Members of our federal judiciary have, time and again, distorted and shown total disrespect to the United States Constitution and federal statutes to suit their own agendas instead to uphold the law. While the recent rulings of the federal judiciary, particularly in civil rights and First Amendment cases, are about precluding both the judicial forum, and the availability of the judicial processes to injured individuals, the amendments to procedural rules of federal courts close the federal courthouse doors to those whose rights have been violated. To date, our Congress has failed to address any of these issues.

LINK

This website is not about any particular lawsuit. It is about the blatant, notorious abuse of power by all members of our federal judiciary at all levels: starting in federal district courts and finishing in the Supreme Court of the United States. It is about the judicial system in which ordinary citizens and small businesses are relegated to second class citizens at best, and whose cases are disposed of by plainly-incompetent administrative non-judicial personnel. This entire scheme --carefully-guarded from public view-- is covered up by "no-citation, no-publication and non-precedent" rules applied primarily against disfavored classes of litigants. Similar abuse of power has also ravaged the criminal justice system.

The net result of this systematic institutionalized abuse of power is tens of thousands of irreversibly destroyed lives and tens of thousands of damaged small businesses of innocent citizens.

Just consider one statistic: since the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976, 700 people have been released from Death Row after spending 10-20 years there (that translates into one death row inmate being found innocent or with substantial evidence of their innocence for every seven executed).

Take another example: 99.98 percent of civil lawsuits filed by individual citizens in federal district courts were summarily dismissed by administrative personnel (parroting for district judges and/or magistrate judges) without even allowing for service of process on defendants. At the appellate level, 99.99 percent of appeals from these summary dismissals were summarily "affirmed", or "dismissed"-- without even allowing for any formal briefing, let alone any oral argument-- by "some law clerk or staff attorney." From eighty thousands (80,000) of petitions filed by individuals, the Rehnquist Supreme Court granted less than ten (that translates into less than 0.01 percent). At the same time, the same Rehnquist Court granted one out of every ten petitions (10%) filed by corporations; and 40 percent of the petitions filed by the state and federal government.

Is it any wonder that our federal judiciary insists on keeping these matters hidden from public view?

WHO WE ARE

SecretJustice.org was started by a former Republican candidate (Primary and General Election 2002) for the office of the Clerk of the Circuit Court for Prince George's County, Maryland. See links below:

Election 2002 Prince George's
Three Courthouse Races Surprisingly Crowded
WISH (Women for Senate & House) Endorsement (Election 2002)
Washington Post: GOP Challenger Trying to Unseat Clerk
Former scientist eyes court position
Clerk of the Circuit Court
Greenbelt News
Official Results of General Election 2002
Press Release: Retaliation for Asking Questions?
McDermott's Letter to Chief Judge Benson E. Legg
2002 Republican Candidate for Clerk

Former Democratic candidate (Primary Election 2002) for the same office, and now a Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Election 2004, George E. McDermott contributes to this web site. See links below:
Businessman and activist seeks term as court clerk
George McDermott Announces Candidacy for Maryland's 4th Congressional District

A Matter of Justice

Citizen's Justice Institute

Quatloos: Cyber-Museum of Scams and Frauds

American Jury Institute

National Judicial Conduct and Disability Law Project, Inc

Victims of Law

Reform Sites

HALT

Self-Help Resources

Legal Information Clearinghouse

EDITORIAL DESK, NY TIMES
Weakening the Rules for Judges
Published: May 22, 2004

The special commission weighing revisions to the American Bar Association's code of judicial conduct seems to have missed the lesson of Justice Antonin Scalia's notorious duck-hunting trip with Vice President Dick Cheney: Americans don't appreciate it when judges behave in ways that undermine the judicial system's fairness and integrity.
The bar panel's newly unveiled proposals for revamping the Model Code of Judicial Conduct would actually weaken the core provision that requires judges to avoid not just actual impropriety in all their activities, but also the appearance of impropriety. Although the new version retains the appearance standard, it waters it down by saying that violations will not ''ordinarily'' lead to professional discipline unless there are charges of other rule violations. Intentionally or not, as Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont aptly noted last week in a letter to the bar association's president, Dennis Archer, that transforms a crucial ethical mandate into ''an ancillary add-on'' and significantly diminishes its moral force and deterrence value.

The proposed change was apparently driven largely by an overblown concern about the ''vagueness'' of the appearance-of-impropriety standard. Judges interpret similar terms every day, and there now exists a substantial body of case law and ethics opinions construing the type of behavior that gives rise to an appearance of impropriety. The proper way to address any undue murkiness, in any event, is for the commission to provide further guidance, not to dilute expectations.

In another disappointment, the commission's proposal failed to tighten the rules on disqualification to match the stronger and more clear-cut requirements for the federal judiciary. A federal judge is barred from sitting in a case involving a company in which the judge has any economic interest. A provision of the bar's current code, retained in the new proposal, requires disqualification only when a judge deems that the economic interest is more than ''de minimis,'' and ''could be substantially affected.''

Even more baffling, the commission has deleted the current instruction to judges to resolve any ambiguity in the Code of Conduct in a way that advances public trust in the judiciary's ''integrity, independence and impartiality.'' Practically and symbolically, that deletion is a real mistake.

Mark Harrison, the Arizona lawyer who leads the commission, stresses that the draft is tentative and partial. Plainly, other critical issues still loom -- not least of which is the festering scandal of the well-attended, expense-paid judicial seminars that are held at nice resorts and underwritten by private interests bent on influencing judicial decisions. The commission still has time to do the right thing, but its proposals so far are not very reassuring.