WhiteNight & Bricker;
Have you two ever heard of ICQ? 
Peace,
mangeorge
(Just kidding, have fun.)
all of which gets back to my original reply to WhiteNight - if you guys can spend so much time arguing about the technological implications and the legal meaning of this provision of the US Code, it suggests quite strongly that there are at least two alternative interpretations and applications to the facts of the case.
in these circumstances, it is quite a reach to assume that the reason for the result was that the judge was bribed.
as bricker says, it’s the very first case interpreting this section. the judge’s view may be upheld, or may not - but if it is, I think your beef is with Congress, White Night, and it’s unfair to libel the judge with accusations of bribery.
and the stars o’erhead were dancing heel to toe
Achtung: This may be long because I refrained from immediately answering Bricker and Melin, in order to do a little research on who these people actually are. They are archetypes of our legalocracy, and there are signs that the latter could be a serious hazard to one’s social health, considering what runs between the words of her profligate posts, which extend into those subbasements here, where I, for other purposes, never tread.
On social issues, I will not supplicate or kowtow before instances of legalocrats’ or medicocrats’ invoking any hierarchical order of their respective professions in these fora, despite my acceptance of their trades’ limited proper roles in our societies. . .and all questions of law and medicine are subject to being social issues. Though this MB be in English, it at least theoretically extends internationally beyond the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, South Africa, etc., and thus outside the American lawyers’ dominant space, outside of which, though, there is full cognizance of their rampant infamy.
Bricker (2/5/00):
I meant that, being of the samewise-trained socioprofessional tribe and having commonality in their both being “officers of the court” rather than objects of the action therebefore, attorneys’ perspectives and loyalties grossly prevent their aloof and general-interest judgment of a judge’s (im)partiality in any court.
I’m not saying lawyers can never judge what’s good for their case. In CA.US you can recuse one judge if you don’t like where his ears flop.
As rules and ruling go, that’s what lawyering and judgment consists of; so, mercy, you mustn’t “rule” out anything that categorically persons without hired guns. I don’t believe, however, that hating pro-pers has been held a hate crime yet, and essentially every judge (and attorney – opposing, left unemployed, or otherwise) is predisposed to hate pro-pers. . .unless they have IQs below 70 and no legal knowledge, in which case, appeals judges are known to write extenisively in published opinions on how much stupider and more ignorant these defendants are than they themselves. If you insist, I’ll look up some cites.
What judges can’t handle is pro-pers who are as or more intelligent than they, and are as or more read-up on the pertinent statutory and case law of their case quite well (not at all qualifying them for the legal club, of course, but putting them in a decent position to argue their case, in some ways better than attorneys, in some ways worse.
In CA.US you flat out can’t claim ineffective assistance of counsel if you represent yourself in propria persons, period.
Now, I’m not saying judges must be highly intelligent. If they were, most of them would certainly have nervous breakdowns. But at this time, in both CA.US and the federal US system, almost all the judges have been chosen to be stooges to some of the worst right-wing Republican politicians in the history of the US. (No, I don’t think I have to worry about judges showing up in the SDMB. Their brand of dope is about as laced as it comes.)
I can’t, in a few words describe lawyers playing up to judges; but, other than you 
, the whole world knows what that consists of. This post is going to be too long without such, but such behavior does not pass as simply “deference” to the extent of politeness. As a pro-per, I have not been impolite to judges, but I have been insistent in ways justicially independently of inhouse professional fun and games, to which I couldn’t have privy, in any case, and have rejected quid pro quo jazz.
I’m not before a court here. You know what I mean – ‘charcteristically so’. See WhiteNight’s view (2/5/00) of my wording.
They can be very ignorant of the law specifically relevant to a particular case or issue therein. You can be sure that any intelligent pro-per before a court, who is allowed access to a reasonable legal library, is likely to be more cognizant of relevant law than would be the judge or most lawyers he might come by. No non-attorney pro-per would want to challenge a trained judge or lawyer across the whole body of a jurisdiction’s law. Some judges will look at the law of which they are ignorant or don’t fathom right off, and some won’t. Some will look at it but never get the gist of it.
A “Good Housekeeping”-seal-of-approval broom.
He has the opportunity for numerous sneaky, interstitual lies that tear apart appropriate jury analysis.
I’m sure you can’t keep a straight face in saying all that. A vast amount of the world’s entertainment, as well as, tons of documented fact establish the insidious distortion attorneys introduce into juries’ views of torts or crimes. Inducement of improper legal “interpretation” of facts constitutes lying, but many of his lies are direct.
These things only if the judges and other attorney
Yeah, and also, just the thought of an attorney having to answer a filing in plain English. Phooey! All attorneys do is simply have their secretaries count the number of paragraphs in the pro-er’s filing and put the number into her computer, which will print out n copies of that same number of correlately labeled paragraphs that simply say no in maybe 25 words or less. What Bricker is griping about is that he has to waste such secretarial time, I guess, because the pro-pers papers aren’t in PDF or whatever format, on a diskette or CD-ROM, which he can merely stick in the machine. (Secretarial wages eat away the floor space of his Monticello-style home.)
Ain’t it though. . .and it ain’t even within the Beltway!
There’s gotta be a judge nearby cussing wildly about lawyers’ filing “formats”. Yeah, I know, there coulda been a prison riot and one o’ them “paranoids” had a cup o’ stale java soil a page of his filing.
Surgoshan:
Well, I guess you’re excused, as apparently a foreign student attending either my alma mater or Ithaca College, but please look at the work of a few other lawyers than Rick and Melin before getting too rash. . .and just maybe a few non-lawyers for some purposes. OK, it appears that in certain narrow areas they know a good deal about the law, but certainly their ridiculous traits not related to knowledge of the law, as seen here, make them stand out as clear evidence that lawyers should not fill judgeships.
Oh, yeah, you grab all this up as gospel – about kook pro-pers. Come to California and I can probably show you all the kook judges. Of course, they have plenty in other states of the US. . .maybe a few even in Canada. About 15 yr ago, as a pro-per, I had to go before a judge who was obviously very senile. Maybe he would’ve done me well, but I didn’t want to get tied up in that kind of justice, so I peremptorily (no need of proof of bias or whatever) disqualified/recused him. In CA.US, a party is allowed to reject one judge per action/suit without specifying any evidence of a reason. It took, as I recall at lest 2 yr thereafter, for the DA in the county of that court to get that judge kicked off the bench for having lost his marbles. Really punk bar association in that high-tech county. I had words, at times, with them, on other matters. Way it goes with judges. . .pro-pers, of course, not being exactly DAs.
Yeah, sure, see above – a whole bar association of a very wealthy county didn’t get an obviously senile judge off the bench for many years. The rest of this country has even much better anecdotes on judges’ qualifications, many of them with serious liquor problems. You’ll learn. Hope you’re not condemned to be a student of the law there though.
Do you think you could buy that soul back from Satan. . .throught the mail. Actually, why don’t you try it by e-mail. You don’t want to get snails in it, do you?
jodih (2/5/00):
I don’t know in what jurisdiction you practice, or what kind of law you specialize in, but CA.US is considerably harder-nosed with pro-pers than is the federal system. As I recall, both have statements on the books as to their rules and outlooks. CA judges are not supposed to convience pro-pers in any way not set out in the statutes or rules of court. My experience (considerable) was that they come very close to practicing that dogma.
You mention “extensive” experience with pro-pers and then include the Freemen. Reading between the lines, I suspect most of your experience was with the Freemen. I can well imagine that such people attempted to take advantage of lenience in rules possibly permitted by judges, given that they tend to believe this country should retrace about 100 yr, wiping out income taxes, etc. . .and, if it doesn’t, total nonparticipation and maybe force should be applied. I don’t accept that your experience with such persons (although they may have well-defined points of law set out) should be taken as representative of pro-pers across the Nation.
As to the relative choice of sins resultant from appointment vs. election of judges, see my comment above on the extended gubernatorial pre-tracking of choices for judgeships in CA.US. In CA, judges are initially appointed, in a manner controlled de facto usually by certain state senators or whatever. Ex-gov Wilson did this while a senator. At following elections, their names are supposed to appear on local ballots, on which the electorate can vote them out theoretically. But if the gov appoints them just before the election to a different position, their names never appear in that election. Hoppity skip to ma (state’s) loo. So, for all practical purposes, judges are appointed in CA. And there are a lot of judges who get passed by completely, for political and decisonal reasons, I’m sure, who are far less than happy with that state of affairs of the state.
BobT:
As of about a year ago, at least, the dollar limit of a claim for money in CA, in the Municipal Court, or as it is now arranged in most counties, the lower division of the Superiror Court, is $25,000. See the details here. Scroll down to “A CANONICAL EXAMPLE OF CALIFORNIA ATTORNEYS PROCLAIMING THEMSELVES AS THE LAW OF THIS STATE” Here, two two-bit attorneys with an insurance company insisted some parties suing me could each go beyond their coverage, saying this to try to prepare me for paying out beyond their coverage, which was complete up to this limit. On the contrary, I had assured myself, not only from a copy of the CA Code of Civil Procedure, but also from a definite statement from the court clerk (not an attorney, of course). These attorneys never admitted their lie but eventually settled the case within my coverage. No, Melin, it wasn’t your company, but what’ll ya bet they wouldn’t’ve been more corrupt? Would you deny this $25K limit? The interesting thing, though, was that the two attorneys mentioned on the above-linked page have some stature, and they, obviously not knowing (because it wouldn’t be worth either’s time to take a lower-division case), also insisted that a single party could go above this $25K limit. One of these attorneys is one who was once prominent for trying to support some Japanese-Americans as to behavior in resistance to the infamous US internment of its Japanese-ancestry, coastally habitated citizens. I’ve never pointed these jokers to my Law Day page, but they’ve never contacted me about it. Does somebody want to sue me for telling the truth of state law on this point. . .without a license?
Not right about a judge hearing mainly criminal cases not having as many pro-ers before him; he’d have more, I’m certain.
jti (2/6/00):
So, if you don’t know anything about the pertinent US law, why would it be that you should choosea hypothetical wording of such law that would support the posting attorney’s position in this contest? Simply BECAUSE YOU ARE AN
Right on! Why do we even need judges in such cases? Just stick those babbling babies on each side of a laboratory balance and declare the winner! Save the public coffers. Well, doesn’t Justice always tote around one o’ them things in one o’ her paws?
mangeorge (2/9/00, 9:14 pm):
Berkeley is asking for peace? Everywhere but in Berkeley, right? (Or is that ‘Please Execute All Computer Engineers’?) (Oops, illegal access to code.)
We interrupt this program with an emergency message: :eek:
Did you see how black those lawyers got when manhattan just “barbecued” my whole picture of them? Just as black outside as their little hearts inside. I thought I smelled something like burnt rubber mixed with guano. It’s a really “Pit”-y.
Resume normal (?) post.
Brucker (2/10/00, 9:58):
That’s one the situations where the representative system of government clearly breaks down. At such time as that law is being tested, the components of “the legislature” are no doubt still around. They should be asked what they thought they meant. (Not to say many of them would know, since most of them were probably just rolling logs when they voted for it.) Instead, the judge glories in his power to invent, really, a whole new meaning for the text of that law.
So then, you would have to settle here what ‘primarily’ is supposed to mean. From what has been said in these exchanges, the design of DeCSS was primarily pursued to adapt CSS to a different OS, not to provide the public with a means of circumventing what you said.
Bricker 2/10/00, 1:20 pm):
What we always knew those who pursue the laws (cops, lawyers judges): They first found out about such things by breaking them.
Well, in CA.US, they’re getting around to wiping out ex-post-facto restrictions, so we’ll just get Virginia to extend the statute on this offense enough to disbar you. Hey, tell it to the judge. 'Most all those hackers the FBI is out after will no doubt be quite young also. You are a good friend of the judge, aren’t you?
ranulfa
Yup.
Melin (2/11/00, 1:07 am)
Yeah, all he needs is a good Siamese-attack insurance lawyer.
WhiteNight (2/11/00, 3:04 pm):
I think this is a just and excellent stance and one that keeps the law from getting infinitely complex. Of course, I’d have to study the batch of related laws to see how well this meshese with them. I gather, as to the DMCA, it is not yet settled in the courts as to whether this stance/doctrine would be compatible with it as presently worded. It’s clear that a lot of traditional concepts, such as machine, document, mechanism, algorithm, work of art, viewing, accessing, etc. are merging and resplitting in different manners, as a result of rapid technology changes. I haven’t really followed much how lawyers, judges and legislators think they want to reconceptualize a lot of this or resist various changes, but the usual legal path is to make a real mess of societal changes legally, in the interest of the compound legocentric brotherhood and the wealthy corporate structures here. The reasonable structure in the law here or anywhere, as in other manageable structures should be to maintain something close to a tree with few main noninterleaving branches and to keep pruning shears handy.
Ray
Sorry about that UBB screw-up of mine that created an unintended long bold section.
Ray
Oh, and yeah, a link to Black Monday in the Pit – slightly tarred and skewered law. Blackened to taste.
Ray (poor cook)
Oh.
My.
Gosh.
Yup. I surely do.
- Rick
Nanobyte, whether you file pro se or not, you are indeed paranoid and obsessive. Thanks for taking the time to illustrate that for us.
Freaking loon.
“I’ll tell you a secret, baby - maybe you can’t do better - gotta settle for second best” - the Judybats
*ranulfa
yup.*
Um, Nanobyte, I was saying that the assertion that that a particular judge had engaged in what would be extraordinary wrongdoing without any evidence, based on an outcome one disagrees with, is libellous, because making such an accusation shows malicious or negligent disregard for the truth – you agree with that? Great!
Otherwise, I’ve not seem such a long deranged post in a while.
But I’ve got to go – I have a political asylum case to do research for that is netting me wads of cash. Got to go cut and paste my brief from an online canned brief factory, so I can get out to the golf course in my BMW.
Not.
If I may jump in here, and restate my original question.
A person goes to med school for what, 4 years or so, before concentrating on a specialty?
Let’s say that another person goes to law school for a while before s/he decides whether to concentrate on becoming a judge or a lawyer? I’m talking about for important civil or criminal stuff, not arbitration. That doesn’t require a lot of legal knowledge and can be handled by by counselors and law students etc.
Lawyers are supposed to “take sides”, judges are not. I don’t think that argueing a case and moderating a trial are exactly the same thing. There would be nothing to prevent a lawyer from becoming a judge or vice versa, as long as they met the qualifications.
Sorry to interrupt.
Peace,
mangeorge
It’s not exactly the same skill set, but it’s pretty darn close.
A litigator needs to develop a strong knowledge of the rules of evidence. He needs to be able to hear a question and quickly act if it’s objectionable. If he can’t immediately realize that it calls for hearsay, for example, the witness will answer, and the jury will hear the answer… and getting an objection sustained at that point is not all that helpful. If the question calls for a conclusion, or for speculation, or is a cross questions outside the scope of direct examination… all of these things have to be clear mor eor less instantly.
This is also true for judges, since they must rule on the objections propounded by each side. They have a little more leeway, I suppose, since they can make the lawyer raising the objection spell out his grounds, and ask the opposition to respond, giving him two sides to weigh. But in general, he’s got to know what the rules are.
It’s certainly conceivable that a person could follow a course of study designed to prepare him for the bench… but the reality is that being in a courtroom as a litigator is the best training ground for being a trial judge.
Traditionally, trial judges are the people tapped to become appellate judges. Here, though, I must admit the connection isn’t quite as clear. An appeals court doesn’t worry about split-second timing. They examine a dry record and listen to timed oral argument from the parties, and make their ruling days or weeks later. Their decisions are based on the law, with the facts already set in stone.
This might be a fruitful area for purely academic types… although I kinda think that even here, it’s good to know the appellate judge reading a transcript has been there. He knows how certain errors manifestly affect the trial’s outcome, and others just don’t matter much.
- Rick
Interesting factoid I came across today would seem to apply here:
Verbosity is not the same as eloquence.
- Sue
Bricker:
Valerieblaise:
“Occupation: superhero/temp”
Hey, ya gotta do better’n that to prove you’re one of them. Where’dja get yer degree in psychiatry, anyhow?
ranulfa:
Well, yes, I agreed fully with your comment as to the libelousness of what WhiteNight seemed to think was preferable to characterizations of persons generally, within a particular social role. Seeming to be quite clear-headed and tuned into things, I was surprised he took that position.
Hmm. I though attorneys hung out in a legal asylum. They sure act like it. Can’t handle the outside world’s less cloistered and more reasonable views. But you know how the lust for money ties one down. 
You don’t believe attorneys cut and paste all the time? Reams have been written on the sub ject. Back before computers were so human literate, a city attorney opposing myself in pro per simply threw a bunch of xerox copies of points and authorities in with her filings. Didn’t matter; she and the judge were of the same profession/brotherhood. Later a deputy DA cut and pasted her prior filings in the same case by computer, and got extra, disrupting legal statements in her new filing. Par for the course. . .er. . .trade. Doesn’t WestLaw have a dial-a-brief?
Majormd:
My, my, aren’t we modest now. The MD is no longer capitalized. Sorry, it still shows.
The libraries are filled with books that quote other people. Even MDs have told me that 95% (hey, that’s above their norm of "90%) of the books in med libes are worthless. “Verbosity is not the same as eloquence,” is not exactly unknown or disagreed with. The length of my post sequence, of course, was in correlation with the overall length of the Bricker-WhiteNight exchange, because I got behind; but also, that exchange was interesting and probably shouldn’t have been broken up anyhow. . .except it was way off topic. I think mangeorge warrants an apology from those two.
Consider the curt pronouncement by the mascot of Mad Magazine:
“What me, worry?” He had old Abe beat by a longshot. I wonder why he never became president.
Here’s a case I won against the City of Palo Alto, CA.US in pro per.
Of course, as all you good attorneys have noted, only a crazy person would play this role in a civil case. I didn’t even live in the exact district in which the traffic-control project at issue was being implemented, but it affected me. The case in the lower court was handled by an older attorney who did live in that district and he was part of a group of dwellers therein who were against the project, as I was. You might say he was handling the case pro bono, but being one of the interested parties, I’d say he was more like practicing his civil duty. Anyhow, his professional interest stopped at the point where appeal was needed.
The city attorney was simply trying to avoid an EIR by splitting into two projects – on paper only – what was, in fact, one larger project. I was not a “property owner”, as the opinion states; I was merely renting. I mentioned that to the judge, after I got the earliest version of this document; but you know how judges are; they’re not too particular about accuracy. But this judge was logical, like not many. However, he was about the last in the area who was, and didn’t last long after the right-wing powers, very quickly afterward, filled almost all the judgeships around that area with their stooges.
Actually, this case ended up not doing anything for the anti-project side, because an unrelated complex act of corruption in that county kept me from pursuing the matter to finality. Now, if I were paranoid, as those here, who prefer fiction over fact, would have it, I’d say the interference that followed was orchestrated in conjunction with the City of Palo Alto. However, I found out the foul basis of the latter, along with the self-documentated evidence of the perpetrating judge, of what she did off the bench, and the two matters were not related.
Four score and. . . (Oh, that was supposed to go at the top, wasn’t it.)
Ray (As the legal bloc always says: “Of the people, by the people and for the people. . .? Hey, only we know how to spell ‘Just us’ the sane and sovereign way.”
Bricker:
I addressed your name in the last post and then forgot to fill in what I was going to say. Almost as absent-minded as a judge.
Sure, there is much in common in what attorneys and judges need to know. Afterall, in the same jurisdiction, they’re supposed to be playing with the same set of laws (even if they have to invent one of their own, so the pro-per on the other side won’t know what’s going on). But, there is obviously a conflict of interest that arises, not, of course, from studying the same material, but from being buddy-buddy throughout law school, when in court, one is supposed to take a non-combative stance while the other is allowed to sling whatever fantasy of law or fact he desires almost.
The reason the judge I mentioned lied in complete vindictive abandon, off her bench, to effect serious outrageous damage to me – in something unrelated to the traffic case in which I was before her, and in any way to me at all – was because I made it clear (in a quite civil manner) that she didn’t know anything about a Murgía Motion and that I made some comments about some behavior in court as to what appeared to be some cozy relationship between her and the official charging the traffic offense I was arguing against. Later, an attorney I only knew socially informed me that he had gone to school with those two women and their present husbands in their undergraduate days at UCLA, and the two, both later educated in law, were long-time personal friends, not just professional work-alongside-each-others. I guess there’s nothing technically illegal about that, but I sensed the game, she realized I sensed it, and freaked; so I guess she wasn’t too comfortable in others knowing of such a relationship between judge and prosecutor.
Well, along those lines, couldn’t one say that the best training for a police officer would be for him/her to accompany crooks (with a sort of non-liability arrangement, of course ) while they do their thing? The more I think of it, the more parallel I see in this, if you consider the ideal in an arbiter/judge. The point is: the two, while needing to know common stuff, law in once case and crime in the other, need to approach it from an entirely different angle. When I studied engineering in undergraduate college, it was exactly as they say: “Yesterday, I didn’t know what an engineer were, and now I are one.” But during my upper-level years, I interleaved industry experience with my schooling. (The Cornell engineering program was then a 5-yr program.) But I didn’t get the same schooling as business majors, say, would, who could end up working at the same plant as did we engineers.
Truly, the worst part of acting in pro per is that you end up thinking like one of those %!*&^%^@#!&^ species that like to invent horrendous jokes about themselves. . .but don’t like to hear people speak of the reality of their exceedingly unjust deeds (collectively) against both individuals and society at large. Then you’re disgusted with yourself. Clearly, I haven’t been a pro-per for some time now, and my disgust is with a society that sits down for all this abuse, even more than it is with the chameleonlike-sensitivy of the perpetrators themselves.
And just because some law professor somewhere should get some students to nose around murder convictions in IL and find innocents about to be executed – whereafter, the governor take a second look at his state’s railroad to the gas chamber/whatever – doesn’t make the legal profession as a whole / lawyers collectively look one bit better than otherwise. The point is, lawyers will never clean their racket up, and the sits around ending up having lawyers run all three branches of their government. All programmed the same in the same law schools. Where are checks and balances in that?
Yeah, I know: Abe Lincoln could’ve said all that in 10 sec. Hey, his world was a little simpler then – no computers to amplify injustice.
Ray (At least we got this thread back on topic – Lawyers vs. Judges. . .vs. everybody else.)
Bricker:
Oh, gee, then I forgot out golf date.
Well, I guess you don’t play. I don’t either. But looking at this page page, and this map when you put 705 Park Ave. into it, I’d say that, if you did play, the closest course would be Penderbrook Golf Club in Fairfax.
Note how the land gets totally smothered with golf courses in a place like DC where attorneys stack up 6 ft deep.
Ray
No, you were right the first time – I do play. My disbelief was at your suggestion that you’d be able to pinpoint the exact golf course(s) somehow. I now see you were just making a reasonable guess based on my location… but as I knew then and you know now, this area has no dearth of golf courses, making a random selection extremely unlikely to be accurate.
I am more the fan of the moderately priced public golf courses - Twin Lakes and Greendale come to mind – that are about as close to my house as Penderbrook. If I want to splurge on a private course, it’s only a twenty minute drive to Bristow Manor, a links-style course to the south. And there’s a little nine-hole within walking distance of my house called Jefferson (also a county course) that suits me fine, too.
- Rick
Until just a few years ago, it was a criminal offense in New Jersey to state truthfully, in any venue, that you had won a malpractice case against a lawyer.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
I didn’t take the position that it’s preferable to pick a name at random from a listing and make false claims about that person instead of about their profession.
I instead claimed that a specific judge, based on his actions, and his explanatory order, was either crooked or criminally stupid.
For me to claim based on the actions of one judge that all are bad would have been wrong, but to claim, based on the actions of a specific judge that the judge specifically was bad seems fine. If we aren’t allowed to say that people’s actions make them either crooked or stupid, how are we to be allowed to call out people we believe to be too stupid for their position, or commiting illegal activities?
My initial reaction when I heard of the trial results were that someone had to be smoking crack, but it wasn’t until I read more about that specific trial that I decided it was the judge. Defendants were disbelieved, motives of others were attributed to them, statues ignored, etc. The plaintiffs though were believed in all claims (or the judge didn’t say otherwise, like he did with the defendants) even when those were provably false.
Look at this from my perspective. If you believed about this judge what I believe, what would you say? That all judges are stupid/crooked, or that thus one is?
Having read the transcript of the hearing (thanks, WhiteNight, for the link) something is clear now that wasn’t clear before.
You’re absolutely right when you say that “Defendents weren’t believed.” But did you pick up on the reason?
Defendents submitted no affidavits at all. The judge refused to permit a defense expert to testify by telephone, and the defense (despite having been served over a week before the hearing) did not submit any evidence other than unsupported allegations at the hearing.
What a lawyer says in arguing his client’s case is NOT evidence. Only witnesses, documents, and tangible physical or testimonial reports are evidence. It’s not that the defendents were disbelieved – rather, that they submitted no competent evidence for the judge to weigh.
- Rick