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	I Object Again, Says the Church Attorney. Everyone Else in the Courtroom Gives out a Sigh By Kay Ebeling Examiner March 5, 2009 http://www.examiner.com/x-1960-LA-City-Buzz-Examiner~y2009m3d5-I-will-not -accept-this-says-the-church-attorney--Everyone-else-in-the-courtroom-gives-out-an-audib At the last hearing on release of documents, Judge Emilie Elias was about to declare the issue closed re document release in the Clergy Cases Los Angeles 2007, when the LA Archdiocese attorney jumped up and said, "I won't accept this. I am going to ask for a hearing date and then determine if an appellate would be appropriate.". DeMarco: Would you mind telling the court the anticipated length of this next brief? Steier: It will be a complete briefing. DeMarco: Are we talking about another 50-page--? Judge: He needs my permission to file a 50-page brief. So Donald Steier filed a 49 page opposition brief instead. DeMarco filed a response to Steier's brief. Steier filed another brief Fighting the Roman Catholic Church in court is hardly balanced justice, since every archdiocese has a bottomless wallet when it comes to paying attorney fees. Judge Elias seemed exasperated at the stream of motions filed by church attorneys, as they apparently using a tactic of drowning the plaintiffs in papers that have to be read and then responses filed, which costs thousands of dollars. When Steier got up and objected again, as soon as he said, "I won't accept this," everyone else in the room gave out an audible sigh. At 11 AM today there will be another hearing on document release in Judge Elias' court and LA City Buzz will be there. Since January 2006 when I started covering the cases at City of Angels Network, the only defense tactic the Church has used has been to delay, obfuscate, and overwhelm with bytes and bytes of streaming motions, drowning the plaintiffs in papers as they have no other approach. Steier represents an undetermined amount of unnamed Catholic priests who as pedophiles were defendants in the 510 civil cases settled in L.A. in 2007. Steier says because the cases settled before trial, there was no trial, so the priests were denied their right to a jury trial. . . Things like that. over and over again things like that Church Anticipating Opposition to Judge's Decisions Before Hearing even takes place In addition to the hearing tomorrow on Steier's opposition to plaintiff's motion to unseal documents, there is another hearing already scheduled for March 24th at 11 AM in the same location, Department 308 at the Superior Court building at 600 S. Commonwealth Avenue. Steier has already gotten a Motion to Quash on calendar for March 24, Motion to dismiss and Hearings of Objections to ruling on Sealed Documents.) Plaintiffs initiating vigilante justice In one of many threads Steier takes off on to wax legalistic and expand paragraphs out extra lines, he accuses plaintiffs of seeking vigilante justice. The following is copy and pasted from Steier's Opposition To Plaintiffs' Motion to Unseal Documents. VI. THE PUBLIC DISCLOSURE PROCESS IS PUNITIVE AND CONSTITUTES ILLEGAL VIGILANTE JUSTICE (This is directly copied from the motion on the part of unnamed priests) Having taken their monetary settlement, plaintiffs now seek to abuse the court's power to carry out private, vigilante justice, taking sensitive private information from private files and publicizing it to shame the "accused" and stigmatize them in a most horrible way. The process has none of the safeguards of the Constitution that attaches to the penal process – the accusers are anonymous, protected by "Doe" fictitious names, there has been no confrontation, no cross-examination by the accused, no impartial prosecutor sworn to do justice, no finding that the lurid accusations are true by a jury or any other impartial fact finder. In fact, the "accused" have been entirely shut out of the process intended to ruin them. Plaintiffs have created a private "Star Chamber," and they now ask the court's blessing and power to operate it. Public shaming was a kind of criminal punishment in colonial times, one long since determined to violate the Constitution and abandoned in the United States. Fredenburg v. City of Fremont [2004] 119 Cal. App.4th 408; Smith v. Doe [2003] 538 U. S. 84. In Smith, the Supreme Court reviewed the history of the past punishment of shaming, at pages 97-98, where the intent was to make the offenders suffer "permanent stigmas, which in effect cast the person out of the community." Illegal today, shaming was recognized as punishment for a crime, and required the full panoply of Constitutional criminal procedural rights before it could be imposed. "Public shaming has long been viewed as a form of punishment." People v. Castellanos [1999] 21 Cal.4th 785. It affects a liberty interest protected by the Due Process Clause. Levenstein v. Salafsky [2005, 7th cca] 414 Fed.3rd 767. "Indivudals have a strong interest in not being associated unwarrantedly with alleged criminal activity." Stern v. Federal Bureau of Investigation [USApp DC, 1984] 737 Fed.2nd 84, at 91-92. Likewise, our legal history is replete with cases of vigilante justice, where an accused was forcibly banished from a community without trial. That process, too, is illegal. Another Steier Quote: "Here the matter is worse, because there is no public oversight at all, simply a press by private individuals to destroy lives with allegations (against priests) that are all denied." Steier contends that since the plaintiffs accepted their settlement checks that were released in December 2007 after the July 2007 settlement, it's too late now to be asking for documents. He doesn't mention why it has taken a year and a half to get this far. . .
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