Dan Meador's letter to Paul Mitchell, 9/25/98 09:24:15


[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] [ Supreme Law Firm Discussion Forum ] [ FAQ ]

Posted by Paul Andrew Mitchell, B.A., M.S. on September 30, 1998 at 16:45:07:

In Reply to: CONSTITUTIONAL COURTS, from "Encyclopedia of the American Constitution" posted by Paul Andrew Mitchell, B.A., M.S. on September 29, 1998 at 15:39:19:

Friend Paul,

The research assistance, accompanied by your usual brevity, came as a
welcome surprise. I owe you thanks for editing & other assistance while I
was at FMC-Lexington, and need to see if we can't coordinate efforts with
broader common ground. You and I played research leap-frog for a year or
longer, with considerable synergistic effect, so I'm pleased that
communication is reestablished.

The last brief you edited had a number of typographical and other errors,
due to Gail's having to try to make sense of my combined typed &
hand-written material, so I had already corrected most, but there were a
few things I wanted to comment on. Time didn't permit much
correspondence after about November. The one thing I really wanted to
respond to, was your questioning of 28 U.S.C. 132, which supposedly
created the United States District Court in each judicial district.

If you read historical and revision notes following 28 U.S.C. 132, you
will find that the section in current editions of the United States Code
is an amalgamation of sections from Titles 28 & 48 (Territories and
Insular Possession), 1940 edition of the U.S.C. The section was applicable
only to territories and insular possessions. I was fully aware of that, at
the time, I constructed the pleading you read, but elected to ignore the
section, rather than spend time demonstrating application.

In about April, a friend sent photocopies of Titles 18 & 28 from 1934 &
1940 editions of the U.S.C., which helped tremendously. The 1940 edition
is the benchmark edition that serves as the point of demarcation for
editions produced since. All U.S.C. editions since 1940 incorporate
amalgamations such as 28 U.S.C. 132 that can be completely misleading
until you understand what happened in 1948.

You might want to read the Preface and Introduction to the first edition,
1926, in order to provide orientation. I've found it in the Forward material
in Titles 5 & 48 of recent editions of the Code. The point of demarcation
for the Code is the Revised Statutes of 1878. If I recall correctly, you
and I had been looking at R.S. 1873-74 prior to my incarceration. The
R.S. 1878 replaced the earlier effort, which was poorly edited and
constructed.

The criminal Code (Title 18) is based on the Criminal Code of 1909,
produced in the Statutes at Large, and the Civil Code (Title 28) is based
on the Judiciary Act of March 3, 1911, also in the Statutes at Large.
I found that the 1934 edition of the U.S.C. was pretty true to form, where
editions after 1948 became increasingly jumbled. At some point, we're
going to have to go back to a previous Code to see the effect of the Act
of 1911 effectively doing away with circuit courts as established in 1789
& 1792, and vesting district courts with powers of circuit courts. The
original circuit courts convened at district courts; they weren't truly
independent courts, in the sense of having a courthouse in a city
somewhere. This accounts for district courts and the Supreme Court having
power to issue writs of habeas corpus, etc., where present circuit courts
are pretty well limited to functions as courts of appeals.

I intentionally haven't addressed litigation strategy in anything put on
the wire, but consider implications of 28 U.S.C. 144 & 372(c), coupled
with affidavits of criminal complaint and the writ of habeas corpus, where
we can demonstrate that: (1) United States District Courts situated in the
several States are private courts, and (2) the United States of America is
a government foreign to the United States, that has no constitutional or
statutory standing in the Union of several States. Let your agile mind
work on logistics of the situation, particularly where local rules of
civil procedure for United States District Courts list all judges
appointed to the district. By virtue of their participating in the private
court system, don't they all have bias and prejudice that prevents them from
convening the Article III district court of the United States for the
district? And, in that event, isn't it the responsibility of the chief
circuit judge to appoint a circuit judge to convene the constitutionally
authentic district court of the United States for the district?

When you go back to Judiciary Acts of 1789 and shortly thereafter, you
find responsibilities of court clerks, including the mandate to certify
certain things to circuit judges. Most of the statutory mandates have
vanished, replaced by regulations promulgated by the Director of the
Administrative Office of Courts of the United States (see 28 U.S.C. 604,
in particular). I'm presently having a pretty good round with people in
the public information department of the Administrative Office, over
securing the compiled regulations and the manual governing procedure of
United States magistrate judges. One of the people, a Sellers, sent me a
couple of Code of Conduct pamphlets, and made the excuse that other code of
conduct material is in short supply, and is at the printer's office --
in other words, a diversionary tactic. Just yesterday I sent a letter back,
insisting on immediate shipment of the regulations, etc., and told the guy
that, if the material isn't available in hard copy, he can download it on 3
1/2" floppies or CD; I can handle details. Regulations governing specific
performance of court officers, including clerks, probation officers, etc.,
will about complete details necessary to get with the program on pending
cases.

Prison really wasn't too bad. It got me away from 100 phone calls and a
dozen or more unannounced visitors per day, knocking at the door. I lost 30
pounds, rested enough to restore physical and emotional strength, and had
time to focus on necessary research. Had it not been for desperately
missing Gail, I would have been pretty indifferent about being behind the
fence. The halfway house situation, since Aug. 4, 1998, has been something of a
blessing, as it is also a shelter that allows me to be selective about
outside contact. I now have 48-hour weekend passes which Gail and I are
enjoying, by going up to Grand Lake to stay with friends. My release date
is Friday, Oct. 2, 1998, and I'm looking at the prospect of going
home almost with fear and trembling. I'm not too zealous about the
prospect of masses of people making constant demands on my time. Our
resources were pretty depleted, so the first task will have to be putting
financial wheels back under us, but I think that will come in due course.

In the meantime, I won't have the same access to Internet, so I will have to
channel communications either through Dale or Tim. Tim lives in
Blackwell, about 25 miles from Ponca City, where Dale is in Tulsa about 15
minutes from the Turley Correctional Center where I'm presently located.
We have a good stand-alone paper FAX, but I'm getting used to the Internet,
so I will get hooked up ASAP.

Again, it's good to hear from you, and thanks for the research assistance.

God bless, keep and strengthen you.


Dan Meador




Follow Ups:



Post a Followup

Name:
E-Mail:

Subject:

Comments:

Optional Link URL:
Link Title:
Optional Image URL:


[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] [ Supreme Law Firm Discussion Forum ] [ FAQ ]