animals.”
• Same-sex marriage would be legal nationwide.
• The U.S. government would obtain and be able to search virtually all Ameri­cans’ phone records.
• Olympic champion Bruce Jenner would become a woman, Caitlyn Jenner.
• Federal, state and local governments would battle over what kind of bathroom people such as Caitlyn Jenner could use.
Similar implausible things happen every day.
Second, Iqbal effectively rewrote the Federal Rules without following the legally established rules for amending them. Under the Rules Enabling Act, before rules are changed, detailed procedures must be followed involving the Advisory Committees to the U.S. Judicial Con­ference’s Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure; the Standing Committee itself; notice to and comment from lawyers, judges and the public; the U.S. Judicial Conference; the Supreme Court; and Congress — so the changes are fully considered and fair.
In 2002, the court unanimously rejected a company’s plea for a heightened pleading standard in employment discrimination cases, saying that result “must be obtained by the process of amending the Federal Rules, and not judicial interpretation.” It should have said that in Iqbal, too.
Third, Iqbal is especially harmful to civil rights, employment discrimination and individual plaintiffs. Last year, the most comprehensive study of Iqbal’s effects, “Measuring the Impact of Plausi­bility Pleading,” was published in the Virginia Law Review. It found that Iqbal increased dismissals of most cases by 10 percent, but employment discrimination and civil rights cases much more (16 percent and 19 percent, respectively). Cases filed by individuals were also dismissed far more often (18 percent), but not cases filed by corporations.
In theory, this could mean that only bad cases were dismissed more promptly. But, if that were true, a higher percentage of the cases remaining in court would succeed. They didn’t. These plaintiffs were just disproportionately denied a chance to prove their claims.
The high court should reverse the Iqbal decision. Whether cases proceed should turn on the facts and the law, not on whether judges think the allegations are plausible.
Arthur H. Bryant is the chairman of Public Justice, a national public interest law firm dedicated to advancing and preserving access to justice. His practice focuses on consumers’ rights, workers’ rights, civil rights, environmental protection, and corporate and government accountability.

Judge Says FBI’s Hacking Tool Deployed In Child Porn Investigation Is An Illegal Search

Judge Says FBI’s Hacking Tool Deployed In Child Porn Investigation Is An Illegal Search

http://abovethelaw.com/2016/04/judge-says-fbis-hacking-tool-deployed-in-child-porn-investigation-is-an-illegal-search/

The judicial system doesn’t seem to have a problem with the FBI acting as admins for child porn sites while conducting investigations. After all, judges have seen worse. They’ve OK’ed the FBI’s hiring of a “heroin-addicted prostitute” to seduce an investigation target into selling drugs to undercover agents. Judges have, for the most part, allowed the ATF to bust people for robbing fake drug houses containing zero drugs — even when the actual robbery has never taken place. Judges have also found nothing wrong with law enforcement creating its own “pedophilic organization,” recruiting members and encouraging them to create child pornography.
So, when the FBI ran a child porn site for two weeks last year, its position as a child porn middleman was never considered to be a problem. The “network investigative technique” (NIT) it used to obtain identifying information about anonymous site visitors and their computer hardware, however, has resulted in a few problems for the agency.
While the FBI has been able to fend off one defendant’s attempt to suppress evidence out in Washington, it has just seen its evidence disappear in another case related to its NIT and the “PlayPen” child porn site it seized (and ran) last year.
What troubles the court isn’t the FBI acting as a child porn conduit in exchange for unmasking Tor users. What bothers the court is the reach of its NIT, which extends far outside the jurisdiction of the magistrate judge who granted the FBI’s search warrants. This decision benefits defendant Alex Levin of Massachusetts directly. But it could also pay off for Jay Michaud in Washington.
The warrants were issued in Virginia, which is where the seized server resided during the FBI’s spyware-based investigation. Levin, like Michaud, does not reside in the district where the warrant was issued (Virginia – Eastern District) and where the search was supposed to be undertaken. As Judge William Young explains, the FBI’s failure to restrict itself to the location where the NIT warrants were issued makes them worthless pieces of paper outside of that district. (via Chris Soghoian)

The government argues for a liberal construction of Rule 41(b) that would authorize the type of search that occurred here pursuant to the NIT Warrant. See Gov’t’s Resp. 18-20. Specifically, it argues that subsections (1), (2), and (4) of Rule 41(b) are each sufficient to support the magistrate judge’s issuance of the NIT Warrant. Id. This Court is unpersuaded by the government’s arguments. Because the NIT Warrant purported to authorize a search of property located outside the Eastern District of Virginia, and because none of the exceptions to the general territorial limitation of Rule 41(b)(1) applies, the Court holds that the magistrate judge lacked authority under Rule 41(b) to issue the NIT Warrant.

The government deployed some spectacular theories in its effort to salvage these warrants, but the court is having none of it.

The government advances two distinct lines of argument as to why Rule 41(b)(1) authorizes the NIT Warrant. One is that all of the property that was searched pursuant to the NIT Warrant was actually located within the Eastern District of Virginia, where the magistrate judge sat: since Levin — as a user of Website A — “retrieved the NIT from a server in the Eastern District of Virginia, and the NIT sent [Levin’s] network information back to a server in that district,” the government argues the search it conducted pursuant to the NIT Warrant properly can be understood as occurring within the Eastern District of Virginia. Gov’t’s Resp. 20. This is nothing but a strained, after-the-fact rationalization.

As the government attempts to portray it, the search was wholly contained in Virginia because the NIT was distributed by the seized server in the FBI’s control. But, as the judge notes, the searchitself — via the NIT — did not occur in Virginia. The NIT may have originated there, but without grabbing info and data from Levin’s computer in Massachusetts, the FBI would have nothing to use against the defendant.

That the Website A server is located in the Eastern District of Virginia is, for purposes of Rule 41(b)(1), immaterial, since it is not the server itself from which the relevant information was sought.

And, according to Judge Young, that’s exactly what the FBI has now: nothing.

The Court concludes that the violation at issue here is distinct from the technical Rule 41 violations that have been deemed insufficient to warrant suppression in past cases, and, in any event, Levin was prejudiced by the violation. Moreover, the Court holds that the good-faith exception is inapplicable because the warrant at issue here was void ab initio.

The judge has more to say about the FBI’s last ditch attempt to have the “good faith exception” salvage its invalid searches.

Even were the Court to hold that the good-faith exception could apply to circumstances involving a search pursuant to a warrant issued without jurisdiction, it would decline to rule such exception applicable here. For one, it was not objectively reasonable for law enforcement — particularly “a veteran FBI agent with 19 years of federal law enforcement experience[,]” Gov’t’s Resp. 7-8 — to believe that the NIT Warrant was properly issued considering the plain mandate of Rule 41(b).

The court doesn’t have a problem with NITs or the FBI’s decision to spend two weeks operating a seized child porn server. But it does have a problem with the government getting warrants signed in one jurisdiction and using them everywhere but.
The decision here could call into question other such warrants used extraterritorially, like the DEA’s dozens of wiretap warrants obtained in California but used to eavesdrop on targets located on the other side of the country. And it may help Jay Michaud in his case, seeing as he resides a few thousand miles away from where the search was supposedly performed.

2016 STATE OF THE JUDICIARY ADDRESS THE HONORABLE CHIEF JUSTICE HUGH P. THOMPSON SUPREME COURT OF GEORGIA January 27, 2016, 11 a.m. House Chambers, State Capitol

016 STATE OF THE JUDICIARY ADDRESS
THE HONORABLE CHIEF JUSTICE HUGH P. THOMPSON
SUPREME COURT OF GEORGIA
January 27, 2016, 11 a.m.
House Chambers, State Capitol

Lt. Governor Cagle, Speaker Ralston, President Pro Tem Shafer, Speaker Pro Tem Jones, members of the General Assembly, my fellow judges and my fellow Georgians:
Good morning. Thank you for this annual tradition of inviting the Chief Justice to report on the State of Georgia’s Judiciary. Thanks in large part to your support and the support of our governor, as we move into 2016, I am pleased to tell you that your judicial branch of government is not only steady and secure, it is dynamic; it has momentum; and it is moving forward into the 21st century with a vitality and a commitment to meeting the inevitable changes before us.
Our mission remains the same: To protect individual rights and liberties, to uphold and interpret the rule of law, and to provide a forum for the peaceful resolution of disputes that is fair, impartial, and accessible to all.
Our judges are committed to these principles. Each day, throughout this state, they put on their black robes; they take their seat on the courtroom bench; and they work tirelessly to ensure that all citizens who come before them get justice.


Our Judicial Council is the policy-making body of the state’s judicial branch. It is made up of competent, committed leaders elected by their fellow judges and representing all classes of court. They are assisted by an Administrative Office of the Courts, which is under a new director – Cynthia Clanton – and has a renewed focus as an agency that serves judges and courts throughout Georgia.
A number of our judges have made the trip to be here today. Our judges are here today because the relationship we have with you is important. We share with you the same goal of serving the citizens of this great state. We could not do our work without your help and that of our governor.
On behalf of all of the judges, let me say we are extremely grateful to you members of the General Assembly for your judicial compensation appropriation last year.


Today I want to talk to you about Georgia’s 21st century courts – our vision for the future, the road we must travel to get there, and the accomplishments we have already achieved.
It has been said that, “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”
Since a new state Constitution took effect in 1983, our population has nearly doubled to a little over 10 million, making us the 8th most populous state in the country. We are among the fastest growing states in the nation, and in less than four years, our population is projected to exceed 12 million.
Because it is good for our economy, we welcome that growth. Today, Georgia ranks
among states with the highest number of Fortune 500 companies, 20 of which have their global headquarters here; we have 72 four-year colleges and universities; we have the world’s busiest airport and we have two deep-water ports. Georgia is a gateway to the South, and for a growing number of people and businesses from around the world, it is a gateway to this country.
All of this growth produces litigation – increasingly complex litigation – and just as our state must prepare for this growth by ensuring we have enough roads and modes of transportation, enough doctors and hospitals, and enough power to reach people throughout the state, our courts also must be equipped and modernized for the 21st
century.
While our population has nearly doubled since 1983, the number of Georgia judges has
grown only 16 percent. We must work together to ensure that our judicial system has enough judges, staff and resources in the 21st century to fulfill the mission and constitutional duties our forefathers assigned to us.
A healthy, vibrant judiciary is absolutely critical to the economic development of our state. Thanks to many leaders in the judiciary, as well as to our partnership with the governor and to you in the legislature, we are well on our way to building a court system for the 21st century.


This time next year, with your support, we will have put into place an historic shift in the types of cases handled by the Georgia Supreme Court – the highest court in the state – and by the Court of Appeals – our intermediate appellate court. Thanks to Governor Deal’s Georgia Appellate Jurisdiction Review Commission, this realignment will bring the Supreme Court of Georgia in line with other state Supreme Courts, which handle only the most critical cases that potentially change the law. Serving on the Commission are two of my colleagues – Justice David Nahmias and Justice Keith Blackwell – as well as two judges from the Court of Appeals – Chief
Judge Sara Doyle and Judge Stephen Dillard.
I thank you, Justices and Judges, for your leadership.
Under the Georgia Constitution, Supreme Court justices collectively decide every case that comes before us. Currently the state’s highest court hears divorce and alimony cases; we hear cases involving wills; we hear cases involving titles to land; and we hear disputes over boundary lines.
But the Governor’s Commission, and a number of reports by other commissions and
committees issued since 1983, have recommended that such cases should be heard by our intermediate appeals court, not by our highest court.
Both of our courts are among the busiest in the nation. But unlike the Supreme Court, which sits as a full court with all seven justices participating in, and deciding, every case, the Court of Appeals sits in panels of three. With your approval last year of three new Court of Appeals judges, that court will now have five panels, so it will have the capacity to consider five times as many cases as the Supreme Court.
Modernization of the Supreme Court makes sense. In a 19th century court system, when
most of the wealth was tied up in land, maybe title to land cases were the most important. Maybe they had the greatest implications for the public at large. But as we move into the 21st century, that is no longer true.
In answer to questions such as who owns a strip of land, what does a will mean, and who should prevail in a divorce settlement or an alimony dispute, most judicial systems believe that three judges are enough to provide the parties with a full and fair consideration of their appeal. It no longer makes sense to have seven – or nine – justices collectively review these types of cases.
There is no doubt these cases will be in good hands with the Court of Appeals.
Let me emphasize that all these cases the Commission recommended shifting to the Court of Appeals are critically important to the parties involved.
Let me also emphasize that the purpose of this historic change is not to lessen the burden on the Supreme Court. Rather, the intent is to free up the state’s highest court to devote more time and energy to the most complex and the most difficult cases that have the greatest implications for the law and society at large.
We will therefore retain jurisdiction of constitutional challenges to the laws you enact, questions from the federal courts seeking authoritative rulings on Georgia law, election contests, murder and death penalty cases, and cases in which the Court of Appeals judges are equally divided.
Significantly, we want to be able to accept more of what we call “certiorari” cases
which are appeals of decisions by the Court of Appeals. The number of petitions filed in this category during the first quarter of the new docket year is nearly 14 percent higher this year over last. Yet due to the amount of appeals the law now requires us to take, we have had to reject the majority of the petitions for certiorari that we receive.
These cases are often the most complex – and the most consequential. They involve
issues of great importance to the legal system and the State as a whole. Or they involve an area of law that has become inconsistent and needs clarification.
Businesses and citizens need to know what the law allows them to do and what it does
not allow them to do. It is our job at the highest court to reduce any uncertainty and bring consistency and clarity to the law.
Under the Commission’s recommendations, our 21st century Georgia Supreme Court will
be able to accept more of these important appeals.


As we move into the 21st century, plans are being discussed to build the first state Judicial Building in Georgia’s history that will be dedicated solely to the judiciary. We are grateful for the Governor’s leadership on this. The building that now houses the state’s highest court and the Court of Appeals was built in 1954 when Herman Tallmadge was governor. Back then, it made sense to combine the state judicial branch with part of the executive branch, by locating the Law Department in the same building.
But the world has changed since 1954, and the building we now occupy was not designed with visitors in mind. It was not designed with technology in mind. And it surely was not designed with security in mind. Indeed, it was designed to interconnect with neighboring buildings that housed other branches of government.
A proper Judicial Building is about more than bricks and mortar. Outside, this building will symbolize for generations to come the place where people will go to get final resolution of civil wrongs and injustices; where the government will go to safeguard its prosecution of criminals; and where defendants will go to appeal convictions and sentences to prison for life.
Inside such a building, the courtroom will reinforce the reality that what goes on here is serious and solemn; it is a place of great purpose, in the words of a federal judge. The parties and the lawyers will understand they are all on equal footing, because they are equal under the law.
There is a majesty about the law that gets played out in the courtroom. It is a hallowed place because it is where the truth must be told and where justice is born. The courtroom represents our democracy at its very best.
No, this building is not just about bricks and mortar. Rather it is a place that will house Georgia’s highest court where fairness, impartiality, and justice will reign for future generations.


We are no longer living in a 1950s Georgia. The courts of the 21st century must be
equipped to handle an increasingly diverse population. Living today in metropolitan Atlanta alone are more than 700,000 people who were born outside the United States. According to the Chamber of Commerce, today some 70 countries have a presence in Atlanta, in the form of a consulate or trade office. We must be ready to help resolve the disputes of international businesses that are increasingly locating in our state and capital. Our 21st century courts must be open, transparent and accessible to all. Our citizens’ confidence in their judicial system depends on it. We must be armed with qualified, certified interpreters, promote arbitration as an alternative to costly, courtroom-bound litigation, ensure that all those who cannot afford lawyers have an avenue toward justice, and be constantly updating technology with the aim of improving our courts’ efficiency while saving literally millions of dollars. For all of this, we need your help.


When I first became a judge, we had no email, no cell phones, no Internet. People didn’t Twitter or text, or post things on YouTube, Facebook or Instagram. The most modern equipment we had was a mimeograph machine.
This past year, by Supreme Court order, we created for the first time a governance
structure to bring our use of technology into the 21st century. Chaired by my colleague Justice Harold Melton, and co-chaired by Douglas County Superior Court Judge David Emerson, this permanent Judicial Council Standing Committee on Technology will lead the judicial branch by providing guidance and oversight of its technology initiatives.
Our courts on their own are rapidly moving away from paper documents into the digital age. At the Supreme Court, lawyers must now electronically file all cases. This past year, we successfully launched the next phase by working with trial courts to begin transmitting their entire court record to us electronically. The Court of Appeals also now requires the e-filing of applications to appeal, and this year, will join the Supreme Court in accepting electronic trial records.

Our goal is to develop a uniform statewide electronic filing and retrieval system so that lawyers and others throughout the judiciary can file and access data the easiest way possible.
Using a single portal, attorneys will be able to file documents with trial courts and appellate courts – and retrieve them from any court in the state. This is the system advocated by our partner, President Bob Kaufman of the State Bar of Georgia, and by attorneys throughout the state.
Such a system will not only make our courts more efficient at huge savings, but it will make Georgia safer. When our trial judges conduct bond hearings, for example, they often lack critical information about the person before them. They usually have reports about any former convictions, but they may not have information about cases pending against the defendant in other courts. The technology exists now to ensure that they do.
Also on the horizon is the expanded use of videoconferencing – another electronic
improvement that will save money and protect citizens’ lives. After a conviction and sentence to prison, post-trial hearings require courts to send security teams to pick up the prisoner and bring him to court. Without encroaching on the constitutional right of confrontation, we could videoconference the inmate’s testimony from his prison cell. Again, the technology already exists.
Our Committee on Technology will be at the forefront of guiding our courts into the 21st century.


As Georgia grows, it grows more diverse.
Our Georgia courts are required by the federal government to provide language services free of charge to litigants and witnesses, not only in criminal cases but in civil cases as well.
Even for fluent English speakers, the judicial system can be confusing and unwelcoming.
My vision for Georgia’s judiciary in the 21st century is that every court, in every city and every county in Georgia, will have the capacity of serving all litigants, speaking any language, regardless of national origin, from the moment they enter the courthouse until the moment they leave. That means that on court websites, signs and forms will be available in multiple languages, that all court staff will have the tools they need to assist any customers, and that court proceedings will have instant access to the interpreters of the languages they need.
Chief Magistrate Kristina Blum of the Gwinnett County Magistrate Court has been
working hard to ensure access to justice for all those who come to her court, most of whom are representing themselves.
Recently her court created brochures that provide guidance for civil trials, family
violence matters, warrant applications, garnishments, and landlord-tenant disputes. These brochures provide basic information about each proceeding – what to expect and how best to present their case in court.
Judge Blum, who is in line to be president of the Council of Magistrate Judges and is a member of our Judicial Council, has had the brochures translated into Spanish, Korean and Vietnamese. Such non-legalese forms and tutorial videos that our citizens can understand go a long way toward building trust in the judicial system, and in our entire government.
The Supreme Court Commission on Interpreters, chaired by Justice Keith Blackwell, is
making significant strides in ensuring that our courts uphold the standards of due process. With the help of Commission member Jana Edmondson-Cooper, an energetic attorney with the Georgia Legal Services Program, the Commission is working around the state to educate judges,court administrators and lawyers on the judiciary’s responsibilities in providing language assistance.
The essence of due process is the opportunity to be heard. Our justice system is the envy of other countries because it is open and fair to everyone seeking justice. By helping those who have not yet mastered English, we reinforce the message that the doors to the best justice system in the world are open to everyone.
Our law demands it. Our Constitution demands it.


The courts of the 21st century will symbolize a new era. A turning point in our history occurred when we realized there was a smarter way to handle criminals.
Six years ago, my colleague and then Chief Justice Carol Hunstein accompanied
Representative Wendell Willard to Alabama to explore how that state was reforming its criminal justice system. Back in Georgia, Governor Deal seized the reins, brought together the three branches of government, and through extraordinary leadership, has made criminal justice reform a reality. Georgia is now a model for the nation.
Today, following an explosive growth in our prison population that doubled between
1990 and 2011 and caused corrections costs to top one billion dollars a year, last year our prison population was the lowest it has been in 10 years. Our recidivism rate is the lowest it’s been in three decades. And we have turned back the tide of rising costs.
For the last five years, the Georgia Council on Criminal Justice Reform – created by the governor and your legislation – has been busy transforming our criminal justice system into one that does a better job of protecting public safety while holding non-violent offenders accountable and saving millions in taxpayer dollars. I am extremely grateful to this Council and commend the steady leadership of co-chairs Judge Michael Boggs of the Court of Appeals and Thomas Worthy of the State Bar of Georgia.
Throughout this historic reform, Georgia’s trial court judges have been in the trenches.
Our number one goal in criminal justice reform is to better protect the safety of our citizens.
Central to that goal is the development of our specialty courts – what some call accountability courts.
These courts have a proven track record of reducing recidivism rates and keeping our
citizens safe. Nationwide, 75 percent of drug court graduates remain free of arrest two years after completing the program, and the most conservative analyses show that drug courts reduce crime as much as 45 percent more than other sentencing options. Last year, these courts helped save Georgia more than $51 million in prison costs.
From the beginning, you in the legislature have steadfastly supported the growth in these courts, most recently appropriating more than $19 million for the current fiscal year.
Georgia now has 131 of these courts, which include drug courts, DUI courts, juvenile and adult mental health courts, and veterans courts. Today, only two judicial circuits in the state do not yet have a specialty court, and both are in the early stages of discussing the possibility of starting one. In addition to those already involved, last year alone, we added nearly 3500 new participants to these courts.
Behind that number are individual tales of lives changed and in some cases, lives saved.
Our judges, who see so much failure, take pride in these success stories. And so should you.

Chief Judge Richard Slaby of the Richmond County State Court, speaks with great pride of Judge David Watkins and the specialty courts that have grown under Judge Watkins’ direction. Today the recidivism rate among the Augusta participants is less than 10 percent.
The judges who run these courts are committed and deserve our thanks. We are grateful to leaders like Judge Slaby, who is President-Elect of the Council of State Court Judges and a member of our Judicial Council; to Judge Stephen Goss of the Dougherty Superior Court, whose mental health court has been recognized as one of the best mental health courts in our country; to Chief Judge Brenda Weaver, President of the Council of Superior Court Judges and a member of our Judicial Council. Judge Weaver of the Appalachian Judicial Circuit serves on the Council of
Accountability Court Judges of Georgia, which you created last year by statute. Its purpose is to improve the quality of our specialty courts through proven standards and practices, and it is chaired by Superior Court Judge Jason Deal of Hall County. Judge Deal’s dedication to the specialty court model in his community, and his guidance and encouragement to programs throughout the state, are described as invaluable by those who work with him.


We may not have a unified court system in Georgia. But we have judges unified in their commitment to our courts. Among our one thousand four hundred and fifty judges, Georgia has many fine leaders. I’ve told you about a number of them today. In closing, I want to mention two more.
When the United States Supreme Court issued its historic decision last year on same-sex marriage, our Council of Probate Court Judges led the way toward compliance. Three months before the ruling was issued, the judges met privately at the behest of the Council’s then president, Judge Chase Daughtrey of Cook County, and his successor, Judge Don Wilkes of Emanuel County. Together, they determined that regardless of what the Supreme Court decided, they would follow the law. Both Governor Deal and Attorney General Sam Olens also publicly announced they would respect the court’s decision, despite tremendous pressure to do otherwise.
These men are all great leaders who spared our state the turmoil other states endured. The bottom line is this: In Georgia, we may like the law, we may not like the law, but we follow the law.


The day-to-day business of the Georgia courts rarely makes the news. Rather judges,
their staff and clerks spend their days devoted to understanding the law, tediously pushing cases through to resolution, committed to ferreting out the truth and making the right decision. It is not easy, and they must often stand alone, knowing that when they sentence someone to prison, many lives hang in the balance between justice and mercy.
So I thank all of our leaders, and I thank all of our judges who are leading our courts into the 21st century.
May God bless them. May God bless you. And may God bless all the people of Georgia.
Thank you.

Bar Groups See Threat from Nonlawyers

The American Lawyer
http://www.americanlawyer.com/printerfriendly/id=1202748892813
from: The American Lawyer

At ABA Meeting, Bar Groups See Threat from Nonlawyers

Susan Beck, The Am Law Daily

February 4, 2016


(Stanford Law School Professor Deborah Rhode criticized the opposition to Resolution 105, which some fear could lead to more non-lawyers providing legal services.
Photo: Jason Doiy/The Recorder)

A modest proposal that hints at opening the door to nonlawyers providing simple legal services faces a tough fight at the American Bar Association’s midyear meetings, which are currently underway in San Diego.

The ABA’s Litigation Section, as well as the bar associations of Illinois, Nevada, New York, New Jersey and Texas, are all on record opposing Resolution 105, which was submitted by the Commission on the Future of Legal Services and five other ABA divisions. The commission was formed in August 2014 by then-incoming ABA president William Hubbard, who has been vocal about the need to improve access to justice. Under the leadership of former Northrop Grumman Corporation lawyer Judy Perry Martinez, the commission has explored new ways to improve the delivery of civil legal services to the public, especially to those who can’t afford a lawyer or are confused by the legal system.

While the 30-member commission has considered many possible solutions—from technological innovations to allowing nonlawyers to provide limited legal services—Resolution 105 doesn’t propose any specific changes to the status quo. Instead, it asks the ABA to adopt “Model Regulatory Objectives for the Provision of Legal Services” that are guided by such benign principles as protection of the public and meaningful access to justice. It also urges each state’s highest court to be guided by these objectives if it is considering new rules to allow activity by “nontraditional legal service providers.”

While the resolution doesn’t advocate for such changes, the mere mention of “nontraditional legal service providers” raises hackles for some in the ABA. The Texas state bar board, for example, has asked Texas delegates to withhold their support for Resolution 105. State bar president-elect Frank Stevenson II of Locke Lord said the board opposes the proposal because it seems to presume there’s a place for nonlawyers to provide legal services. He added that Texas’ chief justice has already set up a commission to study how lawyers can reach more of the public, and his group wants to wait for that group to finish its work.

“Our position shouldn’t be interpreted as rigidly opposed to innovation in the provision of legal services,” Stevenson said. But he added, “We feel lawyers are not fungible with nonlawyers.”

The New Jersey State Bar Association’s board of trustees voted unanimously to oppose the resolution, also because it envisions new categories of legal service providers. The ABA’s Litigation Section voted 17-8 against it.

Philadelphia lawyer Lawrence Fox of Drinker Biddle & Reath, who has long crusaded against allowing nonlawyers to provide legal services, sent a Jan. 29 email to all delegates with the subject line “Save Our Profession.” He implored them to reject Resolution 105: “If we are going to show leadership, it ought to be in opposing the unauthorized practice of law, wherever it rears its ugly head,” he wrote.

The resolution does have some organized support, including from the South Carolina Bar Association, the ABA’s Business Law Section, the Bar Association of San Francisco and the Washington State Bar Association. (In Washington state, licensed nonlawyers already provide some legal services.)

ABA President Paulette Brown declined to comment on the resolution or the work of the commission.

The commission will hold a roundtable discussion in San Diego on Saturday and will meet again on Sunday. The ABA’s House of Delegates will consider the resolution on Monday.

A simple majority vote is needed to adopt a resolution. The ABA has 560 delegates, but it’s not clear how many will be present Monday.

Over the past year and a half, the Commission on the Future of Legal Services has sought new ideas to improve the public’s access to legal solutions. In May of last year it held a National Summit on Innovation in Legal Services at Stanford Law School that drew 200 participants, including 12 state court chief justices, the CEO of LegalZoom, a Microsoft Corp. in-house lawyer and numerous academics.

The following month, in a podcast on the Legal Talk Network, commission chairman Martinez sounded optimistic that the profession might change. “There’s room in this space to think differently about how we provide legal services,” she said. “This has the potential for sea change.”

Some of the profession’s rules, she said, serve as barriers that don’t protect the public. “We’re making sure that lawyers understand what services aren’t needed to be delivered by a lawyer and can in fact be delivered by somebody else.”

Martinez also noted that some lawyers might have trouble adjusting to a new model: “[There] will be some pain for those not alert and ready for change.”

Martinez could not be reached for comment.

The United Kingdom has already allowed some of the changes that are being fought over in the United States. In 2007 it passed the Legal Services Act, which permits so-called alternative business structures in the practice of law. The U.K. law breaks down many of the barriers that prevented nonlawyers from providing legal services or supplying capital to legal service providers.

Stanford Law School professor Deborah Rhode, who co-chaired last year’s summit and who directs the Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford University, called the May gathering an “extraordinary show of support for innovation” by ABA leadership. Four past, current and future ABA presidents attended, she noted.

“The major challenge for the ABA is how to get the rank and file behind some of these innovative initiatives,” she said. “A lot of lawyers feel very threatened.”

Rhode criticized the organized opposition against Resolution 105. “It’s such a mindless reflexive response,” she said. “This [change] is coming whether the bar likes it or not. Sticking their heads in the sand and trying to block even such an unobjectionable compromise position [in Resolution 105] seems a step in the wrong direction.”

She added, “This is why I titled my book ‘The Trouble with Lawyers,’” referring to her 2015 book critiquing the profession.

“I don’t think it’s fair to say that everyone who has concerns is sticking their heads in the sand,” said Locke Lord’s Stevenson, the Texas bar president. “A lot of criticism has been very nuanced and raises some issues that need to be addressed.”

“Four judicial appointments are being denied Gov. Nathan Deal”. “over a period of decades, it has become customary throughout Georgia for a judge to resign mid-way through the final elected term, which allows the governor to install an incumbent of his choice in time for the next nonpartisan election. Which usually discourages all challengers. Bestowing these prizes has become one of the great perks of the governor’s office.”


(Judge Irma Glover speaks to the audience during a criminal arraignment at Cobb County State Court in Marietta in 2013. Her retirement was announced on Tuesday. Hyosub Shin, hshin@ajc.com)
Greg Bluestein
@bluestein
Daniel Malloy
@ajconwashington
Jim Galloway
@politicalinsidr
http://politics.blog.ajc.com/2016/01/06/cobb-county-judges-deny-gov-nathan-deal-four-bench-appointments/

Cobb County judges deny Gov. Nathan Deal four bench appointments
January 6, 2016 | Filed in: Cobb County, Elections – President, Georgia Legislature, Jimmy Carter, John Lewis, Nathan Deal.

Judge Irma Glover speaks to the audience during a criminal arraignment at Cobb County State Court in Marietta in 2013. Her retirement was announced on Tuesday. Hyosub Shin, hshin@ajc.com

Judge Irma Glover speaks to the audience during a criminal arraignment at Cobb County State Court in Marietta in 2013. Her retirement was announced on Tuesday. Hyosub Shin, hshin@ajc.com

We told you earlier this morning that Allison Barnes Salter, daughter of former Gov. Roy Barnes and a managing partner in the Barnes Law Group, will run for an open seat on the Cobb County State Court bench.

But that is only part of the story.

(Allison Salter Barnes, who announced her candidacy for a state court judgeship on Tuesday).

Allison Salter Barnes, who announced her candidacy for a state court judgeship on Tuesday.

A total of four judges in Cobb County – all women, one on the superior court bench and three on the state court bench – have announced that they will not be running for re-election when their terms expire this year.

Which means that four judicial appointments are being denied Gov. Nathan Deal.

This is actually how the system is supposed to work. But over a period of decades, it has become customary throughout Georgia for a judge to resign mid-way through the final elected term, which allows the governor to install an incumbent of his choice in time for the next nonpartisan election. Which usually discourages all challengers. Bestowing these prizes has become one of the great perks of the governor’s office.

One can’t rule out the possibility that these departing judges hold a fervent belief in the power of voters. Superior Court Judge Adele Grubbs, who is retiring at age 72, won her seat on the bench in a 2000 election. State Court Judge Melanie Clayton first won her seat in an open-field election in 1992.

But we also may be seeing something of a Democratic hangover here. Kathryn Tanksley, another departing state court judge, was appointed as one of the last acts of Governor Barnes before he left office in 2002. And State Court Judge Irma Glover, whose retirement was announced Tuesday in the Daily Report, was a 1995 appointee of Gov. Zell Miller.

Agendas Acc0rding to the Federal Bar Association


I ran across this tonight, looking for something else, but it caught my eye and so I read it.
Knowing what I know about this country and being “awake”, I find the following pretty fucking interesting. What are your thoughts?:

FEDERAL BAR ASSOCIATION
2015-16 ISSUES AGENDA
http://www.fedbar.org/Advocacy/Issues-Agendas.aspx

Active Issues | Monitored Issues
ACTIVE LEGISLATIVE ISSUES

Independence of the Federal Judiciary

The Federal Bar Association reaffirms the importance of the independence of the judiciary, recognizing that judicial decisions are not immune from scrutiny, but are to be made solely on the basis of the law.

Funding for the Federal Courts

The Federal Bar Association supports adequate funding for the general and continuing operations of the federal courts, including an equitable level of rent and facilities expense consistent with actual costs, budgetary constraints, staffing needs and security considerations, to permit the courts to fulfill their constitutional and statutory responsibilities

Federal Judgeships and Caseloads

The Federal Bar Association supports the authorization and establishment of additional permanent and temporary federal judgeships, including bankruptcy judgeships, along with support personnel, as proposed by the Judicial Conference of the United States, when rising caseloads in the federal courts threaten the prompt delivery of justice. The Federal Bar Association also supports efforts to educate Congress, the legal profession and the general public about how the overwhelming case loads threaten the ability of the Third Branch of the federal government to function.

Federal Judicial Vacancies

The Federal Bar Association calls upon the President and Congress to act promptly and responsibly in nominating and confirming nominees to the federal appellate and district courts. The Federal Bar Association supports the development of strategies to reduce the time required to fill federal judicial vacancies.

Courthouse Security

The Federal Bar Association supports the adoption of adequate security measures to protect the federal judiciary, their families and court personnel in and outside the courthouse, while preserving meaningful public access to judicial proceedings.

Federal Judicial Pay

The Federal Bar Association support equitable compensation and regular periodic adjustments for the federal judiciary, as well as senior officials of the Executive Branch and Members of Congress, to promote the recruitment and retention of the highest quality public servants.

Respect for the Federal Courts

Declining public confidence in our courts undermines public respect for the courts and the legitimacy of their rulings. To counter that influence, the Federal Bar Association supports programming and other efforts to educate the public about the federal courts and the role they serve in assuring a just society.

Professionalism and Stature of Federal Attorneys

The Federal Bar Association supports and promotes efforts to improve the professionalism and stature of attorneys employed by the federal government, including: enhancements to the compensation packages of federal attorneys, including pay and retirement benefits, to assist in recruitment and retention; the expansion, consistent with applicable conflict of interest laws, of policies encouraging full participation of attorneys employed by the federal government in professional organizations and pro bono legal activities, including approval for use of administrative leave; enhanced federal funding for participation in continuing legal education and training programs, including paid tuition and administrative leave; and the establishment of programs for student loan deferral and repayment assistance for all federal attorneys, including federal law clerks, federal defenders and judge advocates of the Armed Forces, in support of recruitment and retention efforts.

Social Security Disability Appeals Backlog

The Federal Bar Association supports adequate funding and resources for the Social Security Administration to remove the significant backlog of disability benefit appeals awaiting adjudication and to assure the fair and timely administration of justice for all appellants.

Authority of Bankruptcy Judges in “Core Proceedings”

The Federal Bar Association supports amendment of bankruptcy law to expressly allow bankruptcy judges to issue proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law in core proceedings in which they are otherwise barred from entering final judgments under Article III of the United States Constitution.

Commission on Nazi-Confiscated Art Claims

The Federal Bar Association supports the Congressional creation of a commission to address identification and ownership issues related to Nazi-confiscated artworks, pursuant to the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, as signed by the United States and the international community.

Article I Immigration Court
The Federal Bar Association supports the transfer of responsibilities for the adjudication of immigration claims from the Executive Office of Immigration Review within the Department of Justice to a specialized Article I court, as established by Congress, for the adjudication of claims under the Immigration and Naturalization Act.

Federal Criminal Sentencing
The Federal Bar Association supports efforts to advance fairness and consistency in federal sentencing, while preserving judicial independence and discretion to deal with the particular circumstances of individual cases.

Military Spouse Attorney Mobility
The Federal Bar Association supports state-level legal licensing accommodations, including bar admission without additional examination, for attorneys who are spouses of service members, i.e., members of the uniformed services of the United States as defined in 10 USC §101(a)(5), when: (1) those “military spouse attorneys” are present in a particular state, commonwealth, or territory of the United States or District of Columbia due to their service members’ military assignment; (2) they are graduates of accredited law schools; and (3) they are licensed attorneys in good standing in the bar of another state, commonwealth, or territory of the United States or District of Columbia.

Patent Litigation Reform
The Federal Bar Association supports legislation that curbs abusive patent litigation practices and other responsible measures to improve the quality and clarity of patents. The FBA opposes legislation that reduces judicial discretion in adjudicating patent actions or circumvents the Rules Enabling Act by mandating changes that depart from the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in patent cases.

MONITORED LEGISLATIVE ISSUES

Courthouse Construction

The Federal Bar Association supports the full funding of courthouse construction proposed by the Judicial Conference of the United States.

Cameras in the Courts

The Federal Bar Association encourages a discussion of the competing considerations vis-a-vis proposed legislation which would authorize federal judges, in their discretion, to permit photographing, electronic recording, broadcasting, and televising of federal court proceedings in appropriate circumstances.

Division of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

The Federal Bar Association opposes the division of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, consistent with its capacity to effectively and efficiently render justice.

Continuing Legal Education Funding for the Federal Judiciary

The Federal Bar Association supports the expansion of and enhancement of federal funding for continuing legal education and training programs for the federal judiciary.

Expansion of Federal Jurisdiction Over State and Local-Prosecuted Crimes

The Federal Bar Association advocates strict scrutiny of legislation proposing to grant original jurisdiction to federal authorities over crimes traditionally reserved to state and local prosecution.

Criminal Justice Act Panel Attorney Compensation

The Federal Bar Association supports Congressional funding to permit an increase in compensation rates for Criminal Justice Act panel attorneys.

National Security and Civil Liberties

The Federal Bar Association encourages the discussion of the competing considerations in the nation’s war against terror between the protection of civil liberties and the interests of national security.

Prevention of Epidemics and Civil Liberties

The Federal Bar Association encourages and contributes to a discussion of the competing considerations between governmental restrictions to guard against epidemics and pandemics and the preservation of individual rights, as well as the use of technology to ensure the continuance of participatory governance.

Safety of Administrative Judges

The Federal Bar Association supports the efforts by the Social Security Administration and the Executive Office of Immigration Review to take appropriate steps to ensure the security of their administrative law judges and immigration judges, and all others who participate in its proceedings.

Veteran Disability Claims Adjudication

The Federal Bar Association supports legislative and administrative improvements to the veterans disability claims process in the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs to assure equitable and expeditious determinations.

Attorney Fee-Based Representation of Veterans

The Federal Bar Association supports proposals to expand the availability of fee-based representation of veterans in the disability claims process and to oppose any efforts to repeal the authority of attorney representation to veterans in the furtherance of such claims.

Frivolous Litigation

The Federal Bar Association opposes legislative proposals to eliminate judicial discretion in the imposition of sanctions for frivolous litigation, including proposals to revise Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure by imposing mandatory sanctions and preventing a party from withdrawing challenged pleadings on a voluntary basis within a reasonable time.

Adopted by the Board of Directors
Federal Bar Association
July 10, 2015

The compass of FBA’s government relations program is its Issues Agenda, a roster of policy priorities to which the Association devotes its advocacy resources. The policy priorities embraced by the Issues Agenda are associated with active issues that concern the health and welfare of the federal judicial system and effective federal legal practice. For example, they concern the preservation of judicial independence, adequate funding and facilities for the federal courts, sufficient numbers of federal judgeships, equitable compensation for the federal judiciary, fairness and consistency in federal sentencing and a host of other matters

Daily Report and Andrew Phillips: Analyzing the Suit Over Georgia Voters’ Personal Data Leak

Analyzing the Suit Over Georgia Voters’ Personal Data Leak
Andrew Phillips, Daily Report
November 20, 2015
http://www.dailyreportonline.com/id=1202743008663/Analyzing-the-Suit-Over-Georgia-Voters-Personal-Data-Leak?mcode=0&curindex=0&curpage=ALL


Andrew Phillips
Andrew Phillips is senior counsel in McGuireWoods’ Atlanta office, where he is editor of the firm’s “Password Protected” blog, in which a version of this article first appeared. His practice focuses on representing and counseling clients in a variety of class action and high stakes civil litigation.

John Disney/Daily Report

Did the Georgia secretary of state release the Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and dates of birth of every registered Georgia voter? Those are the allegations first made by putative class representatives Elise Piper and Yvette Sanders in a recently filed Fulton County Superior Court lawsuit and confirmed by recent statements by the secretary of state.

The office of Secretary of State Brian Kemp attributes the data leak to a “clerical error,” which it alleges involved the dissemination of CD-ROMs containing extraneous data to only 12 recipients and that the disks are in the process of being recovered.

Piper and Sanders also allege that, despite being on notice of the leak, the state failed to notify the affected voters, or credit reporting agencies, in violation of the Georgia Personal Identity Protection Act of 2007 (GPIPA).

As troubling as the release of this information may be to voters—who may be dubious that the leak has been contained and are concerned about the risk of identity theft or fraud—it is unclear what, if any, legal remedy is available to plaintiffs.

The Data Leak
Per the complaint, the Social Security and driver’s license numbers were collected as part of the voter registration process. However, the suit alleges that although the voter registration process only required the last four digits of each voter’s Social Security number, the Secretary of State’s Office nonetheless maintained “each voter’s complete Social Security and driver’s license number.”

Some voter identification information, such as names and addresses—but not Social Security and driver’s license numbers—is regularly maintained in a “voter file” which is routinely provided on CD-ROM to media members and political parties free of charge. The voter file is also available to the general public for a $500 fee. However, plaintiffs allege, when the October 2015 voter file was distributed, it not only contained standard voter identification information but also the Social Security number, driver’s license number, and date of birth for all 6,184,281 registered Georgia voters.

The Georgia Personal Identity Protection Act
Legally, the type of data released is a distinction with a difference. GPIPA—like many similar state data breach notification statutes—defines “personal information,” in relevant part, as “an individual’s first name or first initial and last name in combination with any one or more of the following data elements,” including a Social Security number or driver’s license number. Thus, while the dissemination of the standard voter file containing voters’ names and addresses alone likely did not constitute a release of protected personal information, the alleged release of that information in conjunction with Social Security and driver’s license numbers could be deemed a breach.
Of course, even if the information was—as it appears to be—”personal information,” that is not the end of the inquiry. Other key questions include whether the Georgia Secretary of State is an “information broker or data collector” subject to the act, whether the release of the information was a “breach of the security of the system” within the meaning of the act, and whether the state failed to comply with the notice requirements of GPIPA.

Based on what we know, it would appear the answers to the first two questions are yes. GPIPA defines a data collector to include state agencies and actors as long as they are not maintaining records “primarily for traffic safety, law enforcement or licensing purposes or for purposes of providing public access to court records or to real or personal property information.” Assuming the Office of the Secretary of State cannot meet any of these exceptions—as seems likely—it is a “data collector.”

Likewise, the act defines “breach of the security of the system” to mean “unauthorized acquisition of an individual’s electronic data that compromises the security, confidentiality or integrity of personal information.” Again, based on the available information, this definition would appear to have been met by the dissemination of the personal information to media and political parties.

That said, the secretary of state may argue that the release of the information to a mere dozen people, followed by prompt efforts to recover the disks and contain the leak, did not jeopardize “the security, confidentiality, or integrity of personal information.” Of course, the fact that plaintiffs’ counsel apparently ended up with one of the disks undermines these arguments.

Turning to the next question, if GPIPA applies and the release was a breach, what was the Office of the Secretary of State required to do?
Under GPIPA, any information broker or data collector “shall give notice of any breach of the security of the system following discovery or notification of the breach” to Georgia residents whose unencrypted personal information was “acquired by an unauthorized person.”
With regard to timing, the notice shall be made “in the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay, consistent with the legitimate needs of law enforcement.” Law enforcement may delay notification if “a law enforcement agency determines that the notification will compromise a criminal investigation.”

Finally, where, as here, a breach requires notification to more than 10,000 residents, the data collector must also inform “all consumer reporting agencies.” Per the complaint, the secretary of state’s office did not provide notice to affected voters or consumer reporting agencies in the approximately one-month since the release, which could constitute a lack of notice.

On the other hand, perhaps the state can argue that the length of time that has passed since the potential breach without notification was not an “unreasonable delay” in light of the facts surrounding the release.

As for the type of notice required, the act typically requires written, telephonic, or, with prior permission, electronic notice. However, where the cost of the notice, as here, would exceed $50,000 or the breach affected more than 100,000 individuals, “substitute notice” may be appropriate. This can include notice by email (when known), conspicuous notice on the entity’s website, and notification via statewide media.
Thus, in this case, the statute could likely be satisfied with a press release and conspicuous notification on the Secretary of State web page—an embarrassment, perhaps, but not a huge logistical hurdle.

Do Plaintiffs Have a Case?
Despite the possibility that the secretary of state’s office may have violated GPIPA, plaintiffs’ remedy, if any, is unclear. Notably, plaintiffs have not sued for damages—likely because GPIPA does not expressly allow damages, and, regardless, seeking damages would likely trigger a sovereign immunity fight. Rather, the suit seeks equitable relief requiring the secretary of state to comply with GPIPA’s notification requirements and “prevent future harm due to the disclosure,” and attorneys’ fees.

While it is difficult to imagine that GPIPA was enacted without any enforcement mechanism or remedy—unlike many other states’ data privacy laws—GPIPA does not expressly create an independent civil cause of action, contain any statutory remedies or provide for an award of attorneys’ fees.

Moreover, while the only two published cases that have examined the act have not foreclosed a private right of action, neither has expressly found one, either. In the first, Willingham v. Global Payments, the Northern District of Georgia held the act inapplicable because the plaintiffs in that case were not residents of Georgia.
More recently, in an opinion arising out of the In re Target data breach litigation, the court allowed plaintiffs’ GPIPA claim to survive a motion to dismiss because “Georgia’s data-breach-notice statute is silent as to enforcement” and “neither party cites any case regarding how a court should interpret silence as to enforcement under Georgia law.”

The plaintiffs’ chance of success is unclear based on the paucity of case law examining GPIPA—and the fact that no court has affirmatively found a private cause of action.

Lessons for Government and Industry
Although the merits of plaintiffs’ suit are an open question—both because the secretary of state may have a viable defense and because GPIPA may be relatively toothless—it still carries important lessons for businesses and others collecting and processing personal information.

First, the Secretary of State Office’s “clerical error” illustrates the risk of collecting more data than needed. If only the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers were necessary, then the retention of complete Social Security and driver’s license numbers appears to have been an unnecessary risk that, in this case, led to a substantial data leak and litigation.

Second, those collecting and processing personal information should know—and comply with—data breach notification laws. For larger companies, this likely means compliance with various states’ disclosure laws—many of which have much clearer penalties and enforcement mechanisms than GPIPA.

Finally—and perhaps most fundamentally—data collectors and custodians should have a robust information management program in place that is commensurate with the volume and sensitivity of the data at issue. Simply put, a data management system with sufficient checks and safeguards should prevent a “clerical error” from potentially putting millions at risk.

Andrew Phillips is senior counsel in McGuireWoods’ Atlanta office, where he is editor of the firm’s “Password Protected” blog, in which a version of this article first appeared. His practice focuses on representing and counseling clients in a variety of class action and high stakes civil litigation.

Read more: http://www.dailyreportonline.com/id=1202743008663/Analyzing-the-Suit-Over-Georgia-Voters-Personal-Data-Leak#ixzz3sCITf37b