Monday, December 23, 2013
Robert Rivernider files Pro Se motion to dismiss due to egregious prosecutorial misconduct
It is happening and expanding nationwide. Overzealous prosecutor's break law, do whatever it takes to win, and get away with it.
This week I was sentenced to 12 years in prison based on perjured testimony, false evidence and just outrageous violations of my Constitutional Rights.
I detailed them in a motion to dismiss the indictment and withdraw a coerced guilty plea, you can read the motion here
The most troubling part is the new tool the prosecutor's use, reading confidential e-mails between a defendant and his attorney. We are learning more and more everyday about the Edward Snowden leaks. The NSA spying scandal encompasses everything in our lives and now privileged e-mails that clearly violate a person's Constitutional right to a fair and open trial. On December 10, 2013, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals again said it was OK to withhold Exculpatory Evidence from the defense, a Brady violation. However, it did not go without a serious rebuke and scolding from Chief Judge Kozinski, read it here
Judge Kozinski had some choice comments in his dissent, including:
"There is an epidemic of Brady violations abroad in the land. Only judges can put a stop to it."
"Nearly everything the district judge understood to be true was false."
"Some prosecutors don’t care about Brady because courts don’t make them care."
"protecting the constitutional rights of the accused was just not very high on this prosecutor’s list of priorities."
"I wish I could say that the prosecutor’s unprofessionalism here is the exception, that his propensity for shortcuts and indifference to his ethical and legal responsibilities is a rare blemish and source of embarrassment to an otherwise diligent and scrupulous corps of attorneys staffing prosecutors’ offices across the country. But it wouldn’t be true. Brady violations have reached epidemic proportions in recent years, and the federal and state reporters bear testament to this unsettling trend."
"The panel’s ruling is not just wrong, it is dangerously broad, carrying far-reaching implications for the administration of criminal justice. It effectively announces that the prosecution need not produce exculpatory or impeaching evidence so long as it’s possible the defendant would’ve been convicted anyway. This will send a clear signal to prosecutors that, when a case is close, it’s best to hide evidence helpful to the defense, as there will be a fair chance reviewing courts will look the other way, as happened here."
They then go on to cite a case that is part of this unsettling trend United States v. Triumph Capital Grp., Inc., 544 F.3d 149 (2d Cir. 2008), that is right, John Durham was the prosecutor. And U.S. v. Rivernider will be added to the list of the cases in which AUSA John Durham committed Brady violations.
Seriously, how many Appeals court opinions do you read that include a paragraph like this "Intriguing, in a Jerry Springer kind of way, but whom was Olsen planning to kill? We don’t know. And what was his motive? The panel doesn’t say. Given that the government so thoroughly “captured [Olsen’s] thought process,” id. at 1186, it’s surprising that these “thoughts” don’t shed light on the intended victim (or victims?). Surely somewhere in the 20,000 pages of Internet proxy logs Olsen searched for “what to wear to your boss’s funeral” or “how to file a widower’s tax return,” or maybe he watched “How to Murder Your Wife” on Netflix. But the opinion makes no mention of it, which makes the materiality analysis that much weaker.”
Also, I had written about rogue investigator’s in my case, I wonder if the 9th circuit is reading my posts? "Olsen’s case points to another important problem—that of rogue investigators and forensic experts.” and this "Even the vaunted FBI Laboratory at Quantico, Virginia hasn’t been immune from charges of falsification and pro-prosecution bias.”
"By turning a blind eye to this grave transgression, the panel has shirked its own duty and compounded the violence done to the Constitution by the Assistant U.S. Attorney.”
It will continue, my case proves it, the Constitution is dead. the rule of law, is no more, the courts are no help.
I will appeal my case, I hope I turn out to be mistaken and a court in this land steps up and says STOP IT.
We shall see.
Robert Rivernider
Thursday, August 22, 2013
Sunday, August 11, 2013
The Real Technicality
The Real Technicality
At A Public Defender, Gideon offers a blurb from the concurrence of some otherwise unremarkable Connecticut opinion that sums up one of the nasty little sucky secrets of the system.
ROGERS, C. J., concurring. I agree with the majority’s conclusion in part II of its opinion that appellate review of a waived constitutional claim that the jury instructions failed to include an essential element of the crime charged is barred by this court’s decision in State v. Kitchens, 299 Conn. 447, 482–83, 10 A.3d 942 (2011). I write separately to emphasize that it is an unanswered question whether such claims are subject to plain error review. Because the defendant in the present case did not seek plain error review, however, I leave that question for another day.
And in his finely-honed way, Gideon explains the significance of the concurrence:
Those 6 lines make me want to throw up.
While defendants are often accused of trying to avoid responsibility by use of that dreaded technicality, the Constitution, few people point out that the real technicality is embodied by this concurrence: that a defendant can be imprisoned, even executed, because a court was able to avoid doing its duty of determining whether he was convicted in accordance with law based upon lack of preservation. Lack of preservation is the ultimate technicality, that a lawyer failed to raise, object or sufficiently explain an argument, so that the reviewing court can simply ignore a constitutional deprivation.
You want technicalities? You got ‘em. While some might argue that one of the roles, perhaps the most critical role, of the neutral magistrate is to assure every defendant that his constitutional rights are protected, despite any failing, incompetence, tactical error of a lawyer, courts see it completely differently. Miss an objection to a horribly erroneous jury charge the omits a necessary element of a crime? You are screwed. The judges chuckle over the easy decision, saving their energies for those cases that require them to think long and hard about how to affirm the conviction.
The point has been made here before, but is worth making again. Preservation is the cheapest excuse for a court to fail to do its duty.
Preservation is intended to provide fairness to the judge below, to protect her from the stigma of reversal for an error that was never claimed or presented, and hence she had no opportunity to avoid. But nowhere in the Constitution do we find anything about the rights of judges to fairness or protection. And certainly, no notion of fairness to judges can be said to trump the rest of those express rights that are provided defendants. How did preservation come to trump all else?
There is an ugly, cynical side to preservation that is hidden behind this fairness notion. This is particularly true when you remember that the first level appellate courts maintain the power to review anything they want to review, making preservation an announcement that they have affirmatively chosen to ignore injustice and error.
Most of the time, judges will make at least the minimal effort to couch their reliance on lack of preservation in rhetoric that makes it appear less than wholly unprincipled and slightly legitimate. But in the example Gideon offers, it is flagrantly held out as a “gotcha” to escape the hard work of adjudicating.
The lawyer screwed up. The lawyer waived it at trial, then left it out of his appellate brief. Hah! Now, per Rogers’ concurrence, we can affirm without even pretending to care that a defendant has been denied his constitutional rights. Gotcha!!!
It’s not that there aren’t rational arguments in favor of preservation. There’s the rather insignificant concern of judicial economy, not making judges work too hard unnecessarily. There’s the “two bites of the apple” argument, that a defendant can’t take a tactical position before one court and then take the opposite position later, though this argument is far stronger when the defendant has chosen his lawyer rather than get saddled with one because of indigence.
But for the most part, the issue arises out of mistake, a simple screw-up in failing to notice and raise an issue that needed raising. The lawyer screwed up. The lawyer just plain failed to do a good enough job, though he stayed awake through most of the trial which is sufficient to overcome ineffective assistance of counsel. Shocking, I know, but it happens.
So that might be a place where the court decides to step in, to see its role as the gatekeeper of the law and Constitution. To assure that no defendant is ever convicted because the lawyer failed to provide what the Constitution demands. The irony of holding a defendant accountable to the most intricate demands of the law, upon penalty of imprisonment or perhaps even death, while everybody else in the courtroom gets a free pass, remains the perpetual paradox.
As Gideon notes, the Rogers concurrence embodies the lowest, the worst, the most disgraceful view of how little rigor the law demands before imprisoning a human being. And like Gideon, it makes me want to throw up. Clearly, it doesn’t bother C.J. Chase T. Rogers in the slightest, and she felt the need to write a concurrence to make that emphatically clear.
Reposted from http://blog.simplejustice.us/2013/08/11/the-real-technicality/#comment-82406
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Report: Bank of America, Wells Fargo received incentives but mortgages redefaulted | CharlotteObserver.com
Poor victim banks:( Scammed into taking $815 Million and now they have to foreclose anyway and make more $$, so sad.
Report: Bank of America, Wells Fargo received incentives but mortgages redefaulted | CharlotteObserver.com
Report: Bank of America, Wells Fargo received incentives but mortgages redefaulted | CharlotteObserver.com
Thursday, July 18, 2013
COMEDY- Why Doesnt The US Government Use Its Domestic Spying Capabilities to Catch Criminals? (Because the Govt. Is In Business With Them!) | Weidner Law
COMEDY- Why Doesnt The US Government Use Its Domestic Spying Capabilities to Catch Criminals? (Because the Govt. Is In Business With Them!) | Weidner Law
Don't try to blame the banks, Government agents won't let you get away with that.
Robert Rivernider
Don't try to blame the banks, Government agents won't let you get away with that.
Robert Rivernider
Friday, June 28, 2013
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Apple releases information on data requests from NSA, other agencies
LA Times
By Jim Puzzanghera
June 17, 2013, 6:30 a.m.
WASHINGTON -- Apple Inc., said it received 4,000 to 5,000 requests for customer data from U.S. officials during the six months ending in May, as it became the latest high-tech company to provide some details on its involvement in the National Security Agency's Internet surveillance program.
The requests involved 9,000 to 10,000 customer accounts or devices, the company said in a statement on its website. Not all the requests involved the NSA's controversial Prism program, which the company said it did not know about until revelations in the news media on June 6.
The data requests came from federal, state and local authorities and involved national security matters and criminal investigations, Apple said.
"The most common form of request comes from police investigating robberies and other crimes, searching for missing children, trying to locate a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, or hoping to prevent a suicide," the statement said.
Apple said some types of data are never provided, including FaceTime conversations and requests made through its Siri voice assistant.
On Friday, Facebook said it received 9,000 to 10,000 government data requests in the second half of 2012, involving 18,000 to 19,000 accounts. The company said it complied with 79% of the requests.
Apple did not provide a compliance percentage.
Apple said its legal team evaluates each request and "from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it."
When a request for data is fulfilled, Apple said, the company retrieves and delivers "the narrowest possible set of information" in order to protect the privacy of its customers.
"We will continue to work hard to strike the right balance between fulfilling our legal responsibilities and protecting our customers’ privacy as they expect and deserve," Apple said.
Apple doesn't provide some types of information either because the company doesn't retain it or because it is encrypted, the company said.
Customer video calls on FaceTime or text exchanges using iMessage have "end-to-end encryption" and Apple cannot decrypt the data, the company said. Also, Apple said it did not store identifiable data on customer location, map searches or Siri queries.
Apple said in April that it records and stores Siri queries for up to two years. At the time, Apple said it kept for six months Siri data that was associated with specific customers. The data were kept for up to 18 months after that, but identifiable information was removed, it said.
Saturday, June 1, 2013
Brady Violation Leads to Arrest of Former Texas Prosecutor
Reposted by ROBERT RIVERNIDER
Brady Violation Leads to Arrest of Former Texas Prosecutor
Prosecutors who have committed Brady violations, even those which have been later demonstrated to have resulted in wrongful convictions and lengthy terms of imprisonment for persons later proven innocent, are rarely prosecuted. Courts tend to find Brady violations inconsequential, prosecutor's offices generally defend or at the least refuse to acknowledge them, disciplinary committees overlook them, and defense lawyers, out of timidity and self-interest, rarely press for sanctions. One notable exception to this general disregard by institutions and the bar is DOJ's commendable effort, at the moment thwarted by a questionable administrative law decision, to sanction prosecutors in the Senator Ted Stevens trial (see here and here).
The State of Texas, whose criminal justice system is often disparaged by commentators and defense lawyers, recently took a giant step in holding prosecutors sanctionable for egregious Brady violations. A Texas judge, acting as a court of inquiry, under Texas law, after a hearing ordered the arrest of a current Texas state court judge, Ken Anderson, for contempt and withholding evidence from the court and defense attorneys when Anderson was a District Attorney prosecuting Michael Morton, who was recently demonstrated to be actually innocent for the murder of his wife for which he served 25 years of a life sentence. See here.
The inquiry judge, District Judge Louis Sturns, found probable cause to believe that Anderson had concealed two crucial pieces of evidence: a statement by Morton's three-year old son that Morton was not home at the time of the crime and a police report which revealed that an unknown suspicious man had been seen on several occasions stalking the Morton house.
For denying to the trial judge that there was exculpatory evidence and for failing to provide a full copy of a police report demanded by the judge, Anderson was charged with tampering with evidence, tampering with a government document, and contempt. The most serious charge, evidence tampering, carries a maximum prison term of ten years, far short of the 25 years Morton served.
Criminal prosecution of prosecutors for Brady violations has been to my knowledge totally or almost totally nonexistent. Thirty-five years ago I drafted a proposed New York State statute criminalizing intentional and knowing Brady violations. As expected, the proposal went nowhere. The statute, as I wrote it, had such strict scienter requirements that the crime was virtually unprovable. It was written more to stress to prosecutors the seriousness of such misconduct than to lead to actual prosecutions. The Anderson prosecution, if it occurs, may fill that function.
(goldman)
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Friday, May 24, 2013
Inspector General Fired by President Obama Files Lawsuit to Be Reinstated*
Why is Gerald Walpin a forgotten man?
Inspector General Fired by President Obama Files Lawsuit to Be Reinstated*: Gerald Walpin, the former Inspector General for the Corporation for National and Community Service whom President Obama took the unusual step of firing last month, filed a lawsuit against the CNCS on Friday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia The suit seeks...
Inspector General Fired by President Obama Files Lawsuit to Be Reinstated*: Gerald Walpin, the former Inspector General for the Corporation for National and Community Service whom President Obama took the unusual step of firing last month, filed a lawsuit against the CNCS on Friday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia The suit seeks...
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
'I Can't Recite the Constitution, Sir'
Sunday, May 19, 2013
They didn't tell the truth
If I was accused of not telling the truth i would be going to prison, hey wait a minute....
Robert Rivernider
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Friday, May 17, 2013
Piers Morgan: Now I see U.S. government tyranny
Piers Morgan: Now I see U.S. government tyranny
I WATCHED IT LIVE IN ACTION AS A TARGET OF TYRANNICAL LOW LEVEL GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES
I WATCHED IT LIVE IN ACTION AS A TARGET OF TYRANNICAL LOW LEVEL GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES
Monday, May 13, 2013
Ann Coulter - August 1, 2012 - OBAMA'S SIGNATURE MOVE: UNSEALING PRIVATE RECORDS
Ann Coulter - August 1, 2012 - OBAMA'S SIGNATURE MOVE: UNSEALING PRIVATE RECORDS
Anything else needed be said?
The answer to Ann's question about picking the lock to the IRS, YES.
Robert Rivernider
Anything else needed be said?
The answer to Ann's question about picking the lock to the IRS, YES.
Robert Rivernider
Gov't seizes AP reporters' phone records
Was the 1st Amendment repealed or doesn't the DOJ recognize it?
ROBERT RIVERNIDER
Gov't seizes AP reporters' phone records
ROBERT RIVERNIDER
Gov't seizes AP reporters' phone records
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Gideon's Trumpet (Full Movie)
One man can change the world. The truth needs to be told. This one man made the courts face the facts and show that the U.S. Constitution did matter, at least back in the 60's. Hopefully it will come back into fashion, even if 50 years later.
Posted by Robert Rivernider
Posted by Robert Rivernider
210 Violations by Wells Fargo and no one is going to Prison, WTF? If you , OR I, committed just 1 violation, or should have known someone was committing a violation we would have our homes raided by armed, bullet-proof FBI agents, all our stuff taken, prosecuted and our families destroyed, but if we can hire attorney's who run the DOJ we get small fines, JUSTICE?????
Schneiderman to Sue BofA, Wells Fargo Over Settlement Violations
Posted by Robert Rivernider
Saturday, May 11, 2013
American Crossroads: Benghazi
This Gov't cover up murder, covers for the banksters, the corrupt IRS what next?
Robert Rivernider
Robert Rivernider
Media Watchdogs Don't Bark About Bank Fraud
Bank make billions and they get the DOJ low lever employees to put the little guys in prison to cover up the fraud and make it look like they are doing something about it. Then they give the top level DOJ attorney's 6-7 figure jobs, what a deal.
Robert Rivernider
Robert Rivernider
Friday, May 10, 2013
Robert Rivernider Creates A Blog
This is A Blog created by Robert Rivernider it will be AWESOME!!!!!
Find me @RobertRivernider
Robert Rivernider and Preventive Fire & Safety
Find me @RobertRivernider
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)