BFEE Judge who Railroaded Gov. Don Siegelman Relieved of Docket for (allegedly) Beating Ex-Wife

[Octafish]

17. The ''best'' spin is the administration had to make a deal with Alabama's US Senators...

...in order to get their judicial nominations and other presidential appointments through. And that makes it even more wrong, IMFO.

Alabama Judicial Scandal Could Taint Many Cases, Not Just Siegelman’s

Posted on May 19, 2012 by Andrew Kreig

EXCERPT...

Bigger Stakes Than Siegelman’s Fate

The Siegelman case has thus attracted the most attention to Fuller’s courtroom.

But from the first, our Project and others have shown that the case was just one part of a pattern involving other disgraceful conduct within the justice system. My 2009 Huffington Post column, Alabama Decisions Illustrate Abuse of Judicial Power, showed how Fuller shaped in highly dubious ways litigation outcomes in election, employment and environmental cases.

None of this should have been a surprise. In 2002, Alabama’s pension officials thwarted Fuller’s effort as a full-time state prosecutor to bilk the system out of $330,000 by his advocacy of unmerited pension benefits for a former staffer.

Yet Alabama’s two Republican senators, Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions, pushed Fuller forward for a lifetime appointment, which Fuller received from a 2002 unanimous voice vote by the United States Senate with no serious discussion of his Doss, pension or other sensitive matters.

Most dramatically, Missouri attorney Paul B. Weeks III filed with Fuller in 2003 a remarkable 180-page brief to show that Fuller should recuse himself from a major civil case litigated by Weeks. In it, Weeks argued also Fuller should be impeached for corruption in trying to bilk Alabama’s pension system of $330,000 when Fuller was a state prosecutor before his judicial confirmation in 2002.

Weeks discovered from confidential interviews in Alabama that one of Fuller’s prosecution office employees appeared to be pressuring him to get unmerited retirement money, using as leverage Fuller’s secret Doss work during his full-time state job and Fuller’s purported romantic affair with a prosecution-office underling (different than Gregg).

The 2003 filing was never posted electronically in the federal court files controlled by the Montgomery federal court clerk’s office. That’s yet another mysterious circumstance in a courthouse seemingly teeming with unresolved irregularities. But we have obtained and preserved the filing in two sections, here (the Affidavit and Exhibits 1 to 13) and here. All of this history is in the Weeks filing and in our previous columns.

Doss last year boasted on its website, that it expected billions of dollars in forthcoming federal contracts. But that announcement along with much of the rest of the company’s institutional history has since been purged from the site following the company’s acquisition in December by J.F. Lehman, a private firm controlled by a former Navy Secretary by that name. The sale keeps the firm’s finances private.

Fuller’s wife is seeking an accounting of family assets. Fuller has asked that Montgomery County’s Circuit Court 15 seal his file over the objections of his wife. This would be an unusual development in a divorce case, and would underscore how judges and court personnel protect each other from public scrutiny.

CONTINUED...

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/05/alabama-judicial-scandal-could-taint-many-cases-not-just-siegelmans.html

Destroying two innocent men's lives isn't politics. It's crime. Letting it stand when aware that it's wrong is something worse.