We had an interesting little debate at our last meeting of our state organization, PSACO – Process Servers Association of Colorado.
It was about the problem with “sewer serving”. That’s when a bad process server takes their client’s money and, instead of serving the documents legally, ethically and diligently, they do what amounts to “throwing them in a sewer”, then put in a Proof of Service, Affidavit of Service or the equivalent, with their clients, who file it with the courts.
It’s a problem that causes an enormous amount of grief, expense and wasted time for their clients, defendants, plaintiffs, the attorneys and the courts each year.
It’s a form of fraud and theft, taking money for services not rendered, but worse than that, it can royally screw up a case, and even peoples’ lives. Someone gets stopped by a police officer for a routine traffic ticket. The officer finds that there’s a warrant for their arrest, so they get arrested and taken in, and hauled before a judge. Then they find out that it was for not showing up in court. But the defendant says they were never served with the citation, subpoena or whatever brought this about! What happened? Well it may have been a deadbeat defendant who just didn’t bother, or it may have been a bad process server who did a sewer serve. It can lead to people getting judgements and having their money, their property, sometimes even their children taken away, because they were never served the court documents!
It’s a very serious matter, and we’ve even heard of a few servers who literally sewer served thousands of cases before they were caught. And it’s perjury, which can often carry a penalty of a year in jail for each count! The process server is swearing under oath that those documents from the court were served by them, diligently! It’s a very serious problem and it makes all process servers look bad when it happens. Here in Colorado, as of the time of this writing, we’re not even a regulated state when it comes to process serving, so companies can virtually hire people off the street, whose breath can fog a mirror, and send them out serving these crucially important documents from the courts, and every once in awhile we hear of someone who sewer served something. We heard of a case back in 2006, where a server had served two cases in the mountains, 15 minutes in time frame from each other, but the locations were 75 miles apart! They had fired her and told us about her as an example! She may have even been prosecuted for perjury.
But it even happens in heavily regulated states. We heard of a very big case in New York, where they were only paying their process servers $5 a serve, and thousands of cases had been “sewer served”. But come on. Is it possible that paying a process server $5 a serve just might be a temptation for them to sewer serve? Seriously? This is why we tell potential clients, who sound like they’re calling around price shopping, that the cheapest server may not be the best, in fact is very likely not to be, and they may be lucky if their case is properly served at all. Bad servers come and go very quickly in this business, because anyone can do it, but not everyone can do it diligently and right, and some people are lazy and looking for easy money. Some are just doing it for some part time weekend “beer money”. “Caveat Emptor” - Let the buyer beware!
It’s for this very reason that we started using video recorders for all of our “untrusted serves”, many months ago. ( A “trusted serve” is someone like a known Registered Agent, who we trust not to claim that they weren’t served, when they were. )
So anyway, we were talking about this at the meeting, how the people who do sewer serves are rarely prosecuted for it, leaving a bad image on our whole industry, and who should actually do the prosecuting anyway?
Some said that the judges should prosecute them, and others said that the police should, and it seems like neither of them really want to. So we debated and lamented it for awhile, then moved on to other business.
But, having taken some time to ponder this, I think I’ve arrived at the correct answer, and it has to do with basic civics. We have three branches of government in this country; the Legislative Branch that makes the laws, the Judicial Branch that judges them, and the Executive Branch that enforces them.
So who should it be up to, to bring prosecution against a process server for allegedly committing perjury and “sewer serving”? Why the Executive Branch – the police or sheriffs. The laws against perjury were made by the Legislative Branch, so they exist. And after the charges are brought, the evidence will be heard by the Judicial Branch and judged. So it seems like it’s up to the Executive Branch to look at the evidence and bring the charges against the process server who’s accused of sewer serving.
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_agent
“A registered agent, also known as a resident agent[1] or statutory agent,[2] in United States business law, is a business or individual designated to receive service of process (SOP) when a business entity is a party in a legal action such as a lawsuit…”
The function of a registered agent
“The purpose of a Registered Agent is to provide a legal address (not a P.O. Box) within that jurisdiction where there are persons available during normal business hours to facilitate legal service of process being served in the event of a legal action or lawsuit.”
Yet, from:
http://epplerjohnson.com/blog/category/blog-posts/
“When a Registered Agent Refuses to be Served
When a company does business in Colorado it is required to have register agent to receive service. Service is the legal notice that is required for a court to bring an entity into a lawsuit. As such, every domestic entity that transacts business in the state of Colorado “shall continuously maintain in this state a register agent…” C.R.S. § 7-90-701. The purpose of the statute is to provide means of providing due process notice to an entity of a pending legal action. C.R.S. § 7-90-704(1).
Unfortunately, some business believe that they can avoid law suits by making it difficult or impossible to contact their registered agent. Often they list the wrong address with the Secretary or State or hide from process servers. This kind of behavior denies a party the opportunity to bring the entity before a court and escape legal liability yet to still transact business in Colorado.”
The way I see it, Colorado’s Registered Agent laws appear to be more along the lines of “suggestions”, rather than actual laws. The word “law” implies that there would be some kind of enforcement mechanism for them, but in the case of Colorado’s Registered Agent laws, there seems to be none.
The very definition of a Registered Agent is someone who’s available during business hours, to accept service of process for a company that’s registered as a business with the state.
Yet in my years as a process server, I’ve discovered many flaws in our state’s system, which allow bad companies the legitimacy of registering with the state, but allow them to defraud and steal from people, without even being able to be found easily for service of process, by someone who’s suing them for it.
It starts with someone registering a business. State law says that they have to give a physical address for the business and for the Registered Agent, and not just use a P.O. Box. Great. But companies that want to defraud people, have learned that they can get away with using a PMB – a Private Mail Box, like those found at mailbox stores. It’s just like the P.O. Box that the state won’t allow, only private.
The state should certainly know that these are no more a “physical address” than a P.O. Box is. If we go to serve them there, we find the mailbox store instead of an office for the company, and under state law, we cannot serve a P.O. Box or a mailbox store location, we must serve the Registered Agent personally, after all, that’s the very definition of what a Registered Agent is for.
When I’ve reported this to the Secretary of State’s office Business Division, they had a “ho-hum” attitude about it, and told me that they consider a PMB to be a physical address, but it seems like an irrational statement, being they don’t consider a P.O. Box to be a physical address, and being the Registered Agent for that company can’t possibly be at that location during business hours, to accept service of process. Where are they? Are they hiding out and living inside that little box?
So it’s erroneous reasoning, if not disingenuous, and a PMB is really not a “physical address” where we can find a Registered Agent during business hours and serve them, anymore than a P.O. Box is.
So this facilitates fraud and abuse by bad businesses, because they can hide behind a PMB and still maintain the appearance of legitimacy by having a business registration with the state, while their “Registered Agent” can’t be served, so they cannot be compelled by law to go to court.
Then we have the second part of this mess – the company that actually has a physical location, or an attorney acting as their Registered Agent, but the “Registered Agent” isn’t there during business hours.
I tried serving one company like this, a very old traditional company in lower downtown Denver, one that had been in business for possibly 100 years. The Registered Agent wasn’t there, though I went back several times trying to serve him. After getting very frustrated with this, I told the manager of the store that they were required by state law to have a Registered Agent present during business hours, to accept service of process. Her reply was; “Well he’s not here, so sue me!” Very funny, considering the fact that someone was trying to sue them! This was obviously someone who was aware of the fact that the “law” has no teeth.
So I called the Secretary of State’s office, Business Division, and asked them what enforcement provisions they have, in the case that a Registered Agent is consistently not available at a physical location, to accept service of process. For example, could they cite the company, and perhaps threaten to shut down their business registration with the state? I was told that there was none. No enforcement. The manager of that store must have known this, which is why she became smart with me and said; “Well he’s not here, so sue me!” In fact it took me over three weeks until that company’s Registered Agent was finally there and I could serve him, wasting my time and gas and making it where we lost money on that serve. And often, my clients don’t have that kind of time to effect service of process, so it screws them up with their case.
In another couple of these cases, my clients were trying to sue businesses, the defendants were hiding behind these PMB’s, and I was told that because of “privacy laws”, the mailbox stores could not give out the Registered Agent’s actual physical address. So the entire system seems to be set up to protect businesses from being sued, instead of for facilitating service of process so that everyone can have their fair day in court.
Another serious problem with these privacy laws nowdays, is that a process server is considered a “public servant” by state law, with the same legal authority as the sheriff to serve these court documents, and there are state and federal laws against obstructing public servants from the performance of their work, specifically process servers. Yet these “privacy laws” seem to trump all of that. People are so terrified of the government these days, that even though there are millions of laws and some of them contradict each other, people are so afraid that they take the path that seems like it will cover their backsides the most, at that moment.
And we’ve seen many, many cases like this.
There’s another company here, a huge corporation, that’s literally a textbook case for this kind of thing. Without naming them, they were even referred to at process serving academy. They have a giant office building of their own, with a full staff of attorneys in a legal department, and when we go there to serve them, we get told by their private contractor guards in the lobby, that their Registered Agent won’t come down, and that we have to call for an appointment to come back and serve him! I’ve even been told that he was out of town for two weeks, and that no one else there, even though they have a legal department, is authorized to accept service for him! They know that our state’s laws have no teeth and that they can get away with these stunts.
I have another case that I’m currently working on, where a company has an office here and supposedly a Registered Agent, but I’d been trying to serve him for at least three weeks and he was never there and wouldn’t return my phone calls. Finally after leaving him numerous messages, we received a call from an attorney who said that she was now the Registered Agent for his company and would accept service, only she “hasn’t been there” for a couple of weeks and when I kept calling and they finally told me she was back from her trip out of town, I arranged to come over there one afternoon when they told me she’d be there. I was kept waiting for fifteen minutes in the lobby, and they finally told me that she wasn’t there that day!
I had another case during this same time period, where an attorney was the Registered Agent for a company and he wasn’t there over a period of two weeks. They kept telling me he was there, and to come over, but once I got there I’d be told that he wasn’t there! I left him numerous messages and he’d never return my calls. This is not acting in good faith, and seems unethical for an attorney to do, but they know that the law has no teeth and they can get away with it. The people at the state Supreme Court attorney complaint line told me that they get about 4300 complaints a month about Colorado attorneys and I had to make an appointment about three weeks in advance, just to talk to the guy who was reviewing my complaint one time, about an attorney who was refusing to pay me for my work.
So the state stonewalls us with regard to Registered Agents, and they act like they simply don’t care. I called the Secretary of State’s Business Division recently and asked if they could enforce the laws that require a Registered Agent to be present to receive service of process during business hours, and they told me “no”, that I should call the Attorney General’s office.
I emailed the Attorney General’s office and this is how they replied:
“Your question …
> Does this constitute a fraudulent Registered Agent filing with
> the state, and can it call into question this company’s business
> registration with the state, or does the law requiring a
> Registered Agent have no teeth at all?
… is a request for a legal opinion. As stated before, we cannot provide you with legal advice.”
I asked them essentially, if they would enforce the law! That reply is a complete blow-off of the issue. Do the Business Division and the Attorney General’s office exist to make companies comply with state laws, or not? From my past experiences with trying to get the Attorney General’s office to address anything, I got the impression that all they care about is consumer protection issues, and not enforcing the other laws of the state.
What this whole state structure of inaction appears to do, is to facilitate companies that commit fraud, theft, or injure people in various ways, so it defeats one of the main reasons that a state legitimately exists for, in the first place – to protect people against the initiation of force, fraud and theft, the latter two being the initiation of force against people by deception.
If a state doesn’t even serve these functions, what is it good for?
And I’m perfectly aware that many business are small ones, and don’t often have the resources to have a Registered Agent sitting in an office all day, but the state should at least make it where they have to comply when contacted, by arranging for service during a day time business hours time frame with the process server ( An entire business day, not like my grandfather used to joke about – saying that they “only worked from 12 to 1 with an hour for lunch”. ). And if they’re a big corporation, they should have to have a Registered Agent or attorney who’s authorized to accept service for them, during business hours, period.
These inequities not only cost our clients time and money, but they further serve to clog up the court system, costing the taxpayers unnecessary money as well.
I’m of the opinion that these are serious issues that need to be addressed by our state legislature, so that people who have been injured, defrauded, or stolen-from by particular businesses, can have more efficient access to the court system for redress of their grievances, and not be stonewalled by a system that has no teeth for enforcing the very laws that the state made.
I had an interesting discussion with a client about a year ago. Before that discussion, I’d never had anything particularly against Sheriffs serving process, but he changed my mind. The reasoning has been stewing in my thought processes since then.
The client, a fellow NAPPS member ( National Association of Professional Process Servers ) from a state in the northeast, called up one day and wanted me to serve an inmate at the Denver Jail. I instantly mentioned that only the Sheriff is allowed to serve process at the Denver jail. Now I’ve long known that this has nothing rational to do with safety. I’ve served inmates at jails before, sometimes at the Adams County Jail, and sometimes at the Federal Prison on Quincy Avenue in Littleton, the same joint that Timothy McVeigh stayed in, before his execution, I understand. They have procedures which keep the inmate isolated from the process server, who passes the documents through a window to the inmate, while the guard watches. And of course the process server is screened and searched in advance. So it’s commonly done, it must be that cities like Denver want the work to go to their Sheriff Civil Division servers instead, so they wrote the rules that way.
But this client didn’t want the Sheriff to serve his documents, he wanted me to serve them. I asked why, and he told me it was a matter of principle. How so? Well, he said that he preferred a fellow NAPPS member to do all his work, ordinarily. He pointed out that Sheriffs people aren’t so good at process serving anyway, that they usually only work from 9-5 and would go attempt residential serves during those hours, when most people are away at work, then tell the clients they couldn’t serve the defendant. I’ve long been familiar with hearing that, being we often get clients coming to us after the Sheriff has done that, tried just three times, and they lost their money and needed someone to get the job done for them. ( They thought they would save money, by going to the Sheriff, who undercut our fees. The old saying comes to mind – “You get what you pay for.” ) So I was familiar with that argument. He pointed out that the Sheriffs should stick to the work that they do best, which is law enforcement. How could I argue with that? If I needed law enforcement work done, I wouldn’t call a process server, I’d call the police or the Sheriff.
And then he made an even more compelling argument. He pointed out that Sheriffs undercut the fees of private process servers, taking a lot of our work, and that they can only do so by getting subsidized by taxpayers money. Taxes aren’t optional, people are forced to pay them. So he said that people are being forced to subsidize the costs of civil court actions, which are private parties suing each other. Good point.
Process serving is a constitutional part of our “right to due process of the law”, though. But in most cases, there are private process servers around, and the parties in these cases pay us to do this work for them. There’s only one instance in which we both agreed that the Sheriff has a legitimate reason to be serving process, and that would be in very remote counties where no private process server is covering the work there. But otherwise, I couldn’t help but agree with everything he said, and we both agreed on the remote counties issue as well.
So he hired me for the serve at the Denver Jail and I agreed to do it. He instructed me that if they refused me access to the inmate, I was to serve the guard by refusal, or an officer of the jail, and his state allowed him to do that and follow up by mailing a copy to the inmate, which we had to do. So I did it.
Since then, I even had a call from one potential client who was in a panic. He called me at 4:30 PM. He had hired the Sheriff to serve a guy at work, on a Same Day Rush basis – it absolutely had to be served that day. The sheriff had taken a hefty chunk of the guy’s money for this, and had then gone to the guy’s work place at 12:30 PM and been told that the defendant was out to lunch. What a surprise! They finally reported that back to this poor guy, at 4:15 PM. I had to decline the job that late in the day, because as I explained to the man, I could rush to print the documents out, then rush over there, and the defendant might have already left for the day, in fact he may have already left as we spoke. So I couldn’t feel right about taking even more of his money, and possibly not even being able to get his job done on time. He was pretty screwed.
And again, I’d pretty much forgotten about the issue, except for the occasional passing thought. But fast forward to the present, and here we are in a situation where the states and cities are in deep financial trouble because of this economy. Thinking about all this now, it would seem like they’d have very compelling reasons to shift nearly all process serving work to private process servers, and let the Sheriff do what they do best, which is law enforcement.
So I’d like to suggest to NAPPS, and our state organization PSACO – Process Servers Association of Colorado, that such measures be pushed for, because our business has fallen off drastically because of this economy, and we could sure use that work, and after all, why should the taxpayers, who are certainly taxed enough already, be forced to support the costs of service of civil process, when us private servers do it best, we specialize it, we know all the nuances and techniques, and we don’t burden the already-strapped taxpayers with the costs?
OK, this is off topic for a process server’s blog, but I figure that a lot of readers like coffee and might enjoy this anyway. If you sometimes make the coffee at your law firm, and would like to really impress your colleagues, read on. Or especially just for yourself ( and perhaps your family ) at home.
Years ago, I started wanting to learn how to make better coffee at home. It was after Starbucks opened up, and suddenly the old instant coffees and pre-ground stuff that I used to buy at the grocery stores, just wasn’t as good anymore, in comparison. But I drink a couple of cups a day, and who can afford $4 for a cup of coffee all the time?
So the first step was buying one of those little Kontakt brewers that they sold at Starbucks, getting a grinder for at home, and grinding at home and brewing the Starbucks whole beans here. That was much better for several years, than what I’d experienced before. It was easy to become a coffee snob. The instants and pre-ground coffees just weren’t as good anymore. There was something better. My favorite became Starbucks Sulawesi, which has a bold, strong earthy flavor. ( Sulawesi is a big island in Indonesia. )
Doing some research on the web, I even found out that coffee starts losing its flavor within a few hours of being ground. So did I want something that had been ground and was sitting on a grocery store shelf, maybe for months? Since then, I shudder when I see people using the grinders in the grocery store, and taking ground coffee home with them.
Then a few years ago, after Whole Foods opened up, I noticed that they had whole beans that had been roasted more recently, usually within a week or so. And they had Sulawesi, so I tried those and they were better than the Starbucks. From the same island but better. Why? Think about it. Starbucks roasts the beans, then packages them and ships them to the stores. How long are they on the store shelves before being sold? Who knows? So it seemed that the beans at Whole Foods, being roasted in the past week or two, were fresher and tasted better. I did some more research and found that beans start losing their flavor after roasting too, only not as fast as after grinding, but they still do. So I started buying my beans from Whole Foods instead.
Then about a year later, ever in pursuit of better tasting coffee ( Some of my favorite things in life are good coffee and good popcorn. ), I started a little Yahoo Groups chat group about coffee. Between that and research on the web, I learned that the brewing temperature counts quite a bit too. It seems that the ideal brewing temperature is around 202.5 degrees F. I also found that, here in the Denver area, water boils right around 203 degrees, not at 212 like it does at sea level. Interesting, huh? The higher you go in altitude, the lower temperature water boils at, which is why if you were in space and lost your artificial atmosphere, your blood would soon boil out. But I digress…
So I took a thermometer and measured a pot of water that I ran through the Kontakt brewer. 155 degrees. Uh oh. More web research. I found out that there were only a few home brewers that would brew coffee at the optimal temperature of around 202.5 degrees like that, which were approved by the Specialty Coffee Association of America. One of them that was affordable, was the Technivorm KBT741 from Holland. This was a few years ago, and I managed to pick one up online for around $190 with free shipping. They cost more now, due to inflation. Thanks Ben!
But this moved my home brewing up another notch. Again, it was some of the best coffee I’d ever tasted, in my opinion, much better than the Starbucks.
I’ve been brewing happily at home since then, until I started noticing that the freshness of the roast can also make a huge difference in flavor. One day I was buying beans at Whole Foods and they had just roasted some fresh Sulawesi. So I bought half a pound ( I’d learned never to buy more than half a pound, because that lasted me two weeks, and it lost flavor quite a bit after that. ) and the aroma in the car on the way home was magnificent. So was the brew, when I ground some up at home and use it in the Technivorm! It set a new flavor standard for me.
Then I began to realize that even Whole Foods was rarely roasting it that freshly, as it had that day. I started paying attention to the roast dates on their bins, and there wasn’t much consistency. Depending on how much they sold, and how convenient it was to roast Sulawesi, among all the others that they sold and roasted, I could be winding up with beans that were roasted anywhere from a few days before, to sometimes two weeks before I bought them. But I was so spoiled, from that taste of fresh roasted coffee that day, that it stuck with me.
So I got a little home coffee roaster ( A Fresh Roast SR500 ) for my birthday recently ( this was written in summer 2011 ), and just tried roasting a small batch today. This was my first roasting attempt ever.
I got it from www.burmancoffee.com and they sent half a dozen 8 oz packages of unroasted green coffee beans with it. One was Jamaican Blue Mountain, which I understand sells for $18 a lb. so I didn’t want to try that one first, in case I screwed up. ( By the way, unroasted green coffee beans should cost about half of what roasted beans cost, but I found out that Whole Foods was charging the same, so I started buying them elsewhere . But for average-priced beans, they generally sell green for around $6 a lb. )
So the first one I tried roasting was the Brazilian Beija Flor ( Is that Portuguese for “Bay of Flowers”? ). I’m not aware that I’ve ever tasted this coffee before, in fact I probably haven’t tasted very many different kinds, from around the world, because we see so many in the stores that are just brand named blends and we don’t even have any idea where they came from. By the way, that’s another thing that always seemed odd to me. Hearing things like “French cofeee” or “Russian coffee”? I thought coffee is grown in the tropics, so what’s the deal with that? Are they roasted there, then shipped from France to us here? All the more reason to roast at home?!
So I put 4 scoops of the beans in and fired up the roaster. I’d read the page of instructions that came with it ( Yes! A process server that reads instructions! ) and found some additional tips on using the SR500 at the Sweet Maria’s site, another place that sells beans and machines, and is considered very good.
There are different ways to roast, but the main gist of it is to watch the beans and not burn them into charcoal, which makes all kinds of sense. The beans do something called “cracking” as they roast, and after the “first crack”, you can roast them either dark or lighter, to your preference. ( Since the first writing of this, I’ve learned by experience, to roast them to “full city” roast, which I prefer, which is just past second crack and a darker roast. I’ve also learned not to use the “high” temperature setting here in Denver, because it roasts them too fast and risks burning, so I only roast on “low”, then “medium”. )
So I ran this small batch through the roaster until they were a medium brown, and then dumped them into a stainless colander to let them cool for a few hours and outgas. ( Since the first writing of this, I’ve also learned to let the beans “rest” for a day after roasting, and I never roast more than I use in a week, because after a week, the flavor tapers off. ) Around 6:30 this evening ( Hey, I’m a process server, I drink coffee in the evening and often don’t get to sleep until 4 AM. ) , I ground and brewed a cup of the Brazilian Beija Flor for the first time, after roasting it here at home. Then I poured it over a big mug of ice, and made iced coffee, like I frequently do all year around.
The results?
Heavenly! Outstanding! One of the best cups of coffee I have ever personally tasted! And it’s not even Sulawesi, so apparently it doesn’t have to be. This has opened up a whole new world of coffee adventure for me. I’m now looking forward to home roasting and brewing, not only this half a dozen types, but coffees from all over the world!
So I can now tell you from personal experience: Coffee that you roast personally and brew at the correct temperature rocks!
Hey, if you ask nice, I may even blog about how I make the best popcorn I’ve ever tasted!
Enjoy!
Most people in California claim to care a lot about the environment, protecting the earth and all that, so there’s something about the California Code of Civil Procedure that keeps puzzling me. Perhaps it just needs modernizing.
But I’m wondering about the part that says that someone must be served by personal service only, on the first three attempts.
I’ve had family members who were home, literally beg me to take the documents for a defendant or other kind of servee who wasn’t home at the time, and I had to tell them “no”, sorry, but the California Codes say that I can only serve them personally on the first three attempts.
This causes a great deal of wasted gas, not to mention time, for the servers all over the country who are serving California papers, and for what? I just don’t understand how the percentages of good serves and perhaps responses, court appearances, etc., are improved by the practice, otherwise wouldn’t all the states be doing it?
Of course I fully understand that I’m seeing this solely from the perspective of a process server in the field. If you’re with the judicial system in California, perhaps you could drop me an email and help me understand this better.
Is it time that it be modernized, to take into account the energy crisis and costs of fuel these days, and the predicament that so many servers face with just trying to pay the bills in this kind of an economy?
Now that we’ve formed an official state process servers organization and seem intent on effecting some serious changes to the rules and laws of our state, the subject has come up about whether to allow convicted felons to serve process in our state.
I’m against “painting with such a broad brush” in the treatment of people, and would like to explain why.
I’ve become painfully aware in recent years, of how government has gotten way out of control in this country and has expanded its size, influence and treatment of people far, far outside the rightful limits established by our Constitution.
In fact, if an honest non-partisan evaluation of the problem could be done ( If there was any hope at all, of it being done. ), I’d be willing to bet that 90% of the laws we have in this country now, have no constitutional authority to exist. In fact I think it’s one of the flaws of our Constitution, that laws have been allowed to take effect before passing extreme constitutional testing. ( One of the subjects of my new book, “The Planetary Bill of Rights Project” – at Amazon.com )
It has been akin to slinging mud ( or some other substance ) at a wall, and if it sticks, it stays. Legislative bodies work, year after year, decade after decade, passing what adds up to millions of laws. No one can really have any idea how many laws we even have now in this country, but we do know that they number literally in the millions, and people can very rarely afford the long and expensive process of challenging them constitutionally.
Any one of us, if put under a microscope, could run afoul of some law somewhere, and be convicted of a crime, even a felony, yet like I said, perhaps 90% of the laws on the books have no legitimate constitutional authority to be there.
Examples that I can easily think of, without even trying?
Colorado has a law against “impersonation” of a police officer. I’ve read it. It says something to the effect of; for the purpose of committing acts, which I assume to mean illegal acts. Yet some cities and their police forces have actually tried to convict process servers of felony crimes for wearing a badge while serving process, which is, in and of itself, certainly not for the purpose of committing illegal acts.
Some governments have literally been behaving like local dictatorships in so many ways like this.
Cities like Denver, NYC, LA, Chicago and D.C. have long had laws against possession of guns, in violation of a constitutionally recognized human right. ( Yes! Human right! Look up the precise definition of that term! )
Yet somehow these cities have been able to contradict the U.S. and state Constitutions, under the guise of “home rule”. What exactly does “home rule” mean? That cities should have the powers to ignore Constitutions? It seems to. But…
“The Constitution is either a superior, paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts and, like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it. If the former part of the alternative be true, then a legislative act contrary to the Constitution is not law; if the latter part be true, then written constitutions are absurd attempts, on the part of the people, to limit a power in its own nature illimitable.” Thus, the Constitution is either The Supreme Law of the Land, superceding all other laws, or the Constitution is a worthless piece of paper. If the latter, government can do as it pleases. If the former, tyrants have seized sovereignty illegally, it is the duty of the people to put them in their proper place in history. – Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall – 1803
Constitution of the United States
Article VI.
2 This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any thing in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
Our Constitution is an amazing document, read it sometime.
One example is Denver’s law against open carry of a gun, which violates both the state and federal Constitutions. ( See Stanley vs Denver, a case which Rick Stanley very likely could have won, had he not been alleged to have threatened a judge, which got him hard prison time. )
Denver originally refused to obey the provisions of our state’s newly-passed concealed carry law, until forced to by the state.
In fact Denver has also been known to confiscate guns that are lawfully carried concealed, and destroy them, giving the owner a voucher, at taxpayer expense, to buy another one.
Another flaw is making a 15 year old who sleeps with another 15 year old, a convicted “felon” and “sex offender” for life after that. If that had been on the books when I was growing up, possibly half the male population that’s now my age, might have been “convicted felons” and considered “sex offenders” for life. In fact such laws reduce respect for laws against very serious pedophilia, the kind that a current process server in our state was convicted of, and he’s still serving process.
So someone could easily, given the myriad of unconstitutional laws, have had a felony conviction, through no real fault of their own, only because of the fact that there are so many unconstitutional laws that shouldn’t rightfully even be on the books.
So I’d prefer to be much more fair about this process and use justice and care in wielding the power to determine who can serve process in our state.
I’m more in favor of wording such rules and laws to prohibit, for example; felony convictions for violent crimes, crimes of theft, fraud ( fraud being theft by deception ) or perjury, and for example, real pedophilia.
Some have suggested “moral turpitude”, but upon examination of the definition ( It depends upon “community standards”. ), it seems too vague. ( For example, mere homosexuality is considered such a “crime”, in some places. ) I think words should have meaning and we should be able to objectively define what we mean, not have it being up to some vague term.
But to sum up the gist of my argument, these things should be discussed openly and be carefully deliberated, because such rules and laws can have a profound impact on the ability of people to earn a living, and in times like these, no one should be excluded frivolously from that.
