Episode 4 The Judiciary

Hello! Welcome to this edition of the Listening Tube! I’m your host, Bob Woodley. This time, we’ll take a look at activism originating inside the justice system, some internet memes to which you should never respond, and a brief history of the influence of the United States Supreme Court. The highest court in the land, the ultimate decision-makers! The only branch of our federal system that is not elected, but appointed for life. Sweet gig if you can get it. But first, not the headlines…

A district court judge in Newton, which I believe is in Massachusetts, although none of the articles I read about it actually say so, and her court officer have been charged with helping a man escape who was wanted by immigration authorities. They allegedly let the man out a back basement door of the courthouse while an immigration agent was in the lobby, waiting for him to be turned over. They’ve both been charged with obstruction of justice. The judge was also charged with conspiracy. Somehow, and I’m not sure how, but this case got to an appeals court before they even went to trial, and the appeals court said they didn’t have jurisdiction. The Boston Globe report says the judges lawyers tried to use the 10th amendment to the constitution as a technicality, which basically says that federal agencies are barred from requiring state officers to enforce federal law. But the 1st US circuit court of appeals said the case has to go to trial before they have anything to say about it. The man in question was a man from the Dominican Republic who had twice before been deported. A story in the MetroWest Daily News details the plot: Prosecutors say the Judges clerk asked the immigration agent to leave the courtroom and told him that the suspect would be released into the courthouse lobby. Instead, after the hearing, the court officer led the defendant downstairs to the lockup and let him out a rear door. So these cases are going to go to trial. The man was caught about a month later. In the meantime, the Judges lawyers claim she didn’t know about the plot, and it was all the defense attorney’s idea. They maintain she’s immune from prosecution anyway, and add that the charges are politically motivated and intended by federal authorities to intimidate others into enforcing federal immigration policies. I think it’s interesting that they refer to federal immigration policies. I’m pretty sure they mean laws, but I could be wrong. The story only quotes what the judges lawyers said in a court filing. But it sounds to me that they refer to them as policies so as to soften the meaning of what they really are: Federal Laws. If an immigration agent is waiting for a prisoner to be released to him or her in a courtroom, and is then told to wait in the lobby while the suspect is led out a back door by court employees while under the supervision of a judge, then I don’t think it’s policies that are being ignored here. I’m guessing that an immigration official at a courthouse has legal authority to take said suspect into custody. That’s not a policy. That’s a law. Now, these people will get their days in court, and it may someday end up back in the hands of the appeals court. We’ll see. They’re presumed innocent until proven guilty. But I don’t think that immigration agent who was hoodwinked by a court thinks their innocent. I would find it hard to believe that a court clerk and officer conspired by themselves to facilitate the backdoor release. Why would these two people risk their jobs by plotting behind the back of the judge? That would be obstruction of justice and contempt of court! Am I right? I’m not a lawyer, sooo….Anyway, the judge and the officer, who has since retired, are the only ones charged. Not the clerk or the defense attorney. If the judge is being charged with conspiracy, evidence must indicate she was probably the ringleader. If not, then she didn’t have a handle on what was going on in her courtroom. The man who was released was brought before her for charges including drug possession, was allowed to escape. No trial date for either defendant has been set.

After next story, use “gonna look that up” and look up “activist Judges.”

While the judge’s lawyers claim that states can’t be forced to enforce federal policies, the US department of justice has filed a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Court system. As it turns out, the feds say that in two counties, courts were violating the Americans with disabilities act, and six other counties had, according to the Legal Action Center, “problematic policies” concerning prohibitions and limits on medication in opioid use diversion programs. It cites experts as saying judges in other counties have unwritten policies that also violate federal law. So what’s goin’ on? Well, according to the complaint, local judges were telling defendants that they couldn’t take prescribed medication for opioid addiction while in the court drug treatment program. That’s kind of like telling someone to put out the fire, but you won’t give them access to the water. The Legal Action Center says the Unified Judicial System of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was given seven days to address identified civil rights violations concerning opioid treatment. No agreement was reached. The department of justice determined that the policies these Pennsylvania courts had in place were “rooted in stereotypes and myths, rather than science” and were “not justified by any individualized medical or security assessments” and “ directly conflicted with medical guidance on opioid use disorder medication. According to a local news story, one woman was kept in the drug court program an additional two years because she couldn’t wean herself off of the treatment drug. Another was told she had 30 days to get herself off the medication. The woman said that she felt like she was being forced to make a choice between freedom and death. She couldn’t physically handle the speed at which she was being forced to end the treatment. Pennsylvania was denying people of vital drug-addiction treatment options, ones that are approved by the Food and Drug Administration, in order to participate in the drug treatment program. I don’t know exactly how atrocious that is, but it’s got to be approaching quite. Pennsylvania claims these are isolated incidents, but the Legal Action Center says they’ve been receiving complaints for years. The DOJ has a variety of demands from the state system, including additional non-discrimination policies, better compliance monitoring and training. Compensation for those who’ve been harmed by the courts policies, and these are policies, not laws, is also being considered. Each district in the Pennsylvania court system has a president judge and an Americans with disabilities compliance officer. Yet Pennsylvania judges are making people suffer, needlessly. There’s no rhyme or reason to deny a person medically-approved treatment for a drug problem, which is why they probably got in trouble in the first place! It’s like creating a vicious cycle of keeping a person with a serious problem in a self-serving program designed to keep you in the program! Let’s face it, a lot of laws we break have monetary penalties; speeding tickets, parking tickets, fines for this and that. Some laws can become local money-making gimmicks. What used to be a speed trap going through the little town on the highway is now drug and alcohol treatment programs that are labeled as treatment, but are really a justification to charge you money to go to meetings, and fill out paper work. At some point, you do enough to satisfy the government that you’re not that person anymore, that you’ve learned your lesson, and you can go on your merry way. But in this case, people were being kept in the system by the system. 

We just heard two stories that have one thing in common: Lower court judges who break the law (allegedly) to advance their own agendas. Agendai. The plural of agenda. I think of them as “activist judges” but not everyone agrees with that definition so…...(I’m gonna look that up).

In an essay by scholar Suzanne Sherry from 2014, she describes judicial activism as any time the court strikes down what the popular vote supports. It’s a simple definition, but she adds that it’s better to have a court that strikes down too many popular laws than a court that strikes down too few. In other words, keeping the majority in check, just in case a new law infringes somehow on some type of minority. By the way, I really don’t like using the words majority and minority. I’ll get into that some other time, but for now I’ll continue. Sherry’s definition only takes into account judges who have the power to approve or disapprove of laws. The judges we heard about earlier were making up laws or circumventing them altogether. The term “Judicial Activism” was first used in 1947 to describe supreme court justices who believed that politics play a role in every legal decision, while the others believed in judicial restraint. An activist judge makes decisions with end result in mind, based on personal beliefs and political affiliation. Judicial restraint prefers the status quo. In our first story, a judge is alleged to have helped a wanted suspect escape. She would appear to have an agenda, perhaps not for the suspect, but against the federal immigration authorities. In the second story, judges are accused of denying people the right to medication because of court programs that are supposed to be helping you but are hurting you. These are the acts of activist judges. Disagreeing with the popular vote as an important part of our system of checks and balances is not being an activist judge. That’s just being a judge. A supreme court judge. Honestly, I don’ think we see a lot of activism from the supreme court. You might disagree. OK. But most activism happens at the lower court level, where individual judges, not a group of judges, are making the final decisions. Remember, all politics is local. Most of the time, the lunatic fringe activist judges get weeded out before they get to a point where they effect public policy, but sometimes they get through. Elected by people from individual wards in cities across America, most of whom have never met the candidate, and have no knowledge of his or her political lean, except maybe an R or D after their name on the ballot. In any case, I think the 1947 definition fits more closely with today’s reality than the 2014 definition. To me, the Sherry definition simply describes what a judge is supposed to do, while she hopes for an unbalanced outcome regardless of the issues. Today’s activist judges are letting politics and personal views cloud their responsibility to the law. More often than not, when judges don’t adhere to the law, or make up laws as they go, or circumvent laws through malicious actions, they put the societies around them at peril. These are the people we are supposed to trust to be fair, and at the very least, follow the law! 

Phone sounder

Here’s a fun internet meme that you can play if you want to give away some of your personal information without knowing it. It involves numbers, but we don’t have to do any math. It says, “How old would you be if your age was flipped?” See this one’s fun, because forty percent of us will be older, and forty percent of us would be younger, and ten percent of us would stay the same age! Sorry, I did say we didn’t have to do any math, didn’t I? Anyway, by the time these things get to me, they already have thousands of replies. My sister answered, and her age flipped would have made her older. Sure, these are fun to play, but they’re just tools to get information out of you. If you post that you’d be 26, then you just gave away our actual age and with some simple math, your birth year, which you just might be using as part of your password somewhere. OR Everywhere! Here’s another one that’s looking for personal information, but it’s written in such a way that it presents itself as a challenge. It says, “Marriages last for 8 years. How long have you been with your spouse? Well, if you’ve been married for more than eight years, you’ll want to brag that you beat the odds! You’ve been married for seventeen years! Now, you just gave away the year you got married, which you might also be using as part of a password, or they may use that information to steal your identity in some way. So your marriage lasted longer than average. But the meme doesn’t even ask you how long you’ve been married! It says, “How long have you been with your spouse?” This meme is tricky. It leads you to give two dates. Well, we’ve been married seventeen years, but we’ve been together for 21! By the time this one got to me, it had 11-million comments and 166-thousand shares. Talk about a treasure trove of information. Here’s one that had 1.2-million comments and 11-thousand shares: “What was the first car you owned? No lying.” Well, you might have heard that question before. It’s often a security question you have to answer if you forget your password. That, and your grandmother’s maiden name, the name of your elementary school. These memes are just fishing for information. I have one more for this week, and it’ one of my favorites because of the way it’s written. It says, “If you had to marry your significant other at the place yall met at, where would yall be getting married at?” I’m just gonna get right to the point here. They’re looking for the place where your met because that is also a common password component and a security question! And, people will say, “Well we met in Chattanooga, but we got married in Louisville! So now you gave them two bits of useful information! But the reason I like this one is because of the labored way it’s written. If you had to marry your significant other at the place yall met at, where would yall be getting married at? Now, I know you didn’t come here for an English lesson, and that’s fine, but if this meme were written in proper English, it would have been much easier to write! I don’t know about you, but if there’s a simple way to do something, and it’s right, that’s the way I’ll do it! So, instead of, If you had to marry your significant other at the place yall met at, where would yall be getting married at? The proper way to say or write this would be, “If you had to marry your significant other at the place you met, where would you get married?” By taking out the words “at”, which are a preposition and didn’t belong there anyway, and replacing yall, which I’ll point out wasn’t even spelled with an apostrophe, with the simpler and correct “you” we can make the question both shorter and correct. Sometimes it’s easier to do things the right way.

Let’s go back….

In 1841, the US Supreme Court rules that kidnapped slaves from the Spanish schooner the Amistad are free. This was a landmark decision in 1841, but the Supreme Court ruled that the Africans aboard the ship were born free, but had been kidnapped by slave hunters. Originally headed for Cuba, the Africans were able to commandeer the ship, which was then captured by a US ship. The captors claimed the ship and it’s contents as confiscated bounty, and claimed ownership, including the Africans aboard. The Supreme Court ruled otherwise.

In 1884, Mississippi establishes the first State College for Women. March is Women’s History Month, by the way. Here are some more reasons why:

In 1917, Jeannette Rankin of Montana becomes the first female member of the United States House of Representatives. Rankin says at the time, “I may be the fist woman member of Congress...But I won’t be the last. She was elected four years before women had the right to vote. And her prediction was correct.

1926 Bertha Landes elected 1st woman mayor of Seattle.

1933 Frances Perkins becomes United States Secretary of Labor, the first female member of the United States Cabinet.

1945 International Women's Day is 1st observed

1945 Phyllis M Daley is 1st black nurse sworn in as US Navy ensign. That’s an officer, by the way.

1950 1st woman medical officer assigned to naval vessel (BR Walters)

1979 MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn orders baseball to give equal access to female reporters

1983

Bertha Wilson is appointed the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court of Canada.

1994 US Navy issues the 1st permanent order assigning women on a combat ship.

1999 The Supreme Court of the United States upholds the murder convictions of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing.

2003 The International Criminal Court holds its inaugural session in The Hague.

2009

The International Criminal Court (ICC) issues an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur. Al-Bashir is the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the ICC since its establishment in 2002.

We may be seeing another head of state being brought before the International Criminal Court. Russian President Vladimir Putin is the subject of evidence gathering by several organizations to show the International Criminal Court that his military invasion of Ukraine has resulted in Crimes Against Humanity and other War Crimes. Ukraine is holding its own for now, but the pressure of the Russian military is beginning to mount. 

By the way, it was also this week in history that both Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China received approval from their respective governments to hold the office of President for life. Jinping in 2018 and Putin in 2020.

Ominous music... 

President Biden recently selected a nominee for appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States of America. There are only nine of them, which makes them perhaps the most elite club in the world. Appointed for life, Supreme Court Justices are the last line of defense for anyone with a legal gripe, if your case can make it that far. The Supreme court decides which cases it will hear, and even then has the option to send the case back to the lower court from which it came. It’s a great gig if you can get it. Many law school students dream of the opportunity to serve on the nation’s highest court, charting a path that they hope will someday lead to the ultimate pinnacle of the practice of American law. Imagine planning your life from the time you’re a teenager, knowing that you wanted to be an attorney from a young age. It’s not uncommon. I knew I wanted to be on the radio from the time I was about 8. So you take all the right courses, and participate in all the right extracurricular activities, and go to all of the JC’s meetings and the join all the right organizations just to get into the best college and then the best law school. You made it. And because you went to the right schools, you got an internship with some of the most influential lawyers you could hope for, and throughout your career, you made all the right moves, made all the right decisions, kept your nose clean, raised a family that shares your commitment to serving the community. You’ve risen through the ranks to place yourself in the ideal position to be nominated to the Supreme Court. A sitting jurist announces their retirement. This is the time you’ve been working toward your whole life. There’s just one problem: You’re not a Black, and you’re not a woman. President Biden made that a pre-requisite for nomination to the Supreme Court. Should the Supreme Court have a Black female on it? Sure. It’s got a Black guy, an Hispanic woman, some white guys who aren’t worthy of a more accurate description, but no Black woman. Neither is there an Hispanic man, nor an Asian of any gender. Wikipedia says Justice Sonia Sotomayor is the court’s first “woman of color”, but Joe Biden insists the next nominee be a woman who is Black. I don ‘t think I should have to point out how incredibly racist and prejudiced that is. He used the same logic to bring Kamala Harris back out of the trash heap of Presidential candidates who didn’t make the cut. He didn’t even get that right. He wanted a Black woman, but got one that’s Jamaican and Indian. That doesn’t fly well with those who identify as African-American. This time, he got the Black part right, anyway. But having a pre-requisite of race and sex is both racist and sexist! I get that for a verrrry long time, only white men were appointed. That needed to change and it did. And if what we’re looking for here is equal representation, and we have nine jurists on the Supreme Court, then based on population numbers, we should have 1.26 Black members of the Supreme Court, and 1.6 Hispanic members, 5.2 white members and a half an Asian member. So Asian and Black populations are slightly under-represented, as are Hispanics. It would appear that white people are over represented. That may be true from a racist point of view, but what about from an ethnic point of view? Maybe the Irish guy doesn’t see eye-to-eye with the English guy. And the Polish woman doesn’t feel any kinship with the Bulgarian guy? White people are always classified as the same, even though they probably have different customs and heritage. White people are always lumped in together, seen as one big roadblock to everyone else having success. I know there are plenty of white people with evil intentions when it comes to people of other races and ethnicity, but most of us are hoping for the success of our neighbors regardless of the color of their skin. I think, or at least I hope, that I can speak for most white people when I say that we would like to move past racism, but then the President of the United States comes along and requires that the next Supreme Court Justice nominee be Black, and pulls racism back into the picture. Meanwhile, there are women who are white, Asian, Hispanic and men who are black, white, et.cetera that have worked their way to be in the right place at the right time in history to be nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States of America, and they won’t be because the President created Racial and Sexual boundaries on the nominee. The truth is, nothing should be more important in considering a nomination for an appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States of America than the nominees knowledge of the law. They should know the Constitution inside and out, the Bill of Rights, the Amendments, and the precedents that have brought us to where we are today. Their background, ethnicity, race, gender, height, weight, eye color, or what size robe you wear should not matter a bit when it comes to a nomination to the Supreme Court. What comes next is the nominees history, and how they’ve demonstrated the way they apply the laws of the land. I’m not a fan of “Activist Judges” when it comes to using your power to circumvent the laws or make up laws to suit your agenda. It’s a Supreme Court Jurists job to interpret the law, not change it. Judges should not legislate from the bench.

The President’s pick has an impressive resume. I hope that without racist and sexist pre-requisites she would still be the most qualified candidate. I don’t know. She has had some of her decisions overturned by higher courts, mostly because she ruled on issues without having jurisdiction. But we’ll let the Senate decide if she’s the right nominee. It may come down to Kamala Harris breaking a tie. Wouldn’t that be ironic?

Unfinished business

I said earlier in the program that I didn’t like the words Majority and Minority. The words themselves are innocent enough; majority means there are more of them, and minority means there are less of them. And sure, the words do come in handy when describing something that a lot of people like, as in, “a majority of Miami fans are glad that Tom Brady left New England and joined Tampa Bay. A minority of Saints fans agree.” But when you’re talking about groups of people that may have a mathematical disadvantage, as in there are fewer of them, then the term “minority” seems to me to be adding insult to injury. The root words of Majority and Minority are the deal-breaker for me. If something is Major, it’s important or large and impactful, like a major celebration or a major malfunction. If it’s minor, it’s not important. A minor inconvenience or a minor infraction. When an ethnic or racial group is classified as a minority, that word implies, right off the bat, that their issues are minor. Look, I don’t want to go all Politically correct on you, but I believe there’s a subconscious conditioning going on here, not designed or done on purpose, but as a result of the words we use, that brand people who are classified as belonging to smaller groups as minor. None of us are minor. We are all major. We should all be treated and respected as being major. We should treat other people as if they are major, and not minor. We should expect to be treated as major and not minor. Treated with respect by our neighbors, co-workers, and our government. Especially our judges, who we place in a position of trust to follow the law, and our jurists, who interpret the laws to make sure we’re all respected by our laws equally. 

Last week, our Ten word answer question was, “When you think of China, what do you think. I got one call. Thanks, Mom. She said the Great Wall of China is Obsolete. I agree. IT’s now a tourist attraction.

Ten word answer liner…

Does anyone on the Supreme Court of the US represent you? Call area code 570-601-1101 to submit your ten word answer. 570-601-1101. You only get 10 words, so use them wisely! Need more than 10 words? Get your own program! Does anyone on the Supreme Court represent you? Call anytime.

Copy write 2022. Written and produced by yours truly. Thank you for being a part of the Listening Tube. I’m your host, Bob Woodley. For thou, ad infinitum.