RE: NO LICENSE - PERFECTED LEGAL ARGUMENT

http://suijuris.net/forum/travel/199-no-license-perfected-legal-
arguement-7.html

If 10,000s of JUDGES can "practice law without a license", locking
folks in jail while IGNORING the law, why can't people travel by car
without a license?

That's called EQUAL PROTECTION doctrine under the US and state
constitutions: when a govt employee gets a "special" right to do
something, then EVERYONE gets that right.

This argument is most specific for "unlicensed lawyers" "practicing
law without a license", which IS ALLOWED IN ALL STATES: this is
called "POWER OF ATTORNEY IN FACT" ("pro se for a pro se"). Or
Durable Power of Attorney, etc. It's a civil contract, as allowed by
the Contract Clause of the US Constitution.

So, since anyone CAN practice law without a license, by representing
anyone in any court, and since anyone can be a judge without a
license to practice law, it stands to reason anyone can travel by the
traditional mode of travel (car) without a license.

Every state code provides "exceptions" to the driver license
requirement. In Tennessee, the statute used by prosecutors to charge
for "driving on a revoked or suspended license" ONLY applies to those
who APPLIED for a license. If you aren't tricked into applying, then
this code can't be enforced. "Revoked" or "suspended" means the
licenser revoked or suspended the contract, not the licensee
rescinding the contract.

Uniform Commercial Code 1-207, and Tennessee Code 47-1-207 are
virtually identical, and voids all contracts forced under duress. If
you do have a license, or sign a traffic ticket, signing "under
protest" or "under duress" or "UCC 1-207" or "TCA 47-1-207" will
destroy the court's "personal jurisdiction", when asserted BEFORE
making a "general appearance" in court. When the judge calls your
case, and asks "are you ready?", the correct answer is "No, your
honor, I have some preliminary matters for the court." Then assert
your claim to lack of personal jurisdiction, since the DL contract
and citation contract are void for duress. It also helps to write
this in an Answer to Complaint filed before making an appearance in
person, but that does tipoff the prosecutor that they have a fighter,
which spoils the element of surprise. You also need to hire your own
court reporter. When you win, you can file a Bill of Costs for
reimbursement, since all traffic tickets are civil trials, not
criminal trials, regardless of what the lying cops, prosecutors and
judges claim.

Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) § 1-207. Performance or Acceptance
Under Reservation of Rights.
(1) A party who with explicit reservation of rights performs or
promises performance or assents to performance in a manner demanded
or offered by the other party does not thereby prejudice the rights
reserved. Such words as "without prejudice", "under protest" or the
like are sufficient.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/1/1-207.html

Tennessee Code §47-1-207 (UCC)
(1) "A party who, with explicit reservation of rights, performs or
promises performance or assents to performance in a manner demanded
or offered by the other party does not thereby prejudice the rights
reserved. Such words as 'without prejudice,' 'under protest' or the
like are sufficient."
http://www.megalaw.com/tn/tncode.php

The following article proves how common it is for judges to not have
licenses, tho it also proves how incompentent they are.

=============================================


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/nyregion/25 courts.html?
_r=2&ref=nyregion&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Broken Bench: In Tiny Courts of N.Y., Abuses of Law and Power


new-york-times-broken-bench-city-judges.jpg
In the Town of Colchester, in the Catskills, court is in the garage.

Some of the courtrooms are not even courtrooms: tiny offices or
basement rooms without a judge's bench or jury box. Sometimes the
public is not admitted, witnesses are not sworn to tell the truth,
and there is no word-for-word record of the proceedings.

Skip to next paragraph
Broken Bench
"This Is Not America"
Part 1 of 3
A yearlong investigation by The New York Times of the life and
history of New York State's town and village courts found a long
trail of judicial abuses and errors — and of governmental failure to
curb them.

Multimedia
Audio Slide Show
Out of Order: Town and Village Justice Nearly three-quarters of the
judges are not lawyers, and many — truck drivers, sewer workers or
laborers — have scant grasp of the most basic legal principles. Some
never got through high school, and at least one went no further than
grade school.

But serious things happen in these little rooms all over New York
State. People have been sent to jail without a guilty plea or a
trial, or tossed from their homes without a proper proceeding. In
violation of the law, defendants have been refused lawyers, or
sentenced to weeks in jail because they cannot pay a fine. Frightened
women have been denied protection from abuse.

These are New York's town and village courts, or justice courts, as
the 1,250 of them are widely known. In the public imagination, they
are quaint holdovers from a bygone era, handling nothing weightier
than traffic tickets and small claims. They get a roll of the eyes
from lawyers who amuse one another with tales of incompetent small-
town justices.

A woman in Malone, N.Y., was not amused. A mother of four, she went
to court in that North Country village seeking an order of protection
against her husband, who the police said had choked her, kicked her
in the stomach and threatened to kill her. The justice, Donald R.
Roberts, a former state trooper with a high school diploma, not only
refused, according to state officials, but later told the court
clerk, "Every woman needs a good pounding every now and then."

A black soldier charged in a bar fight near Fort Drum became alarmed
when his accuser described him in court as "that colored man." But
the village justice, Charles A. Pennington, a boat hauler and a high
school graduate, denied his objections and later convicted him. "You
know," the justice said, "I could understand if he would have called
you a Negro, or he had called you a nigger."

And several people in the small town of Dannemora were intimidated by
their longtime justice, Thomas R. Buckley, a phone-company repairman
who cursed at defendants and jailed them without bail or a trial,
state disciplinary officials found. Feuding with a neighbor over her
dog's running loose, he threatened to jail her and ordered the dog
killed.

"I just follow my own common sense," Mr. Buckley, in an interview,
said of his 13 years on the bench. "And the hell with the law."

The New York Times spent a year examining the life and history of
this largely hidden world, a constellation of 1,971 part-time
justices, from the suburbs of New York City to the farm towns near
Niagara Falls.

It is impossible to say just how many of those justices are ill-
informed or abusive. Officially a part of the state court system, yet
financed by the towns and villages, the justice courts are
essentially unsupervised by either. State court officials know little
about the justices, and cannot reliably say how many cases they
handle or how many are appealed. Even the agency charged with
disciplining them, the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, is not
equipped to fully police their vast numbers.

But The Times reviewed public documents dating back decades and,
unannounced, visited courts in every part of the state. It examined
records of closed disciplinary hearings. It tracked down defendants,
and interviewed prosecutors and defense lawyers, plaintiffs and
bystanders.

The examination found overwhelming evidence that decade after decade
and up to this day, people have often been denied fundamental legal
rights. Defendants have been jailed illegally. Others have been
subjected to racial and sexual bigotry so explicit it seems to come
from some other place and time. People have been denied the right to
a trial, an impartial judge and the presumption of innocence.

In 2003 alone, justices disciplined by the state included one in
Montgomery County who had closed his court to the public and let
prosecutors run the proceedings during 20 years in office. Another,
in Westchester County, had warned the police not to arrest his
political cronies for drunken driving, and asked a Lebanese-American
with a parking ticket if she was a terrorist. A third, in Delaware
County, had been convicted of having sex with a mentally retarded
woman in his care.

New York is one of about 30 states that still rely on these kinds of
local judges, descendants of the justices who kept the peace in
Colonial days, when lawyers were scarce. Many states, alarmed by
mistakes and abuse, have moved in recent decades to rein in their
authority or require more training. Some, from Delaware to
California, have overhauled the courts, scrapped them entirely or
required that local judges be lawyers.

But New York has no such requirement. It demands more schooling for
licensed manicurists and hair stylists.

And it has left its justices with the same powers — more than in many
states — even though governors, blue-ribbon commissions and others
have been denouncing the courts as outdated and unjust since as far
back as 1908, when a justice in Westchester County set up a roadside
speed trap, fining drivers for whatever cash they were carrying.

Nearly a century later, a 76-year-old Elmira man who contested a
speeding ticket in Newfield, outside Ithaca, was jailed without even
a warning for three days in 2003 because he called the sheriff's
deputy a liar.

"I thought, this is not America," said the man, Michael J. Pronti,
who spent two years and $8,000 before a state appeals court ruled
that he had been improperly jailed.

`Justice in the Dark'

It is tempting to view the justice courts as weak and inconsequential
because the bulk of their business is traffic violations. Yet among
their 2.2 million cases, the courts handle more than 300,000 criminal
matters a year. Justices can impose jail sentences of up to two
years. Even in the smallest cases, some have wielded powers and
punishments far beyond what the law allows.

The reason is plain: Many do not know or seem to care what the law
is. Justices are not screened for competence, temperament or even
reading ability. The only requirement is that they be elected. But
voters often have little inkling of the justices' power or their
sometimes tainted records.

For the nearly 75 percent of justices who are not lawyers, the only
initial training is six days of state-administered classes, followed
by a true-or-false test so rudimentary that the official who runs it
said only one candidate since 1999 had failed. A sample question for
the justices: "Town and village justices must maintain dignity, order
and decorum in their courtrooms" — true or false?

The result, records and interviews show, is a second-class system of
justice.

The first class — the city, county and higher courts — is familiar to
anyone who has served on a jury or watched "Law & Order": hardly
perfect, but a place of law-schooled judges, support staffs and
strict rules. The lower and far larger rung of town and village
courts relies on part-time justices, most of them poorly paid, some
without a single clerk. Those justices — two-thirds of all the
state's judges — are not required to make transcripts or tape
recordings of what goes on, so it is often difficult to appeal their
decisions.

When they stray badly, the Commission on Judicial Conduct — a panel
of lawyers, judges and others — can do little more than try to
contain the damage.

Some 1,140 justices have received some sort of reprimand over the
last three decades — an average of about 40 a year, either privately
warned, publicly rebuked or removed. They are seriously disciplined
at a steeper rate than their higher-court colleagues.

The Office of Court Administration, which runs the state court
system, makes little pretense of knowing much about what happens in
the justice courts. Beyond their names, ages and addresses, it has
little information about the justices. Because they are paid by the
towns and loosely tied into the court system, "we have limited
administrative control, and very, very limited financial control,"
said Jan H. Plumadore, the deputy chief administrative judge for all
courts outside New York City.

The courts also handle money — more than $200 million a year in fines
and fees. But the state comptroller's office, which once conducted
scores of justice-court audits every year, now does only a handful.
When it looked most recently, auditing a dozen courts in May, it
reported serious financial-management problems and estimated that
millions of dollars a year might be missing from the justice courts
statewide.

Norman P. Effman has been the public defender for 16 years in Wyoming
County, where he said only one of the 37 justices was a lawyer. In
testimony last year, he described the justice courts as a forgotten
realm: a "closed door, back of someone's house, in the barn, in the
highway department, no record" justice system.

"The reality is," he told a state commission, "if you keep justice in
the dark, it stays in the dark."

That commission, which was studying how the court system treats poor
people, issued a study in June saying the justice courts remained "a
fractured and flawed system." And in recent days, the Office of Court
Administration has said it plans to begin addressing some of those
failings — for instance, taking steps to double the amount of initial
training and to ensure that proceedings are recorded.

But those measures do not address some of the most serious problems:
the use of justices who are not lawyers, and the state's weak
oversight.

This is not the first time the justice courts have come under
scrutiny. "Probably the most unsatisfactory feature of the
administration of criminal law remaining in the state today is the
obsolete and antiquated institution known as the justice of the
peace," another state commission concluded.

The year was 1927.

A Record of Trouble

Certainly, there are worthy justices, and defenders of the system say
the good far outnumber the bad. Those supporters, chiefly the
justices themselves and the local political leaders who often select
them, contend that hometown judges know the hometown problems — and
the problem people — and can tailor common-sense solutions.

And, they have argued, putting lawyers in charge of all the courts
could cost the state tens of millions of dollars.

"It is the most efficient, low-cost method of ensuring that the
people of the state receive justice," said Thomas R. Dias, a town
justice in Columbia County who is president of the State Magistrates
Association, the justices' organization.

But the record shows otherwise in hundreds of disciplinary cases —
most of them unknown to the public.

In the Catskills, Stanley Yusko routinely jailed people awaiting
trial for longer than the law allows — in one case for 64 days
because he thought the defendant had information about vandalism at
the justice's own home, said state officials, who removed him as
Coxsackie village justice in 1995. Mr. Yusko was not even supposed to
be a justice; he had actually failed the true-or-false test.

Outside Rochester, in Le Roy, a justice who is still in office
concocted false statements, state officials said, to help immigration
officials deport a Hispanic migrant worker in 2003. Although the man
had pleaded not guilty to trespassing, the town justice, Charles E.
Dusen, issued a court order saying he had been convicted. In an
interview, Justice Dusen said he tried to right his wrong after the
worker's lawyer complained. But the man was still deported.

Last December, disciplinary officials disclosed that in a five-year
period, a Rochester-area justice had mistakenly imposed $170,000 in
traffic fines beyond what the law allowed. And in June, a justice in
western New York was disciplined for threatening to jail a man — and
warning him to "bring a couple thousand in bail money" — over a
complaining phone message the man had left him.

Even the commuter towns around New York City, where the justices are
typically lawyers, have endured the system's abuses.

In Mount Kisco, people who asked for the court's sympathy were
treated to sarcasm: Justice Joseph J. Cerbone would pull out a nine-
inch violin and threaten to play. Mr. Cerbone phoned one woman and
talked her out of pressing abuse charges against the son of former
clients, state records show. But it took eight years, and evidence
that he had taken money from an escrow account, before the State
Court of Appeals removed him in 2004 after a quarter-century in
office.

In interviews, many of these justices disputed the findings against
them, saying the Commission on Judicial Conduct was unfair and
determined to end the justice courts.

Commission officials say they have no such agenda.

And the agency is struggling itself. Charged with policing all the
state's courts, it can do no more than respond to complaints. Its
staff has shrunk by more than half in the last two decades, with just
two investigators for the western half of the state.

So commission officials were surprised to learn last year that a
western New York justice who had resigned while facing disciplinary
charges was back on the bench.

The commission twice disciplined the town justice, Paul F. Bender of
Marion, for deriding women in abuse cases. Arraigning one man on
assault charges, he asked the police investigator whether the case
was "just a Saturday night brawl where he smacks her and she wants
him back in the morning."

But the commission spared him removal in 1999 because he was not
seeking re-election. Four years later Mr. Bender ran again anyway,
unbeknownst to the commission, for a term that will not expire until
2007.

Robert H. Tembeckjian, the commission's administrator, said, "Our
working assumption is, a judge who resigns while under disciplinary
charges by the commission is not going to return to the bench." But
he would not say whether his agency would — or could — take any
action against Justice Bender.

`I'm Not a Lawyer'

A 17-year-old girl had stayed out all night, then fought with her
family and wound up facing a harassment charge in court in Alexandria
Bay, a busy tourist village on the St. Lawrence River. The justice,
Charles A. Pennington, a boat hauler with 23 years on the bench, took
her not-guilty plea on a Sunday in 2003.

But when told that the girl had no place to go, the judge did not
send her to a women's shelter or alert social service officials, as
local justices typically do. He took her home.

"I left the court kind of in shock," a police officer later
testified. "I've never heard of anything like this before."

The girl's mother, Keitha Rogers, said in an interview that she was
appalled to find her daughter at the home of the justice, then 61, as
he sat drinking with another man. "Sure, he can tell the difference
between the stern and the bow," Ms. Rogers said. "But what does that
have to do with making major judgments about people's lives?"

The judicial conduct commission, which ordered Justice Pennington's
removal last fall for this and other lapses, ruled that while there
was no evidence he had made any improper advances toward the girl,
who left after about an hour, he had shown "extraordinarily poor
judgment."

And while Mr. Pennington argued that he had not been drinking, he did
not entirely disagree with the findings. "Granted, there is
mistakes," said the justice, who resigned before the commission
ruled. "I'm not a lawyer."

Neither are most of his peers. And that is pretty much all the state
knows about them. Office of Court Administration officials say the
only way they usually find out a new justice has been elected is if
local officials notify them.

For decades, the agency has asked justices to fill out modest
biographical questionnaires, then filed away the answers. Under
freedom of information law, The Times obtained questionnaires
completed by more than 1,800 current justices; they portray a group
that is often poorly educated and poorly paid, even though the law
they are dealing with is increasingly complex.

Of those who are not lawyers, about a third — more than 400 — had no
formal education beyond high school. At least 40 did not complete
high school, though several went on to earn equivalency degrees.

Interviews with more than 60 justices made it clearer who many of
these people are: retirees, farmers, mechanics, former police
officers and others with flexible schedules or seasonal work. Most
look something like Mr. Pennington: white, and graying. At least 30
justices are in their 80's, well beyond the mandatory retirement age,
70, for other New York judges.

Though the justices' pay is often meager — as little as $850 a year —
they can set bail, a basic legal safeguard. They hold crucial
preliminary hearings in felony cases and conduct trials on
misdemeanors. They preside over civil cases with claims of up to
$3,000, and landlord-tenant disputes with no dollar limit, including
commercial cases involving hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And then there are the powers they simply take.

In what the Commission on Judicial Conduct called "a shocking abuse
of judicial power," Justice Roger C. Maclaughlin single-handedly went
after a man he decided was violating local codes on the keeping of
livestock in Steuben, near Utica. The justice interviewed witnesses,
tipped off the code-enforcement officer, lobbied the town board to
deny the man approval to run a trailer park, then jailed him for 10
days without bail — or even a chance to defend himself, the
commission said.

In an interview, Justice Maclaughlin said the commission seemed to be
chasing legal technicalities rather than real justice.

An Essex County town justice, Richard H. Rock, jailed two 16-year-
olds overnight without a trial, saying he wanted "to teach them a
lesson." They had been accused of spitting at two other people and
charged with harassment. Then he sent them back for 10 more days, the
commission said, without ever advising them they had a right to a
lawyer.

In 2001, the commission punished him and Justice Maclaughlin with
censure, the most serious penalty short of removal from the bench.
Justice Maclaughlin is now in his 11th year in office. Justice Rock
is in his 10th.

In Alexandria Bay, where Justice Pennington presided at a metal desk
in a tiny room inside the police building, a quarter-century in
office did not seem to deepen his understanding of his role. Just
three days after he took home the 17-year-old girl, another case
raised fresh questions about his familiarity with the law, or even
the world outside his court.

Eeric D. Bailey, a 21-year-old black soldier from nearby Fort Drum,
was facing a disorderly conduct charge after a tussle with a white
bar bouncer. Sitting three feet from Mr. Bailey, the bouncer
identified him as "that colored man." Mr. Bailey's jaw dropped.

The soldier, who did not have a lawyer, told the judge that the term
was offensive. But Justice Pennington said that while certain other
words were racist, "colored" was not. "For years we had no colored
people here," he said.

The commission had heard worse. After arraigning three black
defendants arrested in a college disturbance in 1994, a justice in
the Finger Lakes region said in court, "Oh, it's been a rough day —
all those blacks in here." A few years before that, a Catskill
justice reminisced in court that it was safe for young women to walk
around "before the blacks and Puerto Ricans moved here."

In an interview, Justice Pennington said the commission had treated
him unfairly. But he may not have helped his case when he told the
commission that "colored" was an acceptable description.

"I mean, to me," he testified, "colored doesn't preferably mean
black. It could be an Indian, who's red. It could be Chinese, who's
considered yellow."

Basic Training

As the blunders, and worse, have piled up over the years, so have the
muffled complaints from within the system. Transcripts of the
commission's disciplinary hearings, which are usually closed to the
public, show that some justices have nearly begged for more training,
or any kind of help.

Anthony Ellis, a meat cutter who routinely jailed defendants in
Tupper Lake to coerce them into pleading guilty, neatly summed up his
insecurities in one closed hearing: "I'm almost like a pilot flying
by the seat of my pants."

William G. Mayville, a retired factory worker who turned his
courtroom in nearby Fort Covington into a collection agency for local
business owners, offered a quietly damning explanation: "I certainly
am only a simple man doing a job that, you know, the very best I can
do with a limited amount of education that they offered me."

Simple men, and their simple wisdom, are the whole idea behind the
justice courts. A 13th-century English institution, the justice of
the peace was imported to the colonies in the 1600's along with a
fundamental notion: that laymen could settle small-bore cases with
practical solutions grounded in local custom or common sense.

But as life, and the law, became vastly more complex by the mid-20th
century, several states, including California, New Jersey and
Connecticut, created more professional local courts.

In Delaware, where the appointed local magistrates have less
authority than New York's justices, the state screens candidates with
academic and psychological tests, and starts them off with 11 weeks
of training. "It is a reflection of the view that when we're dealing
with people's livelihood, when we're dealing with people's freedom,
we're going to take this seriously," said the chief magistrate, Alan
G. Davis, a lawyer.

In New York, the justice courts have been replaced by state-financed
district courts, with lawyer judges, in Nassau County and western
Suffolk County. But the last major calls for statewide reform
sputtered out in the early 1980's, and the amount of training for
justices has not changed. Those without law degrees must take six
days of classes at the start. Lawyers do not have to attend, but all
justices must take a 12-hour refresher course once a year.

Maryrita Dobiel, who runs the training program for the Office of
Court Administration, said the classes provide an introduction to
legal principles, but not much more, given a student body with such
varying levels of education. "We have to teach to the lowest common
denominator," she said. General principles of criminal law, a subject
that takes up a semester or more in law school, gets about five hours.

At training's end, justices must score at least 70 percent on a test
of 50 questions, all true or false. Those who fail can retake the
course, and the test. "We don't decide whether they're qualified to
be a judge," Ms. Dobiel said. "The people who have elected them have
already made that decision."

The real test comes on the bench.

Several justices have threatened to arrest litigants in small-claims
cases, showing they do not understand the difference between civil
and criminal cases. Others have told the judicial conduct commission
that they disagreed with the constitutional guarantee that a
defendant is entitled to a lawyer.

John D. Cox, a quarry manager in Le Ray, near Watertown, summarily
jailed people who were unable to pay fines, the commission said. But
he received the lightest public penalty, an admonition, in 2002 after
he explained that in 22 years in office, he had never been taught
that state law allows defendants a new hearing and a lawyer when they
say they cannot pay their fine.

The justices do have something of a lifeline: They can call a
resource center near Albany where four lawyers field more than 18,000
questions a year. But there are limits on what the center tries to do.

"We tell them what their options are," said the center's supervisor,
Paul Toomey. "We don't tell them they're wrong."

Power and Prejudice

Few people who came to his court ever told Donald R. Roberts he was
wrong. A strapping former state trooper, he was working as a gas-
company truck driver when he was appointed village justice in Malone,
near the Canadian border, in 1993. When he was removed five years
later, the Commission on Judicial Conduct dispatched him with a
stinging description: "a biased, mean-spirited, bullying judge."

It was Justice Roberts who declared that women needed "a good
pounding." He had already battled with the county district attorney
over his resistance to granting orders of protection.

When a village resident asked that the dentist suing him be forced to
come to court to prove his case, Justice Roberts told the man, who
had a Hispanic surname: "You're not from around here, and that's not
the way we do things around here." The justice did not mention that
the plaintiff was his own dentist.

A common argument in favor of New York's justice courts is that local
judges know the people and problems that come before them. But that
can be a problem itself when justices use those prejudices to favor
friends and ride herd over others.

"They have their own little fiefdoms," said Laurie Shanks, an Albany
Law School professor. "Some are benevolent despots, but despots
nonetheless."

Again and again, the commission's records show, justices have failed
to remove themselves from cases involving their own families.

In this department, Pamela L. Kadur may hold a record. As town
justice in Root, west of Schenectady, she presided over at least
seven cases involving relatives, who often received lenient
treatment, the commission said when it ordered her removal in 2003.
Justice Kadur heard a speeding case against her son in her own
kitchen, then tried to cover up their family relationship in record
books, the commission said, by misspelling his last name.

One longtime town justice near Albany let a friend who owned a
driving school sit with him at the bench; when the justice ordered
anyone to take a driver-training course, only the friend's school was
acceptable. Another justice, in Rensselaer County, told a trucker
charged with drunken driving that he would not suspend his license
because "I can't do that to a fellow truck driver."

Historically, large numbers of the justices have been former law
enforcement officers, and lawyers complain that many have unfairly
favored the police and prosecutors.

Some justices, unsure of the law, have also come to rely too much on
the authorities. Elaine M. Rider, who presided in Waterville, near
Utica, fretted that she did not "really have the time to puzzle this
out" when a criminal defendant argued that evidence had been seized
illegally. So she had the prosecutor write her decision, the
commission said.

But one of the most common prejudices on view in the commission's
files is far more basic, and it can be found as often in the big-city
suburbs that have official-looking courthouses and lawyers on the
bench.

In 20 years in office in Haverstraw, north of New York City in
Rockland County, Justice Ralph T. Romano drew attention for his
opinions on women, state files show. Arraigning a man in 1997 on
charges that he had hit his wife in the face with a telephone, he
laughed and asked, "What was wrong with this?" Arraigning a woman on
charges that she had sexually abused a 12-year-old boy, the justice
asked his courtroom, "Where were girls like this when I was 12?"

Across the Hudson, Joseph Cerbone, the Mount Kisco justice with the
miniature violin, persuaded a young woman to drop her abuse case
against the son of a couple he had done legal work for. She told the
commission that while she did not believe the justice's claim that
the son was "a decent guy" who had "made a mistake," she had no
choice.

"I kind of felt I had no one behind me, no support," she said. "And
by getting a phone call from a judge, I felt that maybe I was making
a mistake by going through with these charges."

But the human damage can be much worse in the small communities where
the justice is often the most powerful local official.

In 11 years as justice in Dannemora, in the North Country, Thomas R.
Buckley had his own special treatment for defendants without much
money: Even if they were found not guilty, he ordered them to perform
community service work to pay for their court-appointed lawyers,
although defense lawyers and the district attorney had reminded him
for years that the law guaranteed a lawyer at no cost.

"The only unconstitutional part," he told the commission before it
removed him in 2000, "is for these freeloaders to expect a free ride."

He twice jailed David Velie, a 19-year-old charged with a
misdemeanor, even though the law required him to set bail. In an
interview, Mr. Buckley explained that the young man had been a
troublemaker "ever since he was born."

Like many small-town justices, he said many of his decisions were
down-to-earth solutions. "You've got to use your own judgment," he
said. "That's why they call us judges. The law is not always right."

Some residents say that without the law to protect them, they lived
in fear. Debra E. Bordeau, the justice's neighbor, said she went into
hiding after he threatened to jail her in a dispute over her dog,
which he ordered destroyed.

And Carson F. Arnold Sr., a contractor from a nearby town, was jailed
for five days after a woman who knew Justice Buckley complained that
Mr. Arnold had threatened her, the commission said. There was no
trial. The justice simply told Mr. Arnold to shut up, then sentenced
him without bail.

"How many years did he treat people like this?" Mr. Arnold asked in
an interview. "How many people did this affect?"

A Culture of Secrets

The feeling of powerlessness often begins at the courthouse door.

Many justices preside in intimidatingly tight quarters, admitting
participants one by one. Many have heard testimony, settled claims or
ruled in criminal cases without notifying the prosecutor, lawyers or
even the people directly involved. Some justices can be very
selective, state records show: At a 1999 criminal trial in
Kinderhook, south of Albany, Justice Edward J. Williams admitted
everyone but the victim's lawyer.

Court sessions may be just as unpredictable — held infrequently or at
odd hours, or canceled without notice. In 2004, the NAACP Legal
Defense and Educational Fund found that people awaiting trial in
Schuyler County in the Finger Lakes were jailed for months simply
waiting for court to convene again. A high school student arrested on
a minor drug charge in the summer of 2003, it said, was still sitting
in jail in October.

But the biggest obstacle of all is pinning down what happens in the
courtrooms.

A Rochester poverty lawyer, Laurie Lambrix, said that when she
appealed the case of a mother of six — a black woman evicted in 1999
by a white landlord who she said had made racist comments — a justice
in nearby Gates told her she could not examine the court file of her
own client. "I knew court records were public records," Ms. Lambrix
said. "I couldn't believe a judge would be ignorant of that."

She was lucky; at least there were records, which she eventually
obtained. In many justice courts, it is next to impossible to
reconstruct what happened. Some towns spring for a stenographer or
taping system, and some justices try to scrawl notes while they
preside. But in some cases, there are not even notes.

When someone does appeal, the law requires that justices write a
summary of the case. Justices said in interviews that their decisions
were rarely appealed, anyway, and even more rarely overturned.

The Commission on Judicial Conduct, then, remains the last line of
oversight for justices, and only for those who have stirred up enough
concern to be reported by a prosecutor, lawyer or citizen. But the
panel is stretched thin — "persistently and acutely underfunded," as
it lamented in one annual report. Its statewide staff, which numbered
63 in 1978 when it began, is down to 29.

Supporters of the justice courts have long maintained that they are
no worse than the higher courts, citing commission statistics that
show justices are disciplined at about the same rate as their higher-
court colleagues. But responding to questions from The Times,
commission officials studied the agency's three-decade record and
found — to their surprise — that cases against local justices were
more likely to result in serious punishments.

Although the justices make up about 66 percent of all New York
judges, they constitute 76 percent of the 147 judges who have been
removed from office.

Last year, six justices were publicly disciplined for the second
time, more repeat offenders than ever. But Mr. Tembeckjian, the
commission administrator, said the agency had no way to keep a closer
eye on them.

"It would be in the public interest for the commission to make sure
that a judge who was identified as having a problem has corrected
it," he said. "But we simply don't have the resources to do it."

Lawrence S. Goldman, the commission's chairman until April, said all
justices should be lawyers. His successor, the divorce lawyer Raoul
Felder, would not discuss the quality of the justice courts, but
predicted that a reckoning was at hand.

"This is something that's going to have to be addressed by the next
governor," he said. "There is a controversy here, and this issue has
not been addressed for many, many years."

Jo Craven McGinty contributed reporting.


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