Earl Johnson must be laughing his head off..
When I started fighting corruption at the town hall, I had this idea that it would be difficult to find my way through the maze of all the different rules and laws, there are so many; local bylaws, Mass. General Law, United States Code, the Constitution of the USA, the Constitution of the Commonwealth, rules of civil procedure, court Rules, Rules of appeallate procedure, rules of evidence, standing orders, etc, etc..I thought it would be difficult but I thought if I really try hard I could get justice. I thought that judges would know the law, read complaints and other pleadings, and at the end would get it right and serve justice. After all, that is what they do, right? They are judges..
I was wrong, very wrong.. If you think that this great nation is still following the rule of law, think again, or better; read my latest court document, my petition for a rehearing of the Johnson Landgate case.
I mailed this petition today to the Appeals Court and also a copy to the three law firms that represent the defendants in this case.
The next step will be the petition for further appellate review (FAR) to the Supreme Judicial Court..
Click here, to read the petition.
Read also:
Holland Selectman Earl Johnson and Family Profit from Illegal Land Use.Appeals Court affirmed Superior Court Judge's dismissial in the Johsnon-LandGate case.
Earl Johnson, Mr. Grinch or Santa Clause?
Peter Frei filed Notice of Appeal.
Superior Court Judge Dismisses Johnson LandGate Suit.
Homes built by the Johnson's, illegal!
Peter Frei
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Comments:
Posted on 29 Mar 2010, 22:35 by lcmLast Laugh
That was a well written and powerful document Peter. Hopefully the court will actually consider it, the facts presented, and the argument this time and act accordingly. As we both know that is oftentimes not the case.
It is sad that people like the Johnsons get away with the things they do with no consequences. That the residents of Holland do not fully support equal justice and accountibility for all of its residents is sad.
I fear though that you are right, and that Johnson is just laughing right now, but hopefully the last laugh will be on him and his.
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Posted on 30 Mar 2010, 15:16 by Mike LaMountain
Maybe
Maybe we should just give all the selectman and town employees some town owned land. After all they work very hard and deserve it on top of their pensions.
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Posted on 1 Apr 2010, 9:54 by M.B.E. Smith
Do appellate courts regularly cheat?
It probably will not surprise you to be told that the practice of law is almost entirely remote from its philosophy. Lawyers and judges are not much interested in jurisprudence--as indeed, not many mathematicians or scientists are much interested in the philosophies of their respective disciplines. (For that matter, philosophers are not much interested in the philosophy of what they do either.) But I have had one jurisprudential question set for me by my appellate practice, which has been almost entirely as a criminal defender. I have found in a substantial number of my appellate cases that I was left at its end with the distinct impression that the court had "cheated" in reaching its decision: that in considering the case it had early on made up its collective mind what this would be and that it had thereafter ignored contrary facts or legal principles, however weighty those might have been. And I believed in some of those cases (albeit not all) that the court had as a result come to a clearly incorrect legal conclusion--with unfortunate consequences to my client. In talking shop with other appellate attorneys I frequently ask whether they too have often been left with the same impression, and their invariable response is: "Sure, let me tell you about. . .." So I found that I and other practitioners believed that appellate courts frequently fail to follow the law-at times, as it seemed to us, deliberately so. (Because we had clearly brought those inconvenient facts and arguments to the court's attention!) This raised two significant questions: one seemingly empirical (Is it true that courts regularly `cheat' as so described?) and another straightforwardly jurisprudential (Is it proper--that is, consistent with true principles of political morality--for courts so to cheat?)
To be continued..
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Posted on 2 Apr 2010, 9:13 by M.B.E. Smith
Kingship or Democracy?
Somewhat surprisingly, the first question--do courts often cheat?--is the least tractable. It assumes a controversial jurisprudential hypothesis, namely, that at least some propositions of law have a determinate truth value. (If none do, then there is nothing for courts to follow, no way that they could cheat.) Champions of indeterminacy--by whom I understand philosophers who deny that there is determinate truth in domains wherein we commonly suppose we have knowledge: that is, the physical sciences, the social sciences, morality--have also been very influential in jurisprudence. Holmes, one of our greatest judges, famously remarked in his essay The Path of the Law that law is only "the prediction of the incidence of public force through the instrumentality of the courts."(1) Legal realists in the 1930s, and Critical Legal Theorists today, agree that decisions in concrete cases are never deductions from facts and pre-existing law, but rather are mere expressions of judges' political ideologies. The point is sometimes made by saying: "The law is only what the judge had for breakfast." So one might quite reasonably, block my first question (Do courts often cheat?) by saying, "Courts can't cheat because they are not bound by anything at all."
To be continiued..
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Posted on 3 Apr 2010, 9:09 by M.B.E. Smith
Are Judge's decisions based on law or an exercise of power?
Despite the attractive simplicity of the skeptics' answer, I suggest that we not make such short shrift of an interesting question. (Indeed, the best argument against legal skepticism, and against skepticism generally, is that it makes every interesting philosophical question seem boring.) And legal skepticism, while now much in fashion in the law schools and the law reviews, is not the dominant view among scholars who specialize in the philosophy of law. Certainly it is not the dominant view among lawyers--to the extent that they count as having jurisprudential views. Legal scholars often say that legal skepticism is the lawyer's view of the law,(2) but it is more plausibly styled the law professors'. Legal education is still dominated by the case method, which focuses primarily upon appellate cases published in the official reporters. Compilers of casebooks tend to look for those signs of doctrinal embarrassment that prefigure changes in the law: where there is no convincing theoretical justification for an established rule or where such a rule frequently works an injustice. They concentrate upon hard, controversial cases: those about which superb lawyers and judges may reasonably disagree as to which party should win. Law teachers find boring the vastly more numerous "easy," cases, and so they tend to ignore them. When one's entire professional diet comprises controversial cases, it is easy to believe that every legal rule is "squishy," that legal reasoning can never produce determinate outcomes, and that every legal decision is at bottom only an exercise of raw power.
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