Taken from http://www.petermancus.com.

The California Legislature, Governors, and Attorney Generals are violating California's laws, protecting crooked judges. There has been a break down of "checks and balances" and constitutional government in California. The dominant real rule is "No man/woman is above the law.", not "Too big to jail." To read this op-ed with excellent formatting, please go to my campaign Internet site, http://www.petermancus.com.

Executive Summary

This document discusses, in detail, what is perhaps the largest, and longest lasting, judicial scandal in the history of the United States. This assertion is rooted in fact. It is not hyperbole.

On or about 2000, California licensed attorney Richard I. Fine discovered that counties in this state were paying illegal extra compensation to hundreds of state judges in violation of California's Constitution. These payments, as a matter of law, constitute bribery. The offering of these payments, per state and federal law, is a crime. The acceptance of these payments, per state and federal law, is a crime.

The counties made these illegal payments to motivate judges to rule in their favor.

These payments create a conflict of interest for the judges who accept them and raise doubts if a judge who accepts illegal payments is ethical, professional, and worthy of sitting in judgement over others.

When Mr. Fine learned of these illegal payments, he investigated, and he discovered objectively verifiable evidence that the judges who accepted these illegal payments in almost 100% of all cases, ruled in favor of the county who paid them illegal payments.

Per California law, Mr. Fine has an ethical duty to represent his clients competently and zealously. To his credit, he filed formal legal challenges to judges who had accepted illegal payments to disqualify them from sitting on a case that he presented. Mr. Fine did not want to risk his clients' cases by presenting them before tainted judges.

A compelling argument can be made that Mr. Fine would have had a meaningful exposure to a claim of legal malpractice if he did not file challenges to disqualify judges who took illegal payments.

After Mr. Fine filed these challenges and pressed this conflicts issue, in open court, and outside of court, a growing number of state judges, apparently feeling uncomfortable being in the spotlight Mr. Fine placed on them, abused their power, beginning with verbally pressuring Mr. Fine to stop pressing the conflicts issue arising from them accepting illegal payments.

Mr. Fine, understandably, is jealous of his vital First Amendment Right to Free Speech and Right to Petition Government for Redress of Grievances. He is also a fearless, conscientious, principled, attorney, with convictions and the courage of his convictions, who refused to be intimidated by any judge.

After Mr. Fine repeatedly pressed these issues, while always remaining 100% factual and truthful, one judge who had accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal payments from LA County, arbitrarily, without prior notice, ordered him to be incarcerated. Mr. Fine, who has never been convicted of a crime, spent 18 months in the LA County jail under "coercive solitary confinement". While Mr. Fine was incarcerated, the LA County Sheriff released many convicted criminals before they served their sentence due to lack of funds to keep them incarcerated. One reason LA County lacked money to keep convicted criminals incarcerated is because they had paid hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal payments to the 400-430 state judges sitting in LA County, for years.

Mr. Fine, to his credit, did not yield to the judge's oppression, just to get out of jail.

While incarcerated, Mr. Fine filed formal legal challenges to his incarceration, without success.

Lawyers for the County of Los Angeles and the developer who were litigating against Mr. Fine's clients in the case which led to the incarceration and another case, were also members of the Board of Governors and two consecutive presidents of the State Bar of California. They violated the law and committed misdemeanors by not disclosing their conflicts of interests, abused their positions of trust as governors and presidents of the State Bar and motivated the State Bar to collude with these corrupt judges and certain corrupt LA County officials to have Mr. Fine disbarred on trumped up, non-meritorious, alleged "moral turpitude" charges.

Mr. Fine, however, never did anything dishonest or contrary to good moral behavior.

Continued at http://www.petermancus.com.

>>1417757

Eventually, the State Bar recommended that Mr. Fine be disbarred, and the California Supreme Court ordered Mr. Fine be disbarred.

Mr. Fine challenged the disbarment or the unlawful incarceration in various courts, including the California Supreme Court, the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court. Sadly, no judge+state or federal+who was given an opportunity to uphold his vital constitutional rights, did anything meaningful to provide him with any effective legal remedy. These judges circled the wagons to protect the usurpers, some of which included themselves, and denied Mr. Fine any relief.

After Mr. Fine demonstrated that after 15 months of incarceration he was not going to yield to the judicial tyrant who ordered that he be incarcerated, that tyrant admitted that he made a false order, resigned [retired] mid term from his judicial office and unilaterally ordered that Mr. Fine be released from jail after 18 months of illegal incarceration.

In making that order, that judge could not resist the temptation to smear Mr. Fine. That judge opined that it was pointless to keep Mr. Fine further incarcerated. According to this judge, "Coercive confinement of a contemnor is only effective if the contemnor is capable of making a rational choice between the alternatives available to him. It is now likely that Fine is not capable of doing so." Apparently this judge misconstrued Mr. Fine's convictions and courage as irrational behavior or, in the alternative, simply wanted to smear Mr. Fine.

Shortly thereafter, the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, who had been a Superior Court judge in LA County, abruptly resigned [retired] rather than run for re election, and a few months later an Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court resigned [retired] who also had been a Superior Court judge in LA County with approximately 10 years left in his term.

After his release, Mr. Fine sought an order setting aside the void incarceration order. Three judges recused themselves [refused] to hear the motion, a third judge who took illegal payments from LA County denied the motion Mr. Fine submitted, and the court filed a Notice that the Order of Contempt and incarceration were void and null based upon extrinsic fraud upon the court.

Mr. Fine also filed a federal civil rights suit against the California State Bar, the State Bar Board of Governors, the State Bar Chief Trial Counsel and the individual justices of the California Supreme Court to enjoin them to set aside the void disbarment based upon extrinsic fraud upon the court and to declare certain laws unconstitutional including Senate Bill SBX 2 11.

The State Bar defendants, to their credit, responded by admitting in court papers that the disbarment was a fraud.

Based upon that admission, Mr. Fine asked the California Supreme Court to set aside its void disbarment order. The State Bar did not oppose the motion. Inexplicably, however, the justices on the California Supreme Court denied the motion, despite a California Rule of Court that states that a failure to oppose a motion may be deemed a consent to granting the motion.

The official biographies and the 2009 California Judicial Council Report to the State Legislature demonstrate that five of the California Supreme Court justices who ordered Mr. Fine's disbarment, and four of the current California Supreme Court justices, when they were Superior Court judges, accepted unlawful payments from counties in violation of California's Constitution and federal criminal law.

California's Attorney General, California's Governor, and the District Attorneys of the various counties in California, all, by force of law, have a law imposed duty to see to it that the laws of this state are properly enforced. Sadly, to date, no State officer and no county prosecutor has done anything to stop these illegal bribes to state judges or to hold any one who offered these bribes or any judge who accepted these bribes accountable.

>>1417760

Once it became clear that the judiciary was not going to intimidate Mr. Fine to shut up and go along to get along, major components of the California judiciary, including two judges who then sat on the California Supreme Court, drafted a proposed bill to "fix" [e.g., give them pseudo fig leaf protection]. These non-Guardians of Liberty, these Spreaders of a Legal Version of the Bubonic Plague, successfully got the California Legislature to pass, and the California Governor, Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, to sign into law, a law that purported to give these law violators, hundreds of them, and perhaps more than 1,800 of them, retroactive immunity from criminal punishment for what they did.

By seeking this retroactive immunity, these judges virtually acknowledge they knew that their acceptance of these illegal payments was a crime, committed by them. An official grant of blanket retroactive immunity to hundreds of judges's who accepted bribes and to many county officials who unlawfully offered bribes is unprecedented and is an egregious abuse of power.