Judges Having Ex Parte Communications: The New Normal?
This blogger Laura Lynn Hammett
Michigan Attorney Steve Lehto discussing communications a judge partakes in that are not ethical.
Are Courts Zooming Away the Public’s Right to Access?
There is some constructive criticism that might help this YouTube creator. But the general themes of his message are important issues. Are our rights to access to judicial proceedings eroding? Are judges using Zoom to slam the door on court watchers?
In Arkansas, Judge Weaver used Zoom to improve her chance to get away with causing the court reporter to fictionalize transcripts. She also denied use of Zoom when the opposing party wanted to personally serve documents on me, and I lived over an hour drive away.
There should be uniformity and logic in the use of virtual court proceedings. Unfortunately, instead technology is abused by some judges who would rather not have open courts.
Judge Lee P. Rudofsky Claims Capital One Data is Reliable – Despite the Evidence
While I was trying to convince the court to reconsider his unsupportable order, in which he relied upon data that originated with Capital One, this postcard came to my mailbox. It was addressed to the last person who lived in what was then my home for over three years.
Capital One records are messed up. They send data breach litigation notices to addresses that have not been used by the intended recipient for three years. They also sent letters about my alleged account to an address I stayed at for two nights.
A Document Portfolio Recovery Associates Did Not Want You To See
In going through the record, looking for documents that the federal district court in Arkansas and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered me to destroy, I found one for which secrecy was denied. Praise the Lord!
Maybe reading it will give you ideas about how to approach your own suit against PRA for making annoying and harassing phone calls to you. I am not an attorney and I lost my case, but sometimes we learn more from other people’s mistakes and we can prepare for the expected attack by the defense.
I will go into detail after my mandatory assignments are complete. For now, even reading the first few pages, it is clear that Judge Lee P. Rudofsky lied when he said that I agreed that I owed the debt.
“No reasonable juror can conclude there was a debt from Hammett to PRA.” – Paragraph 11
“PRA still produced no account level documentation for the alleged debt and I have no record of my Capital One account opened in 2001 other than the unsupported conclusion of PRA.” – paragraph 14
Feel free to contact me in the comments, or by email to bohemian_books@yahoo.com. Enjoy the FREE Doc of the Day:
Law Firm Uses Interesting but Unethical Methods to Drum Up FDCPA Cases
On a case I filed, Portfolio Recovery Associates LLC asked and Judge Lee P. Rudofsky granted confidentiality of the majority of “evidence” on which the court granted summary judgment in the debt buyer’s favor. The attorneys for PRA acted unethically. The judge acted unethically. But there was no relief given by the Eighth Circuit or SCOTUS. So, as part of the “protective order” written by PRA, I have the task of collecting all the paper copies of documents PRA designated sealed or confidential and deleting electronic copies from my computer and phone. This is a daunting task for me, and I have found one reason after another to procrastinate.
As I went down another rabbit hole about confidential documents, I found an interesting case against Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC. The punchline is that the plaintiff’s attorney in the FDCPA case was sanctioned for unprofessional conduct.
Because I am trying to focus on my task at hand, I only skimmed the court documents. I will surely read them with my usual eye for detail after destroying my copies of the Star Chamber documents in my case.
For those of you with more time than I have, enjoy reading about Rule 11 sanctions imposed on plaintiff’s counsel in an FDCPA case now.
It is notable that the costs imposed against the plaintiff’s attorneys on two cases where they did the same unethical conduct totaled only half the costs imposed against me, a pro se litigant who did nothing unethical and merely wanted a jury to see the evidence in my case.
Eighth Circuit Accepts Documentation Supplied By Untrustworthy Company
I tried to use that order in my case against Portfolio Recovery Associates. District Court Judge Rudofsky said it was not relevant. Just because PRA violated hundreds of thousands of other consumers and agreed to pay $24,000,000 in restitution and fines didn’t mean the documents they produced in my case were inaccurate, according to the big business puppet judge.
Judge Rudofsky forbid me from taking the case to a jury. The Eighth Circuit affirmed his orders.
Judge Rudofsky said I cannot disclose what is in any of the “evidence” presented by the debt collector. I can tell you it was not accurate.
Judge Rudofsky said the debt collector did not need a copy of a credit card agreement between the original creditor and me. He said there was no need for the alleged account to be referenced on a bill of sale or any other documentation. There was no credit card agreement. There was no link between a purchase made by PRA and the account associated with me.
How do you know I am telling the truth?
If I committed perjury when I made these same claims all the way up to the Supreme Court, you better believe there would be perjury charges filed against me.
Since our judges are essentially tyrants, there is a chance one will collude with a prosecutor and kangaroo court me into jail. But it would be a lot harder than what was done to me in civil court. I would be entitled to counsel, instead of representing myself. The sealed documents would be exculpatory evidence and it would be awkward for a judge to deny me the right to show the public the evidence. It would look even worse than the Star Chamber in which Judge Rudofsky ordered me to pay a full year of my pension to the billion dollar company to reimburse for the cost of their defense.
Hopefully, you have an honest judge in your case. The Arizona lawyer in the video above should be right. You should be able to use the stipulated order against Portfolio Recovery Associates to beat prosecution by them and to win an FDCPA or invasion of privacy case against them.
Do me a favor please. Don’t settle for $5,000. One jury on a similar case to mine decided PRA should pay $82,000,000 in punitive damages. And even that didn’t slow them down.
Judge Gets Off With 6 Month Suspension
Judges granted themselves absolute judicial immunity. That means when Judge Susan Weaver transfers property from an older woman to a man who put his intent to defraud the lady in writing, it is nearly impossible for the victim to receive restitution from the judge.
Government workers show a brick wall resistance to filing criminal charges on a sitting judge.
Judicial ethics commissions are a huge waste of taxpayer dollars. They are paper tigers. Lazy paper tigers that lay around all day licking their paws. They act as if the judge is going to throw them their next slab of meat, not acknowledging it is the taxpayers providing for them.
Concerned citizens, like I am, are often retaliated against for challenging the corrupt judges.
The system is designed to work beautifully. It is the people inside perverting it.
So you can verify, here is a copy of the hand written fraud letter mentioned above. It was entered as an exhibit in a motion for contempt against Attorney William Zac White that Judge Weaver denied inexplicably.
On my to do list, the court records about the fraudster, whose name is spelled as in this letter, “Micheal”, have most or all been changed to “Michael” by the various court clerks. This appears to be a way to help Micheal Pietrczak, a felon for using false documents at the border, to deter people from learning the truth about him. One must ask why there was an orchestrated effort by court personnel to do this dirty deed.
The Court and Big Business Billionaire Defendant Allowed to Discuss Sealed Documents on Public Record: Mums the Word for Pro Se Plaintiff
In a case against the most annoying and offensive debt collector, Portfolio Recovery Associates, Judge Lee P. Rudofsky made it clear that the pro se plaintiff, me, was not allowed to discuss sealed documents on the public record.
After Judge Rudofsky finally recused himself, the fresh judge reiterated the threat of sanctions for disclosure of sealed evidence.
But Judge Rudofsky and Portfolio Recovery Associates repeatedly violated their own call for the cone of silence.
Here is a copy (that you can download for free) of plaintiff’s deposition redacted by Portfolio Recovery Associates. They were supposed to redact mentions of the sealed documents – but they didn’t.
For example, look at page 77, line 7. PRA attorney James Trefil of huge defense firm Troutman Pepper starts discussing Exhibits 9, 10 and 11. PRA marked those “CONFIDENTIAL” and filed under seal. There is one short redacted section, then Mr. Trefil asks about the specific data from Exhibit 9.
That is not keeping sealed documents confidential.
Worse, Portfolio Recovery disclosed what was supposedly on a document I designated as “CONFIDENTIAL”. On page 116, line 17. Mr. Trefil: “For the record, this is a confidential document.
This is plaintiff’s credit report. Are you familiar with this document?” His next sentence: “Do you see where says it Midland Credit [?]”
Wow! That is not keeping it confidential. And without seeing the entire document, it is misleading. But Mr. Trefil on behalf of Portfolio Recovery Associates did not stop at just insinuating there were debts showing on my credit report.
“So what debt of yours does Midland Credit Management hold?”
“None [!]”
“It’s showing up on your credit report.”
Liar! “It says, ‘The listing of a company’s inquiry in this section means that they obtained information from your credit file in connection with an account review or other business transaction with you. These inquiries are not seen by anyone but you. They will not be used in scoring your credit file except insurance companies may have access,’ blah, blah, blah about the insurance companies. So I don’t know why they made a soft inquiry, but Portfolio Recovery also made a soft inquiry and it’s on the same report, isn’t it?”
“I don’t see Portfolio on this report. I might just be missing it.”
“Did I give you both? I got two — I contacted all three credit agencies, but I only got two reports back and I don’t think this is the one that has Portfolio Recovery on it. I think it’s the other one. Yeah, Portfolio Recovery made a soft inquiry on November 1, 2019. So Midland just is like Portfolio, a –“
“My question is what debt of yours does Midland hold?”
“None that I’m aware of.”
“All right. But you acknowledge they are showing up on your credit report?”
“As a soft inquiry.”
“Understood.”
“They’re allowed to — anybody can look me up. In fact, that might be the way that companies like Portfolio Recovery find their marks is they go in and they look at people’s credit reports and then they contact them and say, hey, you owe us $2,297.63. How do you want to pay for that? And they have — because they have access to these credit reports, they have a whole mess of information about you, so they’re –“
Trefil interrupted my lecture. “What about Enhanced Recovery Company?”
“Same thing. I have no clue who they are. I don’t have any debt, and so they could look.”
“So it’s your sworn testimony here today under oath that you currently have no delinquent debt?”
“I am not aware of any delinquent debt. I have found out –” Another interesting topic comes up from this statement, which will be discussed in a later post. For now it segues into more of the defense divulging what was in its own confidential documents.
“You sound an awful lot like the Capital One representative who wasn’t aware of any mistakes.”
“That what?”
“In the affidavit of sale, [Exhibit 11] you were complaining that the Capital One representative was saying he wasn’t aware of any mistakes in the records that they were giving.”
So here, PRA is telling the public what was said in the “CONFIDENTIAL” affidavit of sale.
In a bigger picture, Judge Rudofsky told the public what was supposedly said in the confidential, sealed documents. He represented that I agreed to owing the debt. He represented that there was accurate records that showed PRA did not call an annoying or harassing number of times. He said that the evidence under seal was so strong, no reasonable juror could disagree with him.
If we were playing poker, I would say PRA bluffed, then Judge Rudofsky as the casino forced me to fold my hand for a manufactured reason, allowing PRA to avoid showing its hand.
The Eighth Circuit upheld that dishonest service and the United States Supreme Court denied my petition for writ of cert and did not mention my motion to unseal the documents on the docket. 24M44.
Here is the motion that was labeled a motion to seal and was “granted”. Despite the record appearing to grant the motion in full, SCOTUS did not unseal the documents. The highest court in the country behaved as if the motion did not request unsealing and ignored the request.
A Higher Law 
