THE TYRANNY OF THE JUDICIARY

The Supreme Court of Connecticut

Supreme Sophistry, Intellectual Dishonesty
and How a Case is Just Part of a Political Deal

This is to set forth my view of the conversion of the Connecticut Supreme Court into a
political machine trading cases for money as seen in Perez-Dickson v. Bridgeport, when it
threw out the judgment for the plaintiff rendered on a $2,000,000.00 jury verdict. The
decision is not only pure sophistry but is intellectually dishonest. The court has repeatedly
violated its own binding precedents and rules and has based its decision on non-existent
facts or factual claims rejected by the jury as not credible in order to reach a prearranged
political result to relieve the City of Bridgeport and probably the state from having to pay
the judgment.

I argued the appeal for the plaintiff. Lawyers in a case often criticize a decision and
disagree with the court, but they never attack the honesty or integrity of the court. This is
because they have to continue to earn a living and inevitably will have to appear before
the same justices in the future. They can’t bite the hand that feeds them. For over 45
years, this was my strict policy, however, now that I am fully retired I can freely express
my beliefs and opinions about this decision and the court without fear of retribution. I
may be leaving but I’m not going quietly.

First, when we examine this decision in detail, it becomes clear that it doesn’t make
sense. The Supreme Court said we “failed to make the Connecticut Constitution claim” to
the trial court. This is simply a flat outright lie. Paragraph 13 of the first count of the
original complaint dated July 21, 2000 and each and every subsequent revised complaint
specifically alleges that the plaintiff was disciplined for exercising her rights guaranteed
by “. . . Sections 3, 4, and 14 of Article First of the Constitution of this State.” The simple
truth is that we made the claim. It was the defendants who failed to address it. The court
is standing the law on its head. Nothing could be clearer than that the defendants were on
notice of this claim from the start. The defendants argument to the Supreme Court was
that they were entitled to rely on the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Garcetti v. Ceballos,
which was a 5-4 decision holding that public employers who disciplined employees for
employment related speech were immune from lawsuits because such speech was not
protected under the first amendment of the federal constitution. Garcetti, out of
California, makes no reference to the Connecticut Constitution or any other state
constitution. When our case was submitted to the jury, both the federal and state
constitution free speech provisions were read to the jury. No interrogatories were
requested as to whether the jury decision was based on a violation of the federal or the
state constitution. Under the Connecticut Supreme Court’s own heretofore strictly
enforced general verdict rule, the court hearing the appeal must presume that the jury
found every issue of fact in favor of the prevailing party. This rule applies whenever a
verdict is rendered on one or more causes of action. Here, the court ignores its own rule,
to fault the plaintiff for the defendants’ failure to properly address the issue that was
specifically pleaded by the plaintiff.

The court then goes on to say at pp. 501-502 that even if it reviewed this “alternate
ground for affirmance” we failed to establish that the defendants would not be prejudiced
by such a review because the defendants “properly presumed that the state constitution
provides no broader protection [than the federal constitution].” Accordingly, the court
concludes that Garcetti bars our state constitution claim. This is pure sophistry and
outright deception to cover up its own case of State v. Linares, in which it held in 1995
that the free speech provisions in our state constitution are much broader and more
expansive than those under the first amendment of the federal constitution. Since 1995
the court has on at least three occasions affirmed this principal. We constantly cited State
v. Linares and its progeny to the court in our briefs and oral argument in support of the
argument that the defendants were on notice of the indisputable fact that they could not
rely on Garcetti or claim prejudice as to our state constitution claim. Incredibly, the court
deals with our claim by sweeping it under the rug. It simply doesn’t mention State v.
Linares let alone attempt to distinguish it. Accordingly, the court’s conclusion is in direct
conflict with its own case law.

Section 31-51q of the Connecticut General Statutes, the “whistle blower” statute under
which we sued the defendants, specifically references the state constitution free speech
provisions and clearly permits any public employee to sue if he or she is disciplined for
exercising free speech rights under the state constitution. The author of this statute was
my old friend the late Richard Tulisano whose impassioned speech on the floor of the
House immediately before its passage into law, prophetically and emphatically noted that
the free speech provisions of the state constitution are specifically referenced in the
statute because “ our own Connecticut Constitution to me is more expansive and more
protective than the First Amendment of the Federal Constitution.”

The inevitable devastating result of this abomination of a decision is that any public
sector employer is immunized from liability for disciplining an employee for speaking out
on any issue. This ruling is in direct contradiction to the express language of Section 31-
51q. And that is exactly what has happened here. Just three days after the court denied our
motion for reconsideration, the plaintiff was again placed on administrative leave.
Nothing can be clearer than that the Connecticut Supreme Court has granted public sector
employers a license to get rid of disgruntled employees who speak out or oppose them on
any issue.

A good example of how this works can be found in the California case of Hong v. Grant
pending before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Juan Hong was a full professor with
tenure at the University of California at Irvine. He sued the University after he was
disciplined by being denied his annual merit salary increase because he had publicly
complained that too much teaching was being done by lecturers, criticized his dean and
chair for offering a faculty position before the faculty could vote on it, and had criticized
faculty colleagues for grant related conflicts of interest and misrepresenting academic
credentials.

The district court held that under Garcetti, Hong’s statements were not an exercise of his
first amendment free speech rights because they were not matters of public concern but
only internal personnel decisions of his department, notwithstanding his claim that the
public has an inherent right to know the inner workings of a public university funded by
the taxpayers. The district court therefore found the retaliation to be permissible and
granted summary judgment in favor of the University.

An analysis of this disturbing case and of the chilling impact of speaking out by faculty
members of a public university that we can expect in the wake of Garcetti can be found in
an article by S. Sanders, When it Comes to Free Speech, is a Professor Just Another
Government Employee at chronicle.com/weekly, August 1, 2008, Volume 54, Issue 47,
Page A-2. Sanders claims that Garcetti can lead to frightening scenarios and underscores
the principle that a government entity can discipline an employee in ways it cannot
penalize an ordinary citizen and that a professor at a public university speaking out on
faculty issues is no different from a clerk. Sanders notes that professors at public
universities have unfairly been thrown into a Catch-22 situation by Garcetti. Using the
logic espoused in Garcetti, a professor could be disciplined without recourse for opposing
a curriculum change, advocating rights for transgendered colleagues, or opposing
affirmative action in campus hiring. Although Garcetti does not directly address the issue
of the academic workplace, the majority opinion anticipates such a case by noting that
there is an argument that expression related to academic scholarship or classroom
instruction implicates additional constitutional interests but reserves the issue for
“another day.” With great fear we await the inevitable “another day.” No wonder my old
friend Richard Tulisamo is turning over in his grave. One of his greatest legislative
achievements, the enactment of a meaningful whistle blower statute with real teeth has
just been rendered meaningless because our case was just the by-product of a corrupt
political deal.

Why did the court in our case hear oral argument in May, 2011, then wait 6 months until
just a week before the Mayor of Bridgeport was re-elected to issue its order for the parties
to file supplemental briefs on its “alternate ground for affirmance” under the state
constitutional issue where clearly there was no alternate ground? Did it really take 6
months after oral argument for the court to conclude that it was not going to decide the
appeal on the issues briefed by the parties but on the phony artificial issue it created or
did the court deliberately delay the decision in this case because the sale of our case by
the court was part of the political deal between the state and the mayor depending on his
re-election.? The next question is why did the court wait three months to issue its ruling
on the legality of the state taking over the Bridgeport Board where the simple single
issue claim was that the state failed to offer retraining to the duly elected board members
who were removed in clear violation of the statute which required such retraining before
any board member could be removed and when the court finally ruled, why did it not
order the reinstatement of the illegally removed board members who were duly elected
by the citizens of Bridgeport? And why didn’t the court order the removal of their
illegally installed replacements? The only plausible explanation is that the court was
part of the political deal with the governor and the mayor for the state to take over the
board of education and install the governor’s politically chosen people to run the
Bridgeport schools and everything depended on the mayor getting reelected last
November.

They couldn’t possibly reverse the judgment in our case on the issues briefed and argued
in May, 2011 because each and every issue raised by the defendants was not adequately
briefed, not raised in the trial court, not properly preserved for appeal or was
affirmatively waived.

The first signal from the court that led me to believe this case was politically fixed was
the insulting order issued nearly six months after oral argument, for the parties to file
supplemental briefs on the phony issue it created as to whether the defendants were
prejudiced by our failure to raise the state constitution claim, where that claim was
distinctly made in each and every complaint and was fully briefed by the plaintiff.. How
could the defendants possibly be prejudiced by their own failure to address or brief an
issue that was clearly raised by the plaintiff? They never even addressed it in the motion
to set aside the verdict. When I saw this insulting order, I suddenly realized something
was seriously wrong and that there was a powerful stench of judicial impropriety. The
justices of the Connecticut Supreme Court have been called many called many things
by many people during my 45 years of practice but I don’t remember anyone ever
calling them stupid. When I saw it wasn’t the result of stupidity but that this was the
court‘s only way to frame an issue that could possibly justify a reversal, that’s when I
knew we were going to be sacrificed in the deal to bail out Bridgeport.

And indeed we were. Just a few weeks after the decision, in the final minutes of the
legislative session, after midnight, a new appropriation measure was suddenly brought up
by the leadership under mysterious circumstances whereby state funding to the Bridgeport
Board of Education was increased by $3,500,000.00. Now we’re seeing how all that
money is being wasted by a part time superintendent being paid an exorbitant salary,
hiring his cronies and awarding illegal no bid contracts to his friends and cronies,
some of whom have never performed under the contracts, while the governor, mayor,
and the board stand idly by, even though the non performers were paid up front and never
asked for a refund when their non performance necessitated continuing payments to the
contractors who were to be replaced to remain on the job on a per diem basis.

But you ask, what motive does the court have that can justify seven justices of the
Supreme Court violating their oaths of office and the rules of judicial conduct by
participating in such a conspiracy? The answer lies in the state budget. The chief justice,
who wrote the decision in our case, is the person who must present the state judicial
department’s request to the legislature for the appropriation to operate the courts and
other branches of the judicial department. In other words, she is the one who has to grovel
to the legislature for the annual appropriation to operate the judicial branch of the state
government when the state is in the midst of a disastrous fiscal crises. In the last year, that
appropriation has not been sufficient to keep up with escalating costs and expenses,
requiring the chief justice to close court houses and lay off employees. During the
pendency of our case, we were reading horror stories in the newspapers, almost on a daily
basis, of insufficient public funds necessary to provide the most basic school supplies to
the Bridgeport students. On a regular basis there would be a story about schools which
had run out of paper, pencils and other supplies, rendering teachers unable to teach pupils.
How can an inner city school with low test scores ever hope to see any
improvement if its schools are not adequately funded by a City and State that are broke.
And how could such a broke board possibly pay a reduced judgment of over
$2,000,000.00 with interest and over $4,000,000.00 if the original verdict were ever
reinstated?

Where the chief justice has to grovel to the legislature ever year for the necessary funds to
operate the judicial branch of the state government, it is rather obvious that trading in a
case such as ours, results in at least an additional $2,000,000.00 becoming available.

But you still may have doubts about the other justices going along with such a devious
agreement. I believe they were convinced by the argument that if there wasn’t enough
funds in the Bridgeport board’s budget to provide pencils and paper to the students, the
students would be the ones who would suffer immeasurably as a result of any decision
affirming the judgment in our case.

But you ask, why would the two black justices on the court go along with the others if
there was blatant racial discrimination in our case. The answer is that after thirty years on
the bench a judge is not living in the real world and a judge who may have been a civil
rights activist at the time of his appointment may gradually become little more than an
“Uncle Tom” thirty years later, more eager to please his “brethren” on the bench by
looking the other way when outright racial discrimination occurs. But I suppose in their
minds they saw the situation as one where the children of Bridgeport would be the
victims if they affirmed the judgment.

In today’s judicial atmosphere it is difficult if not impossible to find a judge who will
ever find racial discrimination, regardless of the facts. An example is a case I had in the
federal court a few years ago in which I represented a black woman who was fired from
her job as an order processor and shipper from a large manufacturing company. The
stated ground for her termination was her inability to complete and ship twenty orders per
day, the minimum requirement for all processors. The employer moved for summary
judgment and submitted an affidavit from her white supervisor and documentation that
she had been given several warnings and a final written warning but she had never been
able to complete twenty orders a day and had not shown any improvement in her average
of just twelve orders a day. She filed a counter-affidavit in which she stated that her
supervisor required her on a daily basis to fill twenty orders for the supervisor before she
could begin filling her own orders. (Supervisors were also required to complete twenty
orders a day.) Her counter-affidavit further stated that her supervisor would usually
leave and do her personal shopping during this time, that she was the only black
processor out of about a dozen in her department under the white supervisor, and the only
one who was ever required to first fill the supervisor’s quota before starting her own,
and that she was require to fill the supervisor’s 20 orders every day right up to the day she
was fired. Notwithstanding the fact that her counter-affidavit stated that she was actually
filling an average of 33 orders a day but that she was required to put through the first 20
of those orders in the name of her supervisor who would get credited for them, the
district court judge granted summary judgment in favor of the employer. The second
circuit in a per curium one sentence decision affirmed the judgment without explanation
let alone attempting to set forth any reasoning. In effect, this woman - the only black
in her department - was used as a personal slave by her supervisor, something any
reasonable person would acknowledge as blatant racial discrimination and we weren’t
even able to get a trial for a jury to decide.

In my mind, the first real clue of the big fix in our case was Steve Ecker’s and Mark
Anastasi’s behavior in their representation of the City. Ecker presented a picture of
supreme overconfidence by not adequately briefing some of the issues on the appeal and
cross appeal such as the remittitur and interest issues where the inadequate briefing would
have cost his clients over $2,000.000.00 if the judgment were affirmed, exposing him to a
serious legal malpractice claim. In addition, he jubilantly swaggered into the pre-
argument conference bragging that he would bet his house on getting the judgment
reversed. How can an attorney appealing a multi-million dollar judgment rendered against
his client be so confident of a reversal where the defendants’ trial counsel did not
preserve a single issue for appellate review unless he knows something about a deal in
advance? And how could Mark Anastasi as City Attorney, who filed an appearance in the
appeal and was the one Ecker said he had to go to in order to get authority to make an
offer, be so confident as to not even bother to show up at the pre-argument conference or
ever make an offer to settle? I practiced law in New Haven for 45 years and have had
about 200 appeals and knew from the start that something was seriously wrong with the
conduct of Steve Ecker openly displaying his confidence about the outcome of this case
and refusing to make an offer to settle. Their open display of premature celebration
convinced me that they knew enough in advance about the inevitable result right from the
start. They were both counsel for the City in the appeal concerning the illegal removal of
elected board members. In all those years I had never seen or heard of an attorney for an
appellant appealing a multi-million dollar judgment against his client display such an
open exuberant attitude of total confidence in the outcome. At first it was based on the
claim that his clients did not get a fair trial and then when the transcript revealed that
claim had been affirmatively waived, it was the Supreme Court to the rescue with its
phony supplemental issue standing the law on its head.

I have had prior matters with Steve Ecker and have known him for at least ten years.
There is no question that he is an extremely able and sharp appellate lawyer. In fact, he is
one of the best and if I needed to hire an appellate lawyer, he would certainly be on my
short list. That is why I knew something was seriously wrong right from the start. Any
appellate lawyer representing a defendant on the losing end of a multi-million dollar
judgment could not possibly be so confident without advance knowledge of the outcome.
We filed the offer to compromise for $150,000.00 in 2000 when the action was
brought and refiled the same offer when the complaint was amended in 2007. We argued
extensively in our brief that we were entitled to prejudgment interest under the statute
from the date of the judgment back to the date of the filing of the original
complaint in 2000 because the statute specifically provides for the refiling of the same
offer after an amendment and relates it back to the date of the filing of the original
complaint which is exactly what we did. Ecker’s appeal raised the issue that the trial court
erred in awarding prejudgment interest. Ecker claimed in his brief that our second offer to
compromise replaced the first offer and that the statute only authorizes interest back to
the filing of the 2007 amendment. His brief cited no authority and provided no analysis of
his claim. Our brief cited at least five cases in support of the award of interest
relating back to the date of the filing of the original complaint. The Supreme Court has
consistently refused to review an issue raised by an appellant without support or analysis
on the ground it is inadequately briefed. I point this out merely because the difference
between the amount of interest we claimed and the amount he claimed was over
$1,000,000.00. So my question is how can a lawyer representing the defendants-
appellants on the losing end of a multi-million dollar judgment be so sure of a reversal
that he doesn’t even bother to adequately brief a million dollar issue where clearly
he would be committing malpractice if the court ever got to that issue - unless he knew
something about the outcome of the case before he wrote his brief. It is interesting to
note that when federal subpoenas were served on members of the legislature, the state
attorney general, who does not handle criminal investigations, recommended Ecker’s law
firm and one other to the recipients of the subpoenas.

Ecker’s initial appeal was dismissed by the Appellate Court because it was not taken
from a final judgment under a rule that court established in the case of Lord v.
Mansfield over ten years ago. I represented the victim of the then newly established
rule in Lord. Even though we had no prior notice of this then brand new rule, we were
denied permission to file a new late appeal. When the Appellate Court dismissed Ecker’s
appeal under Lord, the rule had been in effect for over ten years, yet, without
explanation, it granted his motion for permission to file a new late appeal more than
three months after the final judgment over our strenuous objection. While, the court
does have discretion to allow the late filing of an appeal, such blatant outright
favoritism shown by this extraordinary and rare exercise of discretion, was just another
example of justice not being fairly administered in this state, as well as a clear signal
that this judgment would never be affirmed.

As to the Supreme Court’s recitation of the facts on which it relies to set aside the jury
verdict, nothing can be clearer than that it violates its own heretofore strictly enforced
rule that it must accept the facts in the light most favorable to the prevailing party.
Instead, it does just the opposite and relies on snippets of testimony quoted in the
defendants’ brief which were rejected by the jury as not credible and the court creates its
own set of facts out of thin air. Although, there are several dozen such instances in
the decision where the court rejects the facts as found by the jury and relies on the
testimony rejected by the jury as not credible, I will just cite two such instances, so as not
to bore you with the rest because it would probably double the length of this letter.

The first instance is at pages 510-511 where the court attempts to recite one example as to
why the disparate treatment of the plaintiff did not constitute evidence of discrimination.
Smith, the personnel director, testified that the Board’s policy was changed in 2003 or
2004 to eliminate the requirement of a preliminary inquiry before placing an accused
employee on administrative leave and therefore when the plaintiff was accused of
sexually abusing the male student and was placed on administrative leave without first
being afforded that inquiry that every other comparable had been afforded, it was not
evidence of discrimination because it was required by the policy change. But the
transcript reveals that this important change of policy testified to by Smith was never put
in writing, was never submitted to or approved by the Board and was never announced or
published anywhere prior to the plaintiff being denied the preliminary inquiry. Moreover,
we presented evidence that Smith’s testimony was inconsistent and not credible - in other
words, that she was lying to cover up the blatant racial discrimination in the treatment of
the plaintiff as evidenced by the fact that each and every principal and teacher accused of
abusing at student up to the day the plaintiff was placed on administrative leave had been
afforded the preliminary hearing and that the written rules affording the hearing were
never changed because it would have required Board approval. Further, and most
importantly, Smith, on cross examination admitted she had made a prior statement
inconsistent with her testimony when she admitted she was accurately quoted in the
Connecticut Post, well after the plaintiff’s suspension, that the preliminary inquiry
requirement was still in effect but needed to be changed. The transcript clearly reveals
that plaintiff’s trial counsel argued to the jury that Smith was a liar and that her testimony
should be rejected as not credible because on cross-examination she had admitted that she
had made the prior statement to the reporter which was completely inconsistent with her
testimony. What right did the Supreme Court have to overrule the jury to restore her
rejected credibility?

Secondly, at page 511, the court cites the defendant Ramos’ (the Superintendent)
testimony that less than a year after the plaintiff was placed on administrative leave, he
placed a white male principal on administrative leave without any preliminary hearing or
inquiry after allegations of sexual harassment were made against him. What the court
fails to mention is that what the defendants attempted to convince the jury was
administrative leave was actually a transfer to the superintendent’s office where that
principal continued to work every day during his so called administrative leave. This was
done in such a manner as to make it appear that the transfer was actually a promotion
because it was never announced that he was placed on administrative leave and could not
possibly have been viewed by the public or by any reasonable person as “administrative
leave” but was designed to be perceived as a promotion. Plaintiff’s counsel argued to the
jury that such a “transfer” could not possibly constitute “administrative leave” and that
Ramos’ testimony that this principal was placed on administrative leave was not credible.
Yet, again, the Supreme Court overrules the jury in order to find nonexistent facts and
determine the credibility of the witnesses.

Also, the court’s recitation of the evidence it lines up to support its own factual findings
obviously was done rather hastily because it just takes snippets of the witnesses’
testimony and ignores the impeachment evidence. The significance of this is that it shows
the decision was hastily written at the last minute, rather than after a lengthy period of
deliberation. Clearly, the court did not consult the transcript to attempt to corroborate the
accuracy of the snippets of testimony taken from the defendants’ brief. The mysterious
midnight $3,500.00 additional appropriation to the Bridgeport Board was due because the
legislative session was ending and our case had to be out of the way.

These are only two examples of at least a dozen similar instances of the Supreme Court
usurping and taking away the fact finding function from the jury. While the court pays lip
service to its long time honored rule that in ruling on a motion to set aside a jury verdict,
the evidence must be considered in the light most favorable to the prevailing party, it
proceeds to do just the opposite. It becomes the 7th juror with absolute veto power over
the 6 jurors who heard the case, observed the witnesses and judged their credibility and
substitutes its own factual findings by restoring credibility to the incredible and rejecting
the credible evidence.

The court makes much out of the seriousness of the allegation of sexual abuse of a young
boy made against the plaintiff by an assistant principal. Yet, the decision fails to mention
that the young boy who was 16 years old at the time of the trial, was called to the stand by
the plaintiff and emphatically testified that the incident never happened and that he had
never been questioned by any person on behalf of the defendants. Incredibly, the
defendants never called the assistant principal who made the allegation to the stand, even
though she was still employed by the Board at the time of the trial. No wonder the jury
was rightly outraged at the defendants’ conduct which they found in only three hours of
deliberation to be an “extreme and outrageous” hell-bent mission to unjustly destroy the
plaintiff for her daring to assert her right to speak out under the state constitution.

The decision makes much out of the court’s finding that the plaintiff’s evidence was not
sufficient to sustain her burden of proof that the defendants’ misconduct rose to the level
of being “extreme and outrageous” to establish her claim of intentional infliction of
emotional distress and the award of punitive damages. However, what the court neglects
to mention is that this claim was made in a separate count from the one under Section 31-
51q of the Connecticut Statutes (the Whistle Blower statute authored by Richard
Tulisano) which has no requirement of “extreme and outrageous” misconduct and
provides for punitive damages and attorneys’ fees if the employee is disciplined for
speaking out.

My take of this case is that while the sadly politicized Supreme Court made a deal with
the financially strapped city to relieve it from having to pay this judgment because it
would result in innocent school children suffering immeasurably, there may be something
much deeper and darker here. Shortly after the court decided our case, a mysterious
supplemental $3,500,000.00, over and above the already determined and paid state
educational funding to Bridgeport, was appropriated to the Bridgeport Board of Education
after midnight on the final day of the 2012 legislative session without debate or discussion.
Not long after the mayor’s reelection last November, Paul Vallas was named by the
Bridgeport Board as the new part time superintendent of schools at an annual salary of
$225,000.00. If you read Jonathan Pelto’s blog, Vallas has spent huge sums of the
Board’s limited funds awarding illegal no-bid contracts to his friends and cronies, all of
whom are out of state. It would be interesting to see if anyone connected to these people
contributed to the mayor’s reelection campaign or if any of them provided funds to others
who made contributions. I remember an occasion last year when he was quoted as saying
he takes allegations of corruption seriously and immediately turns them over for a full
investigation. Why hasn’t he done so in this case where Pelto is constantly hammering
Vallas over the awarding of the illegal no-bid contracts to his cronies and the mayor for
not only looking the other way but for his continuously lavishing Vallas with outright
praise and adulation. Why do they refuse to answer or even acknowledge the existence of
the allegations? Someone needs to investigate the source of the mayor’s re-election
campaign donations. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a connection to those who were
awarded the illegal no bid contracts and since federal funds were used to pay them, there
could be serious federal criminal implications.

“All courts shall

Article 1, Section 10 of the Connecticut Constitution states:
be open, and every person, for an injury done to him in
his person, property or reputation, shall have a remedy by
due course of law, and right and justice administered
without sale, denial or delay.” The chief justice issued a statement on
July 15, 2011 concerning the budget cuts to the judicial department which concludes that
the end result is that “. . . our ability to administer justice as required by the
Constitution may very well be compromised.”

This is truly a shocking admission. Is it a Freudian slip? She’s not limiting the
compromising of justice to untimely delays but apparently is including the sale and
denial of justice as well. It’s obvious that her meteoric rise to chief justice can be
attributed to her being controlled by the politicians. Without hesitation or shame, she
repudiates the very oath of her office to which she has sworn to preserve, protect and
defend the constitution of the State of Connecticut. While I can sympathize with her
plight in having to administer the judicial branch of our government with inadequate
funds to comply with the requirements of the state constitution, surely, one would think
that inadequate funding requiring her to close court houses and lay off employees might
result in delays. But, it truly shocks the conscience when it results in the political fixing
of cases where the state is exposed to having pay multimillion dollar judgments.
Inability to administer justice without delay is not the only thing that is gone. Sadly, we
now have justice administered with sale and denial.

Isn’t it the height of arrogance and unfairness for the chief justice to sit on cases where
the state is on the hook for payment of the judgment where she is the one who must
grovel to the legislature for the inadequate annual appropriation to run the judicial branch
of the government? And this brings up my final questions: Doesn’t this raise an inherent
conflict of interest for the Chief Justice to sit on cases such as ours? And even if she
believes she can be fair and impartial, isn’t this a situation where a reasonable person,
fully informed of these facts, would never believe she could hear the case and decide it
fairly and impartially? And, finally, doesn’t this appearance of partiality require her to at
least inform the parties of this appearance, and to recuse herself unless all the parties,
after being fully informed, agree that she should hear the case and affirmatively waive
their right to disqualify her.

Copyright © 2012 Max F. Brunswick. All rights reserved.