“An Asshole”: A Review of Jeffrey Marks, Tucson Attorney at Law (Who’s Disliked Even by His Heart Doctor)

July 26, 2018July 28, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

Tucson attorney Jeffrey Marks, attorney Jeff Marks, Jeffrey A. Marks, Southwest Legal

This client review of Tucson attorney Jeffrey Marks appears on Avvo.com, which notes that the number of times Marks has been endorsed by other lawyers is none.

In 2013, I told a cardiologist I knew, Lee Goldberg, M.D., that I was in court with some monsters and that they were represented by a degenerate attorney. Goldberg, who had a business relationship with my father at the time, guessed the attorney was probably one of his patients. Sure enough he said he’d seen Jeffrey Marks (whose heart I already knew was rotten). Goldberg described how Marks would commandeer his waiting room and set up shop there like the lord of the manor.

“He’s an asshole,” Goldberg agreed.

My opinion had been cemented years earlier. I’d been in court with Marks in 2010, when he represented the same client he did in 2013, Tiffany Bredfeldt, a woman who has accused me serially since 2006 and whom Marks would go on to represent in 2016, too. But only briefly. Marks insisted I be jailed in that prosecution, I moved the court to appoint me counsel, it did…and Marks hastily took his leave of the matter.

It’s not as jolly squaring off against a fellow attorney as it is taunting a self-represented defendant (as Marks had delighted in doing repeatedly).

Here’s Marks cross-examining me in 2013:

Tucson attorney Jeffrey Marks, attorney Jeff Marks, Jeffrey A. Marks, Southwest Legal

And that’s nothing next to how Marks mocked the court. His first witness, Michael Honeycutt (who today chairs the EPA’s Science Advisory Board) testified:

Then Marks’s client, the prosecuting witness, who told her boss that I had “propositioned” her, told the court this:

Then Marks submitted a brief to the court a couple months later acknowledging this:

And Marks had already provided the court an email by his client to me that said I’d been “nice to [her]” and that she had “never felt the need” to tell me she was married.

Marks didn’t even try to hide obvious contradictions, which any disinterested onlooker might reasonably consider evidence of lying (of a grave nature) to whitewash hanky-panky. I think Marks enjoyed showing me just how stage-manageable judges of the Pima County Superior Court were.

Marks succeeded in coercing an illegal speech injunction against me that year from a judge who has since been shamed off the bench, Carmine Cornelio. It was indicted as unconstitutional in 2017 in an amicus brief to the Arizona Court of Appeals by UCLA law professor and distinguished First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh (who blogs about such violations of citizens’ civil liberties in The Washington Post). The injunction unlawfully prohibited me from disclosing facts about my own case like those I just have.

By trying to enforce the order in 2016, Marks made himself vulnerable to a lawsuit, but I had to relinquish my damage claims for constitutional injury this month in order to permanently arrest false or frivolous claims to the police by his client—who would face punishment were she to engage in this conduct in future.

The unlawful injunction Marks finessed was gutted (at a cost to the Arizona taxpayer of tens of thousands).

A low-rent opportunist, Marks has an advertisement on his Facebook page that says everything a prospective client should need to know about his character: “Don’t forget about our incredible October surprise: 25% OFF ALL MONTH LONG[—]Wills, Personal Injury Cases, Divorces, and More!!”

His Twitter subscriptions include several about pets, including Baby Animals (@BabyAnimalPics), Cats (@Cats), Cute Emergency (@CuteEmergency), and Emergency Kittens (@EmrgencyKittens).

His Twitter subscriptions also include this (fourth among 40 when this screenshot was taken):

Tucson attorney Jeffrey Marks, attorney Jeff Marks, Jeffrey A. Marks, Southwest Legal

At least Marks doesn’t try to conceal he’s an asshole.

Why Judicial Process Is Corrupt: The “Customer” Is Always Right

September 2, 2016June 23, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

Everyone angered by procedural abuse has a different grievance: false allegations of domestic violence, civil rights violations, wrongful claims of child abuse, exploitation of process to silence critics, and even lying about rape, to name a few. Typically, it’s what sort of procedural abuse a person has experienced—or someone close to that person has experienced—that determines the particular subject of his or her outrage. (Restraining order abuse—the abuse of court injunctions—is associated with all of them, and is often discounted as merely incidental to a “bigger problem.”)

There are some broader categories of offense, for example, hyped claims of abuse by women (of whatever nature). Prominent female advocates against procedural abuse, like Wendy McElroy, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Cathy Young, often take aim at social science that’s negatively skewed against men and blame prevailing prejudices promulgated and reinforced by what’s loosely called “mainstream feminism.” These prejudices have conditioned how accusations of abuse are treated by employers, university administrators, the police, and judges—and how they’re reflexively perceived by the public at large. Then there are First Amendment advocates who catalog and decry a plethora of misapplications of law to speech, which may be silenced by wrongful accusations of “abuse” (including violence), “harassment,” “(cyber)stalking,” “defamation,” “copyright infringement,” “trademark infringement,” etc. There’s a dominant tendency among trial court judges to pay heed to anyone who alleges something “unwanted” has been said about him or her or his or her business, especially on the Internet, which to many judges is still a suspect medium.

The success of procedural abuse boils down to a basic corruption of ethics and perception: The customer (the complainant) is always right; s/he is a “victim,” not an “accuser” or even just a “plaintiff”: a “victim.”

This characterization is inscribed in state statutes and, as a matter of form, used by prosecutors and judges in court. Even the “free press” may use it instead of “alleged victim,” and that says everything. It means there are no objective influential voices. Both judges’ and journalists’ determinations conform to a script.

People who falsely accuse seldom or never risk punishment; accountability is almost nil. The only party in jeopardy is the accused. For that reason alone, skepticism by arbiters of fact is mandated by morality.

A judge once told this writer that he considered his court the “last bastion of civilization.” Consider the implications if that supposed bulwark against societal anomie is just a puppet stage where players are issued halos and black waxed mustaches depending on which of them was first up the courthouse steps.

Constitutional Rights Are Only Real if They Can’t Be Denied: On the Price of Tolerating Bad Law

August 22, 2015March 2, 2018Moderator 9 Comments

“Americans need to wake up to the sobering fact they are living in an ongoing Constitutional crisis in the U.S.A. Their Constitutional rights are being deep-sixed by the courts in bulk. And once they’re gone, they’re gone forever, [with] ‘precedent’ and ‘stare decisis’ standing in their place.”

—Former attorney Larry Smith, author of BuncyBlawg.com

Imagine if there were a process of law that allowed citizens’ constitutional rights to be circumvented. Imagine if someone—anyone, possibly a complete stranger—were authorized to take an accusation (any accusation) straight to a judge and receive a ruling on that accusation within hours or minutes. Imagine further if judicial tendencies in the formulation of a ruling in this process had been socially conditioned and monetarily influenced. Then imagine that the accused could be incriminated, absent any investigation, entered into multiple police registries, and deprived of property and livelihood…without ever being heard from at all.

Now imagine that such a process existed in the United States of America and a plurality of other countries, and was conducted millions of times a year, right out in the open and not only under the noses of journalists and other social critics but largely with their earnest approval.

You’ve seen the rhetorical ploy the introduction uses and won’t be surprised to be told such a process doesn’t need to be imagined; it exists and has for a long time.

The writer could enumerate the various civil rights violations licensed by the restraining order process (and has, as have many others), but is it really necessary? Read the first paragraph again.

Viewed in stark simplicity, minus propaganda and graphics and “social science” figures, the process is horrifying. Criticism of it is framed as a political debate, which is merely a distraction. Is a process like that limned in the first paragraph constitutionally, socially, or ethically conscionable? Plainly, it isn’t.

The argument against it is really that basic. Yet the process has not only persisted unchecked but magnified in its scope and severity since its advent nearly 40 years ago.

The epigraph, a quotation from a former trial lawyer with a personal investment in exposing the injustice of this process, highlights what the decades of social tolerance of it imply.

Rights may be called “inalienable” all day long, but if a judge can find a precedent—some snatch of text from a previously published ruling—s/he can lawfully deny those rights. That’s on top of the violations already allowed by statutory law.

The law accretes according to “stare decisis.” The phrase is Latin and means “to stand by decided matters.” A judgment that denied one person his or her constitutional rights (any time, even in the distant past) can be used to deny everyone else theirs.

This is how “inalienable rights” can be judicially obliterated. Citizens have those rights only until they actually depend on them for self-defense. Then they’re not there. The citation of a prior judgment or judgments in a related case or cases nullifies them.

In other words, those rights aren’t real; they’re just pretty words.

In Its Condemnation of the Men’s and Fathers’ Rights Movements, the Southern Poverty Law Center Has Institutionalized Bigotry and Hate (Including Racial Bigotry and Hate)—Here’s How

April 29, 2015July 4, 2023Moderator 6 Comments

There are prominent voices on the Internet, in the ivory tower, and in the press that disparage the plaints of fathers who are alienated from their children by lies and legal abuse, and denied roles in their kids’ lives. They call these fathers’ ventilations of despair and anger “misogynist,” and they look no further.

This post criticizes one such voice, possibly the loudest among them.

The Southern Poverty Law Center equates complainants of legal abuse—male ones, that is—with racists, and it’s taken seriously. It commands social prestige based on its illustrious history of combatting racial hate and violence.

I hope the outraged title of this piece reaches its attention, because the story below exemplifies a modern manifestation of racial bigotry and violence, and it’s one the Southern Poverty Law Center scoffs at and ridicules.

It’s one the Southern Poverty Law Center vociferously fortifies.

The following account, which echoes others and which includes a casual assault of a black man by police based on false allegations by his white wife, was submitted to this blog on April 27, 2015, by a father of two young children who is not a violent man; he just misses his kids and is in perdition. (What this man will be five years from now—or whether he will be five years from now—is another question all together. A man may be taunted like a dog chained to a post. Then when he snaps, there are those content to judge him mad and urge that he be put down.)

Advocacy groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center presume to blame without listening to the details. This is what the details sound like (trigger alert: real life):

Hello. Anyone out there who can help a man who is at the saddest hour of his life? For I feel life is not even worth living at this point due to the evil and malicious acts of my wife.

We had been talking about a divorce for the last year and a half as we have been married for four years and been together since we were 22—for 16 long years. We have a two-year-old and seven-month-old, both baby boys. My wife has rage issues and extreme hormone issues…and she’s clearly depressed, and I cannot help her anymore.

When our marriage became a sexless one, we agreed we were just roommates taking care of the children until we started our divorce. My wife was contacted by a jealous woman who wanted to destroy my life because I would not leave my wife to be with her. She told my wife all sorts of lies. The next day, my wife filed for divorce but also filed a fake restraining order to ensure I burn in hell, and it’s working.

My wife didn’t come home with the kids on Friday evening after picking them up from daycare. No calls, no answer, nothing. I called daycare, and I was advised that my wife picked the kids up with her mother around 4 p.m. We live in L.A., and her mother lives in Ohio, so I was like, “Her mother? I didn’t know she was in town.” It’s now about 11:30 p.m., so I call the hotel her mother usually stays at around the corner on Sunset Blvd. My wife answers and says, “My mother came in town to help us. She’s concerned about us.”

I told her to bring the kids home because she didn’t pack any Pampers or a change of clothes for them. She said, “I’ll be home in the morning.” The next day, they still were missing. I left to run errands, and my wife called about 6 p.m. saying she was back home. When I got back home, the locks to my front door were changed. I banged on the door demanding to be let into my own house and see my boys. Her mother, who was visiting, said, “Go away. She doesn’t want you here.”

I called the cops and went downstairs to wait.

When they arrived, a cop instantly started attacking me and beating me. I screamed, “I called you to help me get in my house!” He was rude, beat me and cuffed me, then put me in the back of a patrol car. I was in there for about 20 minutes.

Finally, I was let go—un-cuffed, bleeding, stepping out of the police car—and her mother is outside the police car and says you’ve been served, and hands me a packet of paperwork. I thought WTF? a divorce, cool, no problem, but it was a restraining order claiming I had done physical violence to my wife for years and years. I never ever breathed too hard on my wife, so how could she make such claims? I lost my breath for a few seconds in disbelief.

I had to leave my house as was, no money, in flip-flops and shorts, no credit cards, no suits for work, no children, no food, nothing. I was threatened with jail if I even tried to call her or stopped at my boys’ daycare. My hearing wasn’t for another 25 days.

I thought, what can I do? This is hell being homeless, but most of all I am the full-time dad and mom to our boys. I do all the cooking, cleaning, dishes, shopping, putting to bed, baths, everything. My wife has given the boys a bath maybe three times in their entire lives. She wakes up at 6 a.m. and leaves out the door while I wake up and bath the children, change Pampers, fix breakfast, dress them, dress myself in a three-piece suit , take them to daycare, and then work 11 hours at the office. My wife picks them up at 6 p.m. from daycare, then I’m home at 7 to fix dinner, put the children to bed, clean, and finally sit down about 11 when my day is complete.

I survived the 25 days of being homeless, living in hotels and racking up around $12,000 in debt, including the cost of an attorney for the hearing. The hearing was going great, my wife getting caught up in lies, backtracking, bringing up events where I might have pushed her on the bed in 2012 or dropped a cup that she stepped on in 2013…or told her I’m going to kill her every day. Yeah, right! No proof, no police reports, no police calls, no telling a friend, no nothing, just her words against my words and phone records.

I thought about all the women getting punched in the head, slapped in the mouth, and living in total fear of their husbands and how it must really suck to live like that. Then I stared at my wife on the stand lying about getting pushed on the bed years ago and saying that she was afraid for her life but still having stayed in the house every night and eaten my cooking and commanded me to be her slave.

The judge still sided with her and issued a permanent restraining order allowing me 18% visitation rights to my kids, my flesh and blood. My boys were dying to see Daddy. It’s been a month. She’s getting child support, too. I have 18% visitation, and I can’t even call my wife. I got a move-out order, but my wife and her mom made moving out hell and even called the cops because they thought I was taking some money secretly stashed in the house. I didn’t even collect my things before I was blocked in the driveway by my wife and her angry mother.

I am a black man, and my wife is white. It doesn’t go well for black men in my position.

[…]

I just had a chance to see my boys this last weekend on Saturday and Sunday from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. I cried like the world had given me the moon when my two-year-old held onto my neck for 10 minutes and said, “I miss you so much, Dada.”

I now feel so much anger and helplessness. It was heart-wrenching that a woman could be this evil to take the boys away from a man like me. All the deadbeat dads, and my kids are my only focus in life. I’m a CPA for a corporation. My wife lied, lie after lie after lie on the stand, and then even cried after lying that she was not a professionally trained actress three times until my attorney asked, “Are you a paying member of the SAG organization [Screen Actors Guild]?” Then she finally said, “Why, yes, I am, ha-ha.”

It’s killing me not to have any rights. I feel like my world has been turned upside down without my boys with me every day. I’m struggling, still living in hotels, blowing money left and right just to sleep. My car is full of clothes, and legal costs are mounting. I feel like jumping off a bridge as this woman’s evil portrayals of me are irreversible.

Now what do I do? I can’t take it. I’m going to lose my mind and snap.

I’d rather she put a gun to my head and pull the trigger than put me through lies and manipulation of the court and hurt my boys, who go insane when I have to drop them back to their mother. It’s most disconcerting to listen to a 65-year-old white judge tell me that I have 18% of my flesh and blood over he-said-she-said and not one ounce of proof at all. The judge was Judge B. Scott Silverman, Los Angeles Superior Court. Please help me, God. Please Please Please.

Thank you for reading.

The Man Who’s Dying Slowly

Contrast the impassioned story above with this antiseptic one: “Claims and activities associated with the men’s rights movement have been criticized by scholars, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and commentators. Some sectors of the movement have been described as misogynist” (Wikipedia).

The Southern Poverty Law Center doesn’t lynch people; its advocacy inspires a social and legal atmosphere of intolerance and civil rights violations that urges people to lynch themselves. The difference is instead of bedsheets’ being worn by a mob, they’re knotted into nooses by lonely, isolated individuals forlorn of hope.

The result is the same.

*As of this writing, the top tier members of the senior program staff of the Southern Poverty Law Center are eight affluent whites/Jews (most of them female) and one black woman, Lecia Brooks. Ms. Brooks is the “outreach director,” i.e., the group’s public face.

A Story of Female Sterilization That Should Stress to Those Who’ve Been Violated by Fraudulent Abuse of Legal Process Why Reporting Judicial Tyranny and False Accusers Is by Itself Pointless (You Must Demand Change)

October 27, 2014February 4, 2018Moderator 2 Comments

The point of sharing the explication below is to emphasize how forlorn prospective recourses for redressing rights violations stemming from false restraining order and similar prosecutions are. Accountability is zero, across the board.

If you’ve ever wondered why a judge may be censured for rude conduct but not for ignoring lies or misrepresenting evidence, here’s why.

Quoted from “The Plumb Line: So What Else is New?” (Murray N. Rothbard, Libertarian Review, 1978), reprinted on LewRockwell.com as “The Tyranny of the Bench”:

The United States Supreme Court ruled, in 1872, that judges were immune from any damage suits for any “judicial acts” that they had performed—regardless of how wrong, evil, or unconstitutional those acts may have been. When clothed in judicial authority, judges can do no wrong. Period. Recently a case of an errant judge has come up again—because his action as a judge was considered generally to be monstrous and illegal. In 1971, Mrs. Ora Spitler McFarlin petitioned Judge Harold D. Stump of the DeKalb County, Indiana, Circuit Court to engage in a covert, compulsory sterilization of her 15-year-old daughter, Linda Kay Spitler. Although Linda was promoted each year with her class, Mrs. McFarlin opined that she was “somewhat retarded” and had begun to stay out overnight with older youths. And we all know what that can lead to.

Judge Stump quickly signed the order, and the judge and mamma hustled Linda into a hospital, telling her it was for an appendicitis operation. Linda was then sterilized without her knowledge. Two years later, Linda married a Leo Sparkman and discovered that she had been sterilized without her knowledge. The Sparkmans proceeded to sue mamma, mamma’s attorney, the doctors, the hospital, and Judge Stump, alleging a half-dozen constitutional violations.

All of these people, in truth, had grossly violated Linda’s rights and aggressed against her. All should have been made to pay, and pay dearly, for their monstrous offense. But the federal district court ruled otherwise. First, it ruled that mamma, her lawyer, and the various members of the “healing professions” were all immune because everything they did had received the sanction of a certified judge. And second, Judge Stump was also absolutely immune, because he had acted in his capacity as a judge, even though, the district court acknowledged, he had had “an erroneous view of the law.” So, not only is a judge immune, but he can confer his immunity in a king-like fashion even onto lowly civilians who surround him.

The U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, unaccountably didn’t understand the program, and so it reversed the district court, claiming that Judge Stump had forfeited his immunity “because of his failure to comply with elementary principles of due process,” and had therefore in a sense “not acted within his jurisdiction.” To allow Stump’s action to stand, said the appeals court, would be to sanction “tyranny from the bench.”

Now this was pretty flimsy stuff, and besides it opened an entertaining wedge toward holding judges accountable to the law and to the protection of rights like everyone else. But this would have shaken the foundations of our monopoly archist legal system. And so the U.S. Supreme Court, on March 28, set the matter straight. In a 5–3 decision in this illuminating case of Stump v. Sparkman, Justice Byron R. (“Whizzer”) White, speaking for the majority, sternly reminded the appellate court of the meaning of the 1872 ruling:

A judge will not be deprived of immunity because the action he took was in error, was done maliciously, or was in excess of his authority. Rather, he will be subject to liability only when he has acted in the “clear absence of all jurisdiction.”

Justice White conceded that no state law or court ruling anywhere could be said to have authorized Judge Stump’s action; but the important point, he went on, is that there was no statute or ruling which prohibited such an action by the judge.

Those interested in reading more are urged to click the link to Mr. Rothbard’s article at the top of the post.

What all of this should make clear is that for redress of rights violations stemming from false allegations made in restraining order and related prosecutions to be possible, the laws themselves must be rectified—and legislative reform will only be urged when more people loudly demand it.

For rights abuses to be capable of remedy by process of law, they must be illegal, which means the processes that authorize those abuses must be revamped or repealed by lawmakers (your state representatives). So long as the standard applied to restraining orders is merely a discretionary one, judges can rule however they want (that’s the statutory latitude they’ve been given), and they’re accountable for those rulings to no one.

Larry’s Story, Part 2: Suing a False Accuser and the Judge She Rode in On

October 18, 2014July 4, 2023Moderator 8 Comments

Buncombe County, North Carolina, where Larry Smith has for three years been harried by relentless false allegations from a disturbed neighbor, is the source of the word bunkum.

Bunkum (or bunk) is more familiarly called BS, which is what Larry’s been daily forced to tolerate for three years. He’s 70, and the time he’s had stolen from him was precious.

Larry filed a lawsuit in federal district court this week (pro se) against the State of North Carolina, his neighbor-cum-accuser, the judge who encouraged her reign of terror, and a number of other public officials to be named later in an amendment to his complaint.

Larry, a grandfather living on Social Security who practiced law in his salad days, is an object lesson about why it’s ill-advised to poke a sleeping bear.

Despite suffering from agonizing scoliosis (a degenerative spinal disorder), Larry’s been summoned to court over 30 times since 2011, locked in a cell, and had a gun pointed at him consequent to crank allegations from a vengeful neighbor who’s publicly accused him of being a disbarred attorney, an embezzler, and a psychopath (including on Facebook).

She says he’s “barked like a dog” at her, recruited “mentally challenged adults” to harass her while shopping, and mooned her friends. She says he’s cyberstalked her, too, besides hacking into her phone and computer.

Larry, who’s in pain even when he’s sitting down, has been reported to the police a dozen times or more while out walking his toy poodles or just puttering around his house. His accuser has also twice filed restraining orders against him since he took exception to her cat’s killing the local songbirds that have always been a source of joy to him to watch. The first time she petitioned a restraining order, she reported that he violated it later the same day.

Larry hadn’t even seen the woman.

Larry’s accuser’s is an extreme version of the mischief that’s widely reported by targets of restraining orders. Notable (and telling) is that even the outrageous degree of flagrant procedural abuse Larry’s been subjected to is winked at by authorities and judges.

There’s liable to be more blinking than winking this time around: Mr. Smith is going to Washington—and circumventing the local old boy’s network.

Larry’s lawsuit alleges deception; fraud; judicial dereliction; frivolous and malicious prosecution; fundamental constitutional rights violations; false imprisonment; unjust stigmatization; judicial politicking; collusion, conspiracy, and tyrannical oppression by representatives of regional government; and felonious forgery of a criminal complaint.

It also requests a jury.

One man’s debunking procedures this country and many others have invested faith and a fortune in is probably a forlorn hope, but the endeavor is nothing shy of heroic (and may at least restore to a sorely hectored man his peace of mind).

TALKING BACK to restraining orders

THEY’RE NOT JUST ABUSED BUT ABUSIVE

Tag civil rights violations