Not familiar with Giancola. Distinguishes between appeal bond issues and merits appeal?

I hope Governor’s counsel is able properly to handle such; as you suggested, he apparently didn’t seek recusal of fuller.

Scott, thanks for hanging with this.

(*_-)

And I think I was quite late to the dance here…..

You ask some of the best questions around. Go on, Doctor, I am anxious to hear what answers you may provoke.

Thanks for taking the time to talk today. I’ve heard that William Pryor is potentially involved, or is implicated in the same “scandal” that took down Siegelman. What, if anything, do you know about Pryor’s involvement? Is his seat on the court of appeals potentially in trouble?

Scott Horton March 3rd, 2008 at 12:28 pm 38

In response to MadelineBassett @ 18William Pryor is the man who hatched the Siegelman prosecution. He started piecing together a case against Siegelman almost as soon as Siegelman was elected governor, and he consistently attempted to push the charges off on the U.S. attorney’s office so he himself could sit in the backseat. Interestingly, one of the key allegations against Siegelman came from a man named Lanny Young. When Young came in, he detailed specific allegations of petty corruption against Siegelman, and far more substantial allegations against Pryor and Jeff Sessions, the Alabama senator. The U.S. Attorney had her first assistant, Julia Weller, negotiate a plea-bargain with Young. Ms. Weller is the wife of Chris Weller, who was William Pryor’s attorney. So it would come as a surprise to no one that all the accusations against Pryor, and his mentor, Sessions, were dropped, and only the charges against Sessions went forward. This gives you a taste of the rancid “ethics” practiced by the Justice Department in this case. It is the strongest case of selective prosecution I’ve ever seen. But federal judges have life-time tenure, and it takes a special vote of impeachment in the Congress to remove them.

Scott, thank you for your amazing work and vigilance. I so regret I missed the discussion you brought to the Lake and Christy hosted for us. Thank you both for creating this conversation today.

Scott, I have a question for you (should you return to this thread) and other attorneys here. Though the tone may be a bit flip, my intent is serious; any disrespect in the question is directly to the legal community at large, not to the Constitution-defenders like yourself and our attorneys here at the Lake.

Pryor’s apparently criminal and certaintly unethical actions on multiple matters may ultimately be overturned (I sure hope they will) as Siegelman’s appeals progress. Yet that appropriate relief for Siegelman will not remove Pryor’s power on the Appelate Bench.

As impeachment is the only mechanism by which Pryor can removed, the fact the legal and judicial authorities aren’t demanding his removal as a matter of course appalls me – and fascinates my inner shrink.

Pryor’s behavior is so corrupt – this prosecution is so corrupt – and yet I don’t see or hear the legal establishment (or even Dem attorneys) publicly calling for the only way to stop Pryor from possibly abusing power: impeachment.

As much as organized medicine sucks, even the AMA and state medical boards pull licenses from incorrigibly dangerous docs – especially (all too often subsequently) if the doc’s “bad practice” gets big media play. The media – appropriately – run with the story, too – and ask why the doc’s still able to work. And the MD from the doc society du region may get camera time to say what is and is not allowed (like, don’t fuck your patients, even if you’re a plastic surgeon. duh.)

Yet here Pryor’s actions look awful – and great ethical attorneys like Scott and Christy make certain the world knows about it.

I am so sincerely grateful for you both and folks like you (and lhp and hugh and…).

What I don’t see in legal culture is the default value that abuse of power – past or present – gets Judges’ present power pulled.

OK – so the Constitution vests the Impeachment of Federal judges in Congress. And Impeachment’s a poltical decision.

Yet the State of California vests licensure removal in the State Medical Board – and like all State appointments, Board appointments may be quite political.

We docs can usually kill only one person at a time – even working at HMO speeds. Judges who misuse their power – for money, party, jollies, or lunacy – can injure millions. And though they can usually only kill one person at a time, they can imprison many.

If docs have anesthesized a patient to abuse them, everyone expects we’ll lose our licenses. That’s the professional and public culture. We abuse our power to harm patients, we lose that power.

When the very special attorneys we call Federal judges have misused their power to imprison – for party hence money and jollies – I expect the judicial ethics panels and relevant Congressional Committee members to stand around with their briefs up their butts and do nothing. And I expect media and the (vast majority of) legal and public culture to treat Impeachment like some legendary act from the Cargo Cult God, remembered only by elders.

Of course, with overt crimes prosecuted in criminal court, they do pay attention. But for all else – they’ll apparently wait for action by the DOJ – under Bush.

[BTW, what I really hope to learn is that legal culture is crying out for impeachment and I’m too ignorant to know it.]

OK, so what are my questions?

(1) Just as a corrupt doc is often removed only after a series of Medical Board efforts, a corrupt Federal judge may not be removed the first time Congress discusses their Impeachment. But why – when faced with monstrously corrupt Federal judges – does legal and political culture not reflexively attempt their impeachment?

[Docs certainly sound off to patients - and sometimes the media - when they hear another doc’s reported practice deserves Board sanction and removal.]

(2) Why is the cultural norm among attorneys to treat the part of the Constitution setting forth the power of impeachment as though it were near forbidden knowledge, generally not brought up by attorneys to the public, and used even less?

[The media sure don’t let up (nor should they) when an apparently corrupt and/or deadly doc still has a license. Once roused, the Medical Boards don’t, either.]

(3) Why do American media and audience – we the people – apparently expect we’ll have far less vigilance over the corrupt Federal judges among (less than) 2,000 Federal Judges then over the corrupt docs among over 300,000 physicians?

[Do we simply expect the corrupt Federal judges will hide their tracks better? Or that the robes just make them harder to spot? *g*]

(4) And…uh…what does the foregoing say about the expectations for ethical behavior on the Federal bench?

[If our expectations have come to be so low, why?]

But, to be fair, there have been some improvements made since Mukasey came in — most notably the attempt at restoration of the civil rights division comes to mind. I think that honorable people come into positions like this thinking that they could either stay above the political fray rather than be swept into it, or they see some level of good that they could do that would not be done by someone else, and so they rationalize work within the administration for themselves by trying to do the good that they can and walling off what they cannot fix — or at least making more of an attempt to move things than a predecessor might have done. (Considering his predecessor was Gonzales, that’s not a stretch to say that any real attempt to make changes toward respect for the rule of law or to push back at the Cheney/Addington line would be more than we were getting for years from Gonzales.)

But I think there may have been some tacit agreement to stay away from what was past, and to focus on rebuilding for the future, to try and salvage what could be saved or rebuilt within the DOJ rather than let it continue to wither and die before everyone’s eyes. Frankly, there is a lot of value in that — I’m just not certain that I could, personally, stomach turning a blind eye to the past conduct to achieve that as a goal were I in Mukasey’s shoes. But someone needed to step in and start the rebuilding process sooner rather than later, before they lost even more decent and honorable longtime attorneys who could no longer stomach working under the prior conditions — because holding the line on the rule of law had to be put before even personal feelings about all of what had come before, and I can see how that could be a seductive personal argument to do that if given the opportunity to salvage something of what was a very honorable place to work in the not too distant past.

Does that answer your question at all?

Thanks to all!

‘Holding the line’ on the ‘Rule of Law’, going back, with respect to ‘our’ law to the Magna Charta, cannot tolerate too many gaping breaks before becoming either a discontinuous bunch of snipped threads which won’t support the weight of Justice or just the ‘right’ length to ‘hang’ us altogether.

What you define in other terms is often referred to as ‘rationalization’ and deemed, in certain circumstance, if we are honest, to be less than
‘honorable’.

Certain ‘Positions’ with respect, once again, ‘to’ and also ‘for’ the Law require more than that, else the ‘Law’ means nothing except another club to beat down decency, courage and conscience in the face of clear depravity.

Any nation which depends upon ‘the Rule of Law and not of men’ requires a certain fundamental coherency a well as a clear continuity to its legal ’system’, otherwise it is a piecemeal sham and a source of continuing pain, loss and destruction, at the whim of those who claim to be ‘above’ said law, as Augustus did in Rome and Bush/Cheney have asserted in our times.

It is of interest to me that our nation’s founders, not having the experience of more recent tyrants, used particularly their understanding regarding the destruction of the Roman Republic as the model which they hoped to design protections against. Their design, though not perfect, as many well know, still yet would be viable were courage and basic humanity at play in our august chambers of government. At this place in time, it could well be that our founders’ gravest concerns and deepest fears are to be realized.

Now, perhaps more than ever before, we’ve need of men and women willing to stand, even at the ultimate cost for (that thrilling line from the old Superman television series) ‘Truth, Justice, and the American Way’.