Swarzenegger - The People's Governor... is he?

Conditions in the state prisons in California are so bad, and there's so much overcrowding that a group of federal judges has given the governor 45 days from August 4 (so end of September) to improve conditions, or they may step in. Read the story by Mike Zapler.

September 29 is the day the U.S. Supreme Court justices will hold a conference and consider taking Attorney Fine's case. Information regarding Attorney Fine will be distributed to the justices for conference on September 29, 2009. 

Check it out: Video made by Attorney Fine at a town hall meeting just before he got locked up. The governor has a duty to protect the people of his state; however, Arnold Schwarzenneger signed a bill (SBX 211) giving retroactive immunity to the judges who accepted the payments which Richard Fine has been trying to get returned to California taxpayers. Judge Yaffe jailed Attorney Fine soon after, and he's been trying to get released ever since! His writ of habeas corpus was denied. His Certificate of Appealability is pending in 9th Circuit Court.

Attorney Fine has committed no crime, yet he's been kept in jail since the beginning of March... on false contempt of court charges. This is nonsense! The governor was wrong to sign a bill giving the judges immunity from prosecution for accepting the illegal payments. SBX 211 was snuck into a budget package which the governor approved in February of 2009. 

A story at the Metropolitan News-Enterprise explains. Justice Patricia Benke reversed a lower court's grant of summary judgment to the county; and on December 24, 2008 the California Supreme Court denied a review of that decision...Merry Christmas! The authority to determine compensation for the judges belongs with the state legislature, not the county.  

I sent an email to Governor Arnold Swarzenegger, asking him to release Mr. Fine. This country is desparate for a return to law and order. Our government officials, right along with large corporations, are the biggest violators of our rights!

 

READER DISCRETION ADVISED - Penile Prosthesis / Medical malpractice?

In the year 2000, our son Aaron broke his arm, but the doctor in the emergency room misdiagnosed it as a dislocation, which had to be repaired through surgery. I was researching about the Maine Health Security Act (MHSA) because of that litigation when I discovered a very disturbing case: Pease v. Kester.

Ms. Pease filed a claim against the doctor, Kester, who performed a penile prosthesis on a known rapist who had been incarcerated in Maine and other states...for a total of about twenty years. She felt the doctor had been professionally negligent.  

On March 30, 2004, Pease filed the present complaint, asserting that Dr. Kester owed her a duty of care to refrain from providing a non-medically necessary penile implant to Commeau without making a reasonable inquiry into his social and criminal history.

Doctor Kester claimed that Pease and her husband (who was suing for loss of consortium) had to bring the case as one of medical malpractice; and the reason he did that is those types of cases are governed by the Maine Health Security Act (MHSA), and provisions of the Act make it difficult to meet the requirements to ever get a case to trial.   

The judge dismissed the Pease's complaint. The decision in Kennebec County was 8 pages long, and at the end of it was listed the name of the judge: Donald Marden. Huh, I recognized it; he's the judge who affirmed the small claims court decision in 2004 in our case against the contractor Maine Wide Construction. 

And Marden was also the judge who denied Dennis Dechaine's motion for post-conviction review (PCR) after DNA testing years later proved his DNA did not match the one found on the murder victim in 1988. That DNA, which is believed to belong to the killer, has yet to be identified; and efforts by the group Trial and Error have thus far failed to get him a new trial, or release. And another connection I made was that one of the attorneys listed for the Pease's was Michaela Murphy, who represented Dennis for a while before being appointed as a judge.  

Dr. Kester was shielded because of legislation that Maine politicians passed making it near impossible to file and win cases against medical professionals. From my research I learned why they did this; it's because they feared that doctors would leave the state because of rising medical malpractice insurance costs...the increase which was wrongly being attributed to frivolous claims filed by patients. 

And was it really a medical malpractice case? Dr. Kester didn't operate on Ms Pease, but on the man who assaulted her, and it was because that operation was a success that she was assaulted! Here's a link to the Maine Supreme Court decision which affirmed (rubber-stamped) the Superior Court decision by Judge Don Marden. It's barely one page long.  

Pease v. Kester illustrates why we need healthcare reform, judicial accountability, and tort reform. 

As for Aaron's case, it was not dismissed, but the result was just as bad. The physician and her assistant had admitted in their initial reply to the claim: "a valid claim exists to defend against." Despite this, summary judgment was granted to the defendants by Superior Court Justice Ellen Gorman; I appealed and here's the decision by the Maine Supreme Court in Aaron Michaud v. Blue Hill Memorial et al . 

Here's some information at Wikipedia regarding summary judgment and also says what a judge and jury's duties are.

A link to the 1017-page healthcare bill - H.R. 3200

I was sent a link to the healthcare reform bill by a woman named Meredith.

She summarized some of the provisions: "Page 317, Doctors: You are now prohibited from owning and investing in healthcare companies!"

If this is true, it should stir some serious debate in Maine especially, because most doctors here get their liability insurance through the physician-owned Medical Mutual Insurance Company of Maine; the doctors are shareholders of the insurance company which provides them liability insurance for malpractice. I wrote about this in older posts, and how because of it plaintiffs with cases of medical malpractice have difficulty securing a law firm to represent them, or a doctor to testify on their behalf. You see, if a law firm represents just one doctor, they don't want to take your case because they'll be going up against their client's company, so to speak. They consider that a conflict of interest. Not being able to obtain a lawyer is one reason why victims of medical malpractice have little to no chance of winning their cases in Maine.

Summary on Richard Fine

A Los Angeles Times story by Victoria Kim is a good place to learn why Attorney Richard Fine was sent to prison by Judge Yaffe.

Kathryn and K2GS - Trial by the public

The judicial system is broken - maybe beyond repair. On Wednesday, I hope to discuss Attorney Richard Fine's case and that of Dennis Dechaine with Kathryn and other judicial reform advocates at Kollective Acquisitions at the BlogTalk Radio .

Kathryn is into green construction, that is building homes which are friendly to the environment; and she promotes social responsibility as well. She has set aside Wednesdays as "Justice Day." She will take a few cases, discuss them, and ask listeners to give their verdicts... a sort of trial by the public. The call-in number to her show is 347-945-7100. The time of the call will be 11:30 a.m. eastern time... that's 8:30 a.m. pacific.

To submit a case, write to Kathryn at trial@k2gs.com and to send your verdict on a case, email her at verdict@k2gs.com

Souter remembered - "Alden" and "Kelo" decisions

As he exits the scene soon, I think about Justice Souter's dissent in a 1999 U.S. Supreme Court case involving a group of roughly 60 probation officers and a violation of 1938 Federal Standand Labor Laws (FSLA) by the State of Maine. The officers, one whose last name was Alden, had been jipped of their overtime pay and both the state and federal courts turned their backs on them. Souter dissented in the U.S. Supreme Court case.

From Wikipedia: Alden v. Maine

From Cornell University: Syllabus in Alden v. Maine (98-436) 527 U.S. 706 (1999)

And here's a June 24, 1999 article by David Savage of the LA Times, Rulings Give States Broad Immunity Against Lawsuits, which mentions the decision and others regarding federalism and the sovereign rights of states.

However, most people will remember Souter as the justice who was part of the majority in Kelo v. City of New London, and whose home in Weare, New Hampshire Clarence Darrow Clements tried to take by eminent domain and turn it into the "Lost Liberty Hotel." In Kelo, the U.S. Supreme Court decision affirmed the Connecticut Supreme Court decision which allowed the taking of private property by eminent domain, for the benefit of a developer who promised to improve the neighborhood... people's homes were leveled.

So how is the redevelopment project going? It isn't. (I edited this post when I came to it in 2025 and saw that a prior story I linked to was gone, and I replaced it with one written by the New York Times on November 12, 2009). You may need a subscription to read the entire story Pfizer to Leave City That Won Land-Use Case, but here are a few paragraphs from it:

From the edge of the Thames River in New London, Conn., Michael Cristofaro surveyed the empty acres where his parents’ neighborhood had stood, before it became the crux of an epic battle over eminent domain. 

 

Pfizer said it would pull 1,400 jobs out of New London within two years and move most of them a few miles away to a campus it owns in Groton, Conn., as a cost-cutting measure. It would leave behind the city’s biggest office complex and an adjacent swath of barren land that was cleared of dozens of homes to make room for a hotel, stores and condominiums that were never built.

Out of balance...

Here's an article by Laura Lynn, Los Angelos Family Courts Examiner, and Michael Warnken, judicial reform activist:

How to end the corruption in court

While increasing representation is part of the solution; we need to hold those representatives accountable or all is lost. While Californians only have 1 representative per roughly half a million people, Mainers (Mainiacs some call us) have 1 representative per about 8000 people... and we're in trouble because we haven't really got their ear!