Spread The Word: Jerry Brown Approves 2,100 Felons Sitting as Judges in California Courtrooms

February 21, 2010
By:  Savannah S. Winslow

LOS ANGELES -  Senate Bill SBX2-11 granted retroactive immunity for criminal prosecution to over two thousand superior court judges and commissioners in California's courtrooms last February after twenty-plus years of an illegal payment scheme between judges and county supervisors was uncovered.  (It should be noted that judges in San Francisco County, Mendocino County and Yolo County did not partake in the scheme; their numbers are therefore not included in the headline's calculation.  However, their silence concerning their thievin' brethren hardly makes them pure.)

Although technically given amnesty (under illegal circumstances, but that's another story), these people committed many, MANY crimes ... which makes them felons, unindicted and unconvicted but felons just the same.  (SBX2-11 also protects them from being sued civilly, and from being disciplined by the Judicial Performance Commission,)

Although they've fixed it so they cannot be prosecuted, the crimes were still committed and no records have been expunged.  The pretense that these men and women are innocent and pure is the greatest legal fiction ever attempted in history.

The Internet is rife with references to the judicial community's lofty references to its "integrity."  Sure, judges take oaths, swearing before God himself that they each will uphold and defend the Constitutions, state and federal.  They even created "canons", a special set of rules governing their conduct.  All these fail-safes failed spectacularly this year, however, when not one judge would come forward to correct the major scandal that taxpayer advocate attorney Richard I. Fine, and later Judicial Watch, exposed.  (Which is why palms were quickly greased and SBX2-11 was secretly passed by the Legislature.  Their pride in that work was evidenced by their deliberately omitting the amnesty provisions from the government code, thus concealing it from the public ... the same public that had financed the free-for-all to the tune of about a billion dollars and ten million felonies.) 

Richard Fine was jailed on a trumped-up "contempt" charge last year as Judge David P. Yaffe scrambled madly to cover up his own role in furthering the parallel scheme in which judges saw to it that the County always won the lawsuits filed against it when they could keep the cases from the hands of juries.  Dr. Fine, though, has become a national martyr against judicial corruption, locked in solitary confinement since March 4, 2009 in the nation's "worst" jail.

Meanwhile, 2,100 judges and commissioners continue to sit on their thrones in their courtrooms as if everything is just peachy.  Then there are the county supervisors who reauthorize payments for the scheme yearly and, in the case of Los Angeles County Supervisors, also receive the same extra $57,000 per year that the judges receive ... illegal bonuses they could not convince the taxpaying public to award them.

"Moonbeam" Jerry Brown has either been bought off or he really is simple-minded enough to believe that he can become California's next governor despite the fact that he refuses to take any action whatsoever against the cabal of judges, even going so far as to quash an internal investigation that was opened at the demand of the Judicial Performance Commission concerning SBX2-11.

All of this is, of course, not only embarrassing, it's a ridiculous waste and very expensive for California's already over-burdened taxpayers.  But it has become the pinnacle of 70-year-old Fine's altruistic career.  Yet can one man of principle and his team of patriotic aides manage to inform the public before the entrenched regime finally squashes them?  Already the guilty parties have managed to rob Fine of his license to practice law by conspiring to disbar him for "moral turpitude" for the crime of exposing the judges' receipt of the monies and objecting to their bias in favor of L.A. County, who'd made the payments to them. 

What can you do?  Call or write Sheriff Leroy D. Baca.  (Call (213) 473-6100 or email ldbaca@lasd.org)  Let him know that you understand that the California Code of Civil Procedure Section 1218 and the "William Farr" cases all confirm that Richard Fine could not legally be kept in jail longer than five days even if he had committed the contempt alleged.  Let Baca know if you think the fact that Fine has been there for a full year is outrageous.  Remind him that you will keep Baca's handling of this case in the forefront of your mind when re-election time comes around.

Tell Sheriff Baca that you know that Judge Yaffe was being paid under the table by Los Angeles County while he ruled on their cases, and always in their favor, at the same time.

Ask why, if Judge Yaffe is in the right, is Sheriff Baca currently being sued in Federal Court for his refusal to allow the press access to Dr. Fine to conduct an interview?  (Baca has said that Yaffe ordered the denial of media access, but Baca has not produced such an order, and there's no such thing in the court file.)  Ask the Sheriff what he's getting in exchange for covering for a corrupt judge?

And when re-election time rolls around, be sure to vote all these crooks out of office.

(For the story background, read "The Best Courts (Your) Money Could Buy", not to mention the rest of this blog.)

Updates

On February 10th, Ninth Circuit Judges Reinhardt, Trott and Wardlaw released their order denying Richard Fine's petition for rehearing en banc.

On February 12th, the same judges denied Fine's motion to disqualify each of them due to their connections to Los Angeles County, a defendant in the underlying case and the entity which continues to make illegal payments to superior court judges in exchange for favorable rulings when sued.   These bottom-rung judges are now getting more than even the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.