Originally Posted - February 10, 2007

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CORAL GABLES, FLA---Last year, a Florida attorney known nationally for his position against pornography, taking on video game manufacturers and Howard Stern, sued the Florida Bar for violating his constitutional rights.

Now, in what seems to have to become the standard modus operandi against whistleblowing attorneys who dare to challenge the system, the Florida Bar has retaliated.

Coral Gables attorney Jack Thompson filed suit in federal court last April against Florida's bar association, 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.

Now the Bar has filed a five count, 40 page complaint against Thompson for allegedly making false and disparaging remarks about a judge and several lawyers, charging that Thompson has attempted to humiliate, embarrass, harass or intimidate them.

The attack on Thompson is reminiscent of the tactics used against Ohio attorney Elsebeth Baumgartner who blew the whistle on Ohio's retired visiting judge system and alleged case fixing in northern Ohio as well as alleged criminal wrongdoing involving several prosecutors including alleged sex crimes and drug dealing as well as illegal contracts and grant fraud.

Similar tactics have been used by the Florida Bar against Tampa attorney Mark Adams for challenging Sixth Circuit Court Judge Crockett Farnell along with GOP fundraiser and legal don Anthony Battaglia.

New York attorney Israel Weinstock was also disbarred for challenging a judge and several attorneys as was family law attorney Barbara Johnson of Andover, Mass., and Linda Kennedy of Virginia who blew the whistle on a Virginia judge and prosecutor from the Virginia State Bar for allegedly materially altering court transcripts.

However, unlike Baumgartner who is facing eight years in state prison for criticizing retired visiting judge Richard Markus in court documents and raising other allegations of wrongdoing, Thompson faces no criminal charges.

Thompson had alleged 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.

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 had sought to mediate the complaints, the Bar has refused, instead bringing formal disciplinary action against him. In his response to the Bar complaint which could lead to his disbarment, a temporary suspension or a mark on his "permanent record", Thompson has again moved for mediation and has filed a motion to stay all disciplinary action.

Among the complaints against Thompson are that he made derogatory remarks about Howard Stern's attorneys, an attorney representing video game publisher Take-Two as well as a judge.

E-mails to a judge are also the subject of the complaint against Thompson although, once again, unlike Baumgartner, Thompson has not been criminally charged. Baumgartner is currently serving a 120-day jail sentence in Ottawa County Jail for 27 counts of contempt for sending e-mails to Markus who was presiding in a criminal matter involving her and served a previous 45-day sentence for contempt for similar expression of speech last summer.

The Bar claims that Thompson had violated an order not to send a circuit court judge any letters or emails relating to a November 2005 case involving the death of two police officers. The Bar claims Thompson violated the order more than 30 times but again, unlike the Baumgartner case, no contempt charges were filed against Thompson.

The complaint also alleges that Thompson has sent strong and accusatory letters and e-mails to several lawyers including Miami attorney Alberto Cardenas, lawyers with the Philadelphia law form of Blank Rome and Judge James Moore of Fayette County, Ala.

One of the counts against Thompson is for his letter to Cardenas accusing him of "distribution of pornography to children".

Thompson says that the Bar's action is just another example of the organization flexing its muscle to infringe on his First Amendment rights and activism.

The disciplinary complaint against Thompson will be handled by Florida's Supreme Court.

Judge Moore, Cardenas and attorneys at Blank Rome have filed complaints against Thompson as well as the Bar itself and attorney Norman Kent of Fort Lauderdale.

The Alabama Bar Association has also filed a complaint against him. That action is pending in Alabama Supreme Court.

In 2005, Thompson had filed a case in Alabama on behalf of the families of two police officers and a dispatcher, all of whom were killed by Devin Moore in 2003. Moore was convicted and sentenced to death. Moore is no relation to Judge Moore who heard the case.

Devin Moore's playing of the video game Grand Theft Auto was a key issue in the criminal case and Thompson blamed the game's publisher, Take-Two, for the deaths.

Two of the five Bar counts against him are related to Judge Moore's complaint against him, claiming that Thompson took steps to intimidate opposing counsel in the Alabama civil suit involving the game maker and claims that Thompson violated a court directive not to comment publicly about the case.

After Judge Moore removed Thompson from the case in November 2005, saying he didn't want any communications from Thompson, he complained that Thompson sent him more than 30 letters and emails, challenging his integrity. Moore also claimed that he had received copies of letters that Thompson had written to other public officials in which he had allegedly stated that one Alabama attorney had claimed that he could "fix any case that comes before" Moore.

Moore complained about another letter allegedly written by Thompson which said that the judge "breaks the rules, even the Alabama State Bar Rules, because he thinks that the rules don't apply to him".

Thompson is also under fire for sending a letter to the managing partner of the Blank Rome law firm which is representing video game maker Take-Two, saying that "your law firm has actively and knowingly facilitated by various means the criminal distribution of sexual material to minors".

Two of the Blank Rome attorneys complained about a letter Thompson allegedly wrote to President Bush and copied to others which accused Blank Rome attorneys of having done "their best to promote what Pope John Paul II called a 'culture of death' to an entire generation of American children".

In his federal litigation failed last April against the Bar, Thompson wrote, "The Florida Bar has hectored plaintiff Thompson for 19 months with SLAPP Bar complaints filed by opposing counsel (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participants)", Thompson charged in his federal suit against the Florida Bar filed last April. "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.

Thompson's federal complaint against the Bar, which seems to have prompted their retaliatory action against him, consisted of five counts.

He stated 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 the 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 Thompson's claim, he also addressed 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 maintained 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.

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 him are SLAPP Bar complaints intended to infringe upon and destroy his 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.

The Bar had moved to dismiss Thompson's complaint. Thompson moved to disqualify the judge, saying the judge was a member of the Florida Bar but did not respond to the Bar's motion to dismiss. The judge did recuse himself and in May, 2006, Thompson withdrew the lawsuit. The case was dismissed without prejudice, meaning it could be brought again.

The war between Thompson and the Florida Bar has been long waged, dating back to 1992 when Thompson asked a Florida judge to declare the Florida Bar association unconstitutional and claimed that the Bar was engaging in a vendetta against him because of his religious beliefs. He argued that "the wedding of all three functions of government into the Florida Bar, the 'official arm' of the Florida Supreme Court", violated the separation of powers. He settled out of court for $20,000.

Thompson had asked the Department of Justice to investigate the Florida Bar in January 2006, saying that "the Florida Bar and its agents have engaged in a documented pattern of this illegal activity, which may sink to the level of criminal racketeering activity, in a knowing and illegal effort to chill my First Amendment rights". 2-10-07

To read more about the Elsebeth Baumgartner case, go to www.northcountrygazette.org, click on the site map, and search the site. Dr. Baumgartner has been stripped of both her law license and pharmacy license for having made complaints against various public officials She has been charged with multiple criminal charges stemming from the exercise of her right of First Amendment right of free speech, freedom of expression, trying to make public allegations of corruption. She has been convicted of criticizing several judges, in particular, retired visiting judge Richard Markus who operates a private judicial service while at the same time using taxpayer resources to conduct his judicial business. Baumgartner has been sentenced to eight years in state prison after pleading no contest to charges of intimidation and retaliation for sending Markus e-mails to his address which was freely available on the Internet, criticizing his judicial performance and questioning if he was legally qualified to perform judicial duties, calling him a rent-a-judge which in essence he is, being assigned to various cases throughout northern Ohio through his private firm. Although he was mandated to retire from elected judicial office when he reached age 70, at age 76, Markus is still handling cases under the retired visiting judge system which was enacted by Chief Judge Thomas Moyer although Baumgartner, and many judges, say is unconstitutional and contrary to law.

© 2007 North Country Gazette