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CORAL GABLES, FLA---A Florida attorney known nationally for his position against pornography has filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Southeastern Florida, alleging that The Florida Bar has participated in a civil conspiracy, collaborating with complainants who have filed SLAPP bar complaints against him to shut him up. He says his constitutional rights have been violated by The Bar.
Coral Gables attorney Jack Thompson is seeking one million dollars for damages he says have resulted from the Bar harassing him by investigating what he says are baseless complaints filed against him by disgruntled adversaries.
Thompson is known nationally for his crusades against pornography and violence in the entertainment industry, taking on Howard Stern’s radio show and video game manufacturers. Those opponents in turn have filed complaints against Thompson with the Bar.
Although Thompson has sought to mediate the complaints, the Bar has refused. Included with his federal litigation is a motion for mediation.
“The Florida Bar has hectored plaintiff Thompson for 19 months with SLAPP Bar complaints filed by opposing counsel (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participants). Continually, during that time, Thompson and his counsel in these Bar matters have repeatedly asked The Florida Bar to sit down with him and his counsel to try to resolve, once and for all, this dispute, which goes back more than 18 years when other baseless SLAPP Bar complaints were filed, resulting in the payment of money damages to plaintiff Thompson”, his motion says. “The Bar has utterly refused even to discuss the possibility of trying to resolve this matter. Yet, this obduracy comes from a Bar that officially promotes the benefits of “alternative dispute resolution” and “mediation.”
Thompson’s motion for mediation says that a recent survey taken by former Florida Bar President Miles McGrane shows that a significant number of Florida lawyers believe The Bar’s disciplinary system protects well-connected lawyers at the expense of other lawyers such as himself.
His federal complaint against the Bar consists of five counts.
He states that “The Florida Bar presently seeks, at the behest of Beasley Broadcast Group, Inc., and its lawyers, including the Miami law firm of Tew Cardenas, who were unsuccessful in the face of plaintiff Thompson’s public-spirited and effective efforts to force the indecent, illegal Howard Stern Show off the public airwaves, through his efforts before the Federal Communications Commission, to apply, improperly and illegally, Florida Bar Rule 4-8.4(d) to punish plaintiff for his success. This Rule states: “A lawyer shall not engage in conduct in connection with the practice of law that is prejudicial to the administration of justice, including to knowingly, or through callous indifference, disparage, humiliate, or discriminate against litigants, jurors, witnesses, court personnel, or other lawyers on any basis, including, but not limited to, on account of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, national origin, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, age, socioeconomic status, employment, or physical characteristic.
Thompson says this Rule, on its face and/or as it is being applied by The Bar to him, clearly constitutes a violation of the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.
He says that he has “enjoyed tremendous success, litigatively and otherwise, against the makers of the hyperviolent cop-killing Grand Theft Auto video games”. He has appeared on roughly 80 national television programs about the marketing of violent, mature-rated video games to children, having most recently appeared twice last year on CBS’s 60 Minutes regarding the killing of three police personnel in Alabama by a teen who was sold this cop-killing simulator made by Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. The wrongful death case filed in Alabama by Thompson and co-counsel is now proceeding to trial, Thompson having successfully argued before the Alabama court that the First Amendment does not protect the sale of adult virtual reality murder simulators to children.
Take-Two is represented in this Alabama case by the giant law firm of Blank Rome in Philadelphia, which also serves Take-Two as its officially-registered lobbyist in the US House and US Senate. Blank Rome is the national version of Miami’s lobbyist/law firm Tew Cardenas in more ways than one, Thompson asserts.
“The Blank Rome/Take-Two strategy to try to win the Alabama case was to SLAPP attack plaintiff herein, Jack Thompson. The Florida Bar now has zealously and wrongful seized upon the opportunity afforded it by these SLAPP efforts by Take-Two and Blank Rome to even file its own SLAPP Bar complaint against Thompson, not content to rely upon Blank Rome’s own SLAPP complaint.
He says that all of these Blank Rome/Take-Two inspired SLAPP Bar complaints are resulting in ongoing violations of plaintiff Thompson’s First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights under the US Constitution.
In count three of Thompson’s claim, he addresses Canon 7 of the Canons of Judicial Conduct which states that “A candidate for judicial office shall not make statements that commit or appear to commit the candidate with respect to cases, controversies or issues that are likely to come before the court”.
Thompson maintains this Canon violates the First Amendment of the United States Constitution in that it, seeks, remarkably, to prohibit and punish pure “political speech” by a candidate for political office, which speech occupies the highest rung of First Amendment protection. He charges that The Florida Bar has chosen to violate, knowingly, the United States Supreme Court ruling in Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, 536 U.S. 765 (2002), which clearly prohibits application of the aforementioned Florida Canon.
However, in New York State, embattled Albany Supreme Court Justice Thomas J. Spargo, when the subject of a formal written complaint by the state Commission on Judicial Conduct, made this same argument in federal court only to have the court determine it was a state issue. The matter was sent to the state Court of Appeals which ruled against Spargo. Spargo was removed from the bench last month for engaging in political activity while in judicial office in addition to other complaints including his shakedown of attorneys to contribute to his legal defense fund.
Thompson charges that The Florida Bar “has a very long history of illegally using its “disciplinary” machinery to infringe upon plaintiff Thompson’s constitutional rights, including but not limited to his First Amendment rights to engage in public activism, most notably against the American entertainment industry’s marketing and sale of adult and adult-rated material to children”.
“In the early 1990s, for example, The Florida Bar, in league with pornographers and their attorneys, as well as with an operative of the American Civil Liberties Union, persuaded the Florida Supreme Court, ex parte, to enter an order mandating that Thompson must submit, without protest, to psychiatric and psychological tests administered by health care providers chosen by The Bar because of “Thompson’s alleged obsession against pornography which is so severe that he is disabled by that obsession and thus unfit to practice law.” “Brain damage” was also alleged. Thompson was allegedly suffering from this disabling mental defect while securing the first fines ever levied by the Federal Communications Commission for the airing of indecent material in violation of federal criminal statute18 USC 1464. His opponents were unable to out-litigate this allegedly mentally ill, brain damaged lawyer, Thompson”, his complaint says.
“This was in fact a contrived SLAPP assault upon Thompson’s constitutional rights, participated in fully by an ideologically-driven Florida Bar.
“The Bar’s experts found that Thompson was suffering neither from brain damage nor from any mental illness, and that he was in fact simply pursuing his activist Christian faith in the public and legal arenas. The Bar’s bizarre, illegal, unconstitutional effort to pathologize his conservative public activism and his Christian faith resulted in the payment of money damages to Thompson by The Bar’s insurer as well as the happy result that Thompson is now the only officially Bar-certified sane lawyer in Florida!”
Thompson says that the “Bar never got over this defeat and is now at it again, at the behest of some of the same lawyers on behalf of some of the same broadcasters, as well as also at the behest of the violent video game industry, the makers of the Grand Theft Auto games, and their lobbyist/lawyers”. He maintains that all of the pending Bar complaints against Thompson are SLAPP Bar complaints intended to infringe upon and destroy Thompson’s First Amendment and other constitutional rights to engage in his spirited public interest law activism. “The Bar is a willing participant in the pursuit of these SLAPP Bar complaints”, he claims.
4-13-06
© 2006 North
Country Gazette
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