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Showing posts from 2015

It's NOT a Rhetorical Question

P arents often ask me, in one form or another, why our family court system is so broken.  How can the judges, attorneys, therapists, police officers, etc., who are supposed to protect children fail so miserably?  How can “they” deny due process, violate the First Amendment, ignore the rule of law, and inflict so much pain and suffering on families in the name of justice and get away with it, every day, right here, in the greatest country on earth? All over the world, people suffer this and worse, I'm sorry to say. Look at Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, the Sudan, Nigeria, to name just a few.  “Injustice” doesn’t begin to capture the reality of those places.  You think because you’re Americans and you live in the "greatest country on earth" that you are guaranteed "liberty and justice."  You entrust your freedoms to others; put yellow-ribbon stickers on your cars; share warm and fuzzy memes on Facebook; choose your elected officials based on a two-second

Starving for Justice - All I want for breakfast, lunch or dinner in October, is JUSTICE.

It's October, and that means it's Domestic Violence Awareness month so to commemorate it, I am going on a hunger strike.  The only nourishment I will take for the entire month of October is JUSTICE because I'm starved for it.  And I'm not the only one; there are millions of us out there who are starving for justice. They are the victims of domestic violence, the protective parents, and the victims of social services who turned to the courts seeking justice, and are starving for it still. Unlike most, if not all of them, though, I am in a privileged position to do two things that most people can't: I can speak out about the travesties that are taking place in our courts every day; and I can literally starve for justice. In honor of Domestic Violence Awareness month, throughout October lots of non-profits, governmental agencies and celebrities will make extra efforts to urge anyone trapped in violent and dangerous relationships to leave their abusers and find safe

Roadmap to Disbarment

It should be obvious by now that if someone is determined NOT to know the truth, then it doesn’t matter how much truth is put in front of her or him, the truth will be ignored.  But for anyone interested in facts underlying my journey to disbarment, here they are. The underlying events dealt with allegations of abuse of two small children which gave rise to a custody case in Mississippi, an intra-family adoption case in Louisiana, and a petition seeking emergency relief, also filed in Louisiana. On July 20, 2011, Chancellor Deborah Gambrell, the Mississippi judge presiding over the custody case in Mississippi, issued  an illegal order  affecting custody and visitation of the children. The order was issued without prior notice to mom, and it was done in the judge's chambers so there was no record of what was said. Those two factors alone make is absolutely null, according to the U.S. Constitution and Mississippi law. The order allowed dad to have supervised (by his mother w

More Facts; Fewer F#(K Y@Us.

That was the advice my friend and attorney, Richard Ducote, gave me when I sat down to write this application for rehearing to the Louisiana Supreme Court.  That proved even more challenging than I imagined, so it's not my best legal work, but the ultimate product, I think, gets my point across with only a couple of "kiss my @ss"es.    Not that I think it's going to make an iota of difference.  If the Court was ever interested in the facts, or the law, it could not have published that tortured, contrived, largely fictional analysis underlying their opinion that I should be disbarred. ( In Re McCool, 2015-DB-0284 (La 06/30/2015 )).  And not that I care what the individual - ahem - justices think.  Knoll called the U.S. Supreme Court justices "attorneys in black robes" a half dozen times or so in her outraged concurrence in Costanza v. Caldwell , 14-2090 (La. 7/7/15) and pretty much accused them of wiping their collective asses with our Constitution, but fo

Beasties Behind the Curtain

I've come to the not-so-un-obvious conclusion that we, as a nation, are all concerned with the wrong terrorists. It's not ISIS, or ISIL or radical Islam in general that is the preeminent threat to our freedom and security - it's judges, and attorneys who aspire to be liked by judges. How many people really understand that you can't do anything to a judge (legally) no matter what they do to you or your family?  Until you've seen it, lived it, fought it and lost your kids in it, most Americans cannot wrap their heads around the very simple fact that any judge anywhere can take everything from you - your job, your home, your life - even your kids, and do it maliciously and without any regard for the law, and you have absolutely no recourse.  It's called judicial immunity.  Look it up.  Stump v. Sparkman,  435 U.S. 349 (1978).   It's our fault, you know.  Well, not mine really. I've seen the little beasties behind the curtain; the sociopaths wearing

Justice is process, NOT outcome

"And when a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to the fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws, is abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we have no longer a Constitution; we are under the government of individual men, who for the time being have power to declare what the Constitution is, according to their own views of what it ought to mean. When such a method of interpretation of the Constitution obtains, in place of a republican Government, with limited and defined powers, we have a Government which is merely an exponent of the will of Congress; or what, in my opinion, would not be preferable, an exponent of the individual political opinions of the members of this court."  Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393 (1857) Justice Curtis, dissenting at p. 621. I am finally getting around to reading the US Supreme Court's decision finding that states cannot bar same sex marriages.  Although I pe

A bitter pill I'm proud to swallow.

Just for clarification, my license has not been suspended ... yet. If it is suspended, I will likely never be able to have it reinstated because I will never agree that it isn't my job, as an attorney and a US citizen, to call out a judge who ignores the law; who abuses her authority and who denies due process to litigants and that it isn't my sworn duty to call attention to those transgressions to the public, which is the last and only remaining check on judicial authority. This Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board disagrees with me and now the Louisiana Supreme Court will ultimately decide, but it's obvious from the LADB's recommendation that it and I have completely different notions of what is honorable and ethical and what an attorney's duty is to the profession and who it serves. The thing I keep coming back to is, why do I care? Why even fight? If You, the People, don't care, why should I? This country is, on paper anyway, a democracy and I believe