To Earnest, with Love

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 (...

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 Constitut...

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 wearin...

"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...

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 ...

When I was trained as a law enforcement officer a long long time ago, we were trained to use only the force necessary to protect others and ourselves; to use deadly force only as a last resort; to always act in a way that deescalated the situation, not escalated it; and most importantly, to be willing to sacrifice our lives before we took the life of an innocent. That meant that in the split second of making a decision of shoot or don't shoot, your duty was to sacrifice your life before you harmed or killed someone you weren't absolutely certain posed a threat to you or someone else. We were repeatedly reminded that the people we were engaging with were the people we had sworn to protect and serve. Law enforcement is an extremely difficult and thankless job when its done the way I was trained and I was in awe of the officers who trained us and did this thankless job every day. They were/are heroes - true heroes. Today's LE officers are not trained as police but as an o...

It DOES exist! Recently, someone messaged me and remarked that because of my recent stint in politics, I must agree that there was no “good ‘ole boy network” in St. Tammany anymore.  I don’t know this person except through Facebook, but his posts, wherever I've seen them, are intelligent and respectful so his remark gave me pause.  After my year of living politically – that is, wading through an ever deepening river of slime and hoping I didn't step off into a deep hole – I am more acutely aware of the “good ‘ole boy network” than I ever was before.  Before I ran, ‘the machine” was just a concept that I understood about as well as I understand gravity.  I know it exists because I can see the effects of it all around me, but I don’t know how it works or what it looks like.  In fact, I was less certain that there was some political machine in St. Tammany before I ran than I was certain of gravity.  Having now seen the ...