05 May 2010
By Jane Stillwater
Well, the U.S. Supreme Court just reviewed attorney
Richard Fine's habeas corpus case and gave it a pass.
Poor sweet attorney Fine has been held in the slammer
on a bogus contempt-of-court charge for over a year
now. Further, he's being held in the Los Angeles
County Central Men's Jail, one of the most violent and
overcrowded jails in the country. This man is 70
years old, in failing health and has never committed a
crime in his life. What's wrong with this picture?
About a year ago, attorney Fine challenged Superior
Judge David Yaffe's right to rule in a southern
California land-use case -- after Yaffe refused to
recuse himself in the matter of Marina Strand
Colony II vs County of Los Angeles.
Yaffe, whose salary is being augmented by $46,436 each
year by the County, then ruled in favor of L.A.
County. Sounds fishy to me. They shoulda
automatically given Fine's client a change of venue.
But I digress.
Aside from the disgustingly unfairness of attorney
Fine's contempt charge and his subsequent brutal
incarceration, however, the main problem here seems to
be that if attorney Fine actually IS finally released,
almost everyone who knows him (including the FBI, the
CIA and other persecutorial types that we on the Left
are all-too-familiar with), also knows that the number
one thing that attorney Fine will do upon his release
is to mount a huge campaign to stop Senator John
McCain's latest enthusiastic assault against the U.S.
Constitution, S.3081 -- the Enemy Belligerent,
Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010.
S.3018 is a nasty Senate bill that hands over even
more power to the powers-that-be in Washington who are
already far too powerful. And this act of almost
dictatorial proportion could easily backfire on the
rest of us -- and put ANYONE that Washington
power-brokers determine to be "enemy belligerents" in
jail, even patriotic Americans such as you and me;
perhaps even in a cell next to attorney Fine's.
So getting Richard Fine out of jail is of paramount
importance to you and to me as well as to him.
PS: Richard Fine is a respected and well-known
70-year-old California attorney who the U.S. Supreme
Court has just sentenced to what will probably prove
to be a life sentence (or even death sentence) in one
of the worst jails in America -- just for standing up
for his belief in American citizens' rights to a fair
hearing and a fair trial. But aside from the fact
that every American who loves justice should be
appalled by this latest SCOTUS decision (why aren't
the Teabaggers and Fox News out picketing the streets
over this issue?), we also need to consider that bit
in the Constitution about such type of cruel and
unusual punishment being illegal.
Er, duh.
And also, why isn't attorney Fine simply being
released into a house-arrest program? We all watch
"The Good Wife" on TV. We all keep up with Paris
Hilton. We all know that house arrest is a definite
possibility -- especially if you are 70 years old, in
ill health and facing a life sentence unless you sell
out your principles, cry "uncle" and let Judge Yaffe
get away with his apparent conflict of interest.
And what about all those old guys who have been in
jail forever for committing horrendous murders and
such, but who are released from jail simply because
they are old and sick? Attorney Fine is old and
sick. Release him too. "Attica! Attica!"
Not only that but in the past year alone, hundreds of
prisoners -- and we're talking about hundreds of mean
guys, evil-doers and blatant criminals here! -- have
been released from the same jail that attorney Fine is
now being held in, in order to alleviate
overcrowding. So why doesn't Los Angeles release
attorney Fine too? The jail would be far less crowded
without him hogging up a cell.
And what about that time when someone in my
neighborhood who committed a white-collar crime,
embezzled some money and was sentenced to two years in
jail? She got into a work-furlough program and only
had to spend weekends in jail. Why can't attorney
Fine get released on a work-furlough program too -- so
that he can continue working and also not lose his
home?
And, better yet, why can't attorney Fine be released
on said work-furlough program so that he can help
defeat John McCain's horrendous, scary and un-American
Senate bill S-3081?
PPS: I'm not the only one that's pissed off on
attorney Fine's behalf. Here's what the National
Review has to say about this case:
On April 23, 2010, the
Supreme Court of the United States denied the petition
for “stay of execution” (of coercive confinement for
civil contempt of court) by attorney Richard I. Fine
in the case of Richard Fine v. Leroy Baca, Sheriff
of Los
Angeles County
(09-1250). In doing so, the highest court of the land
has refused to rectify a clear-cut case of judicial
corruption in the state of California.
So who’s Richard Fine and how did he run afoul of the
law? A distinguished attorney with a doctor of law
degree from the University of Chicago Law School and a
Ph.D. in international law from the London School of
Economics, Mr. Fine has practiced law in government
service and private practice for 42 years and achieved
considerable distinction in both. He has served in
the antitrust division of the Justice Department,
founded the Anti-Trust Division in the Los Angeles
City Attorney’s Office and was awarded the prestigious
“Lawyer of the Decades” award in 2006. He has also won
numerous cases on behalf of California taxpayers in
state courts, including a 2003 California Supreme
Court lawsuit that stopped salary payments to the
governor and the legislators if they were unable to
pass the budget.
Yet this distinguished
70-year-old attorney in poor health has been sitting
in solitary confinement in “coercive incarceration” in
the notorious Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail
without being charged, tried, or convicted of anything
since March 4, 2009. In effect, he was thrown in jail
for an indefinite period with no bail or hearing set
for blowing the whistle on judicial corruption in
California.
The chain of events that led to his incarceration was
set in motion in 2000, when Richard Fine became aware
that L.A. superior court judges were receiving illegal
“judicial benefits” payments from Los Angeles County,
despite the fact that lawsuits against that county
were often adjudicated by these same judges, thus
creating clear conflict of interest problems. By 2007
these payments amounted to $46,436 per year on top of
their state salary of $172,000, making L.A. superior
court judges among the highest paid in the country.
Not only was this a blatant conflict of interest
but also unconstitutional, insofar as the California
constitution states clearly (in Article VI, Section
19) that “the legislature shall prescribe compensation
for judges of courts of record.”
In Richard Fine’s opinion, these payments were illegal
if not criminal, and in 2000 he began challenging them
in various appellate briefs and lawsuits against
several judges, thus making himself extremely
unpopular with the superior court bench and also with
the county supervisors who had authorized the
payments. The usual justification the supervisors
give for extending these payments to the judges is the
ostensible need to attract qualified jurists in a
high-cost-of-living area like Los Angeles. Less well
publicized is the possibility that by granting the
judges such payments, the supervisors may be voting
themselves a pay increase as well. Article II,
Section 4 of the Los Angeles County Charter states
that the supervisors’ compensation “shall be the same
as that now or hereafter prescribed by law for a judge
of the Superior Court in and for the County of Los
Angeles.”
Not surprisingly, since the initiation of these
“judicial benefits” in 1988 — at a cost to L.A.
taxpayers of some $300 million to date — the county is
reported to have seldom lost a lawsuit in superior
court. It also appears to be the case that Los
Angeles County is not the only California county which
provides such payments and, according to one estimate,
1,500 out of a total of 2,000 superior court judges in
the state are allegedly implicated in receiving the
illegal payments, as are five of the state’s Supreme
Court justices.
Mr. Fine’s current misfortunes stem from his demand at
a contempt hearing on March 4, 2009, that Judge David
P. Yaffe of the Los Angeles Superior Court, a
recipient of such illegal payments, recuse himself
from the case in front of him, in which L.A. County
was a party. Judge Yaffe had Mr. Fine handcuffed and
thrown in jail for civil contempt of court for an
indefinite period. Judge Yaffe was later to explain
that “the intent of the (non-criminal) solitary
confinement was to coerce Richard Fine into
submission.”
Yaffe’s unusually confrontational behavior was
preceded by events that must have given him and his
colleagues assurance that they had nothing to fear on
account of these illegal payments. The first such
event, paradoxically, was a decision by the California
Court of Appeals for the Fourth Appelate District in
Sturgeon v. County of Los Angeles (BC351286,
filed 10/10/2008) that payments to the judges were not
permissible and that the legislation’s responsibility
to prescribe compensation “is not delegable.” Alarmed
by this decision’s implication of potential criminal
liability for judges and politicians alike,
California’s political and judicial powers that be
moved quickly and quietly to rectify the situation
legislatively. As California grappled with the huge
budget-deficit crisis afflicting the state in early
2009, the Judicial Council of California, chaired by
the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court,
quietly drafted, the legislature approved, and the
governor signed a senate bill (SBX2-11, enacted
February 20, 2009) giving retroactive immunity from
criminal prosecution, civil liability, and
disciplinary action to “judges that had received
payments from a governmental entity prior to the
bill’s effective date.” In doing so, the legislature
and the governor essentially admitted that the
payments had indeed been illegal and very likely
criminal.
Emboldened by the granted immunity, the judicial
machine moved to get rid of Fine once and for all by
having the California State Bar disbar him for “moral
turpitude,” a course of action reminiscent of the
Soviet Communist regime’s practice of declaring
political dissidents criminally insane and locking
them up in psychiatric wards.
In the meantime, Mr. Fine’s jailer, L.A. county
sheriff Lee Baca, has started releasing hundreds of
convicted criminals from Men’s Central Jail because of
overcrowding. Overcrowding is evidently not an issue
for Richard I. Fine, now serving his second year of an
indefinite solitary confinement term as an American
prisoner of conscience.
— Alex Alexiev is a
visiting fellow at the
Hudson Institute in
Washington, D.C. The views expressed here are his
own. http://bench.nationalreview.com/
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