Comments on ABA Newsletter

By Charles W. Heckman
A Matter of Justice

By looking at the ABA newsletter, I learned that the ABA takes an interest in Congressional legislation and provides recommendations on certain issues that some people might consider lobbying. It associates itself with various philanthropic causes, and it provides advice to people to keep their medical care givers informed so that they do not wind up like Terri Schiavo. The newsletter is interesting but I already knew the the ABA lobbies, tries to make itself seem benign and philanthropic in the public eye, and likes to get people involved in preparing legal papers for which the services of an attorney are usually involved.

Sending the newsletter around seems like an exercise in damage control after the beatings the reputations of the legal profession and judiciary have recently been taking. Where the deficiencies of the ABA are apparent is in the maintenance of legal ethics for attorneys, the establishment of effective legal protections for the majority of Americans who cannot afford the services of an attorney, and the monitoring of the performance of judges in light of established standards of ethics. As for being reactionary, I would classify the ABA as being just a little less reactionary than the Communist Party. In fact, the legal profession has been in the fore-front of radical changes in the standards of legal ethics, in the elimination of jury trials, in the breakdown of due process in criminal cases, and in the usurpation by judges of powers that were formerly considered to belong to juries, legislatures, or parents.

While it is apparent that all of the ills that beset American society were not created by the ABA, a great many of them have been produced by the profession that the ABA represents. As I see it, the ABA has some critical problems to solve quickly in order to avoid becoming an object of general scorn and contempt by the entire American public. I fail to see that there is any initiative within the ABA to tackle these problems. Here are just a few of them:

1. Perjury has become a national sport, and government officials, including prosecutors and even agency scientists, have become the most frequent culprits, knowing, of course, that they will not be subject to prosecution or censure. Federal Circuit judges recently set a higher standard of evidence to prove that a Federal employee lied than the standard necessary to sentence someone to death.

2. Pro se lawsuits are often summarily dismissed with comments indicating that the judge did not even understand what they were about, and dismissals are often approved by appeals courts before the submissions are even read.

3. What should be a simple matter of obtaining documents under the Freedom of Information or Privacy Act has become an ordeal lasting years due to the failure of the courts to take appropriate action against agency employees who make it a sport to violate these laws.

4. Judges have given themselves such a wide latitude in interpreting or disregarding laws they do not personally agree with that nobody can tell in advance how a lawsuit will be decided, even when the law and facts indicate that it should only have one outcome.

5. The judiciary has created a system under which the assignment of the judge is more important to the outcome than the law or facts.

6. Judges know that they can decide lawsuits at whim because they are not accountable for any of their actions.

7. For taking bribes and other blatant criminal violations, judges can expect that years will pass before they suffer any consequences, and there is little likelihood that they will suffer consequences, at all.

8. Whistleblowers are still persecuted for the rest of their lives through dismissal, blacklisting, and loss of professional accreditation. Both lawmakers and the courts have established methods of adjudication designed to rob whistleblowers of due process and all effective means of redress.

9. Debtors prisons have been established in the United States for the first time since the early 19th century.

10. The only established measure of success by a lawyer is winning, regardless of the means used to win.

The American public is often slow to learn, but once institutions start to go bad, the process continues until the public cannot avoid noticing it. The legal profession has been suffering from eroding standards for many years, but it is now showing it so conspicuously that a reaction is soon to come. During the 1960s and 1970s, it was fashionable to discard established standards of behavior. The deterioration of the social conditions throughout society was the natural result. Since 1960, such indicators of social well-being as the gap between the rich and the poor, the educational level of the average citizen, the crime rate, and the stability of the family have all moved radically in a negative direction. Legal ethics have declined tremendously. Nowhere have the professional standards of lawyers reached such depths as among those attorneys who have taken their places on the courts as judges. Spin, denial, and all efforts at improving public relations are bound to fail in the long-run, and the ABA will eventually have to face up to the crisis its members have caused.