The Court System - Rico Model vs. Legitimacy Model (also, taser litigation update)
me
litigation update)
The following is what I sent to a group of activists in California.
The activists are generally interested in the subject of
homelessness.
The case I'm commenting on is the Ciampi homeless taser case. He was
sleeping in his van when the police arrived. You can google for more
articles on it.
There are other taser cases, two of which are active and consolidated
in the federal 9th Circuit court of appeals (Mattos, Brooks). You
might want to keep track of them on their website. The decision
hasn't been posted yet. They were argued on Dec 15th. The audio/
video is accessable on the 9th Circuit website.
At the end of the posting below I'm including links to Ciampi case
documents that you may find interesting.
Here is the cast of characters as a handy reference:
Joseph "Tony" Ciampi, homeless guy, tasered
Palo Alto police, did the tasering
David Beauvais, attorney for Ciampi in state court suppression hearing
Thang Barrett - state court judge in suppression hearing
Andrew Pierce - former attorney for Ciampi in federal civil suit
Lucy Koh - federal district court judge in civil suit
Additional judges described in context
Robert Norse, homeless activist, interviewed Ciampi on his radio show
-----Forward-----
(edited for Usenet)
Dear Activists,
I've been sending many of you some original documents from the Ciampi
homeless taser case here in Palo Alto, assuming that you might be
interested in the situation. The civil case been dragging in the
federal court. I have already sent you a copy of federal district
judge Lucy Koh's recent ruling that dismissed Ciampi's constitutional
causes of action. A recent radio interview with the Ciampi is
referenced at the end of this letter.
I want to take a moment to tell you what I think is really going on
with the courts, the lawyers, and the rest of us. Bear with me,
please. I see two court system models - the legitimacy model and the
RICO model. Any liberal institution can be converted into a RICO
model. It is my belief that one always erodes the other and the
coexistence of both always erodes one or the other (not doubletalk
here, but sort of a Fibonacci logic). Many of you know the terms
"justice", "just us", "of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the
lawyers", "selective enforcement" and maybe "selective justice". So
this is where we are. As you read this I would like you to have both
models in mind.
The Ciampi taser case was accepted by the California attorney David
Beauvais. Let's assume the facts and law were pretty much on Ciampi's
side. There are other cases where the facts and laws are on the side
of victims (of government crime), but the lawyers will not take many
of their cases and the judges won't give favorable rulings without the
lawyers. In fact, Ciampi once told me that his first attorney, the
Public Defender, urged him to plead guilty. If it hadn't been for
David Beauvais' presence in the case, the Public Defender would have
told the judge that Ciampi "refused to cooperate with Counsel" and the
judge would have screwed Ciampi by pushing a false conviction.
So, the judges in the state court did an extensive analytical ruling
on the Ciampi taser case as a political/financial favor for David
Beauvais. I know the same lead judge (Thang Barrett) deliberately
falsified a ruling against another homeless person without an attorney
as a political favor for the opposing attorneys in a different case
involving an abduction by police and a lot of money and property that
was laundered through the court system. The law and evidence was
otherwise on the homeless guy's side. To me this helps illustrate a
partial extent of the RICO model of the court system.
I attended the 2008 state court Ciampi hearing where the police were
questioned on the witness stand by the attorneys, and the audio
recording of the taser incident was played to the judge. Anyone would
objectively conclude that the police were far out of line and too
young and immature to deal with the situation. In the recording, one
young policeman kept shouting at Ciampi, "WATCH YOUR FUCKING MOUTH!!!"
"GET OUT OF THE FUCKING VAN!!!", while Ciampi, apparently under
attack, was shouting back "This is BULLSHIT!"
For the lawyers, the state court judges also set the stage for a civil
suit. All sorts of section 1983 civil causes of action against the
police under color of authority could be inferred from the ruling,
such as assault and battery, disability discrimination,
provocateurism, some sort of presumptive race/gender discrimination,
that all flowed from or contributed to the broader violations of
Ciampi's constitutional rights to due process, equal protection,
immunity from unreasonable search and seizure, slave control with
tasers, etc.
Then, as a side note, there is an interesting legal question whether
the federal courts should allow a separate cause of action for
conspiracy to spoil evidence (videos) or whether the federal court
should deem discovery sanctions to be an adequate remedy, like in
Cedars-Sinai v. Superior Court, 18 Cal.4th 1 (1998). I'd say a
separate federal cause of action should be allowed since the evidence
tamperers can be cited as accessories to the principal acts of the
main defendants.
Another interesting "legal" question might be whether "assault with a
taser" can be recognized as a distinct cause of civil action since it
is already a distinct criminal offense (244.5 Cal. Penal Code) and
whether this would make an "implied right" of civil action. See
Prosser on Torts 5d, "Negligence: Standard of Conduct - Violation of
Statute" p. 220 et seq. (dumpster dive edition, may be outdated).
But for some reason unknown to me until recently, Ciampi and the
attorney David Beauvais separated. This led to the hiring of another
attorney by Ciampi, Andrew Pierce of Palo Alto. This effectively
created a lack of continuity from the state courts to the federal
civil lawsuit because the favorable state court ruling, under the RICO
model, was intended for David's benefit. Andrew Pierce left the case
last year, leaving Ciampi to do the case himself in pro per.
Ciampi has been extremely aggrieved in all aspects of the case, in
contrast to the attorneys who apparently wanted an easy, non-grievous
profitable case with no blowback. A newspaper reporter once told me
that Pierce had settled another grizzly false arrest case for a mere
$50,000. For reasons I will say below, Ciampi should get a lot more.
Lucy Koh's latest ruling in the federal civil suit illustrates how
disjoint the case has become.
Lucy is fairly new at the federal bench. She seems to lean towards a
certain anti-poor bench faction: Kozinski (who wrote Roulette v
Seattle and who is now Chief Judge of the 9th Circuit Federal Court of
Appeals); Rymer of Stanford (anti-poor in Jones v. City of Los
Angeles, and who failed to disqualify herself in an estate laundering
case when she had been on the board of trustees of a claimant
organization that helped with an elder abduction, deliberately
screwing a homeless person out of a bequest); Callaghan (Stanford) who
Kozinski might be mentoring; and Lucy's mentor is probably "judge"
Fogel (helped with the abduction and laundering. Fogel also once gave
a $2 million dollar handout to a former Stanford student, which Ciampi
is not, in an astronomically weaker case). The opposite faction might
include judge Kimberly Wardlaw 9th Circuit (Jones v. City of Los
Angeles, NASA v. Nelson, Bryan v. McPherson (siding with victim of
police tasering); and judge Pregerson who opposed Kozinski in the
Roulette case in 1994 and worked with younger judge Wardlaw, possibly
as her mentor, in the Bryan v. McPherson case. But Pregerson is now
in his 80's.
Lucy Koh of Harvard recently ruled in a "sit-lie" ordinance case in
which she falsely denied that the Palo Alto ordinance or its
enforcement involved invidious discrimination against a particular
panhandler, Victor Frost. It's been common knowledge of practically
everyone in Palo Alto (who reads the newspaper or city council
transcript) that the ordinance was specifically discriminatory against
Frost.
Lucy's sit-lie ruling sided with the tax-paying businesses in the same
way Kozinski did in the Roulette v. Seattle case against the poor. I
presume Lucy was nosing up to Chief Judge Kozinski because at the time
of her ruling she was being nominated to the federal bench. Kiss up,
kick down. And her "nosing up" may be further illustrated in her
incorporation of Kozinski's Mattos taser ruling 590 F.3d 1082 (2010)
into her Ciampi ruling of May 11 2011. Kozinski seems an expert in
dismissing search and seizure violations as if the Constitution does
not exist - perhaps he is more interested in impressing younger
Stanford women like judge Cansuela Callaghan who voted with him in the
Mattos taser ruling before an 11-judge rehearing was ordered (and
consolidated with a Seattle taser case, Brooks).
The 11-judge panel in Mattos/Brooks is sure to re-examine judge
Wardlaw's logic in Bryan v. McPherson which sided with the taser
victim. Kimberly Wardlaw is technically not on the Mattos-Brooks-en
banc taser panel, but she works with Pamela Rymer in Pasadena who is.
Wardlaw, the "beauty contest winner" of the 9th Circuit, is a cult
onto her own because of the preferential treatment she normally gets
from males. The five female judges on the Mattos-Brooks panel may not
be so "fortunate". Their internal court politics and disposition of
the case is sure to be shaped by this. Most likely, they have taken
secret judicial notice of the Ciampi case in the technically lower
district court, and adjudged that the state court decision was a
"men's club" decision. It is likely that a couple of the male judges
on the new Mattos panel will side with the females out of naive
altruism or sloth, so the Fourth Amendment will go down the drain,
again.
Lucy will eventually side with a bench faction or create her own. She
also has probably felt the state court decision favorable to Ciampi
was a "men's club" affair, so it would be OK to trash the Full Faith
and Credit Clause of the United States Constitution. Lucy may be
confused now which direction she needs to go in the case and how far.
She may be waiting for her matron sisters above to strike the first
blow. After all, it was a men's Constitution anyway. And she, like
the others, have been installed into power under the RICO paradigm
that favors wealth and bliss for her fellow self-styled credentialized
elites who are in numerical minority in society, and who favor poverty
and oppression for the majority credential poor. The most important
lesson that schools and licensing agencies teach is rejection, which
the graduates and their lesser-credentialed servants follow with
malevolent heel-clicking certainty. So Ciampi's pleas can easily be
rejected too.
Tossing out Ciampi's case would be easier if there had been a
favorable judgment in the state courts for the police instead of for
Ciampi (like when the so-called Public Defender tried to get Ciampi to
plead guilty). Then you can be sure that if Ciampi sued the way he is
doing now the same opposing attorneys would rush into federal court
shouting funky legal terms like "Res Judicata!", "Abstention!", "He's
appealing a state court decision to the federal district court!" or
whatever, and Ciampi's case would be handily thrown out by all of the
so-called federal judges. Now the situation has been inverted where
"full faith and credit" could be applied to the state court decision
favorable to Ciampi, but I don't see any such summary judgment in
Ciampi's favor. What is apparent though is an anti-Constitutional
judicial bias against oppressed "pro se" litigants in favor of the
judges' fellow credentialized elites and lesser-credentialed servants.
The police who were called against Ciampi were young and unknowing
servants of the political corruption from the credentialatura elders
who benefit from the "homeless" situation in the first place, floating
on the benefits of Papachristou-like vagrancy discrimination (and its
Stanford / Palo Alto variants) against the poor. (Papachristou v.
City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 (1972)). The Palo Alto city
administration has hundreds of employees, many well above the $100K
range. They also dole out enormous money to contractors and other
credentialatura wealth whores (I use this word for both males,
females, and their organizations). In contrast, Ciampi has had
poverty and "homelessness" imposed on him for most of his adult
working life. He has been oppressed before by the Palo Alto police.
At this point, I might suggest he deserves a multi-million dollar
judgment so he too can buy himself a life.
If the "City" has to make up a deficit because of this, let it
proportionately cut its massive salaries and attorney fees across the
board, or impose a homeless tax on residential real estate sales, or
impose a tax on income from post-secondary academic degrees and
occupational licenses which I think Ciampi doesn't have. I'd like to
see the face of Palo Alto's anti-poor Wilson Sonsini and Morrison
Forster mega-law firms when they get their tax bill.
I suppose the poor should not tolerate the status of stepping stones
of the rich. I don't see why people like Ciampi, Victor Frost the
panhandler, or even myself should not also be given enough money to
buy a piece of land, a house, some business capital, be allowed to
work in a free non-RICO employment market, or retire as if we had been
permitted to live such "normal" lives.
I myself could offer to go into the Ciampi case as an amicus curiae,
but I would be working under the RICO model of the court system since
the "legitimacy" model is now forever beyond reality.
In contrast, Ciampi seems still dealing with the "legitimacy" model
under which he still might be able to make an effective motion to
amend the complaint and vacate the May 11th ruling. He might revise
the complaints somewhat to include what I said above about the "causes
of action", especially about the "slave control" - an objective
reality that could promote a decree to outlaw tasers entirely by
police everywhere. (It would place the question of "excessive force"
in a different light.) "Full faith and credit" for the state court
ruling and consequential estoppel could be explicitly alleged instead
of implied. Ciampi can maybe challenge the judge's dismissal of his
Constitutional claims based on U.S. v. Classic and Monroe v. Pape.
The "Monell" principle of "limited" municipal liability is stale in
light (again) of the outrageous wealth that the city doles out to
preferred credentialatura and the desirability of giving Ciampi to
have enough money to permanently avoid a poverty/oppression lifestyle
- so general principles of organizational "deep pockets" liability
should apply as law students study in their corporation law courses.
I do not know if Ciampi will be able to motion all this for rehearing
or reconsideration before his appeal time frame expires.
Depending on Ciampi's private feelings, he can ask the U.S. Attorney's
office to initiate federal criminal civil rights charges, especially
since the 3 year statute of limitation for state law felony taser
assault has expired.
References:
Lucy Koh's ruling May 11th 2011
Pirate Radio interview with Ciampi June 2 2011 -
http://www.radiolibre.org/brb/brb110602.mp3
Other matters you might have to google or write me
Links to docs from Ciampi himself include:
http://judgekohsdecision.weebly.com
http://judgeko.weebly.com/
Supplement
In my opinion, the Ciampi complaints are poorly drafted and tiresome.
Maybe the judge felt the same way. The section 1983 counts were all
crunched together. The complaint could have been structured more like
a many-count indictment, simple, clear, and unglamorous on each
count. This would be better for a judge and jury, especially for jury
instructions. Ultimately this is the way it would have to go to a
jury.
The poorly drafted complaints may have encouraged the judge to rule
somewhat arbitrarily and capriciously on the partial summary judgment
order on May 11th. She may have felt that Ciampi was getting nowhere
with his amended complaints and probably would get nowhere with
another one.
The allegations against the "DOE" defendants were not adequately
developed in the complaints. The "DOE" defendants should be cited as
responsible if Ciampi does not know exactly who did the evidence
tampering. Both for conspiracy and for the acts. There are state and
federal criminal laws to help supply the standards of (mis)conduct for
evidence tampering, such as 18 U.S.C. 1512(c).
For Ciampi it is very difficult being a party, a witness, and then
having to be his own attorney and more so. Complaint inadequacy
should be therefore more excusable for him than for the attorney
Andrew Pierce who drafted the first one.
I believe the Ciampi case
represents an important opportunity to outlaw police tasers, period.
This opportunity should not be lost because of technical pleading
issues. It would be nice if Ciampi could go for a preliminary and
permanent injunction against taser use by police. It would be nice to
see many amicus curiae briefs to support this.
Robert Norse wrote me on June 7 2011:
> While many of your thoughts have merit, the issue was probably
> determined by Tony's apparent insistence on handling his own case--
> perhaps because he couldn't find an attorney to front the
> expert witness fees, perhaps because he was too focused on the tampered
> evidence instead of
> the rest of the case--which was a pretty blatant 4th amendment
> violation--, perhaps because
> he had too high an estimate of his own damages. I don't really know.
> You probably need to
> correspond directly with him. Thanks for your making me aware of this
> case, though.
> R
Robert -
These are good questions for another radio interview with
Ciampi. It seems to me that Ciampi went ahead with his case alone
because the attorneys weren't up to task.
From what Ciampi told me,
he discovered the evidence tampering around the same time as the
preliminary hearing. This caused him to freak out considerably. His
attorney David Beauvais, who had prepared for only the hearing,
appeared insensitive and said pallative things to Ciampi to shrug it
off.
I read in your nazi salute case (attached) that there was also
evidence tampering by the city that you and David Beauvais objected
to. So from this I presume that David was not insensitive to Ciampi's
situation. A difference was that the evidence tampering was much more
egregious and injurious in Ciampi's situation. So it seems like it
was miscommunication between David and Tony because of bad timing and
because of the injury itself that was caused by the defendants.
According to Ciampi, the attorney after David, Andrew Pierce, did not
want to deal with the evidence tampering issue and told Ciampi to
"find another attorney". This left Ciampi alone to handle his own
federal lawsuit.
Another problem for Ciampi, yes, has been financial
barriers and financial disincentive. As you and he mentioned in your
previous radio show, the judge or whoever wanted him to pay upfront
for an expert witness to testify that the electronic evidence was
tampered with. This would be a significant financial barrier for
Ciampi, imposing an unfair burden of proof. I don't see why the judge
couldn't appoint a Special Master educated in sound/video recording to
make findings at the federal government's expense instead of imposing
the expense on an oppressed, indigent litigant in such an important
case. Ciampi has come up with good lay evidentiary arguments in his
favor and the alleged tampering doesn't seem especially high tech.
Ciampi said that David effectively wanted a large cut from an unfairly
small judgment. But I recommend that you talk with Ciampi on your
radio program about the veracity of this.
In the meantime, Ciampi has
posted more writings at
http://www.paloaltofreepress.com
His motion
for reconsideration was denied on June 7th.
d.
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