William de Berg, The Late, Once-Great American Judiciary

March 21, 2021 James Fetzerblog

William de Berg

The United States Constitution, despite some initial flaws necessary to achieve a consensus and jumpstart the new American republic (e.g., the provision counting slaves as 3/5 of a person), is one of the great documents in history and has served the nation well during the almost 250 years since its inception.   But, lots of nations, even dictatorships, have impressive Constitutions on paper, promising human rights, free elections, and the rule of law.  What transforms the ideals of any Constitution into the reality of a thriving, successful democracy is the integrity of its legal system and courts.

The United States has had for the most part a strong judicial system, with checks and balances through multiple layers of review.   It has also had more than its share of distinguished jurists, from John Marshall to Oliver Wendell Holmes, to Thurgood Marshall.   But, in recent decades the judicial system has become besieged by corruption, partisanship, and intimidation.   From the individual judge level (where over 90% of those accused of misdeeds remain unscathed on the bench) to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), which refused to hear any evidence pertaining to the 2020 electoral fraud, the disturbing question is:  What happened to the once-great American judicial system?

The most obvious evidence of the recent debasement of the American judicial system concerns the lawsuits filed to uncover and overturn the results of the 2020 election.   Over 60 straight lawsuits filed on behalf of the President of the United States (!!!) —by famous lawyers, to boot—were dismissed, without evidentiary hearing.    A few were passed on to SCOTUS, where all were finally dismissed.   The most shocking of the dismissals involved the lawsuit filed by Texas and supported by 17 other state attorneys general; this dismissal followed heated discussions in which SCOTUS Chief Roberts supposedly raised the possibility of riots in the streets to persuade some of the junior justices.   The other most shocking dismissal was the lawsuit against absentee ballots in Pennsylvania, since it dealt with the question of acceptance of late ballots that SCOTUS Justice Alito had required prior to the 2020 election to be set aside and not counted.    So, in refusing to hear this case, SCOTUS failed to examine the evidence concerning the fate of its own directive.

It should be noted that at least one court in Antrim County, MI, allowed a forensic analysis of its machines after a lawsuit was filed over  down-ballot issues, but the allegedly damaging results have never been made public.   And a court in Maricopa County, AZ, directed the county  elections office to submit the ballots for forensic analysis, but the county did not comply and at least some of the ballots in question were evidently shredded.    So, to date, there has been no formal forensic evidence obtained and publicly released anywhere in the country and there probably won’t be, since a demonstration of major electronic or other voting fraud anywhere in the country makes the probability of voter fraud having occurred elsewhere in the country more likely.   Of course,  the refusal of courts to hear electoral fraud evidence presented under oath conveniently allows the ruling elites and  their media  and political henchmen to continue to claim no voter fraud occurred.

The total refusal of the courts to review evidence of electoral fraud is not surprising to the Truther community, given how it has suffered from bizarre trials and judicial rulings for over two decades.   The defense in the Oklahoma City bombing trial, which led to the conviction of Timothy McVeigh, was handcuffed and weak, with crucial forensic evidence withheld that could have proved that  McVeigh’s alleged truck bomb did not cause the damage to the Murrah Building.    But at least the Oklahoma City bombing case made it to trial—not a single lawsuit filed on behalf of the victims of September 11 against the government has ever done so.  The case of April Gallop, whose baby son was severely injured in the blast at the Pentagon, is the most extraordinary of the rejected lawsuits.  The 2^nd Court of Appeals of New York concluded, despite mountains of evidence, that Gallop’s lawsuit was “frivolous”, and it even threatened sanctions against her lawyer, a former University of California at Berkeley law professor.

But, the Sandy Hook lawsuits  of fired professor James Tracy and of James Fetzer and Mike Palacek were equally if not even more egregious—the judge in the former’s lawsuit against Florida Atlantic University and other parties arbitrarily threw out all but one count of the complex case, and the judge in the latter would not permit a jury trial nor allow the defense to present forensic witnesses.   [Editor’s note: See, for example, “The Sandy Hook ‘Pozner v. Fetzer” Lawsuit for Dummies“; “The Sandy Hook ‘Pozner v. Fetzer” Lawsuit: Why it Matters”; and “Judge finds Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theorist from Oregon in Contempt of Court”.]  The most bizarre case of all was that of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the alleged Boston Marathon bomber, whose judge allowed his own defense counsel in her opening remarks to the jury to state that her client was guilty, even though he had pleaded innocent earlier.

So, are judges corrupt and partisan (which is a form of corruption), or are they merely intimidated?  If corruption is limited to financial matters, it is unlikely that very many judges on the Federal bench are on the take.  But, if corruption can extend to abuse of power or a deliberate failure to uphold one’s fiduciary duty to the American public, then this would certainly include a much larger percentage of judges at both the state and federal level.   For example, Christopher Connor, a Federal District judge in Pennsylvania, delayed a lawsuit challenging the legality of voter rolls in three major counties brought before him in April of 2020 until after the November election, citing the flimsy pretext of COVID-19.   Since a state audit the previous year had already shown that state voter rolls contained tens of thousands of illegal voters, Connor’s decision essentially amounted to an endorsement of voter fraud going into the election.   But, the most nefarious abuse of power was that of Federal district judge Emmet Sullivan, who refused to drop the perjury charge against retired three-star General Michael Flynn even after the Department of Justice withdrew it because of serious misconduct on the part of FBI officials.

As far as partisanship, it has undeniably reached new levels in the American judiciary, even extending to SCOTUS.   Recent SCOTUS confirmation hearings have been obscenely partisan, and the open and privately expressed disdain for Donald Trump by Stephen Breyer, John Roberts, and the late Ruth Ginsburg is shocking in and of itself.   But, that it would occur among justices in the highest court in the land is even more dangerous in the precedent it sets for those on the lower benches.   Of course, the election of state judiciaries has long been openly partisan in many states and localities; although a minority of states officially have partisan judicial elections, there are many more that are unofficially partisan, with justices allowed to receive funds from political parties.    The role of partisanship at the state supreme court level was implicated in the 2020 electoral lawsuits in many key swing states, most notably Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Even when judges are not corrupt or partisan, inexplicable rulings against basic constitutionally protected rights such as due process, voting, speech, and assembly could be the result of intimidation.   While judges tend not to be openly threatened or physically harmed, the level of intimidation behind the scenes may be very intense.   James Troupis, a retired Wisconsin judge, claimed before Congress that leftists used intimidation tactics to thwart judicial review of the evidence in the Wisconsin electoral fraud lawsuits.    It is also unknown how many judges might be blackmailed into voting certain ways.   SCOTUS Chief Roberts, known for his inexplicable swing votes on various issues—including the citizenship census question, which had been asked for nearly 175 years but which he voted to disallow in 2020—has long been rumored to have been compromised by his association with Jeffrey Epstein.  On the other hand, open intimidation of lawyers in the recent electoral fraud lawsuit debacle was widespread.   Not only did it occur to relatively obscure lawyers like Matthew Deperno in Antrim, Michigan, but threats of disbarment and physical harm were made even to prominent attorneys and former federal prosecutors like Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, and lead Trump impeachment lawyer Michael van der Veen.

Large numbers of lawyers even refused to file election lawsuits and behalf of the president and others because of financial and other threats.   Truthers have long suffered the same fate, finding it difficult to obtain lawyers willing to take on the risks to defend them.    The risk to them is a real one, as shown in the case of Abe Dabela.   The young African-American lawyer from Connecticut, a defender in 2^nd-Amendment cases, was prepared to take up Wolfgang Halbig’s defense in his Sandy Hook case but was shortly found dead after a suspicious accident near his home.   His  death was labelled a suicide, although the bullet entered from the back of the head and forensics did not indicate he had pulled the trigger on himself.    What was extremely strange was that he had been in good spirits among friends immediately before leaving the nearby bar, planning a motorcycle outing for the very next day, and was maneuvering to exit his crashed car before he was shot.    There was no investigation of the “first-responders” and the case remains closed to this day, despite appeals by family and other interested parties.

In the end, the United States Constitution is merely a canvas on which the ideals of democracy and individual rights can be painted—or not.   What matters who are the painters.  Are they the noblest of judiciaries  … or the most profane?   Sadly, in courtrooms across  America in which the truth is yearning to be told, the latter is becoming the new normal.

William de Berg is the pen name of an American scientist and author of four conspiracy/truther fiction novels: Serpent and Savior, White Spiritual Boy, Divided We Stand, and Shield Down.