A Roadmap of Corruption in Real Time

My house is scheduled to be unlawfully seized and auctioned at noon on May 12 on the steps of the Shelby County Courthouse in Columbiana, Alabama.

With that as a backdrop, we are going to spend quite a bit of time in the next few days, showing you exactly how corrupt this action is. And we will be naming names, showing you the public officials--all Republicans--who are behind it.

The process of threatening my house--and the house of my wife, who is co-owner, and the home of our kitty kats, Baxter and Chloe--is corrupt on multiple levels. So we will address the corruption in two segments, showing that:

* The actual process of seizing my house--the writ of execution, the notice of levy, the sheriff's sale--is unlawful and corrupt from start to finish.

* The underlying judgment upon which the house seizure is based is also unlawful. In fact, the corruption leading up to the judgment is so pervasive that we will deal with it now in fairly general terms, saving many of the details for later.

At the risk of tooting my own horn, I think we are embarking on a journey that is perhaps a first in American journalism--of either the mainstream or nontraditional variety.

I can't think of another instance where a reporter (a citizen journalist or mainstreamer) has outlined exactly how corrupt judges and associated officials go about their dirty business. If anyone can think of another such case, please let me know.

To borrow an important phrase from Don Siegelman, "This is not about me." This is about our broken justice system at the state-court level, which affects far more Americans than our federal courts do. But like the Siegelman case, my situation also illustrates corruption in our federal justice system. Corrupt state-court judges are criminals, and the crimes they commit--because they usually involve the mail or wires--tend to be federal crimes. But is the Bush Justice Department interested in pursuing these state judges who happen to be Republicans? Not in the least.

In fact, my story will show you the two sides to Alice Martin, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. Ms. Martin went after Don Siegelman (a Democrat) like a rabid wolverine, firing off a case that was so weak that a federal judge bounced it out of court before it barely got started. But when presented with clear wrongdoing by Republican judges in Alabama, Martin turns into a shih tzu.

That's called political prosecution, the subject of an ongoing Congressional inquiry. We will show you that Alice Martin is Exhibit A when it comes to the ugly practice of political prosecution.

We will get to details on Alice Martin in a few weeks. But first, we will deal with the corrupt Republicans who are threatening my home. Thanks to the technology of blogging, I can give Legal Schnauzer readers an inside look at "corruption in real time." This isn't stuff that happened last year or last month or even last week. It's happening right now.

So please come along for a ride that should be educational--for you and for me.

To provide the foundation we need to understand this corruption in real time, we will work backwards--showing first exactly how the home-seizure process is unlawful and then showing how the underlying judgment is unlawful, as well.