Anti-Spam Suits and Booby-Trapped Motions

Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes in to say "The last few times that I sued a spammer in Washington Small Claims Court, I filed a "booby-trapped" written legal brief with the judge, about four pages long, with the second and third pages stuck together in the middle. I made these by poking through those two pages with a thumbtack, then running a tiny sliver of paper through the holes and gluing it to either page with white-out. The idea was that after the judge made their decision, I could go to the courthouse and look at the file to see if the judge read the brief or not, since if they turned the pages to read it, the tiny sliver of paper would break. To make a long story short, I tried this with 6 different judges, and in 3 out of 6 cases, the judge rejected the motion without reading it." The rest of this bizarre story follows. It's worth the read.

An example of a "booby-trapped" legal brief with the pages still joined together

I did this after it occurred to me one day that I'd never won a Small Claims case against a spammer or telemarketer where the defendant had showed up in court. Sometimes the judges said the spammers were not liable, sometimes they said that the subject line of the spam was not misleading enough, and sometimes they simply said that they were going to make an exception under the law ("It was just one phone call"). So I asked the handful of other people in Washington that I knew had sued spammers in Small Claims, and none of them had ever won a case against a spammer or telemarketer who appeared in court either. (The only Small Claims victories had been out-of-court settlements and default judgments where the defendant didn't show up.) It wasn't because most judges said that the cases couldn't validly be brought in Small Claims court, it was simply that the number of times the defendant appeared and the judge ruled against them, was zero. Now, there were only a handful of us suing spammers and telemarketers in Small Claims, and the defendant only rarely showed up, so we're talking about a sample size of dozens of cases, not hundreds, and I'm sure some of those were cases where reasonable people could disagree. But still. Zero?

I knew when I started suing spammers in 2001 that many judges would have attitudes similar to this guy:

Judge Nault: You know what I think about these cases?
Bennett Haselton: Uh... what?
Judge Nault: They stink.
Bennett Haselton: Really? Why?
Judge Nault: I don't have to answer your questions, you have to answer mine.
Bennett Haselton: OK.
[...]
Judge Nault: I just think this is the stupidest law in the world. But I didn't write the law and I'm bound to follow it. So I'm gonna go ahead and give you your money. But I'm just saying, it just takes up court time and it's absolutely stupid.

Actually, I like honesty, and Judge Nault is like the hot chick who just tells you that she doesn't like your looks instead of making up some crap about your personality. But after getting similar (but usually more subtle) messages from so many different judges, I thought it was worthwhile to test whether the motions I was filing were being read at all. The 6 test case motions were all filed as part of the formal cases, so the judges were at least theoretically required to read them -- and each one was about facts unique to that case (that is, I wasn't handing in a copy of something that I had already handed in a million times before, that wasn't why they were being ignored). I posted the complete list of all the test cases here.

I realize, of course, that courts are overburdened and judges have to prioritize what they work on. The problem I have with that excuse applied to these cases, is that often the judge spent so much time haranguing me for filing some "silly" lawsuit, that they could have read the brief forwards and backwards in the same amount of time. More likely, most judges probably just don't think spam is a real problem worth spending time on. (Obligatory rebuttal.) But, strictly speaking, that's not the judge's decision. If the legislature has passed a law making spam punishable, the judges are simply supposed to apply that law, not to be influenced by their opinion about the law. (If a judge asserts a bias in the other direction, that's just as inappropriate, but that has been very rare.)

Well, shoot, I can't complain

If you feel you've been wronged, there is a Commission on Judicial Conduct in Washington for processing complaints against judges for improper behavior. For example, when a certain Judge Gary W. Velie got in trouble for saying "nuke the sand niggers" (referring to the first Iraq war), and for saying in court that a defendant had "gone crazy from sucking too many cocks" and telling another lawyer in court that he looked like he had been "jacking off a bobcat in a phone booth", the Commission flew (by judicial standards, meaning, a little over a year later) into action, and issued a reprimand. Evidently this was an exceptional situation, since the CJC takes action in response to only about 3% of submitted complaints in a typical year. Apparently the last time the CJC actually barred someone from office was in 2005, in the case of a judge who was convicted and imprisoned for molesting an 11-year-old boy. The Commission lists this decision as one of their accomplishments, although I think the judge probably wouldn't have been re-elected after that anyway.

Of the three test cases judges who got caught with the booby-trapped motions, two of them I thought were not really worse than most other judges anyway, but for the third one, I thought filing a complaint was probably justified. This was a case where I had telephoned the spammer before the trial, pretending to be an interested customer, and tape-recorded him making such statements as "Well, I would blast out 5 million for $500" and "It's a United-States-based company but they pump everything through China and then it comes back to the United States". At the trial, presided over by Judge Karlie Jorgensen, the spammer didn't know I was the guy from the phone call, so he claimed that he didn't even know how to send spam and had no idea what I was talking about, while Jorgensen kept Judge-Judying me in between just about every other sentence for picking on this obviously innocent man. After I brought out the recording, she became very flustered for a few moments and then started accusing me of "entrapment". (Entrapment, of course, is where you trick someone into doing something, and then sue them or arrest them for it. That wasn't the case here, since he spammed me first, and I called him afterwards just to get evidence that he was in the spamming business.) In the end she dismissed the case, and never said anything about the statements the spammer had made under oath.

So, that's when I filed my "motion to reconsider" with the pages stuck together, and after I got a letter that it had been denied (no kidding), I went to the courthouse and found the pages still attached. After the rest of the experiment was finished, I filed an official complaint with the Commission on Judicial Conduct saying that my motion had been rejected with the pages still stuck together, indicating the judge didn't read it. A little over a year later, I got a letter saying the complaint had been rejected.

Making a federal case out of it

Fortunately, there is a way to bring future spam suits in federal court, where several lawyers have suggested to me that I'm likely to get better results (with their help, naturally).

First though, I am of course aware that most spam can't be traced to the original sender to sue them, and that a lot of spam is sent by some Russian hacker or some loser in his Mom's basement who wouldn't be able to pay off a court judgment anyway. However, quite a bit of spam can be traced indirectly to companies that paid the spammer to send the spam or paid them for the leads that they generated, and those companies are usually easier to find and easier to collect against. For a while, every time I got a mortgage spam with a link to fill out a contact form, I would fill it out using a temporary phone number in a certain area code. Then I'd see which mortgage companies called me, and I'd call them back saying, "The person who sold you this lead is generated them illegally; you should stop buying leads from them, and should stop buying leads from people without asking where they came from." Then I'd wait until the next similar mortgage spam came in, fill out the form with a new phone number in the same area code, see which mortgage companies called me, and repeat.

Sometimes the mortgage brokers apologized and said they'd stop dealing with the person who sold them the lead. Others were unrepentant and started hanging up on me by the second or third time that I called them to tell them their latest batch of leads was generated by a spammer.

The Washington law lets you sue anyone who "sends, or conspires with another to send" spam if the person "knows, or consciously avoids knowing" that the spam violates the law. If I do file any future spam suits, what I'll probably do is use this method to find mortgage companies that refuse to stop buying leads from spammers, and then sue them for the cumulative liability for all the spam that I got from their lead generators. There are several advantages to doing it this way:

• Unethical mortgage companies are easier to locate, sue, and collect against, than most spammers.
• Rather than waiting for that rare spam that contains enough information to find and sue the spammer, you can almost always trace a mortgage spam to the company that is buying the leads, by filling it in with "bait" contact information.
• If you reach more than $75,000 worth of liability, you can sue in federal court. At least one good lawyer has said that if I built a case in this way against a spam-enabling mortgage company, he'd help file it for no up-front fee in exchange for a percentage of the winnings.

This last advantage is the big one. Whatever most media figures say in their rants against judges, what they usually don't mention is that there's a dividing line between judges at the state and federal levels: to be a federal judge, someone has to put their reputation on the line and nominate you. It's a horribly politicized process, but at least it's something. At the state level on the other hand, any lawyer who wants to be a judge can run for office -- and even then, for most judicial positions there is only one candidate. If we're so cynical about lawyers and politicians, why on Earth do we give a pass to judges, when a state-level judge is just a lawyer who ran for office? In fact, to be a "pro tem" judge, filling in for a day for the regular judge, you don't even have to win an election, you just take a class and then sign up for an available time slot.

Given the vastly greater seriousness of becoming a federal judge, I'll bet that if one of them had been handling the Karlie Jorgensen case, and the spammer said he "knew nothing about any spam" right before being confronted with a tape of his past conversations, maybe the judge wouldn't have sent him to jail for perjury, but the judge probably would have mentioned something about it. And if you had proof that a federal judge denied a motion without reading it, some cynics might not be surprised, but an official complaint at that level would probably be taken more seriously.

Besides, the nice thing about federal cases is that the defendant is likely to have a lawyer who will talk some sense into them and get them to settle out of court, instead of digging in their heels the way spammers often do in Small Claims. They say the best lawyer isn't the one who wins in court but the one who keeps the case from going before the judge at all, and I'm sure that's true even with federal judges. By that standard, I hope that every spammer that I sue in federal court, has a fantastic lawyer.

Re:I don't get it

[kisrael]

And other than that the headline contains the word "spam", this is on /. because???
Because issues concerning the Internet and how the American Judicial System is willing or not willing to act when it's abused is "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters"?

What, praytell, does your vision of slashdot look like, if this would fail to qualify?

And so?

[khasim]

If the judge was doing the job s/he was being paid to do, then the judge would not have been "trapped".

What this minor experiment is showing is that we have judges who are abusing their position / authority and ruling from their own beliefs instead of from the Law.

And the mechanism for addressing that issue seems to be broken, also.

Re:Judges probably don't like it

[gravesb]

State judges are elected. Trapping them would be very interesting to their future opponents, I am sure. No one should be afraid of angering judges with legitimate means and for legitimate ends. That is why most federal judges tend to look down on state judges, for better or for worse. I would like to see a PAC present some of your evidence to voters during the next election period. That would hit the judges were it hurts, and send a signal to others.

no

[Anonymous Coward]

since most /.ers will read an article summary and REJECT its value without reading the whole article, I can see a judge reading the opening part of a motion, seeing that it has no merit and rejecting it.

no, judges have a responsibility to read and understand what motions are put in front of them, including reading the entire motion regardless of its percieved worthlessness. This is a corrupt system that polices its self and thus nothing ever gets changed. A system that actually puts fear into those who abuse their power would fix the problem, preferably one run by the people for the people.

Am I the only one...

[Control Group]

...who finds it depressing that several of the first comments on this article are mocking the person for attempting to follow through on the actions the law gives him access to? Unless there are people defending spam, I don't see what's wrong with anyone trying to hold the people involved accountable to some degree for their violation of the law.

It's not like this is going to eliminate spam, and it's not even like going the small claims court route is something that I find personally worth the effort. But that doesn't mean I'm inclined to think less of someone who does take legal action.

Re:My goodness!

[krbvroc1]

Seriously, grow up. Judges have better things to do than uphold laws they don't understand.

The above quote pretty much sums up the failures of our current 'justice system', the public who fails to hold them accountable,
and the criminals complete lack of fear about breaking these laws.

Corporate and political lobbying took all the teeth out of these SPAM and Telecom laws, but Congress put the 'Small Claims' remedy in there so there
appears to be some sense of justice/enforcement. Even that remedy has failed.

Re:I see what the problem is.

[Chibi Merrow]

In the Bush era, justice is for the rich.

As opposed to the Clinton era, where justice was for the rich.

Re:If I was a judge...

[BlueStrat]

Also, since most /.ers will read an article summary and REJECT its value without reading the whole article, I can see a judge reading the opening part of a motion, seeing that it has no merit and rejecting it.

IANAL (or judge), but in my limited experience, the first page is nothing more than a 'cover' page, describing the case number, date(s), names of the parties, jurisdiction, presiding judge, etc.

It contains no factual evidence as to the facts, evidence, or validity or lack thereof of the motion. So, his 'boobytrap' *does* mean that the motion was not read, other than the basic information as to what case it pertains to.

Basically, the judges are looking at the cover page and saying; "I'm not wasting my time with this, regardless of the facts or any duty of mine as a judge to actually rule on the law. The legislatures' decision to create this law and the constitutional rights of the victims of the lawbreakers to redress can go hang!".

Strat

Re:Am I the only one...

[moeinvt]

You're not the only one. I found many of the comments surprisingly Trollish as well.

I think this was actually a clever thing to do, and I'm glad that there are people going after spammers while simultaneously exposing lazy-assed judges and a malfunctioning judicial system.

Even if this effort might be scorned as a "hobby" or "waste of time", I think it's more noble and worthwhile than the efforts of the average open-source contributor.

Re:And so?

[Paradoks]

What this minor experiment is showing is that we have judges who are abusing their position / authority and ruling from their own beliefs instead of from the Law.

You say that like it wasn't normal.

Wrong

[christurkel]

The judge was correct about your taping the phone call but for the wrong reasons. You cannot record anyone without permission unless you have a court order. Playing that recording in Court was a BAD idea. You broke the law.

The inevitable conclusion...

[Rob T Firefly]

Anyone taking bets on how soon they implement rules against handing in legal papers with white-out on them?

Judge responsible for unread briefings

[davidwr]

Whether the actual judge reads the briefings isn't critical.

What is critical is that someone representing the court should have read the briefings. The judge is morally if not legally responsible if the briefing goes unread.

This alone should be grounds for re-hearing.

Re:If I was a judge...

[Anonymous Coward]

The poster never said he used glue. When you use white-out to correct, say a legal document, the white-out tends to "glue" in the sense of a sticky note to the page above it. Essentially, the posted created a seal disguised as a corrected document.

As for the judge reading the opening part of the motion-- he cannot do that (in theory)-- he must read the entire document before making a decision. The fact that the seals were in tact means that he did not read it, probably at all, definitely not beyond the cover sheet.

There was no missing page, they were simply barely stuck together at one point.

Also, this was a very valid motion. A spammer did something illegal. The poster brought the spammer to court. Then the spammer committed perjury, another illegal and punishable offense. The judge seemed offended by the poster ever taking a spammer to court, ignored the perjury (and seemingly the facts) and ruled against the posted. So the poster filed a motion and the motion was rejected/denied without ever being looked at. Obviously these judges do not seem to be in favor of justice and seemed annoyed by doing their work-- and this seems, to me, to be because they cannot imagine why the spammer would ever spam anyone. Um, this is not how the justice system is supposed to work. What's more, the poster brings up the point of the lack of oversight on the lower courts. Nothing bad happens to them in cases where they don't do their jobs. This is a disturbing problem if you ask me!

Anyway, in hindsight, you obviously did not read the posted article in its entirety. I recommend doing so. It's a rather chilling assessment of the lower courts. And when problems go unnoticed, they rarely get corrected.

--Dave Romig, Jr.

The judge thinks you are a crank

[wsanders]

This is *small claims* court, fercryinoutloud. The judge wasn't trapped, they didn't even read your brief in detail, and they are not required to. In fact, most cases are judged (like traffic court) based on whether the judge perceives you are wasting the court's time or not.

That being said, if you are unlucky enough to live in a state with elected judges, many many judges are cranks themselves. Enlist an attorney friend at election time and ask them to tell who who the good judges are and who are the cranks.

Typical Small Claims Case No 1: Plaintiff: "Your honor, to keep it brief, I wuz ripped off!" Judge: "I find in favor of plaintiff! Next"

Typical Case No 2: Plaintiff: "You honor it is a gross violation of that most fundamental of Human Rights the US Evil Government and their secret UFO base and allow me assemble my overwhelming evidence that they sap and impurify blah blah blah blah .. " Judge:"STFU! Next!"

How are we supposed to know the law?

[alberion]

I was reading your comment and it occurred to me. At what point in our life are we supposed to have learned the laws, not all laws, but the basic rules according to which we are supposed to live by?
I am sure that we all get the basics (no killing, no adultery, no stealing) from when we are kids. But why don't we have basic law taught to us just as we have basic language and math? How many times people break laws simply because they didn't know them? I think that is something to think about.

BTW, I am not from the USA but I guess the same problem happens everywhere.

Re:If I was a judge...

[Svartalf]

The problem with that "nope, case closed," is that legally speaking, with only a few notable exceptions
(Which the article author is not in any thereof...) the Judge doesn't HAVE that option. They're not
supposed to ignore filings like that in the lower courts. It's a valid motion- in order to even say
"no, I'm not giving in on this," the Judge in question HAS to read the motion to come to that same
conclusion unless they're declared a vexatious litigant, which I suspect is not the case here.

"stupidest law"

[bidule]

Judge Nault: I just think this is the stupidest law in the world. But I didn't write the law and I'm bound to follow it. So I'm gonna go ahead and give you your money. But I'm just saying, it just takes up court time and it's absolutely stupid.

Erm, is the judge telling you that you are spamming the court with useless suits?
Is he saying that the law forces him to lose time handling spam?

Well, is he for or against spam? I am confused...

little off topic: Legal system is so screwed

[cdn-programmer]

The thread is a little off topic but you are dead on the mark here. Its the abuse of the legal system that is out of control and actually getting worse.

Judges and lawyers do abuse the system... there is no question on that. Cops also abuse the system. So do our pollies and public servants who administer the system. In part, the cops are just doing what they are ordered to do.

You are correct that if you go to court the state loses money. They count on people not going to court. Hence I think it is perfectly reasonable to fight all charges. Sometimes the cops don't show up. Then you win. Sometimes they don't have their paper work in order. Then you win.

Of course, the cop wins anyways because as you point out - he's being paid overtime. Its the state (IE. the taxpayer who loses). But then... consider that its the state that is running the system and most people look at these tickets as little different than another form of taxation.

On this basis one might forecast that we'll see computer software track people who always fight tickets and these people might be bypassed in the future when the cops write the tickets. As I write this "tongue in cheek" it occurs to me that tracking the propensity to fight would be pretty easy to tie to the drivers license or car license plate and a "code" could be flashed up telling the cops in essence: Don't charge this guy - we lose money on him!

Cynical comment? You bet.

But then the story is cynical. Its about judges who don't read the submissions. I've had this happen. I was in court accused of failing to show up for a discovery. The fact that the lawyer in question canceled the discovery and didn't re-schedule was lost on the master. The lawyer lied to the master. My lawyer for some strange reason didn't challenge this.

So... I was "suppose to be sanctioned and was suppose to pay $1000 bux and was ordered to discovery". The fact that the other side had been staunchly avoided discovery for two (2) years was also lost. Typical legal manouverings I suppose.

What happened? The discovery never took place. The other side's lawyers were fired from the firm in question and it appears they don't even practice law anymore. Perhaps they were lying to other judges as well. Next, the ordered discovery got canceled. This was a summary judgment anyways. We didn't care if there was a discovery or not. There was nothing for them to discover. The sanction? That means nothing. The ordered $1000 bux? That means nothing. The other side eventually settled out of court and paid me what I was owed net of all the bullshyte.

My costs? Well - one appearance where my lawyer didn't really challenge the lies told to the master and maybe he didn't do this because he just wanted to get out of there and could deal with it down the track. He charged me under $1000 bux for everything. The other side paid out over $5,000. I found out later they paid over $30,000 in legal fees and costs.

So all can laugh at how stupid people can be! It was over some lumber they ordered and used and didn't pay for. The amount they owed was about $5,000 bux. So rather than keep the lumber and pay for it and use it for their project, instead they hired lawyers and went into the courts and spent over $25,000 and paid for the lumber in the end on top of their legal bills... and get this... bought the exact same lumber anyways to build their project... and eventually sold their unfinished project. As for my lumber? Well - I got paid for it and got to keep it... however, it had been slightly used.

I learned many lessons. But the issue with the master not reading the submissions... very real. And the issue of the lawyers having a somewhat cavalier attitude for the truth? Also very true. One explanation is that the system is set up like a meat grinder and they just turn the crank. Nobody wants to spend time reading these submissions. However they do like to bill for making them. This is where the money is.

Look at

Re:Can I suggest model railroads?

[Z00L00K]

Well - escalate by entering the phone number to the judge's office in the forms instead... Would be really interesting to overhear that conversation...

You may have to explain to the youngsters...

[Dareth]

You may have to explain to the youngsters who have had a cell phone for their "entire life" what a phone booth is.

Ah-men... The real problem here (a bit long)

[Anonymous Coward]

Suing spammers is a *great idea*... HOWEVER:
The real problem here is that it sounds like you sue everybody. Given that you started out by saying "The last few times" you tried to sue a spammer indicates that you've done this quite a few times. Judging from the content of some of the linked pages, it sounds like you constantly sue people in small claims court. The judge is probably assuming that you a)Have nothing better to do b)Don't understand that sometimes, life sucks and you don't get your way, or c) are mentally ill. You know what, they're probably right. I'm willing to bet that the same exact motion, filed by someone else would have been at least read. When you constantly bring people/groups to small claims over the slightest, practically inconsequential injustices you're going to run into a "Boy Who Cried Wolf" situation every single time... even for the important stuff. Despite what people think, those judges have some (comparatively) really important cases to try... such as landlord abuse of low income tenants, or some scumbag employer trying to screw a working mother out of her overtime pay. Understandably someone who, for example, constantly files motions against retail establishments for amounts of less than what it costs to file, even if all of a sudden your landlord decides to withhold your $1500 security deposit for no reason at all, they're going to just assume that you're being a prick again and tell you to piss off.

Although I've never had a job in the legal profession, for a number of years I had a job that I had in which I was asked to make snap judgments about various situations: I was a bouncer in a night club. (another job where it's very easy for people to assume you're a prick for doing your job the exact way you are supposed to) Normally(95% of the time), if a woman would come up to me and complain that a male customer was bothering them, it was pretty safe to assume that they were telling the truth, and depending on the severity of the complaint, I'd either keep an eye on them, go talk to them, or physically toss their ass out onto the sidewalk. However, there were women who would come in, and when someone (in a night club) would have the audacity to wink at them they would storm over to one of us and indignantly demand that the person get thrown out immediately. The first couple of times this happens with someone, you don't have much choice but to at least keep an eye on the person, but after the 5th time in a night, or the 10th time in a weekend, or even the 1st time that someone gets hurt because you're not able to see/respond to a much more serious problem occurring while you were dealing with their idiocy, you tend to just filter the complaints of that person out. It would be a real shame if something actually did happen to that person, but how the hell are we able to tell the difference between a legitimate and non legitimate complaint?

With the idiotic "I pay taxes" BS aside, that judge doesn't work for you... and wasting their time every time you can think up some reason to throw the book at someone won't win you any favor in the judges chamber. Unlike in bars, being a regular won't get you points.

Also, despite the way you are treating this, law suits aren't like an intellectually stimulating argument over whether or not someone violated the rules in a roll playing game, where most of the time the loudest, most abrasive nerd wins. These people have a lot of stuff on their plate to go through in a small amount of time. They are really not interested in hearing your long winded, overly detailed, explanation of every single possible way in which the defendants actions could have possibly annoyed you. There is a certain amount of respect you have to have for court room etiquette, and the time constraints of the people involved.

Also, on your linked page where you described the incident where you made the tape of the person agreeing to send out spam for you... you said that judge was constantly attempting to interrupt you. If you don't understand that when th

YOU are the crank

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

Any civil suit brought before a court of law deserves a fair hearing and decision on preponderance of the evidence.

You seem to think we pay to file a claim so we can meet Judge Judy. Hell, no, it is to redress a wrong, even if it costs us more in time and fees than the matter at hand. The principle is what is at stake.

It's called justice, punk.

Who is haranguing who?

[jojoba_oil]

Interesting idea, but I must say that it is poorly done -- for the sole reason of the person "booby-trapping" the motions. Reading around on the linked sites from TFA, it's quite apparent that this guy has been doing the same shit for years.

IANAL, and I'm near-certain HINAL either. That being said, the example of his "sting operation" [judgejokes.com] (which he seems quite proud of) is a great one. It seems that he believes the spammers came to him with an offer by spamming him. Sure, I'll grant him that spam is annoying. Sure, Joe Spies should rot. Yes, Joe lied in court; However Bennett still initiated the contact with FullServicesOnline seeking to "purchase" spam. In my understanding it's still entrapment, whether or not someone else has used the same system against him.

I can't recall where exactly, but somewhere this d-bag mentioned that "it's not like his claims are all the same". What about this page [judgejokes.com]? And in all honesty, how different can the motions be when they're all coming off as "I am on a crusade against spam!"

So basically, this guy just reminds me of Michael Crook [boingboing.net], with a slightly better means. Bennett is an attention-whore, using his (misinterpreted) views of the law to try and "crack down on spammers" ultimately (it seems) to get mentioned in the news. He's a 28-yr-old programming contractor, upset that he hasn't amounted to anything more. Get over it, grow up, stop haranguing the judges and judicial system, and for the love of god stop posting self-publicizing crap to /. Seriously, if I were a judge I would just dismiss this guy's motions straight off myself as well.

Re:Ah-men... The real problem here (a bit long)

[AK Marc]

wasting their time every time you can think up some reason to throw the book at someone won't win you any favor in the judges chamber.

Yes, expecting judges to follow the law is an unreasonable assumption. If the laws are bad, they should be changed, not have judges break the law and their oath to fast-track the ignoring of a valid (if frivolous) complaint.

Re:I see a trend...

[frisket]

Hardly surprising when you elect your judges instead of having them appointed by a commission. As Bennett points out, any dickhead can become a judge at a local level, and clearly many do. An appointments commission doesn't solve all the problems, but it can provide far greater accountability and transparency.

Far worse is the problem of stupidity. I find it hard to believe that even local judges believe spam is not a problem, and that the anti-spam laws are "bad". What planet have these people been raised on, and what have they been smoking (and where can I get some)? Or were they simply bought for the day by the spammer?

Re:The Judge was right

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice advertisement for lawyers.

If these judges even took two minutes to explain their prefered procedures, maybe they wouldn't be sooo annoyed with these silly laypeople comming into their courts. Its small claims court for crying out loud.

But no, laypeople should not judge judges. The public has no right to criticize their public officials. We're not qualified.

Elected?

[Mark_MF-WN]

Saying that judges are elected is virtually meaningless. Mussolini was elected too, over and over again. China and most of Iran's leaders are elected too. Elections don't really matter when there's only one candidate, or the requirement to be a candidate excludes all but a small group of people who are basically in cahoots already. They definitely don't matter when the ruling party gets to choose the candidates.

If someone were to present the evidence to the voters, would it matter? Who else would they vote for? Some other, identical judge, who'll just appoint the loser to some equally exalted position?

This doesn't judge apply to judges, communists, fascists, and theocratic puppets. It's a basic feature of cronyism, and cronyism is inescapable wherever charisma mattes more than merit.

Re:Legal system is so screwed up anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

I got pulled over in Buffalo, NY, I wasn't doing ANYTHING wrong (just checking if I had been drinking, I hadn't, and then they just kept on looking to find a problem with my paperwork), in the mean time, not even 10 yards away, people were obviously dealing drugs in front of a convenience store. I made a remark on it, because they already kept me busy for 15-20 minutes, they said something like: "well, we do our job the way we see fit, you just sit there and shut up". They drove off, never even checked on the drug dealers.

Um... drug dealers might have guns and shoot back. Docile citizens being probed for paperwork violations (like not having proper license, registration, and the lawyers' favorite: proof of insurance) are less likely to endanger a cop. Which one is more likely to receive the loving attentions of the average policeman?