U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ statement
“I am sure that the overwhelming number of judges
have no tolerance for harassment”
is knowingly misleading and
contradicted by official statistics showing that
he and his fellow judges cover-up all forms of their abuse
“I am sure that the overwhelming number of judges
have no tolerance for harassment”
is knowingly misleading and
contradicted by official statistics showing that
he and his fellow judges cover-up all forms of their abuse
By
Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq. Ph.D., University of Cambridge, England
M.B.A., University of Michigan Business School
D.E.A., La Sorbonne, Paris
Judicial Discipline Reform
New York City
http://www.Judicial-Discipline
Dr.Richard.Cordero_Esq@verizon
M.B.A., University of Michigan Business School
D.E.A., La Sorbonne, Paris
Judicial Discipline Reform
New York City
http://www.Judicial-Discipline
Dr.Richard.Cordero_Esq@verizon
A. The circumstances forcing the Chief Justice to cease tolerating harassment
1. Last December 18, former 9th Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski unexpectedly announced that he was resigning with immediate effect rather than defend against the numerous sexual harassment accusations that had been brought against him.
2. His resignation was shocking because he had been on the bench for 35 years. Despite the vast number of IOUs that he must have collected during his above-average long career, he could not cause the accusations to be dismissed by his peers or prevent their referral to the 2nd Circuit for investigation by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
3. On the contrary, Chief Justice Roberts announced on December 31, in his 2017 Report on the Federal Judiciary[1] the formation of a working group to review the handling of sexual harassment complaints. Therein he wrote “I have great confidence in the men and women who comprise our judiciary. I am sure that the overwhelming number have no tolerance for harassment”.
4. Chief Justice Roberts made that statement only after some 700 letters of complaint[2] that he had received from former and current clerks made his silence risky in the wake of the exposure by the media of the accusations by fewer than 70 women of sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein; their overcoming of their fear of his retaliatory career enders and intimidatory practices; and the exposure of other VIPs as sexual predators. The clerks’ fear of retaliation and lack of recourse in the Judiciary against judges’ abuse could no longer ensure their silence given a receptive media and MeToo! public.
B. Means of abuse: confidentiality agreements and retaliatory end-of-clerkship letters
5. Judges, whether federal or state, have means of suppressing any complaint about their abuse of any kind and of anybody: The first means is the confidential agreement that judges require clerks to sign before clerking for them.
6. Clerks are people who just graduated from law school, most are young, and clerk for a judge for one year before getting their first regular law job. They are saddled with a huge law school debt. They are vulnerable financially.
7. It is prestigious to clerk for a judge because they can choose the best candidate –a Supreme Court justice hires three– among those who apply.
8. So judges pay clerks only a modest salary. The complement comes in the form of a glowing letter of recommendation at the end of the clerkship. It can earn a clerk a signing up bonus from her or his new employer worth $100,000s -a clerk to a justice commands a $250,000 bonus- because the clerk has gained precious knowledge of the workings of, and contacts in, a court, the decision maker.
9. A ‘poor’ letter is devastating, branding the clerk as a persona non grata in that court, or incompetent as a lawyer. That is what a clerk gets if he or she dare complain about any abuse by the judge.
10. If the clerk finds a job, its salary establishes the floor for future salaries.
11. If a clerk complains in a way that her or his hiring judge alleges to be in breach of the confidentiality agreement, the judge can bring suit, most likely under seal, before the judge’s peers. They decide any motion by the clerk for their own recusal. They have similar agreements with their clerks and the same interest in having them enforced to their benefit. If a judge goes against another judge, he or she becomes a treasonous, unreliable pariah among all of them.
12. It follows that clerks stand no chance of winning against a judge.
13. The above illustrates how to understand and influence the workings of a group of people by applying dynamic analysis of harmonious and conflicting interests as the foundation for strategic thinking(†>OL2:593¶¶15-16).
† * The materials corresponding to the parenthetical (blue text references) are found in my study of judges and their judiciaries, titled and downloadable thus:
Exposing Judges’ Unaccountability and
Consequent Riskless Wrongdoing: Pioneering the news and publishing field of
judicial unaccountability reporting* †
Consequent Riskless Wrongdoing: Pioneering the news and publishing field of
judicial unaccountability reporting* †
* Volume 1: http://Judicial-Discipline-
† Volume 2: http://Judicial-Discipline-
C. Official knowledge of the Federal Judiciary’s statistics on systematic dismissal by judges of complaints against them
14. Chief Justice Roberts, as a former law student, law clerk to Judge Friendly and Justice Rehnquist, and appellate judge, and as the current chief justice who hires clerks, cannot pretend not to have known for decades how judges use their recommendation letters to ‘purchase’ the right to abuse clerks; extort their silence; and compensate them for their abuse.
15. He has imputed and official knowledge of how judges abuse sexually and otherwise, clerks, parties, and the rest of the public. Official knowledge denies the availability as a defense of willful ignorance and blindness and supports intentional dereliction of duty(*>jur:90§§b-d):
a. Under 28 U.S.C. §601[3], the Chief Justice is charged with appointing the director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts[4], the one whom he “asked…to assemble a working group to examine our practices and address these issues” concerning sexual harassment and complaints thereabout.
b. Under §604a(3), the director is charged with submitting an annual report[5] to the Judicial Conference of the United States set up under §311, whose president is the Chief Justice and whose other members are the chief circuit judges and representative district, bankruptcy, and magistrate judges.
[5] http://www.uscourts.gov/
c. Under §604h(2), in that report, the director is required to “include…the number of complaints filed with each judicial council under chapter 16 [the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980, §§351-364], indicating the general nature of such complaints and the disposition of those complaints in which action has been taken”.
16. That Act provides for any person, including a judge and even if not the victim of the abuse, to file with the chief circuit judge a complaint about the misconduct or disability of any judge in the circuit.
17. Chief Justice Roberts has known officially[6] that when Then-Judge, Now-Justice Gorsuch served on the 10th Circuit(†>OL2:548) and Then-Judge, Now-Justice Sotomayor on the 2nd(*>jur:11; 24[20]), 99.83% of complaints against judges were dismissed and that without investigation; appeals from those dismissals to the respective circuit council, set up under §332(a)(1), were denied up to 100%(jur:24§b). Those percentages hold true for the other circuits(jur:10).
[6] E.g., http://www.uscourts.gov/
18. The Chief Justice and the associate justices have official knowledge that judges abuse the self-disciplining authority granted them under that §351 Act of Congress so as to exempt themselves from any discipline:
a. Under §42[7], he and each of the associate justices are allotted to one or more of the 13 circuits as circuit justices; and under §45(b), preside over any meeting of their respective circuit’s judicial council[8].
[7] 28 U.S.C. §42. Allotment of Supreme Court justices to circuits. The Chief Justice and the associate justices of the Court shall from time to time be allotted as circuit justices among the circuits by order of the Court.
[8] 28 U.S.C. §45(b)….The circuit justice, however, shall have precedence over all the circuit judges and shall preside at any session which he attends.
b. Under §332(g), each council “shall submit a report to the Administrative Office on the number and nature of orders entered under this section during the preceding calendar year that relate to judicial misconduct or disability” [9] under §351.
[9] On the two-way flow of official information that reach the circuit justices and the Chief Justice through the Administrative Office, see also:
28 U.S.C. §332(a)(6)(c). The chief judge shall submit to the council the semiannual reports of the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. The council shall take such action thereon as may be necessary.
19. Hence, Chief Justice Roberts knows that he misled the public when he wrote in his 2017 Report1 that he and the other justices and judges “have no tolerance for harassment and share the view that victims must have clear and immediate recourse to effective remedies”.
20. Judges not only tolerate each other’s abuse. They have institutionalized the self-interested abrogation in effect of the §351 Judicial Conduct and Disability Act by unlawfully dismissing systematically all complaints against judges, thus ensuring their impunity by depriving complainants of ‘recourse to any remedies’.(*>jur:21§§1-3)
21. If a complainant files with the Department of Justice a complaint against a judge, he or she is referred to the Act and the judges that apply it(*>jur:78fn159, 160), for the very last thing that the Department wants is to become the target of judges’ retaliation(*>Lsch:17§C) if the Department were to investigate the complained-against judge.
22. After President Trump criticized two federal judges, they suspended nationwide his Muslim travel ban(†>OL2:641¶3). President Roosevelt had a similar experience(jur:23fn17).
23. When presidents and their Justice Department are powerless against judges, what ‘recourse to any remedies’ does a newbie, unconnected, puny clerk have against abusive judges and their peers closing ranks behind them as they shout in unison, “Don’t you ever mess with us!”(*>jur:22¶31)?
D. Complaint processing rules can be suspended by any of their implementing judges to exonerate their peers and tolerate their abuse
24. Chief Justice Roberts stated in his 2017 Report[1], “I expect the working group to consider whether changes are needed in our…rules for investigating and processing misconduct complaints”.
25. He and his colleagues drafted and adopted those rules[10]. They provided under Rule 2(b) “A Rule will not apply if…a chief judge, a special committee, a judicial council, the Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability, or the Judicial Conference expressly finds that exceptional circumstances render [its] application unjust or contrary to the purposes of the Act or these Rules”.
[10] http://www.uscourts.gov/
Cf. http://Judicial-Discipline-
26. The Rules are not mandatory, but rather discretionary with every officer or entity authorized to apply them; any of them can get any abusive judge ‘off the hook’ of the complaint. The Rules are illusory, a sham intended to deprive any complainant of any “recourse to effective remedies”.
27. Chief Justice Roberts has abused We the People with his pretense that judges have “no tolerance” for judges’ abuse. Through self-interested coordination, they even have a scheme to get away with it.
E. Journalistic investigation of judges’ common knowledge of their abuse
28. Chief Justice Roberts and the other justices and judges attend the meetings of the Judicial Conference, the judicial councils, and/or the circuits’ §333[3] judicial conferences, all of which are held anywhere, mostly in fun cities.
29. They also attend seminars and speaking events organized by private parties, e.g., corporations that can afford them as occasions for publicity and lobbying and may pay for all their judicial guests’ expenses, which is prohibited due to the risk of bribing. So, judges frequently fail to report their attendance at them(jur:146272). The late Justice Scalia is reported to have attended more than 250 of them.
30. For most judges, these are out-of-town meetings and may include a hotel stay. Judges have lots of fun, particularly at the party in the suite of a chief judge or the seminar host.
31. After they have had lots of whisky, cognac, lobster, caviar, waitresses and waiters too catering to them, their tongues move from serious conversations on valuable, especially if confidential, information to fun ones on how they abusively cut their workload(“The math of perfunctoriness and abuse”, †>OL2:608§A) and manhandle clerks: It is time for Hollywood Access-type of outboasting each other.
32. Drivers, bar attendants, maids, and similar little people invisible to VIP judges have lots of fun information and are not bound by confidentiality agreements.
33. They and clerks, who can be turned into insider informants(jur:106§c; †>OL2:468), should be contacted by journalists who find statistics and statutory provisions too dull for themselves or their audience.
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I encourage you to donate to the effort to hold judges accountable and liable to compensate the victims of their abuse. One of the intended uses of donated funds is the development of the website http://www. Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org as a clearinghouse for complaints against judges uploaded by the public and searched by anybody for commonalities revealing patterns of all types of abuse(*>OL:274; †>OL2:592, 563).
subscribe for free to this series of articles thus:
http://www.Judicial-
As a call to join forces in a coalition to expose abusers of any kind and hold them accountable and liable to compensate their victims, share this article with the officers and members of the MeToo!, Time’s Up, and Women’s March movement and all those who shout self-assertively:
Enough is enough!
We won’t take judges’ and anybody else’s abuse anymore.
Dare trigger history!(*>jur:7§5)...and you may enter it. * http://Judicial-Discipline-
Sincerely,
Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq.
Judicial Discipline Reform
New York City
http://www.Judicial-
Judicial Discipline Reform
New York City
http://www.Judicial-
Dr.Richard.Cordero_Esq@verizon
