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Court - rulings - procedures

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Calculating the time to file motions in federal court

I remember how totally clueless I was a few years ago.  When corrupt judge Taylor dismissed my case against Compass Bank in 2002 and awarded their attorneys fees, the order stated that I had 10 days to appeal.  On about day 9, one or two days after receiving the order, I set up an appointment with a local attorney to get more info about how to appeal.

I still can’t believe that I PAID for the consultation and we discussed in DETAIL the issue of the due date, and he FAILED to tell me that weekends aren’t counted.  He also didn’t tell me that the local court has a FORM that I could have filled out right at the clerk’s counter in 2 minutes.  I ended up paying the attorneys fees because I thought I had no chance of filing that notice of appeal on time.

Since then, I learned that weekends aren’t counted for less than 11 days and in AZ state court you actually get 5 days for mailing (unless you were served in person) and the federal rules are very similar, but you get only 3 days for mailing.

So, I thought I had that down pretty good, but now I’m wondering what’s up—can’t go into the details right now.

If an order was filed on 10/18/06 and you have 10 days for a motion for reconsideration, when is it due?

I actually put together the calendar so you can count the days: 

The calendar to count the days

Local Rules regarding electronic filings FAQ:

Has the Rule regarding mailing response time changed?

Answer:
The Federal Rules governing the computation of deadlines still apply to all filed documents, including those file electronically, so the 3-day mailing time would apply as provided by the Rules.

Federal Rule 6:

(a) Computation. In computing any period of time prescribed or allowed by these rules, by the local rules of any district court, by order of court, or by any applicable statute, the day of the act, event, or default from which the designated period of time begins to run shall not be included. The last day of the period so computed shall be included, unless it is a Saturday, a Sunday, or a legal holiday, or, when the act to be done is the filing of a paper in court, a day on which weather or other conditions have made the office of the clerk of the district court inaccessible, in which event the period runs until the end of the next day which is not one of the aforementioned days. When the period of time prescribed or allowed is less than 11 days, intermediate Saturdays, Sundays, and legal holidays shall be excluded in the computation. As used in this rule and in Rule 77(c), legal holiday includes New Year’s Day, Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, and any other day appointed as a holiday by the President of the Congress of the United States, or by the state in which the district court is held.

(e) Additional Time After Service by Mail. Whenever a party has the right or is required to do some act or take some proceedings within a prescribed period after the service of a notice or other paper upon the party and the notice or paper is served upon the party by mail, 3 days shall be added to the prescribed period.

So, I thought the due date would be 11/6, but the judge says it was 11/1. 

Why?

Is there no mailing time for motions for reconsideration?

What am I missing?

Friday, February 02, 2007

Corrupt Spokane district court judge Sara B. Derr needs to be FIRED!

Judge Tied to Collection Agency Overruled in Collection Case

by Mike Bevel,
insideARM.com
February 2, 2007

A recent case in Spokane, Washington, appears to be highlighting some unsavory conflicts of interest between a judge and a local collection agency.

District Court Judge Sara B. Derr ruled in favor of Automated Accounts against Betty Winfrey. Winfrey, who had let a grandchild use her home address as a mailing address, started receiving collection notices in the mail. Winfrey ignored them; the collection notices were for a towing bill on a car that Winfrey neither owned nor used.

In court, Winfrey provided documents that proved that she was in no way connected to the car in question. Judge Derr even agreed that Winfrey’s documents proved her case. But then, in an odd sort of Bizzaro World justice, Judge Derr still ruled in favor of the collection agency, claiming that Winfrey could have been more proactive in proving that she was incorrectly listed as the registered owner of the car. “I’m basically looking at what was done,” Derr said at the trial. “I don’t believe that Ms. Winfrey took sufficient action to rebut” the presumption that she owned the car.

Some things it might be interesting to know about Judge Derr:

Derr worked for Aetna Adjustment, a collection agency, before being elected as judge back in 2004 Derr worked for more than a decade in the same law office as Jack R. Reeves, who filed the suit against Winfrey on behalf of Automated Accounts.

Neither, of course, should have any bearing at all on Derr as a judge. However, she kept these potential conflicts out of the court record.

Judge Derr noted that Reeves’ collection agency would not be able to recoup the money from the towing bill if she ruled in Winfrey’s favor. Which seems to set up a disturbing precedent; it doesn’t matter who pays the debt, so long as the debt gets paid.

Judge Derr’s ruling was later appealed, and reversed.

Derr continues to dispute any suggestion that her association with Reeves or her work with a collection agency prior to becoming a judge had anything to do with her ruling. Derr says she simply followed the technical requirements of the law even though she felt bad for Winfrey.

“I do not always rule in favor of a collection company or landlord or whoever,” Derr told the Spokesman Review. “I follow my oath. I take it seriously. And I have no bias to that collection company or any collection company.”

How many people have the CASH to get these bizarre rulings overturned?  There are so many corrupt judges you do NOT read about in the press and they feel safe and don’t think they could lose their job.

Judge Derr needs to be FIRED immediately!

Debtors do NOT have to prove that they do NOT owe, it’s up to the COLLECTOR to document the debt.  I don’t care WHY judge Derr ruled the way she did, her ruling documents that she is simply not qualified to be a judge.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Justice in America: 10 years in prison for consentual oral sex

Genarlow Wilson to serve 10 years in prison for consentual oral sex

… He’s 20 now. Just two years into a 10-year sentence without possibility of parole, he peers through the thick glass and bars, trying to catch a glimpse of freedom. Outside, guard towers and rolls of coiled barbed wire remind him of who he is.

Once, he was the homecoming king at Douglas County High. Now he’s Georgia inmate No. 1187055, convicted of aggravated child molestation.

When he was a senior in high school, he received oral sex from a 10th grader. He was 17. She was 15. Everyone, including the girl and the prosecution, agreed she initiated the act. But because of an archaic Georgia law, it was a misdemeanor for teenagers less than three years apart to have sexual intercourse, but a felony for the same kids to have oral sex.

Afterward, the state legislature changed the law to include an oral sex clause, but that doesn’t help Wilson. In yet another baffling twist, the law was written to not apply to cases retroactively, though another legislative solution might be in the works. The case has drawn national condemnation, from the “Free Genarlow Wilson Now” editorial in The New York Times to a feature on Mark Cuban’s HDNet.

“It’s disgusting,” Cuban wrote to ESPN in an e-mail. “I can not see any way, shape or form that the interests of the state of Georgia are served by throwing away Genarlow’s youth and opportunity to become a vibrant contributor to the state. All his situation does is reinforce some unfortunate stereotypes that the state is backward and misgoverned. No one with a conscience can look at this case and conclude that justice has been served.” ...

Could somebody please liberate Georgia?

Saturday, January 06, 2007

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation kills the people they claim to want to help

An outstanding article by LA Times writers Charles Piller, Edmund Sanders and Robyn Dixon on two of the word’s most evil people:  Bill and Melinda Gates

Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation

... At the end of 2005, the Gates Foundation endowment stood at $35 billion, making it the largest in the world. Then in June 2006, Warren E. Buffett, the world’s second-richest man after Bill Gates, pledged to add about $31 billion in installments from his personal fortune. Not counting tens of billions of dollars more that Gates himself has promised, the total is higher than the gross domestic products of 70% of the world’s nations. ...

The 5 page article describes in great detail how the Gates Foundation invests in pharmaceutical companies and polluters like oil companies and paper mills.  It is stunning to read how they DIRECTLY cause disease and misery in Africa, while claiming to want to help.

How the West will make a killing on Iraqi oil riches

...The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972. ...

Bill and Melinda Gates “help” the poor by killing them and Iraq was “liberated” to have at least half a million people killed, to have the country destroyed and polluted with depleted uranium and now FINALLY their oil will be stolen.

Since the “insurgents” don’t seem capable of stopping the takeover, maybe aliens will intervene.  NPR has an interesting interview with Chicago Tribune transportation reporter Jon Hilkevtich.

Not only is it amazing to have such qualified witnesses, but both United and the FAA LIED about the election day sighting at O’Hare until Hilkevtich filed an FOIA request.  Funny how that goes ...

But I’m not too optimistic about alien intervention, at best they’re watching and making sure we don’t blow up the planet.  Maybe we’re some alien high school experiment, an advanced version of Sim City.

It sure is frustrating to be able to read about all that corruption, not being able to DO anything about it and knowing that just about everybody with the power and money to do something is only interested in accumulating more power and money.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Settled with First Magnus—despite Kangaroo Court, corrupt judge John Taylor and regulators

After over a year in Kingman Kangaroo Court (Justice Court, Cerbat Precinct), I prevailed on appeal and we finally settled my mortgage junk fax claims.

Some background is at First Magnus at Fight Back and the filings are at CreditCourt

You may have read some of the recent news about dramatic increases in foreclosures.  Much more important than the fact that the mortgage junk faxes I continue to receive from all kind of scummy outfits are sent in violation of the TCPA is the CONTENT:

The false advertisements of terms and APRs and the misrepresentations and deceptions, not only in the faxes, but also in print, radio, TV and of course web and spam advertising. 

Mortgage lenders and brokers engage in ILLEGAL advertising, lie and deceive without suffering any consequences:

*** The Arizona Department of Financial Institutions ignored my complaint and refused to enforce the law. 

*** Kangaroo Court Justice of the Peace John Taylor DISMISSED my claims and on his own initiative he invited First Magnus to claim attorneys fees and costs.  He then awarded $6,400 for ONE court appearance by the First Magnus attorney.  They had not filed a single motion.

If I hadn’t had those $6,400 to pay to the court for a supersedeas bond, First Magnus could have garnished wages, raided bank accounts, etc. to collect the judgment even after the appeal was filed.  It also cost me almost $500 for filing fees and the transcript.

The superior court ruled in my favor before Thanksgiving.  I called Kangaroo Court to find out how/when I get my $6,400 and Samantha told me that judge Taylor would decide and that he had the file on his desk.  Of course he decided NOTHING in his subsequent scheduling order for briefs pursuant to the superior court ruling.

I had to file a motion for return of the supersedeas bond and for First Magnus to pay my costs of the appeal.  Judge Taylor then sent out a notice stating that he would not decide until the time for First Magnus to respond expired, in about 3 weeks.

Today I found out that the case was dismissed pursuant to our stipulation, but Samantha is the only person who knows when/how I’ll get my money back and she is out sick.

I SHOULD have received the bond money IMMEDIATELY after I prevailed on appeal.  There was no need for the court to keep my money.

So, now you have an idea what to expect in Kingman Kangaroo Court and unfortunately, that may be how YOUR court operates too.  It’s even more unfortunate that few people dare to publicly complain about judges IF they had the cash, skills and guts to appeal.  The likely repercussions are obvious, especially in small towns and rural areas.

From the court’s website:
Justice of the Peace John Taylor

… After working two years in private practice, Judge Taylor moved to Arizona, and worked in the Mohave County Attorney’s office, until he was elected as a Justice of the Peace in 1998. During his tenure as a Deputy County Attorney, Judge Taylor served 13 years as a felony trial attorney. ...

Having experienced judge Taylor’s nasty habit of deliberately ignoring the law, facts and evidence, I can imagine how many innocent people went to jail and how many lives he ruined.

In 2002 judge Taylor IGNORED the FCRA requirement to provide the adverse action letter after a decline due to information contained in a credit report

A few years ago a reader contacted me after reading about my 2002 cases and he was planning a class action suit against Mohave county over judge Taylor’s misconduct.  He had a Tucson lawyer working on the suit, but apparently it was never filed.  Too bad.

HOW TO FILE A COMPLAINT AGAINST A JUDGE

I’ll try to get around to submitting my complaint and documenting how nothing happens.  And I’ll also try to file another suit in Kangaroo Court soon, I got a big stack of junk faxes and some other issues.  Having fallen into many of judge Taylor’s traps, I wonder how many more there are.

So much to do, so little time and money.