HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
Aug. 27, 2006 Here are the fine-sounding phrases of the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The Constitution is like the Bible or Shakespeare in that its real attraction seems be in its quaint, old-fashioned diction, rather than from anything of merit that it provides. I’m referring in particular to the clause, “nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”. Anyone, like myself, who has lost a fine house that he worked hard for long years to earn in a case that was riddled with perjury, forgery and other federal and state offenses might ask why the phrase “due process of law” is so unconstitutionally vague. Does any old travesty of a trial and post-trial hearings presided by an indifferent, moronic judge and attended by thieving lawyers constitute “due process of law”? Surely when the whole miscarriage is over, all that remains is a handful of court orders, all written in highly formalized diction that makes them inscrutable. All the lies and trickery have been washed away. So at this late date, even if I could get whatever records of the case might remain, it would be difficult to reconstruct it very faithfully. Rather than try to retell the whole story, which would take at least 25,000 words, let me select a seemingly trifling, but crucial, series of events. I received a summons to appear at a discovery deposition in a lawyer’s office in downtown Chicago in 1978. The summons was defective in two ways. Firstly, it wasn’t signed. Secondly, no statutorily required amicable efforts had been made to get me to depose without a summons. I checked these points out in the Illinois Annotated Revised Statutes, and my objections were well-grounded. I sent by registered mail to the lawyer’s office a letter refusing to appear. The real reason the lawyer had failed to sign the summons was that he was in Massachusetts, lecturing at Harvard, and later I retrieved a phone bill showing his collect call from Massachusetts to my house on the very day of the summons. The lawyer’s secretary sent me a letter telling me that only the original needed to be signed. So I sent another registered letter requesting a copy of the signed original. I received no answer. When Solber, the lawyer, returned to town about a week later, he signed the summons, but backdated it. His partner and his secretary had prepared a proof of service bearing the supposed date of the service. Solber’s partner, Ellis, who was a lawyer and a notary, had affirmed that he had witnessed the signing of the proof of service, but the signature was absent, a fraudulent acknowledgement prima facie. Solber was too crafty to sign the already prepared proof, because he could be caught in the fraudulent acknowledgment more easily, so a new proof of service, in which the signing and the witnessing were done in due chronological order, was prepared, but backdated several days, to make it look as if Solber really had served it on the specified day. Anyway, when Solber got back to town and found that I didn’t show up at the deposition, he called me at my house. I told him to read his mail, that I had made it clear that I wasn’t coming. What I expected is that he would file a motion for a rule to show cause, and I would merely go answer it, since I had the return receipts from the registered letters. But no, he served a petition alleging that, without notifying him, I had failed to appear. He was using a sophistry. He said I had failed to notify the petitioner, as if I wouldn’t understand that notifying the petitioner’s attorney constitutes notifying the petitioner, according to Illinois Rules of Civil Procedure. In other words, he acted as if I had been an ignorant simpleton and he was going to pull a fast one that would take right in. But I knew what would happen if I appeared. Having seen this lazy, arrogant, presumptuous judge on several occasions, I knew he would not look at evidence or even hear me out. I was pro se. Solber would address the court first, and run at the mouth almost hysterically for half an hour, and, before I got a word in edgewise, I’d be down at Cook County Jail. So I didn’t appear. I sought other remedies. I had ironclad proof of two fraudulent acknowledgments, perjury, and simulating legal process. These are criminal offenses. As a citizen I was legally entitled to seek criminal prosecution and disciplinary action against the lawyer. I should not have had to proceed civilly any more than I should have to proceed civilly against a burglar or a robber. And I did not proceed civilly. I’m stubborn and, what’s more, the case had impoverished me. I didn’t have money to go squander on another thieving lawyer- There were some federal offenses in the case too, particularly obstruction of mail, but I won’t get into that right now. I had reams of evidence for everything I’ve described. I went to the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois, the State’s Attorney for Cook County, the US Attorney for Northern Illinois, the Illinois Judicial Inquiry Board and the US Postal Inspectors. I didn’t contact them just once. I stayed on them for nearly two years, again and again trying in vain to get them to act. They wouldn’t lift a finger. They’re totally worthless. I got their annual reports. The Attorney Commission and the Judicial Inquiry Board never do anything. Perhaps 1% of the complaints received by them result in any significant activity, and, by following the newspapers at the time, I was able to discern that the only cases that every got attention were ones that had gotten into print somehow, usually involving wealthy people. So the upshot is that I lost my house. And the last thing I knew was that the lawyer was trying to get the judge to designate a special deputy to hunt me down. He was probably afraid I’d get legal action against him sooner or later, but claimed I was terrorizing his wife, because I wrote her some letters about his crimes at the bar. Therefore, I had to abandon my job too. That’s when I moved to Atlanta, Georgia in 1979, possibly with a warrant on my head. The Fifth Amendment may sound nice, but from my viewpoint, it’s totally worthless, at least in the matter of loss of property without “due process of law”. People who have not had such experiences may say, “Oh, isn’t the Constitution just a wonderful piece of work! There probably has never been a gathering of finer minds! We’re so fortunate to have civil liberties that are the envy of the world!”- ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
