"At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed us in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping little and little, the foundations of the Constitution, before anyone perceived that invisible and helpless worm had been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account." --Thomas Jefferson, 1823.
We, the class of persons aggrieved by the government and in the courts, do hereby formally proffer our petition of grievance and demand for redress and amelioration, as is constitutionally guaranteed and provided for by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It has come to our attention that the federal judiciary, which serves as the role model and exemplar idyllic for all American courts, has gone terribly astray in its practice and administration of the law, and has de facto breached both its Constitutional idealism to unbiased justice and its purport to its public charter, from which its power is derived.
We impute the government's & courts breach of its duty, where its adherence to written procedure and law has degraded to such a degree, that the outcome and resolution of cases in these forums has become probabilistic at best, and oligarchically complicit at its worst.
We, those of us among the public who have had first-hand and informed experience in the court system(s), have taken up indignant notice of the discrepancies between the theory and the practice of the law; have suffered unjustly due to those discrepancies, and hereby articulate these abuses and breaches; we speak for ourselves and for the unknowing laity whose liberties and properties are at jeopardy where the judiciary has abrogated its Constitutional charter.
Preamble and Declaration of Condition
We assert that the current state of the courts' standard modus operandi has devolved into one of caprice and peremptory resolution --a condition where the judges now consistently rule with expedience and favoritism, with a post hoc mentality, geared more toward a synthesized end result than of a resolution wrought by the impartial weighing of the facts as directed to by the law. Whether it be because the issues therein are deemed too disruptive to society or the legal mettle, or because one of the litigants is politically more precedential than the other, or other reason, this is a breach of the public role of the judiciary.
Cognizant of the above, we also note that there appears to be an orchestrated effort by the judiciary to uphold the appearance of intact due process in the public eye. We also observe that, due to the technical nature of these matters, this effort is generally successful, and the very many micro injustices perpetrated as a matter of course in these forums side-step and escape the attention of the uninvolved public at large, who continue to retain a confidence of faith that all is basically well with the system.
As more members of the laity unavoidably get involved in the legal arena, these problems will not be concealable much longer. Although the details of the situation may continue to evade the general public's comprehension, the sentiment will not, as those who have had the misfortune of being subject to these inequities complain loudly to all that would listen.
And in that vein, it can be seen that a plethora of grass roots political action committees and coalitions, highly critical of the state of the various judiciaries and demanding change, have emerged.
Each one of these groups is representative of thousands of people who have deep-set grievances with the judicial system in its current defective incarnation, and have been unjustly affronted by their participation with it. The members don't complain about unfavorable decisions to themselves;they complain about the institutionally corrupt way decisions are arrived at and handed down.
We don't demand favoritism from the courts; we demand impartiality and plain adherence to the rule of written law.
Historical Backdrop and Precedent
It has long been past since the federal courts upheld their rightful roles as guardians of the ideals of the Constitution, a bulwark against greater political and social powers seeking to establish an agenda at the expense of the common man's rights and guarantees.
There was a time when the federal courts did not recoil at the incidental possibility that a decision or ruling might have uncontrolled or unforeseen ramifications, rather they let the facts of the case and the law as written be their guides to just resolution, and let the results go where they may. They were the leaders of law, and set the outer limits to what was right and wrong.
Their decisions issued were pertinent and succinct to each case at hand; legal findings issued righted the wrongs at bar without reserve or fear that such a decision would or could affect other cases. There was a purity of process, compartmentalized, as it should be, within the instant cases being entertained, and beholden only to the applicable law at hand. Pristine in the application of the facts and law to the case at hand, such process was not soiled either by outside influences nor by the socio-political status of either litigant.
However, where there once was a dynamism, an open-mindedness to lead wherever the logic of the law may take it, without reservation to pragmatic forces or eventualities, there has now come a miserly stodginess of thought and forethought, where the results of judicial decision making are feared by those making them, and decisions' scope are artificially constrained, held tightly and reigned in as close as they can, so as to preempt what may come of them.
The fall-out from this change, from the free-form intellectual clarity of purpose and the openhanded idealistic application of the law, to the close fisted and small minded micro-management of the judicial administration (i.e., decision making and application), has been the practical degeneration of the legal system to the point where there is now particularized "justice" for one, not for all. Litigants cannot reliably depend on written law, because it could be "interpreted" to mean anything the courts want it to mean.
Legal truths no longer apply to all people everywhere similarly situated; rather, rulings and order memorandums are crafted to single persons or entities, constrained in scope solely to the instant cases, with judicially stamped captions boldly stating just that.
Such individualized justice systemically inevitably permits an arbitrariness of law; equal protection becomes meaningless as the law is applied fundamentally differently, depending on who you are and what impact your circumstance may have on the status quo.
This sloppiness and lack of legal consistency, and the accompanying loss of quality of decision issuance and analysis, has become a mindset and model for the judiciary at large. No longer are the previous ideals of adherence to the written rule of law held in sacred esteem, as something meant to be inviolate and kept pure. Now the judiciary feels free to "interpret" and reinterpret clearly written laws, unambiguous on their face, in whatever way seems pragmatically suited to the circumstance at bar.2 (It must be noted that in concert with this judicial trend is the contemporary legislative tendency to enact ambiguously written law, often incomplete and by design requiring interpretation by the courts to make any sense. Yet the courts' refusal to readily overturn such laws on the grounds of ambiguity makes them complicit in this dereliction).
[2. Such a legal system, brought to its logical conclusion, is indistinguishable from the Chinese judicial system of "laws" and ruling; there are no codified laws - judges hand down decisions based upon the reigning power structure's sentiment, presumed to be known to all, implicitly and without prior notice. Chinese judges do not publish their decisions or reasons thereof; all decisions are sealed and kept secret from the public. In practice, this is similarly indistinguishable to our judiciary's increasing habit of issuances of orders without opinion, or qualified with some cryptic summary statement, such as "based on the record and pleadings before the court it is so ordered." This is how Chinese leaders thus maintain flexibility in their courts.]
{End of Part I | Part II will ensue in a few days.}
