The property motion
The court is now doing all it can to prevent a key issue in my case: the illegal taking of 63 volumes of personal diaries from my apartment on March 29, 1979, from surfacing.
Material of such nature can’t be used in court as it is fifth amendment protected. A basic right against self-incrimination and one of the first ten amendments to the constitution and the basis for the unique form of freedom – when observed – that citizens of the USA enjoy.
The material was taken under the aegis of a poisonous warrant.
It was then given to a journalist, Steven Levy. Such behaviour is unprecedented in American law as evidence is sacrosanct and supposedly protected under bond of law. His use of such stolen property is plagiarism among other crimes.
All of this is described clearly in my pro-se petition.
It is a legal horror story that my two closest prosecutors, posing as lawyers, William Cannon and Mitchell S. Strutin, ‘missed’, though the series of actions would have given any first year law student apoplexy.
The diaries were used at the trial and dominated the trial. Egregious prosecutorial misconduct and legal error on the part of Mitch and bill that would bring about hara-kiri in Japan. When they were history, I immediately tried to reclaim my property.
I am public enemy no. 1, so the DA avoided the motion for a year, then tried to time bar me and added an insult as part of the process. A continuous ad hominem attack that has gone on for almost three decades and was furthered by the DA’s office illegally giving my diaries to a writer to use against me for his own purposes.
See page 32 for the DA’s insult. It has nothing to do with the law and is indicative of their bankruptcy.
The judge has refused to put anything on paper, thus avoiding the basic function of the law. To commit rulings to paper, so they can be discussed and appealed when necessary.
When a petitioner submits a motion to a court, a judge must rule on it. That is the function of the court. That ruling must then be put in writing and sent to the petitioner.
Judge Palumbo has not ruled on:
1. my asking for additional time
2. my in forma pauperis petition
3. my motion itself.
Or to be more accurate, he has ruled on all three matters, but has not taken the trouble to inform the petitioner in writing, an abrogation of his basic function and a destruction of the basic due process rights of the petitioner.
I have appealed the matter and sent a copy of the appeal to the present judge and a number of other people of note.
Yet, technically you can’t appeal unless you have a written order. Knowing this and suspecting that the judge would never issue one, or issue it too late (sorry, you are time barred is the bane of so many of those fighting an unjust system), I asked leave to appeal from his verbal order which he granted, but you can’t get a transcript without a signed in forma pauperis order which the judge never signed and without a transcript – a record of what happened – you can’t perfect an appeal.
Yet I sent the appeal in, explaining the defects, including a secondary (copy) cover sheet, asking that it be date stamped and returned to me in a SASE that I included with the appeal.
That was three weeks ago. My SASE has not come back.
The motion about my property that you will find below is mainly factual. The law I used is simple and straightforward. The principle is clear; if something is not contraband, it must be returned.
The pages were written in response to a three part submission by a SA that I can sum up very concisely: the sum total of the Commonwealth’s argument adds up to the following:
A. an argument based on fallacious facts.
B. an argument based upon conflating a return of property hearing with a forfeiture hearing, using as support a case that has little relevance in our court system.
C. an insult that is based on the total misstating of the actual factual situation.
In situation after situation, the court has acted towards me in a manner that an objective observer would describe as subterfuge.
It is the tonus of Pensylvania courts in too many instances as the article below illustrates:
International Herald Tribune, February 14-15, 2009, p. 5
Judges got $2.6 million to jail juveniles
By Ian Urbina and Sean D. Hamill
At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stem lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Bane, Pennsylvania.
She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page slated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.
Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.
She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by.
“I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare,” Hillary, 17, said. “All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing.”
The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.
While prosecutors say that Conahan, 56, secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders, Ciavarella, 58, was the one who carried out the sentencing to keep the centers filled.
“In my entire career, I’ve never heard of anything remotely approaching this,” said Senior Judge Arthur Grim, who was appointed by the state Supreme Court this week to determine what should be done with the estimated 5,000 juveniles who have been sentenced by Ciavarella since the scheme started in 2003. Many of them were first-time offenders and some remain in detention.
The case has shocked Luzerne County, an area in northeastern Pennsylvania that has been battered by a loss of industrial jobs and the closing of most of its anthracite coal mines. It raised concerns about whether juveniles should be required to have counsel either before or during their appearances in court and whether juvenile courts should be open to the public or child advocates.
If the court agrees to the plea agreement, both judges will serve 87 months in federal prison and resign from the bench and bar. They are expected to be sentenced in the next several months.
Since state law forbids retirement benefits to judges convicted of a felony while in office, the judges would also lose their pensions.
With Conahan serving as president judge in control of the budget and Ciavarella overseeing the juvenile courts, they set the kickback scheme in motion in December 2002, the authorities said. They shut down the county-run juvenile detention center, arguing that it was in poor condition, the authorities said, and maintained that the county had no choice but to send detained juveniles to the new private detention centers.
Prosecutors say the judges tried to conceal the kickbacks as payments to a company they control in Florida.
Though he pleaded guilty to the charges Thursday, Ciavarella has denied sentencing juveniles who did not deserve it or sending them to the detention centers in a quid pro quo with the centers. But Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Zubrod said that the government continued to allege a quid pro quo.
“We’re not negotiating that, no,” Zubrod said. “We’re not backing off.”
No charges have been filed against executives of the detention centers. Prosecutors said the investigation into the case was continuing.
For years, youth advocacy groups complained that Ciavarella was unusually harsh. He sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants lo detention centers from 2002 to 2006, compared with a state rate of 1 in 10. He also routinely ignored requests for leniency made by prosecutors and probation officers.
“The juvenile system, by design, is intended to be a less punitive system than the adult system, and yet here were scores of children with very minor infractions having their lives ruined,” said Marsha Levick, a lawyer with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center.
“There was a culture of intimidation surrounding this judge, and no one was willing to speak up about the sentences he was handing down.”
I was told Friday there will be many more arrests to follow. Given my egregious experience, I am not surprised.
February 22, 2009
