WND EXCLUSIVE
STATE CHIEF JUSTICE SUES OVER CONSTITUTIONAL VIOLATIONS
Alabama's Roy Moore seeks damages for complaint process that deprived him of due process
Bob Unruh
Judicial officials in Alabama have launched what has been described as a “political” persecution of the elected chief justice of their Supreme Court. Then they created charges against him based on his administrative orders in managing the state’s court system.
Finally, they hired the former legal director of the organization that filed the original complaint to prosecute Chief Justice Roy Moore.
And he’s had enough.
He filed a lawsuit on Friday in federal court explaining that the state process for handling, hearing, responding to and adjudicating complaints against him violates his constitutional rights.
He’s asking the federal court to derail the process that state officials are pursuing, and he’s asking for damages, as well as immediate reinstatement.
“The immediate and automatic disqualification of Chief Justice Moore from the office of chief justice has prevented him from serving the entire term of his elected office, even though he has not been tried on the [Judicial Inquiry Commission] charges, let alone convicted in the [Court of the Judiciary],” the new lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama states.
“The immediate and automatic disqualification causes Chief Justice Moore substantial and irreparable harm because he is indefinitely prevented from exercising his duties and powers as the administrative head of the judicial branch,” it continues.
He’s also prevented from sitting on cases, voting on cases and writing opinions and he’s suffered injury to his “reputation, good name, honor, and integrity.”
All of this, the lawsuit brought on Moore’s behalf by officials with Liberty Counsel explains, was done without due process, as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
The complaint explains that when state charges were assembled against him, Lyn Stuart, who is acting chief justice as most senior on the bench, removed Moore’s votes from pending cases, withdrew his assignments, ordered his staff out of Moore’s office, stored his computer, canceled his login, removed programs from his computers and told Moore staff “although she would not tell them to refrain from speaking with him, they could not talk to him about Alabama Supreme Court matters.”
“Chief Justice Moore’s office staff have been told that they effectively do not work for him anymore …”
Stuart even ordered that Moore “was no longer to have access to his office in the judicial building.”
These events, the complaint alleges, violate the 14th Amendment’s Due Process clause.
“The 14th Amendment forbids a state from depriving Chief Justice Moore of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”
The state provision, Section 159 of the constitution, under which state officials are prosecuting him is therefore unconstitutional and should be dropped, it explains.
“Any interest in the operations of the courts and the judicial conduct of judges does not permit the defendants to eviscerate Chief Justice Moore’s own fundamental due process rights,” the complaint states.
The defendants are the Judicial Inquiry Commission, its chairman, Billy Bedsole; members David Scott, Randall Cole, Craig Pittman, David Thrasher, Ralph Malone, Augusta Dowd, Kim Chaney and David Kimberly, attorney general Luther Strange and Stuart.
Stuart did not respond to a WND message requesting comment.
The complaint warns the procedures give the JIC power to injure judges “based upon trivialities, viewpoint-based objections, differences in legal interpretation, political motivations, or, even worse, to protect itself from investigation of violations of its own rules.”
The court filings also seek preliminary and permanent injunctive relief to protect the constitutional rights of Moore and “future Alabama judges.”
The state essentially provides removal by impeachment – that is, charges from the state house of representatives for some offense like corruption, intemperance, moral turpitude or incompetency, followed by a conviction in the senate.
The JIC’s issue with Moore involves his administrative order from last January “in which he wrote that the 2015 orders of the Alabama Supreme Court regarding same-sex ‘marriage’ remained in effect until the court held otherwise. Chief Justice Moore did not participate in the 2015 orders, which ruled that the state’s probate judges must uphold the Alabama Sanctity of Marriage Act,” LC reported.
“The charges against Chief Justice Roy Moore must be dismissed. The JIC has no jurisdiction over an administrative order of the chief justice. Only the Alabama Supreme Court has jurisdiction, and that court agreed with the order,” said Mat Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel. “We are asking the federal court to strike down the automatic removal provision in the Alabama State Constitution and we are asking that Chief Justice Moore be immediately reinstated.”
WND reported just a day earlier that the JIC had picked a man to prosecute Moore who formerly was legal director for the Southern Law Poverty Center, which filed the complaint against Moore.
“I have almost no words for this corrupt and unjust system,” Staver said on Thursday.
“We have said that the charges are politically motivated and that the JIC violated its own rules of confidentiality. You would think that the JIC would be astute enough to at least avoid an appearance of bias, but obvious the JIC does not care. This is a brazen act that calls into question the entire JIC process.”
Judicial Inquiry Commission staff member Rosa Davis told WND that the commission doesn’t comment on such matters.
But she enthusiastically defended Carroll, confirming to WND that he formerly worked for SPLC.
She argued he later became a law school professor, dean of a law school and a magistrate judge.
The SPLC advocacy by Carroll, Davis told WND, was “32 years ago.”
She contended the “facts of his career since of that time speak for themselves.”
On his Samford University bio page, however, Carroll boasts of his experience with SPLC as its legal director.
The page says he teaches, or is interested in, mediation, evidence, trial practice, ethics and e-discovery.
It states: “Judge Carroll is a frequent lecturer and panel member at national and local seminars on the subject of the discovery of electronically stored information, mediation, ethics and other topics relating to federal courts. He was the reporter to the committees of the Uniform Law Commission that drafted the Uniform Rules Relating to the Discovery of Electronically Stored information and the Uniform Asset Preservation Order Act. He was also a member of the Uniform Law Commission committee that drafted amendments to the Uniform Athlete Agents Act. He is currently a member of a committee drafting a model veterans court act and a committee judging a model equal rights act.”
“The travesty of the politically motivated charges by the JIC against Chief Justice Roy Moore have become even clearer with the appointment by the JIC of a former legal director of the same organization that filed the charges. This is a miscarriage of justice of the highest sort,” said Staver.
SPLC routinely blasts people and organizations who do not agree with its social agenda as “haters” and was linked in federal court to the gun attack several years ago at the Family Research Council headquarters in Washington, D.C..
“By falsely and recklessly labeling Christian ministries as ‘hate groups,’ the SPLC is directly responsible for the first conviction of a man who intended to commit mass murder targeted against a policy organization in Washington, D.C.,” Liberty Counsel has said.
“On August 15, 2012, Floyd Corkins went to the Family Research Council with a gun and a bag filled with ammunition and Chick-fil-A sandwiches. His stated purpose was to kill as many employees of the Family Research Council as possible and then to smear Chick-fil-A sandwiches in their faces (because the founder of the food chain said he believed in marriage as a man and a woman). Fortunately, Mr. Corkins was stopped by the security guard, who was shot in the process. Corkins is now serving time in prison. Mr. Corkins admitted to the court that he learned of the Family Research Council by reading the SPLC’s hate map,” LC reported.
Corkins later was sentenced to prison for domestic terrorism, after admitting on video he accessed the SPLC’s recommendations to pick a target for his attack. The SPLC identified FRC as a hate group because it holds to a biblical definition of homosexuality.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/05/state-chief-justice-sues-over-constitutional-violations/#vmGerwQH3Z5XXjHw.99
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