pro se litigants

Ethics Heroes: The Appeals Court For The Commonwealth Of Massachusetts

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I am not honoring the appeals court that just upheld the lower court judgment in my favor in a two-year old (and probably not over yet) frivolous lawsuit against my for defamation by an angry ex-Ethics Alarms commenter. The court’s decision rejecting the plaintiff’s appeal was dictated by precedent and black letter law, as was the decision in the original case. It took no special courage or integrity to hold so, and in fact any other result would have evinced rank incompetence.

No, I am awarding the court Ethics Hero status after receiving today its  published opinion in case n. 18-p-1605, where the judgement of the lower court judge was affirmed. It is officially a summary decision, and thus not binding precedent, since the usual details a full appellate opinion would contain are missing. However, in the eight page opinion affirming the lower court dismissal of the complaint, the judges are impressively restrained, respectful, and thorough. They manage this despite the fact that the lawsuit was doomed from the beginning, without merit or law on its side. The persistence of the plaintiff has wasted taxpayer money (and mine) and occupied time the judges needed to address more serious and legitimate matters.

Nonetheless, the fact that a pro se litigant is able to receive more than perfunctory handling of even a complaint this misbegotten and trivial speaks well for our system, and very well for the judges. Despite all the attacks claiming that our system only caring about ‘justice for the rich,” a pro se litigant seeking justice (as he saw it) and using confused, garbled and outrageously long documents to that end,  cannot deny that his case and arguments were ignored. He lacked the financial resources to hire a lawyer to pursue them (though I wonder if any lawyer would have accepted the representation) and represented himself—rather badly, but still, he took his best shot. Continue reading →

Spurious And Vindictive Litigation Ethics: An Update On The Ethics Alarms Defamation Lawsuit

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

As I predicted yesterday, upon being informed that the plaintiff’s motion to reconsider the rejection of his appeal of the trail court’s rejection of his defamation suit had also been rejected, the now-banned Ethics Alarms commenter filed a petition for “futhur Appellate review” with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

The argument presented is an extension of his appellate brief, which erroneously relied on Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., 497 U.S. 1 (1990), a Supreme Court case that is not germane to this one. The plaintiff isn’t a lawyer, though he is inexplicably confident of his legal analysis skills, which is unfortunate for both of us, as well as the poor judges and clerks in Massachusetts who have to waste their time and the State’s money dealing with these flawed motions and appeals.

The reason there was no defamation and could be no defamation is that my opinions of the plaintiff and his motives, harshly expressed as they may have been, were based entirely on what he had written on the blog and an email to me that I quoted, as well as the plaintiff’s own blog, to which I included a link. The core of defamation, be it libel or slander, is alluding falsely to or asserting some undisclosed event or conduct that a reader or a listener has no way of knowing whether it is in fact true or not. That was indeed the situation in Millkovitch, where  a newspaper columnist’s account of a brawl at a high school wrestling match reported that one of the teams’ wrestling coach, Millkovitch, had incited the riot and lied about it. Continue reading →

CALLOO! CALLAY!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

I’m chortling in my joy because I FINALLY figured out how to navigate the Massachusetts efiling system sufficiently to get my reply appellee’s brief in just before the March 1 deadline. What is known at ProEthics as “The Stupid Lawsuit” has eaten up enough billable hours for me to buy a Lexus if anyone was paying me for it. Having this thing off my back is like having a 75 pound wart removed, not that I don’t expect a new assault eventually

This is, as loyal followers here know, the continuation of the frivolous defamation suit filed against me by a mad commenter who had his little boo-boo bruised by the rough and tumble here. I referred to him in metaphorical terms that weren’t very nice, but they weren’t defamatory either, and now that I have experienced the full vindictiveness of this guy, I realize that my terms were unnecessarily restrained. My return brief, however, was a model of respect and decorum, and also only 12 pages, five of which are mandatory boilerplate. His was seventy incoherent pages or something: I confess to not reading more than a few of them, using the rest to make little origami frogs. The gist was the judge who dismissed the suit in August was an unqualified fool whom I had hypnotized or otherwise turned into my lackey, and I…well, heck, let me get the thing out of my files and not recite it from memory…am a “craven, venal LIAR” who had displayed “toxic mendacity”, though “Orwellian psychosis may possibly overstate the case.” Continue reading →

From The Ethics Alarms Frivolous And Vexatious Litigation Files: The Ethics Alarms Libel Case

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Once again, the appellate brief for the appeal in Massachusetts courts involving the defamation lawsuit against me and ethics alarms has been rejected by the courts as non-compliant. This is actually somewhat annoying, as I had almost finished the brief brief in response (in market contrast to the 70-plus page monstrosity that was served on me. It took several hours to read the thing, several days to recuperate from the barn fervor, that is, bran flavor…no, brain fever! That’s it!

having to decipher the damn thing inflicted on me, and several more hours to almost finish my professional, clear document designed to give the poor clerk and judges that would have to read the appellate brief a break. That stalled, because while I am entitled to have the Appendix to the appellant’s brief to refer to, it was too big a file for the court to send to me, so they were making a special file.

So now I’m confused about 1) whether the deadline for my response is reset, 2) whether I’m going to have to start my response all over again, and most of all, 3), how many times a pro se litigant with no clue what he’s doing whose only motivation is revenge and to cause as much expense and inconvenience as possible because I banned him from Ethics Alarms after I figured out that he was, well, the kind of person who would behave like this?

It is a great virtue of our nation and its legal system that it allows amateurs—I was going to write well-meaning and sincere amateurs, but that obviously doesn’t apply here—to stumble around in the courts. After all, lawyers are expensive, even more expensive than psychiatrists. Nevertheless, there has to be a limit, don’t you think? People like my adversary cost the system, and taxpayers, millions of dollars as they play around being lawyer because they are bored, ” a few cherries short of a sundae,” to quote the comment that started this fiasco, without gainful employment, or all three.

Or does my home state assume that eventually pro se litigants will be so embarrassed by the constant rejection that they will give up? Boy, I hope not, because this guy is impossible to embarrass .

Well, I guess I have to call the Clerk of the Court again. We’re getting to be great pals.