jurist nonprudence

Have you followed the horrible and tragic case of Larry Delassus? Larry was a guy in Hermosa Beach who got caught up in a screwup when Wells Fargo bank misread an assessor's parcel number and mistakenly foreclosed on him.

It is such an awful tale, Larry ends up dying in the courthouse the day after Torrance Superior Court Judge Laura Ellison signals that she is going to find for the bank. Heartrending. Read the original story in L.A. Weekly here.

You talk about a guy being sodomized by the system, aided by a judge whose husband is a detective and is said to have a palsy relationship with cops, prosecutors and "the man."

This guy got chewed up and spit out, ground down in the wheels. Why couldn't the judge understand that this older man, a veteran, would have a hard time finding his legs after being beat up so by Wells Fargo? They wouldn't even tell him how much he would have to pony up to make the mistakenly foreclosed on loan correct.

Their spokesman made a lame statement absolving themselves of responsibility and expressing their condolences. Fat lot of good that will do. I would think long and hard before becoming a customer of that bank. Poor Larry.

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Found this one on a conservative site, Townhall. I happen to agree with the author, Mike Adams. Titled Abusing Due Process. Guy bitches online about a judge in a child custody case and gets five years in the slam. Prosecutors say that he crossed the line and threatened the judge, something that the defense disputes. A guy loses his kids and blows off steam and now he gets five years in the joint.

Dan Brewington is justifiably angry because James Humphrey took his kids away from him based on a report by an unlicensed psychologist. During the custody battle, Judge Humphrey also failed to provide adequate justification for his decisions as mandated by Indiana law. But that just makes him a bad judge. What he allowed to happen in the wake of Brewington's reaction makes Humphrey downright dangerous.Dan Brewington was convicted in 2011 of intimidating a judge and attempting to obstruct justice. The Indiana attorney general’s office successfully argued that he exposed the judge to “hatred, contempt, disgrace or ridicule." There is no question that Dan Brewington broke the law when he went online and criticized Judge Humphrey for denying him the right to visit his own children. But the law criminalizing Brewington's criticism of the judge is patently unconstitutional. And Humphrey's complicity in the prosecution is simply unconscionable.

Brewington may in fact be a bag of wind but we don't yet live in a monarchy or dictatorship where criticism of our public servants is a crime. Or do we?

...He said his client may not have had “the rhetorical skill of Thomas Paine” but that he had a right "to complain about unfair treatment by an oppressive system.”