Dear concerned citizens,

Our civil and criminal justice systems are tasked with maintaining public safety and upholding the rule of law. Yet far too often, social justice takes a backseat while those in authority violate inalienable human rights.

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Information Pollution

 

When information pollution exists in the mainstream media we end up with societies that are overwhelmed with information and where truth can be somewhat elusive. Indeed, a significant portion of the populace can't even tell truth from fiction anymore.

 

Are you aware that innumerable documentaries, research papers, congressional reports / hearings, books, websites and articles (a selection has been curated and summarised on our website), along with hundreds of freedom organisations, international appeals and open letters throughout the world, addressed to the top leaders at the United Nations, the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN Environment Program, and all member States across the globe, supported / endorsed by thousands of sincere, educated, intelligent, highly credentialed experts (see below for summary) prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that global civil and criminal justice systems  (in both the developed and developing worlds) are riddled with corruption, misconduct, unethical practices, junket judges, magistrates and tribunal members who trample the conditions of their appointments (e.g. code of conduct, service charter, and obligations of diligence, impartiality and integrity), along with constitutions, statutes, case precedents, international agreements, contracts, medical codes, etc.?

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Award winning journalists who have won almost every honour in broadcast journalism (including several Emmy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, a Peabody Award, a Murrow Award, the Goldman Environmental Prize, and received citations from scholarly, professional, and charitable organisations); scientists; professors; healthcare professionals (e.g. medical doctors and physicians: generalists and specialists); legal practitioners; judges; law enforcement officers; current and former heads of state and government (e.g. Presidents, Prime Ministers, Former Governor General of Canada, Former Chancellor of Austria, etc.); Nobel Laureates; civil society organisations, current and former government and intergovernmental organisation officials; including representatives and leaders of civil society, academia, business, and faith communities.

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Many individuals have personally experienced the effects of tyranny and arbitrary removal of their rights, freedoms, privacy and possessions. However, too few in positions of authority condemn the inequities of our legal systems. Meanwhile, judges, tribunal members, legal practitioners (e.g. solicitors, attorneys, lawyers, barristers), law enforcement officers, and representatives (e.g. real estate agents) break laws with impunity.

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How long will we keep pretending:

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• That our justice systems work?

• That there is such a thing as objectivity?

• That self-selecting biases and the failures of justice systems have disengaged, disempowered and confused populaces around the world?

• That countries which are seen as the leaders of the western world in a lot of ways are in massive crisis?

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Verifiable Facts to Change Our World and Build a Brighter Future
 

PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO READ THE FOLLOWING NON-EXHAUSTIVE LIST TO GAIN A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF THE EXTENT AND PREVALENCE OF JUDICIAL CORRUPTION, MISCONDUCT AND UNETHICAL PRACTICES.

 

All information is taken from the most reliable sources available and can be verified using the links provided to trusted information sources. The PJA team presents this information as an opportunity for you to educate yourself and others, and to inspire you to strengthen democracy and to work together for a brighter future.

 

• If these things are possible, so too are just about anything else. If we can't trust our justice systems, who can we turn to?

• If the facts presented here were reported in headline news where they belong, wouldn't concerned citizens be astounded and demand to know more?

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This has not happened, which is partly why PJA was founded. Don't stay silent. It is high time to do something. Being aware of or witnessing human rights abuses and standing by is a form of complicity, which is effectively the same as allowing the offences / crimes to happen.

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We welcome you to learn more about our work and to join us in transforming our world for the better. To learn how, click here. We encourage everyone to join PJA. The world needs us more than ever.

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Did you know that:

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• ⚕️ Medical licenses are being used as licences to betray patients, whereby sexual abuse by medical doctors (GPs and physicians) is tolerated by regulators and forgiven in every state across the U.S., and that the medical profession shields doctors’ abuse nationwide, leaving patients traumatised and in the dark?

  • More than 2,400 U.S. doctors were sanctioned for sexually abusing their patients, according to a revelational reporting (2016-2017) that surveyed records from all 50 states and reveals the nationwide scope of the problem, or that more than 450 doctors had been brought before medical boards or courts in 2016 and 2017 for cases involving sexual misconduct.

  • State medical boards, which oversee physicians, allowed more than 50% of the sanctioned doctors to keep their licenses even after the accusations of sexual abuse were determined to be true, according to a yearlong investigation.

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• 🏛️ Thousands of U.S. judges who broke laws or oaths remained on the bench: As part of its Teflon Robe project / investigation, Reuters identified and reviewed 1,509 cases from the last dozen years (2008 through 2019) in which U.S judges resigned, retired or were publicly disciplined following accusations of misconduct. Thousands of state and local judges across America have been allowed to keep positions of extraordinary power and prestige after violating judicial ethics rules or breaking laws they pledged to uphold.

  • The news agency's investigation identified 3,613 cases from 2008 through 2018 in which states disciplined judges privately withholding from the public details of their offences, including the identities of the judges themselves.

  • 🏃 In many states, the lack of aggressive public oversight means that judges may behave with impunity.

  • In the unlikely case that judges are publicly charged with misconduct, many states enable judges to simply resign or retire, effectively putting a stop to the charges and any investigation of potential wrongdoing.

  • Reuters found that at least 341 judges across the United States escaped punishment or further investigation in the past dozen years by resigning or retiring amid misconduct allegations.

  • At least 5,206 people were directly affected by a judge's misconduct. The victims ranged from people who were illegally jailed to those subjected to racist, sexist and other abusive comments from judges in ways that tainted the cases.

  • For instance, Reuters found that city police, the sheriff's office, the state police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and a federal grand jury investigated Tim Parker, 58 (lawyer and a part-time judge) for about four years. Witnesses gave evidence that the judge disclosed the identity of a confidential informant; traded money and opioids for sex; and gave favorable treatment to young women in his courtroom, Reuters found. Despite the intense scrutiny, Parker was never charged with any crime.

  • All told, 9 of every 10 judges were allowed to return to the bench after they were sanctioned for misconduct, Reuters determined. They included:

    • A California judge who had sex in his courthouse chambers;

    • A New York judge who berated domestic violence victims;

    • A Maryland judge who, after his arrest for driving drunk, was allowed to return to the bench provided he took a Breathalyzer test before each appearance;

  • An Arkansas judge who styled himself as a Sugar Daddy stood accused by local women of soliciting sex in exchange for cash, drugs, and bail leniency, largely escaped accountability from authorities for years, a Reuters investigation found. Yet afterwards, he continued to practice law despite his misconduct.

 

• 🤝 Legal immunities: Meanwhile, with judges judging judges, rogues on the bench have little to fear.

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• ⏩ Emergency proceedings: The U.S. Supreme Court does not always receive full briefs on legal matters or hear oral arguments, and override the normal sequence of appellate proceedings to issue their orders. The “shadow docket”, the so-called emergency proceedings now constitute the majority of the Supreme Court’s business. Minimally argued, rarely justified and decided without transparency, shadow docket orders were once a tool the court used to dispense with unremarkable and legally unambiguous matters.

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• 👀 Secret revisions of decisions: The U.S. Supreme Court has been quietly revising its decisions years after they were issued, altering the law of the land without public notice.

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• 👮 Domestic abuse (verbal and physical assault) by police officers: Jonathan Blanks, a Cato Institute researcher reported that in the thousands of news reports he has compiled, domestic violence is the most common violent crime for which police officers are arrested. And yet, most of the arrested officers appear to keep their jobs. In 2016, an ABC 7 investigation found that nine of every 10 domestic violence allegations made against Chicago police officers by spouses or children resulted in no disciplinary action.

  • Courts can be perilous to navigate, too, since police intimately understand their workings and often have relationships with prosecutors and judges.

  • Police are also some of the only people who know the confidential locations of shelters.

  • Diane Wetendorf, a domestic violence counselor who wrote a handbook for women whose abusers work in law enforcement, believes they are among the most vulnerable victims in the country.

  • States like Texas make it nearly impossible to obtain records in police abuse cases.

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• 👮 Sexual abuse (rape) by police officers: A police officer in India was arrested after being accused of raping a 13-year-old girl who went to his station to report she had been gang-raped. In 2022, the alleged incident was the latest to spotlight the high levels of sexual violence in the world's largest democracy, where a woman is raped every 18 minutes on average. Police said the officer was arrested along with four other people and the girl's aunt, who was reportedly inside the station house room when she was attacked. Twenty-nine other officials present at the police station in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh at the time of the alleged assault were suspended from duty.

  • India has long been plagued by sexual violence against women.

  • India's rape laws and sentencing guidelines were overhauled after the 2012 Delhi rape and murder of a young medical student.

  • But the number of offenses remains high, with more than 28,000 rapes reported in 2020, according to the latest official data (as of 2022), which is thought to be just the tip of the iceberg.

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• 👮 Sexual assault and rape victims turned into suspects and charged with lying: There are many reasons for women to think twice about reporting sexual assault. But one potential consequence looms especially large: They may also be prosecuted. A retired police lieutenant in Memphis, Tenn., Cody Wilkerson, testified, as part of a lawsuit against the city, not only that police detectives sometimes neglected to investigate cases of sexual assault but also that he overheard the head of investigative services in the city's police department say on his first day in charge: The first thing we need to do is start locking up more victims for false reporting. In 1997, a legally blind woman reported being raped at knife point in Madison, Wis. That same year, a pregnant 16-year-old reported being raped in New York City. In 2004, a 19-year-old reported being sexually assaulted at gunpoint in Cranberry Township, Pa. In all three instances, the women were charged with lying. In all three instances, their reports turned out to be true. The men who raped them were later identified and convicted.

  • Meanwhile, a billionaire pedophile the police wanted to be locked up for life got a slap on the wrist.

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• 👨‍👧 Leglised child marriage: Child marriage is still legal in most of the U.S. due to loopholes in state and federal laws.

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• 🔞 Legalised child pornography: Meanwhile, in many countries it is perfectly legal to watch child pornography (real or fictional, including possessing pornographic material).

  • In 2016, throughout 17 years of operation, PS the Children, Malaysia's biggest NGO dealing with child abuse, saw zero convictions on the cases it handled, its founder Madeleine Yong told Reuters.

 

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• 🤰 Innocent women arrested and tortured to boost arrest figures: According to damning research by Amnesty International, including reports to judges, prosecutors, doctors, and the National Commission for Human Rights, in Mexico, innocent women (young, poor, single mothers) have been illegally arrested and tortured by Mexican security services looking to boost arrest figures. Over 70% of the women interviewed said they were sexually abused during or soon after being arrested. Ten of the women were pregnant when arrested; eight subsequently suffered a miscarriage. Most spent years in prison awaiting trial without access to adequate healthcare or legal advice.

 

• 👨🏾‍🦱 U.S. taxpayers spent almost $1 billion incarcerating innocent black men and women:

  • According to the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE), since 1989, 2,515 men and women have been exonerated after proving their innocence. In total, among all known exonerees, Americans have shelled out a staggering $4.12 billion to incarcerate innocent men and women since 1989. Thats largely money spent on trials, and the cost of housing inmates in prison.

  • Since 1989, taxpayers have wasted $944 million to incarcerate black men and women that were later found to be innocent. That number climbs to $1.2 billion when including Hispanic men and women. On average, from the time a person enters the criminal justice system until they are exonerated, $1.26 million is spent per inmate who is facing the death penalty. The total sum $4.12 billion spent on all known exonerees also includes $2.2 billion that taxpayers have paid the innocent in compensation since 1989 for the time they were imprisoned, according to a 2018 NRE study. But while a large sum, only 44% of exonerees have ever received compensation.

 

• 🕵️ DOJ review of flawed FBI forensics processes lacked transparency:

  • Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh decided to launch a task force to dig through thousands of cases involving discredited agents. The task force took nine years to complete its work and never publicly released its findings.

  • Officials never notified many defendants of the forensic flaws in their cases and never expanded their review to catch similar mistakes.

  • If the Justice Department was secretive, the agency’s independent inspector general was not. Michael R. Bromwich’s probe culminated in a devastating 517-page report in April 1997 on misconduct at the FBI lab. He concluded that FBI managers failed — in some cases for years — to respond to warnings about the scientific integrity and competence of agents.

  • The chief of the lab’s explosives unit, for example, “repeatedly reached conclusions that incriminated the defendants without a scientific basis”.

 

• 👨‍⚖️ Many courts screw innocent victims into pleading guilty: An essay by senior federal district judge, Jed A. Rakoffs in The New York Review of Books attempted to explain why innocent people too often plead guilty. At the time (2014), at least 20,000 people had pled guilty to and gone to jail for felonies they did not commit. Rakoff identified three ways the criminal justice system obstructs its own truth-seeking mechanism, a trial by jury.

  • Dishonest prosecutors: In 2018, prosecutors of the U.S. Justice Department were caught withholding massive amounts of evidence undermining federal charges.

 

• 📜 Judicial errors take high tolls on inmates and taxpayers: 692 felony convictions in California were thrown out between 1989 and 2012 based on errors or misconduct by police, prosecutors, defense lawyers or judges, according to a study (2016) by researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania.

  • The report didn't include misdemeanor cases, which amount to about 80 percent of all prosecutions, or juvenile cases. And it also excluded the costs of jailing people who were later released without charges, which may amount to $70 million a year, the report said.

  • The study examined only records from California and looked at cases in which felony convictions were overturned and the defendants were later cleared. More than half the cases involved prosecutors wrongful withholding of evidence.

  • The authors questioned long-standing laws that shield prosecutors from lawsuits by criminal defendants. They said they knew of no other profession that received immunity for intentional wrongdoing that gravely injures another.

 

• ⚰️ Nearly 5,000 died in U.S. jails without getting their day in court: In an unprecedented examination of mortality in more than 500 U.S. jails from 2008 to 2019, Reuters documented 7,571 inmate deaths. Death rates have soared in those lockups, rising 35% over the decade ending last year. Casualties are typical: held on minor charges and dying without ever getting their day in court. At least two-thirds of the dead inmates identified by Reuters, 4,998 people, were never convicted of the charges on which they were being held. Reuters is making the full data it gathered available to the public here.

 

• 🤬 Over 3,000 U.S. prisoners served life without parole for non-violent crimes: The report: A Living Death, by American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), chronicles the thousands of lives ruined and families destroyed by the modern phenomenon of sentencing people to die behind bars for non-violent offences.

  • Taxpayers paid an additional $1.8bn to keep the prisoners locked up for the rest of their lives. About 65% of the prisoners identified nationwide by the ACLU were African American.

  • A black man is serving life in prison for stealing hedge clippers.

  • Crystal Mason, the woman who became the poster child for voter suppression when she was sentenced to five years for casting a ballot in Texas, went into federal prison. Masons crime was to cast a ballot in the 2016 presidential election.

  • Fort Worth has been particularly hardline, not only prosecuting Mason but also going after a Hispanic woman, Rosa Ortega, for mistakenly voting as a non-US citizen. Ortega, 37, who had permanent resident status in the US having come to the country as an infant, was sentenced to eight years in prison to be followed by deportation.

 

• 🏭 Polluting with impunity: Governments fail to limit thousands of dangerous, understudied and unstudied chemicals in consumer products, medical treatments (e.g. feeding tube liquid given to babies and children with cancer in hospitals), food, water supplies, and the air we breathe, such as lethal, toxic, carcinogenic, mutagenic, genotoxic, neurotoxic, reproductive toxic, endocrine and nervous disruptors' (ENDs), and radioactive chemicals associated with severe health complications at the immune, metabolomic, and neuroactive levels.

  • Meanwhile, chemical manufacturers polluting our planet's ecosystems and causing irreversible birth defects are getting off scot-free with exemptions and permits / licenses to pollute.

 

• 📝 Corporations stacking the deck of justice through arbitration: By inserting individual arbitration clauses into a soaring number of consumer and employment contracts, companies have devised a way to circumvent the courts and bar people from joining together in class-action lawsuits, realistically the only tool citizens have to fight illegal or deceitful business practices. It has become increasingly difficult to apply for a credit card, use a cellphone, get cable or Internet service, or shop online without agreeing to private arbitration. The same applies to getting a job, renting a car or placing a relative in a nursing home. By banning class actions, companies have effectively disabled consumer challenges to predatory lending, wage theft and discrimination. This is among the most profound shifts in our legal history, William G. Young, a federal judge said in an interview. Ominously, businesses have a good chance of opting out of the traditional legal system altogether and misbehaving without reproach. Thousands of cases brought by single plaintiffs over fraud, wrongful death and rape have been decided behind closed doors. And the rules of arbitration largely favour companies.

 

Together we can build an improved world and brighter future for us, our children, our grandchildren and our planet.

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The future is bright, if we each all do our part.

 

For a transformed world,

Planetary Justice Alliance 🕊️
9 May 2024