THE ROBING ROOM

Hon. Shira Sheindlin In 2009, there were public hearings held at the State Capitol concerning the level of public dissatisfaction at the Appellate Division First Department Disciplinary Committee (the Committee that oversees attorneys in New York) and the State Commission on Judicial Conduct (the Committee that oversees judges’ misconduct). I testified. I testified concerning attorneys at the DDC. I had requested the DDC’s assistance because attorneys I had retained were not sending me copies of checks that they were required to send. One of the attorneys was formerly employed as an attorney at the DDC; the other was a former Chief Counsel at the DDC. The DDC attorneys were claiming they were obtaining the copies of the checks from the bank — the DDC attorneys were telling me this for three years. Everyone knows it does not take a bank three years to send checks. When I realized that the DDC attorneys were not being honest, I filed a complaint in the NY State Court in order to obtain copies of the checks. The presiding judge was the Hon. Joan Kenny, and she dismissed the case, calling me frivolous by attributing cases to me that were not mine, and then publishing the decision on the front page of the NY Law Journal. The checks that the DDC eventually turned over to me were forged. The Chief Counsel of the DDC, Thomas Cahill, closed the case and stated that the attorneys had turned over the checks to the DDC when I filed the complaint with the DDC. This was inconsistent with what the DDC attorneys were telling me for three years. At the hearing, I testified about the expert’s report that I obtained concerning the forged checks. The expert also investigated the curriculum vitae of Judge Kenny, which she found on the judge’s campaign website; she found material misrepresentations such as: inaccurate and false information about participation in law school activities, her licensure date and legal employment, and her professional experience. Many people who testified filed Federal Court cases. I filed a federal complaint and it was consolidated with many other with similar issues and defendants. In the complaint, I also questioned the constitutionality of a state statute. Article VI, Section 22 of the Constitution of the State of New York established the State Commission on Judicial Conduct (SCJC) to receive, initiate, investigate and hear complaints with respect to the conduct, qualifications, fitness to perform or performance of official duties of any judges and may determine that a judge be admonished, censured or removed from office. The powers of the SCJC are a constitutional obligation. The State Statute, Section 44 of the Judiciary Law, was unconstitutional in that it violated the due process and equal protection clauses, since unbridled discretion had been given to the SCJC to determine which allegations of a complaint are without merit and to dismiss them. It allowed for complaints filed against a judge with the SCJC not to be made public, and therefor,e the legislature had abrogated its constitutional responsibility by giving a constitutional obligation to an organization that is not subject to review or oversight. Judge Sheindlin, in a sua sponte decision, dismissed my case and all other related cases in one decision. The sua sponte decision was shocking in light of the language in her opinion, in which she stated: “I note the Second Circuit’s warning that ‘failure to afford an opportunity to oppose a contemplated sua sponte dismissal may be, by itself, grounds for reversal.’” (Abbas v. Dixon, quoting Acosta v. Artuz.) Many of the related cases were going on for years. Judge Sheindlin is ignoring a truism central to American Constitutional jurisprudence: that state laws that are repugnant to the Constitution are absolutely and void, and of the well-established principle of American Constitutional Law that Federal courts have jurisdiction to evaluate the constitutionality of challenged state laws. I appealed the dismissal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Hon. Richard C. Wesley was assigned to the appeal. When I filed my Appellant’s Brief, I had my third case manager. Since I was pro se when filing the complaint, the District Court considered me pro se and I could not use the ECF system or follow any other requirement for attorneys. My first two case managers at the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals also considered me pro se. The third case manager refused to file my Appellant’s Brief and insisted that I serve the New York State Attorney General, who had never appeared in the case and was in default for over nine months. Further, she insisted that I follow the guidelines of an attorney, which caused me additional expense, since I now needed to reprint the brief. Catherine O’Hagan Wolff was the Chief Clerk of the Court of Appeals. I find it difficult to believe that she did not know that I was an attorney from the beginning, since she was one of the defendants in the lawsuit and was served with the complaint in the case. (She was named as a defendant because during her prior occupation as Clerk of the Appellate Division, First Department, she corresponded with me numerous times when I sought the intervention of the presiding justice who oversaw the DDC.) Many people in Albany testified about the manipulation of their cases by Catherine O’Hagan Wolff — the corruption of the NY State Court system moved directly into the Federal 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. This is how the corruption occurred. Judge Wesley was bound to recuse himself from hearing this appeal; due process requires a neutral and detached judge. Here, Judge Wesley was intimately connected with the allegations of judicial misconduct by State judicial actors in this and other cases, having sat in the New York Court of Appeals while some of the relevant events integral to my complaint were transpiring. I obtained his financial disclosure form that listed a pension he received from the New York State Employees' Retirement System. He was being asked on this appeal, in effect, to “second guess” the decisions of a state court on which he sat. Moreover, one respondent in this case, the Hon. Judith S. Kaye, Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, is alleged to have negligently supervised certain judges and negligently supervised certain attorneys of the DDC in her other duties as Chief Administrator of the Court. Respondent Judge Kaye was appointed to the New York Court of Appeals in 1983. Judge Wesley, after being appointed to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, Fourth Department in 1994, became a judge on the Court of Appeals in 1997 and sat with Judge Kaye on that court for six years. Both Judge Wesley and Judge Kaye were on the Court of Appeals when I was seeking to have Judge Kaye exercise her supervisory powers over the conduct of certain judges and DDC attorneys. As such, Judge Wesley had knowledge of Judge Kaye’s daily activities and how much time she devoted to either deciding cases or supervising, in her administrative role, the judges and attorneys at the DDC. Thus, Judge Wesley may be a material witness in this case, and should have recused himself. Furthermore, he had an outburst from the bench during oral argument in this case, with denigrating remarks in open court, and exposed the prejudice and bias that he brought to this matter, which warranted his recusal. If anyone ever want to know why there is so much corruption in the New York Court systems, it is not because attorneys and litigants are not trying to deal with it, it is because the judges are blocking their efforts — they want the corruption to continue.