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I
realize what I am about to say does not apply to all attorneys
or judges, but it’s pretty clear that
it applies to most.
I can say that with certainty given what I've observed.
What I'm about to say to
you is also
true of ordinary citizens as well. But lawyers and
judges are a special case because as a matter of course, you
study at some depth the content and meaning of the law and the
Constitution.
Most citizens
appear to be undereducated or misinformed about what their citizenship
and professional responsibilities are to the rest of society.
It is for this reason that our country now faces the greatest
challenge it has ever faced -- the permanent loss of the
Constitution and the sovereignty of its citizens.
Every citizen
has a job to do and you apparently do not know what your job is.
I'm not saying that it's your fault. And my purpose here is
not to lay blame. But you and the those you love face the possibility of losing
your freedom, both political and economic. You have failed to carry out your responsibilities
and that failure has put every person you know and love at
risk of losing everything that is precious to them.
Apparently,
you are not prepared to carry out your
responsibilities. What responsibilities am I talking
about? The responsibility to preserve, protect, and
defend the Constitution of the United States against all its
enemies foreign and domestic. Rather than repeat what I've already written elsewhere, please read my short commentary on citizenship
before continuing.
The
reason the title of this piece is directed at attorneys and
judges is that you, if you are an attorney or judge, specifically
studied the history and meaning of the Constitution, and what
its significance is. In fact, you agreed to
dedicate your life to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution
and the rule of law. How do I know you agreed to make
that your life's work? Because you took an oath. If you had not agreed to make
that your life's work, you would not have been allowed to
practice law. Maybe you forgot.
"Oath:
A solemn, formal declaration or promise to fulfill a pledge,
often calling on God, a god, or a sacred object as
witness." 1
In
the link I offered earlier, I make the case that
every citizen has a similar responsibility, i.e., to protect
and defend the Constitution when necessary. Citizens not
trained in the law or otherwise not properly educated might not fully understand
what their responsibilities are or how to discharge
them. That's
why I'm writing this piece. My point is, the fact that
you don't know, don't remember, don't care, or otherwise don't
believe you have such responsibilities is why you and your
loved ones have already lost some of your most precious rights
and freedoms and are very close to losing the rest of them. What good is being a citizen of the
United States if you lose all or most of your fundamental human
rights that took centuries for western culture to identify,
define and win?
You can't
effectively practice law if you don't understand what the meaning
of responsibility is. And you can't honorably practice
law if you don't understand what an oath is or what the words
in the Constitution mean.
Obviously,
there are all kinds of things lawyers and judges might do that
constitute the practice of law. And when they do those
things, it's critical that they do them with integrity, which
is to say, to
the best of their ability. Everything they do when they
practice their profession is their job. But there's only
one thing you promised to do for which you gave your solemn
and sacred pledge to your fellow citizens and to God. You swore
on your honor to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the
United States against any enemies foreign or domestic.
Now
it's not only lawyers and judges who take that solemn oath as
a prerequisite to practicing their profession. Every
soldier, every police officer, every naturalized citizen, and
every elected government official does too... consciously and
on purpose. Why do you suppose you were asked to do
that? I will tell you why. It's because freedom is
a precious and fragile gift for which a great many brave and
honorable people sacrificed and died to secure on your behalf. Our basic rights and
freedoms may very well be unalienable gifts from God, but for
them to become and remain real in your life, you have to preserve, respect
and cherish them, otherwise they can be lost, and once they are
lost it might not be very easy to get them back.
Officers
of the court, soldiers, police officers, and elected officials
are the first line of defense against tyranny. When they
fail, the responsibility necessarily falls upon the rest of
us. Our children, our posterity depend on all of us to preserve
their birthright.
When the president
of
Pakistan tried to illegally remove his country's Chief Justice
from his post and also when he declared what attorneys in his
country perceived to be an illegal state of
emergency, those attorneys jumped out of their chairs and marched the
streets of the capital in protest at the government's attempt to undermine the rule of
law, some being injured and/or arrested in the process.
Would you do that if your government attempted to undermine
the rule of law?
The fact is, the
viability of our Constitution is now hanging by a thread and
you are still going to work every day, earning your fees,
working with your clients as if nothing has happened.
You have not, for the most part, taken any significant
action, which is to say you have not given your best effort to
preserve our founding document as you promised you would do.
Without your help now, not only is the economy likely to collapse, but life as you have known
it is
likely to
collapse. Maybe
not today or tomorrow… but that day is coming... and maybe
it will be tomorrow.
How do I know
this is true? Because I've been paying attention.
The evidence is overwhelming that the Constitution has been
degraded even though most citizens don't seems to know it or
understand what the implications are of what has
transpired. The fact that they don't understand is
evidence that you, if you are a lawyer or a judge, have not
explained it to them.
A Few
Examples - there is a great amount of evidence that the
following examples (listed in no particular order) are quite
real, and evidence of such is available to anyone who is
willing to take the time to look for it.
1. The
Writ of Habeas Corpus has been corrupted or
suspended.
2. A
US President was allowed to take office even though he didn’t
legally win the election.
3. Overwhelming
evidence suggests that destruction
of the twin towers was an inside job and yet the events of 911
were never properly investigated.
4. Hundreds
of thousands of citizens were defrauded out of their
homes by bankers who were never prosecuted for their crimes,
and those defrauded were never compensated for the injustice
they suffered.
6. A
President of the United States has become an accessory-after-the-fact
for being unwilling to prosecute known criminals.
He has also committed crimes similar to those he refuses to
prosecute, and yet, so far, no official action has been taken
to correct this injustice. Apparently, it is now
accepted that Presidents are above the law and not subject to
the same legal restraints that apply to ordinary citizens.
7. Illegal wars were started and
egregious war crimes have been committed,
and continue to be committed, with no accountability on the
part of the perpetrators.
8. Torture has been used by
our government and is
being used against suspected civilian and
military detainees.
Perpetrators of these crimes are not, and have not been
investigated or prosecuted even though several perpetrators of
these crimes have admitted their culpability.
9. People are being punished for crimes they
didn’t commit and/or are being held, some for years, without any due process whatsoever.
10. At
least one President believes he has the right to murder
people on his own say so and has committed that crime multiple
times.
11. At
least one President believes he has the right not
only to murder suspects but also, through negligence, to murder people in the
vicinity of those suspects without any due process of law and in
public places far removed from any battlefield.
He does this without a declaration of war and without
any legal authority whatsoever.
12. First amendment rights have been grossly
degraded and privacy is no longer respected by our government
as a general rule. Your
phone can be tapped, your body can be touched or groped, your emails
read without legitimate due process.
13. Homes
have been foreclosed on thousands of people even though the
documents used in the process were not legally executed.
14. Patents are being issued on life forms that were
known to exist for eons. People
are losing their farms or being sued when the wind blows the
seeds from plants their neighbors grow onto their land and
begin to sprout.
15. Police officers are being trained not to protect
the rights of ordinary citizens, but instead to use weapons
and follow illegal orders of superiors that degrade the rights
of ordinary citizens. Police officers who commit such
crimes are generally not prosecuted.
16. People who do not work for corporations are
being sent to jail for crimes they commit while corporate
moguls who commit far more egregious crimes are allowed to
walk free while the penalty for their crimes are converted to
fines which are then paid by their corporations.
17. This list could be greatly expanded.
Basic
principles of justice, our Constitution, and the rule of law
are under attack. Your
job is to defend them. It’s
everyone else’s job too and yet what I see is a general
failure of the legal community to take responsibility for
itself, when the legal community by all rights should be
leading the charge.
During a
recent TV debate among Republican candidates for President, six
out of eight of them said that they approved of torture and
would use it against detainees if elected, in effect, reporting to the
electorate that they have no intention of keeping their oath
of office, given that torture is both illegal under our
nation's laws and also under international law. How is it possible that talk of torture is so generally acceptable if the rule of law is still respected in
America?
At least one
of these candidates reported that, as President, he would gladly
sign agreements with certain of our trading partners purporting to advance
trade and peaceful co-existence while at the same time carry out covert
operations making undeclared war against those very nations that
are party to those agreements (that is, as long as he was
confident that he could get
away with it without being found out), thereby telling the
people of our nation and the world that not only is this person's word of
honor worthless, but that the people of the United States are
also without honor, lacking in respect for the pursuit of peace, and
lacking in respect for their own dignity, and for the dignity
of other members of a larger world community.
The policy of
torture used by our forces against other peoples is a process
whereby torture is applied to any number of individuals even
though none of them are known to be guilty of knowing or doing
anything wrong, hoping that the torture might yield useful
information for future military use. There is evidence that mistreatment of suspects
and prisoners in the US prison system is growing in response to this
unconscionable example
being set by our government.
The truth is, you can no longer guarantee your client
justice in America's judicial system.
And if you cannot guarantee your client justice, you
have failed in your duty to keep your oath, your sacred word
of honor. In America, innocent people are being sent to
prison. Suspects are not presumed innocent but are being
punished as they wait for their trial to begin. Since when is it justice to fail
to charge people for crimes they do commit, or to charge
people for crimes they are known not to commit? And if a
person does commit a crime, who gives a prosecutor the right
to lower the charge to a lesser offense or raise the charge to
higher offense than was committed? How do such practices
serve justice?
We are a
nation whose government is at war against the world and also against its own people, spurred on by profiteers wealthy
enough to buy elections and corrupt legal processes for their
own ends.
That so many judges and lawyer find it more convenient
to value their daily schedules, their amicable relationships
with colleagues, and/or
their own personal incomes more than they value the freedom of
other human beings, or the right of other human beings to expect and receive justice
when it’s needed, is a disgrace.
Maybe it’s already too late.
I don’t know. The
failure of our most trusted professionals may have already cost all of humanity its freedom.
Perhaps the rule of law is now like
the walking dead, where the moving finger has already written and
where it’s now too late for tears to cancel any line or
wash out any word of it.
But
here we are. You are the front line defense and that
line of defense is crumbling. If you do not think things
are bad enough yet for you to raise your voice in support of
justice and the rule of law, then how
bad does it have to get before you will decide to do your
job and keep your word?
I
think you owe us all an answer.
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