Wednesday, April 4, 2018

The VIRGINIA STATE BAR Misuse of POWER to Silence Rhetta M. Daniel


A feud lasting nearly four decades
between a Virginia lawyer and the Virginia State Bar (VSB)
is coming to a head
Daniel and the VSB
Rhetta Daniel has been practicing law in Virginia for almost forty years;

                      from 1982-1990 she worked as an    Senior Assistant Bar Counsel for the VSB, prosecuting bad lawyers for them.
These proceedings could lead to the removal of a lawyer’s license to practice law, and as such their ability to continue to practice law.
Daniel said she was pushed out as a the Senior Assistant Bar Counsel in 1990 after it became clear that her aggressive style was not welcome and that the VSB was more interested in protecting connected attorneys than weeding out   unscrupulous ones.
The specific case was My Linh Soland, a client who had two  powerful lawyers. “What they did was protect her defense counsel.”  Daniel said.
She explained that a letter which may have doctored attorney’s letterhead was in the possession of her two
attorneys; when she served them with a subpoenas, issued by former Bar Counsel, Michael L. Rigsby, tor these well-connected lawyers to produce the disputed letterhead, all hell broke loose, so to speak.
She said rather than supporting her, in 1990, Daniel was fired within forty-eight hours after Mr. Ricgsby issued   the subpoenas, the Alexandria Circuit Court record was sealed and eventually Soland was prosecuted criminally and sent to prison.
Daniel said since that since 1982, she’s been a constant critic of the VSB.
But now she says the VSB again has its sights set on her, Daniel said she faces a trumped-up hearing ostensibly to challenge her competency.

The Estate of William Wellington Jones

Daniel said the VSB is desperate to remove her from representing her client, Mary Margaret Jones, because Jones is being embezzled from by a connected lawyer, E Grier Ferguson.
Mary Jones’ father was William Wellington Jones, a former domestic relations and general district court judge, in the Suffolk, Virginia, area.
Ferguson is the son of the Judge Jones’ former law partner, and Ferguson is the executor of the Jones Estate and the Trustee for the Jones trust Judge Jones had created in 2006. In 2011 Jones noticed that approximately $30,000 was embezzled from his personal account.
“He (Ferguson) started out raiding the personal funds, on August 11, 2011, he started raiding Judge Jones 'and Mary Margaret Jones' personal funds.” Daniel said. “He made cash transfers from Jones' and her father’s joint bank account on that date and emptied it, approximately $30,000.”
Mary Jones noted that in 2006, at a time unbeknownst to her, Ferguson obtained her father’s power of attorney, that had her father execute a will, and the set-up the trust.
When Jones and his daughter Mary began to investigate, she told me Ferguson issued a veiled threat.
“He told me that if I continued investigating the finances, he’d have my father put into guardianship,” Jones said.

The Guardianship of William Wellington Jones

That’s exactly what happened in 2014, when Ferguson petitioned the court have the elder Jones placed into guardianship.
In so doing, Ferguson was arguing that William Wellington Jones was so incapacitated that he could not take care of his own affairs and the courts would then appoint a guardian to take over.
Ferguson did not respond to an email sent to him at this law firm.
The first hearing was held on November 24, 2014.
Fred Taylor was first appointed the guardian-ad-litem on that day.
Taylor is an attorney, and as a guardian-ad-litem he is supposed to be an independent third party who acts in the  ward’s- in this case William Wellington Jones- behalf, but Jones told me she felt he was appointed unnecessarily and  was only there to move the guardianship process forward.
Taylor did not respond to a voicemail at his office.
Mary Jones told me she did not learn about the trusts her father set-up until the guardianship unfolded.
William Wellington Jones was moved multiple times. He was living at Seaside Home Healthcare(Rehab) at Atlantic  Shores, Virginia Beach, Virginia.
He was moved to Bay Point Kindred Care in October 2014 before being moved again to James River Convalescent   Center in Newport News, Virginia.
It was all part of a hectic process to gain control of the elder’s multi-million-dollar estate.
From June 2014-October 2014, there was a battle to force her father to take mind altering drugs while he was living at the Seaside Home Healthcare Rehabilitation Center.
“My father told the administrator and staff that he is not in pain and didn't want any mind-altering drugs.” Jones  said “I tell them, too, and give them my Medical Directive. I tell them Ferguson only has a Power-of-Attorney for my father.
“It wasn't long before the Seaside Staff starting (sic) drugging my father against his wishes and mine. The administrator  who lived in Suffolk, admitted in writing to doing it in documents that are filed with the Suffolk Circuit Court. Physical therapy starts at the facility to help my father regain his strength, and  then it is abruptly stopped even though my father and I want therapy to continue and we both make it known that PT should continue.”
An email to the facility was left unreturned.
At the time, Ferguson, Jones told me, only had a power of attorney while she had the medical directive, which gave  her full control to make medical decisions.
She had her father moved from Seaside in October.
She and her father also did these five things she told me.
  1. Friday Oct 31, 2014: My father signed a durable power of attorney (POA) for me to have and signed several separate original revocations of Ferguson's POA.
  2. Nov 5, 2014: My father signed another durable POA that is more detailed for me to have.
  3. Nov 10, 2014: My father signed letter firing Ferguson and his law firm "in any and all matters", notarized.
  4. Nov 10, 2014: My father signed a new will, before 2 impartial witnesses and a notary.
  5. Nov 13, 2014: My father signed a revocation of the trust which was notarized.

That set off the guardianship battle; he was moved again as part of that process.
While in a subsequent convalescent hospital, Jones said at least three attempts were made to have her father drugged again.

  1.    James River Rehab Staff administered the 1st mind-altering drug saying it's an appetite simulate,  but my father was eating and had a good appetite without this drug and he was not losing any weight
  2.   A few days prior to the scheduled mental capacity evaluation date, I visit my father, and I find  my father in a comatose condition which was the result of the 2nd known administration of a mind-altering drug to my father in this Assisted Living Facility, James River Rehab.
  3.      The 3rd administration of a mind-altering drug by James River Rehab was the one that caused  me to insist that my father be transported immediately to the hospital on Jan 12, 2015, when I found my father comatose again.
Her father died on January 26, 2015.

Enter Rhetta Daniel

Daniel said she entered the case in September 2016.
She said that the court system has allowed Ferguson to effectively ruin Mary Jones’ life.
Ferguson has been the power of attorney, the trustee, and the executor/trustee of the estate and trust. He  controls all the money and only shares what he wants with Jones.
She said one of the first things Daniel did in September 2016 was subpoena all the trust/escrow and business  accounts for the law firm, bank records for all those escrow and business accounts, and issued a subpoena for
Ferguson’s personal account.
Ferguson has had a judge in his pocket the entire time; that judge’s name is Judge John Daffron. Judge Daffron would not allow Mary Margaret Jones' subpoenas to move forward.
He did not quash subpoenas, but he "suspended "them.
As a result, Daniel explained that this is not a final ruling and as such, it could not be appealed.
The Judge has been coy in his handling of the subpoenas.
Here’s part of an interaction from a court hearing, over a year after the subpoenas were issued, on October 23, 2017.
Daffron was addressing Daniel when he noted of the subpoenas: "Because there will come a time, perhaps, when all of that should be presented."
Daniel responded, "Well, the time has come."
Daffron retorted, "Well, you have not reached that threshold yet." "Sir?" Daniel said.
"You haven't reached that threshold," Daffron concluded.
Later, in the same hearing, Daffron even stated: “here is an issue strongly raised by Miss Daniel about the  subpoena for the trust account. That is a legitimate issue. I have suspended the action on that subpoena so far.
I say, again, there may be a time where that has to be turned over to fully reconcile the account as defendant --
I'm sorry as the plaintiff's sees it.”
Daniel said Daffron has presided over the trust, the estate, and the guardianship. Daffron is retired though he maintains a semi-retired schedule.
He could not be reached, and the Virginia court system declined to comment. With her hands tied, Daniel is unable to discern how much has been embezzled.

The VSB Star Chamber

But having a judge interfere with the enforcement of the subpoenas was not enough, because now on
April 9, 2018, Daniel faces the VSB in a related hearing against her alone.
The VSB is not accusing her of misconduct but rather filed a spurious Petition claiming Daniel is impaired
and so can’t continue being an attorney.
Daniel said that this is the only way they can remove her from representing Jones.
According to a March 2018 blog post in Justice for All Virginia, this hearing is nothing more than a star chamber proceeding.
“On April 09, 2018 at 9:00 am, the Virginia State Bar Disciplinary Board has scheduled a hearing for based on a frivolous impairment petition against Rhetta Moore Daniel Esquire, with no medical evidence to support the position of the Virginia State Bar.
“The 37 page Petition filed by the VSB is requesting the VSB Disciplinary Board to determine if Ms. Daniel’s  license to practice law should be suspended is an unusual one because Ms. Daniel’s attorneys have provided
the Virginia State Bar prosecutor and the VSB Disciplinary Board more than enough medical reports to prove that Ms. Daniel has no impairments at all, much less any that would affect her ability to practice law.”

The Virginia State Bar is proceeding despite evaluations from her long-time physicians.
“I have a Psychiatric Evaluation Report from a highly qualified local psychiatrist, Dr. Elliott J. Spanier, which states I have no mental or emotional impairments at all and I am completely fit to practice law in the Commonwealth of Virginia and have been for the past 30 or so years that he has known and seen me as a patient from time to time because I had to take care of my mother and at times my sister who both needed intermittent intervention and care,” Daniel said in an email to the VSB on March 1, 2018.
A call to the VSB was left unreturned
E. Grier Ferguson's brother, C. Phillips Ferguson, is an elected member of the VSB Council; he was first elected in 2016 and shall serve through 2019  and Phil Ferguson is the Commonwealth's Attorney for Suffolk, Virginia, where Mary Margaret Jones lives

Grier Ferguson was an elected member of the VSB Council in 2000 and served on the VSB Council with Karen Gould, the current Virginia State Bar Executive Director.

Written By: Michael Volpe has been a freelance investigative journalist since 2009. In 2013, he gave the keynote address at the Eugene V Katz Award sponsored by the Center for Immigration Studies. Since 2013, he's been widely recognized as a leading figure in exposing judicial abuse and corruption, especially in divorce and guardianship. A 2016 investigation of a bogus guardianship of former Army Ranger Martin Patterson led to Patterson being released from guardianship. A 2015 investigation of a bogus change of custody in Rockland County led to the first serious investigation of abuse's throughout that county's court by he and others in the Rockland County Times.. Volpe has also made significant contributions to the Tsimhoni kids, who were reunited with their mother after their father falsely accused her of parental alienation. Volpe was the only journalist to expose the the judge in the Tsimhoni case, Lisa Gorcyca, engaging in abuse in numerous other cases. Volpe is the author of four books including Bullied to Death: Chris Mackney's Kafkaesque Divorce which exposes the Virginia Court corruption,  his latest, Sandra Grazzini-Rucki and the World's Last Custody Trial
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Sunday, January 28, 2018

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

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
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-Reform.org

Dr.Richard.Cordero_Esq@verizon.net, DrRCordero@Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org, CorderoRic@yahoo.com 

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* †
* Volume 1: http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf >all prefixes:page number up to OL:393

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.

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/statistics-reports/complaints-against-judges-judicial-business-2016. The official statistics on complaints against judges for the year in question appear on Table S-22, e.g., http://www.uscourts.gov/statistics/table/s-22/judicial-business/2016/09/30 .

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”.

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.
*************************

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-Discipline-Reform.org > + New or Users >Add New

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-Reform.org/OL/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf

Sincerely,
Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq.
Judicial Discipline Reform
New York City
http://www.Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org
Dr.Richard.Cordero_Esq@verizon.net, DrRCordero@Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org, Corderoric@yahoo.com, 
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