Monday, July 30, 2007, 01:20 AM
Posted by Administrator
You would have to wonder what is wrong with the legal system if you know both all that I know and all the similar stuff that you likely have heard about the subject in the media.Posted by Administrator
The O.J. trial. U.S. Attorneys fired for charging Republicans with crimes instead of Democrats when the scales of justice are supposed to be blind. The Supreme Court unable to make anything other than a 5-4 decision along partisan lines, imperiling our democracy and showing the highest court in the land is incapable of deciding a case on legal grounds due to inherent bias, making real justice no more fair (and perhaps much less so) than tossing a coin to make the decision.
Then there are the "lower" and "logically" less able and more biased courts, prosecutors, and attorneys in the levels below the Supreme Court. You would hope somewhere in this system there was somebody that followed the rules and did their jobs, even if the Supreme Court is unable to. A prosecutor's office. A company's legal department. A private legal firm. An attorney.
It seems finding people of integrity in the legal system is as slapdash as it was to find such people in my department when I was an inspector at Boeing. I was almost alone in being the one with enough integrity to do my job while being pressured not to do it by people without integrity.
Take the Boeing Legal department, for instance, which I tried to report fraud to on two occasions and who are assisting in my persecution now. They have many attorneys in house who presumably had to pass the bar and have to stay members of the bar to continue their profession.
Why weren't any of them kicked out of the bar association when they advised Boeing that the State Department had no authority to keep them from exporting militarily sensitive devices on aircraft to proscribed countries without an export license? It would seem like an open and shut case. The State Department prevailed over the Boeing legal department's wrong legal opinion that may have placed our country in danger. Boeing had to pay a $15 million dollar fine. But why weren't the attorneys who made that obviously incorrect decision fired or disbarred to keep them from making such huge "errors" in the future? Your guess may be as good as mine. There seems to be a lack of accountability in the profession. Or did Boeing's attorneys give the errant legal opinion and let the militarily sensitive technology on the airplanes deliver just because Boeing needed to deliver the airplanes to meet revenue and profit targets? That might explain both the highly questionable opinion by Boeing's attorneys and why Boeing deferred complying with State Department requests for Boeing to apply for export licenses before delivering such airplanes on multiple occasions. It also explains why such attorneys were not fired or debarred for incompetence. They were just doing their jobs. But that would have made them even better candidates for disbarrment, you would think.
But since when did attorneys stop advising comnpanies how to avoid legal problems by ensuring they complied with laws, and stop advising companies how to minimize the damage from any accidental breaking of the law, and start advising their companies how to break the law with impunity?
I saw that in the same Boeing legal department. They refused to end the fraud in quality assurance I reported to their chief counsel on two occasions, and instead seemed to pull out all the stops in ensuring that fraud was not ended, as a naive person like me (at the time) might have expected. Hell, the Chief Counsel of Boeing showed up at the doorstep of my work not to help end the fraud, but instead to decide how to dispose of me, who they viewed as the real problem. You would think any attorney involved in this covering up of this fraud and the resulting retaliation against me would be a prime candidate for disbarrment. But I have no knowledge of any of them being disbarred. To this day they labor to cover up the same fraud I reported to them over five years ago. Their spokespeople have repeatedly lied to the press about it also, both in responding to the inevitable defects that such a quality system lets deliver to the fleet (in which they said something like "we have multiple layers of inspection that would never allow such defects to leave our production system" which most people inside and outside Boeing know is untrue) and in responding to my persecution at their request (saying something like "we have processes in place to address such concerns" while not stating the fact that those processes didn't work to end the fraud I reported or the related problems in the quality system I also reported). Indeed, my prosecution is just one part of their plan to cover up the noted fraud.
But if private legal departments operate thusly, what about our prosecutors? Wouldn't those attorneys who work on our dime spot such fraud and the related efforts to cover it up by placing false reports to the police to get people trying to end it arrested and the information they were gathering for the relevant authorities confiscated? Nope. They apparently do what the Boeing legal department wants them to do, not what is in the interests of the public or public safety. They decide to participate in the cover up by attacking the messenger of the fraud. Of course, maybe it is not incomptence or corruption that caused our public attorneys to act against their professional ethics. Maybe Boeing's chief outside law firm contributing to the campaign of the prosecutor who faces his first election for King County Prosecutor in a few months played a part. I don't know if Boeing is helping his election directly yet, but they have certainly proven themselves arrogant enough to do so. Souldn't these types of activities cause these prosecutors to get disbarred as well? It would seem so. I don't see the bar association condoning this type of behavior.
So, if private and public attorneys are becoming corrupted and are working together to silence people like me that seek to end corporate fraud and don't seem to face any consequences for that corruption, what is the hope for us not to devolve further into some kind of Fascist nightmare of a state where corporations run all branches of the government, and not us? Individual attorneys that want to take on such monoliths at their own cost? Who would end up getting disbarred? The corrupt attorneys or the ones seeking to end that corruption?
We are at a dangerous point in America, especially when a progressive State like Washington experiences this kind of corruption bordering on Fascism. Will it get better, or worse? Will someone in the legal systems of governments and corporations stand up and actually do their jobs like they are supposed to even if they won't get disbarred if they violate bar association ethical requirements? Will anyone at the bar association stand up and do their jobs to get rid of these people that are affronts to their profession?
Who knows? I am just one insignificant "victim" of unethical public and private attorneys working together that should probably be disbarred for incomptence and/or corruption. There will be others, unless someone, like I did in my job as an inspector at Boeing, stands up and actually does their job with the required ethics.




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