janbtucker.com Blog

One of the canards being bandied about on the internet against me by the opponents of MCE is that a “retired attorney” listed as a supporter of Mandatory Continuing Education (MCE) for private investigators is that she has a bad record with the state bar.  I call this a canard because it is a deliberately misleading non-story.  There are certain things that the opponents who used this didn’t tell their readers that they would have if they weren’t just picking the fly-sxxt out of the pepper to use for spin doctoring.

First off, they didn’t bother to give the entire list of primarily non-PI supporters of SB 202 brought together by the “Same Page Coalition,” which includes:

RE:  SB 202 – SUPPORT

Supporting Public Entity:

• City of West Hollywood

Supporting organizations:

• California League of United Latin American Citizens
• LULAC Councils 3122, 3036, and 3150
• San Fernando Valley Chapter of Mexican American Political Association
• San Fernando Valley/Northeast Los Angeles, San Gabriel Valley/Whittier, Los Angeles South, and Sonoma County Chapters of the National Organization for Women
• Stonewall Democratic Club of Los Angeles
• Adelanto Committee of Watts

Supporting Individuals:

• Angel G. Luevano, Vice President, Far West, LULAC
• Argentina Davila Luevano, State Director, California LULAC
• Norma Ramirez, President, LULAC Council 3122 (San Fernando Valley)
• Jose Luis Ramirez, President, SFV Chapter MAPA
• Cynthia Conover, Activist Liaison, SFV/NELA NOW
• Linda Pruett, Co-President, SFV/NELA NOW
• Jeffrey Prang, City Council Member, West Hollywood (Title for ID only)
• Ramon Miramontes, Member, Pasadena Board of Education (Title for ID only)
• Marguerite Buckley, retired attorney
• Pamela Narcisse, President, Adelanto Committee
• Malinda Rosell, President, Los Angeles South NOW
• Joseph Paolella, Retired U.S. Secret Service, member LULAC Council 3150
• Roger Jon Diamond, Attorney at Law

The opponents of MCE also didn’t mention a few facts that they apparently didn’t know or didn’t think anybody else ought to know for context about the “retired attorney” that they condemn out of hand.

They didn’t mention for example that she got her bar card when I was three (3) years old.  It does not take intuition for anybody to understand that even great attorneys (like some great PIs) sometimes fall on hard times when they get older, lose their edge, and things start falling through the cracks.  That said, assuming arguendo that everything the State Bar claims is true about her, not one of the opponents of MCE who has been publicly vocal about the issue can hold a candle to her accomplishments.

First and foremost, none of them won a 9-0 (nine to nothing) United States Supreme Court decision that was hailed by a major law review as being the landmark 14th Amendment case of the decade of the 70′s on issues of equal protection of law.  That decision overturned 19 out of 20 California state and federal judges who had ruled the other way in the case (Lubin vs Panish), including a unanimous State Supreme Court, before it made it to Chief Justice Warren Earl Burger.   Burger, a Nixon appointee and no flaming liberal, wrote the majority opinion; there were separate concurrences by Rehnquist joined by Powell, and by William O. Douglas.  The case established the right of poor and working people to run for office without paying filing fees if they could not afford them.

She was also the first attorney ever to appear before the Supreme Court in a mini-skirt (in front of Earl Warren) and a pants-suit when she argued Lubin vs. Panish in front of Warren Earl Burger.  The pants-suit was controversial for women attorneys once upon a time and Chief Justice Burger issued a dress code the next day banning them.

Now, whether or not people agree with the politics of the American Indian Movement and their occupation of Wounded Knee 71 day occupation in 1973, one can respect the courage of an attorney who was inside with her clients while gunfire was being exchanged between them and the United States government, while her more famous leftist colleagues, like William Kunstler and Leonard Boudin were outside, holding press conferences.

I could go on ad nauseum about her credibility and credentials, but if any of the opponents of MCE can even come close to matching her 9-zip U.S. Supreme Court win, I’d like to hear what they did that compares with that.

One last point.  I’ve been accused, quote – unquote, of “hiding behind the skirts of NOW” (the National Organization for Women) by the chief self-appointed opponent of MCE for PIs.  Please keep the quotes coming.  That one, like the ones denouncing the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC, the nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization), will go over really well with women and minority legislators in Sacramento and guess how they will go over with a new Governor if the Democrats (by the way, I’m not now and have never been a Democrat myself) win the office back in the next election.

I’ll tell you how those comments will play out.  The opponents of MCE have created an independent agenda and an independent reason for the Same Page Coalition to seek to have PI MCE revisited as soon as there is a Governor who is not hostile to MCE in office.  They view these comments as demonstrating (a) sexism, (b) racism, and (c) lack of impulse control by people who hold state licenses.  So now you’re going to see groups outside of the PI community wanting to craft a legislative MCE and regulatory response instead of CALI being out in front and proactive on the issue.

Exactly what we’ve been warning about for a long time.

When I was a security guard working my way through graduate school, I found that a significant number of the guys I was working with had literacy problems.  It wasn’t just a problem of not being able to write a cogent report of an incident they’d witnessed or been involved in; some were just functionally illiterate.  But I never imagined that I would encounter this same phenomena amongst private investigators, when as a fluke, I wound up as one myself.

It’s not like I’m trying to hold people to my own personal standards of scholarship.  I had completed 22 units with a 4.0 GPA (grade point average, i.e., straight A’s) before I dropped out of graduate school.  But since I’ve been in the profession for thirty (30) years, I have found that some private investigators and some police officers are in fact functionally illiterate.  I’m emphasizing some because some people didn’t understand the grammatical construction of a letter I wrote to the Chair of the Assembly Business & Professions Committee in support of SB 202 and there was nothing difficult about the plain language of the letter.

Several investigators have criticized me for the following language that is quoted in the letter:

And whereas, since 80% of all private investigators are former law enforcement officers who have little or no training regarding family law and civil practice procedures, laws, ethics and regulations, it is imperative that such additional training be required to insure consumers are better served and the public protected;

If the people reading the letter actually understood what they were reading, first off, they would have realized that this was a quote from a resolution passed by the State Convention of the League of United Latin American Citizens.  Instead of saying that in their emails and postings, and letters denouncing the statement, they attributed the statement directly to me.  The second problem with their criticism is that they did not understand the grammatical effect of the use of the conjunctive word “and” between “family law and civil practice procedures,” and the subsequent use of commas as additional conjunctives.  Those conjunctives relate the words “laws, ethics, and regulations” back to “family law and civil practice.”

At no time did that resolution ever intend to mean, and no reasonable person would interpret it to mean that law enforcement officers don’t get training in “law, ethics, and regulations.”  The plain fact is, that most law enforcement officers don’t get training in the non-law enforcement related court procedures and civil process rules relating to issues like orders to show cause and motions in family law or the nuances of civil cases having nothing to do with criminal law enforcement.  Granted, if somebody worked in the civil division of a Sheriff’s office, something most peace officers will never do, they would certainly know the nuances of process service very well, but that doesn’t make them experts at the rules of evidence for civil and family law cases, which are very different from those of the criminal courts.

Getting back to literacy though I have found that it is entirely possible to be functionally illiterate and to be either a sworn peace officer or a private investigator.  Two cases on point:

• While investigating a former Compton Police Detective, who defense lawyers had always noted seemed to have brilliantly written reports, I came across his divorce case.  Somebody must have been ghost – writing his reports for criminal court, because he’d drafted his own declaration for his divorce case.  There was not one single complete sentence and not one properly constructed paragraph in the entire declaration.  Forget the mis-spellings.  It was fundamentally incomprehensible.  Additionally, he served the divorce summons and petition on his sister-in-law, not his wife and he did it personally.  He served it at an address which he acknowledged his wife didn’t live at and had the sister-in-law sign the proof of service where the process server was supposed to sign and he signed on the line designated for a peace officer to sign if a paper was being served by a sheriff or marshal.
• Recently, Lita Abella and I took over a case that had previously seen several other investigators before us.  When we saw the “report” done by one of the former investigators, a former federal agent, we were appalled.  I won’t even go into the details, but unfortunately, I’ve seen this kind of deficiency one too many times in my own profession and it’s embarrassing.

So, the people who’ve criticized that quote from the LULAC resolution think that private investigators don’t need Mandatory Continuing Education.  Well, maybe some don’t.  But some clearly do.  Those that do need it can do great harm to the public by not getting up to par.  It’s almost impossible to write a law that creates the perfect law for every single individual it will affect, but that’s the nature of the legislative process.  You try to get the best remedy for the most people.

So, if the opponents of MCE can think up a better way to deal with those within our profession who are functionally illiterate and somehow wound up with a private investigator license, I’d like to hear your solution.   In the meantime, I’d like to require them to get MCE and to do that, we all have to get MCE to improve our skills and keep up with the constantly changing legal and technological environment that we practice in.

By the way, you can find the full letter from the Same Page Coalition at:

http://www.janbtucker.com/IdeaOpinions.html

While trying to stop SB 202 earlier this year in a California Senate committee proceeding, an opponent of Mandatory Continuing Education sent an opposition communication on the letterhead of the Federal Public Defender’s Office for the Eastern District of California.  As a result, the staff analysis for the committee mistakenly listed the FPD’s office itself as opposed to the bill.

The investigator who sent this letter — and his boss — defended the use of the FPD’s letterhead on the grounds that the letter represented only his personal opinion and therefore it was perfectly okay to use the FPD’s stationary.  As far as they were concerned, it wasn’t their fault that the Senate staff got mixed up and listed their agency as opposed to the bill.

If you buy that one, you must also believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

Defending the use of the letterhead on the ground that it was a private communication demonstrates just how far some people will go to defend the indefensible.  Since it was by their own contention a private opinion being expressed to a legislative body, not a function of the government agency itself, using the stationary violated Title 5 CFR Section 2635.704.  It’s a violation of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) to use any government office supplies for a private purpose.  That’s just plain common sense; it’s the same thing as stealing stamps, pens, or paper clips from the United States government.  It’s less politely called employee pilferage.

But this guy was arguing that the State of California shouldn’t require private investigators to go through 12 hours of Mandatory Continuing Education each year, that would include at least two hours of training in ethics…..hmmmmm……and he wants to be able to use a federal letterhead to express that opinion instead of paying for his own piece of paper to do it with…….hmmmmmm!

Aside from the obvious fact that you can’t just take your employer’s property for your own use, one of the reasons that a CFR regulation even exists prohibiting the use of office supplies is that using federal envelopes or letterheads can cause confusion — just like the confusion that resulted in the Senate staff listing the FPD office itself as opposing SB 202.

One of the opponents of MCE (Mandatory Continuing Education) for private investigators recently wrote me and made the following accusation (this is a verbatim cut and paste from his email):

“Personally, I know nothing of running a corporation. But, I do understand NON_PROFFIT. But I don’t like the way you use your position in the Corp to flog the membership for dollars for your personal causes, LULAC, Nut Crack and all your other concerns of the world, then turn around and bash 80% of the industry. Logically, that makes you look stupit.”

It’s bad enough that he thinks that I “…look stupit.”  I know this sounds like a Jeff Foxworthy joke and the guy does come from the Central Valley, but then, some of my favorite PI’s are from the Central Valley.  But what’s greater concern to me here is that he apparently did not understand that he was de facto committing libel per se (he was apparently BCC’ing his emails to others) with his accusation that I was supposedly flogging the membership for dollars for my personal causes.

Any reasonable person looks at the implication of that statement and comes away thinking that I’m using my influence as a corporate director to get money for other organizations that I’m associated with.  Since those people include CALI members who are entitled to look at the financial statements we produce for the Annual Business Meeting, reasonable people would wonder why there are no line items showing us sending money to LULAC or whatever he means by “Nut Crack.”  In the context of how the opponents of MCE have irrationally accused us of engaging in a corporate cover-up (simply by following the law and heeding the advice of our corporate counsel), this is just the latest in a series of irresponsible and malicious accusations that increase the paranoia of a group of disgruntled dissidents.

Now, if I had actually gotten money appropriated to LULAC from CALI (or any other organization) without a vote of the board (no such vote will appear in the board minutes because it never happened), then the purported fact of such an appropriation as claimed by this guy would be a violation of Sections 504 and/or 506 of the California Penal Code, because utilizing corporate and/or non-profit money held in trust for purposes not intended by the trust is verboten.

I call him on this and he writes, ” It was a phrase not an accusation.”  Are you kidding me?  “…a phrase not an accusation…”  What does that mean and how is it different.  You still accused me of facts which can be interpreted as a crime.

So, after going back and forth a few times about the propriety of his statement and whether he will retract it (he won’t), this is his response:

“I had a good uncle and his name was J.T.. I hate to think of what he would think of you being called by his name. While you were reading about logic, he was involved in bringing peace to the world. You would not qualify to shine his boots.

I was gong to give you some shit then let you off the hook, but no, you won’t have it. You will never get it. You will learn nothing. Just keep running people away from CALI.

So sue me shithead…? (Sorry shit, did not mean to insult you.) I’m tired of your stupid nonsense and self-centered goals and bloated ego, sucking off the hard working PI and taking up valuable space on the Corp BOD. Go suck a lemon and stop speaking against the industry! Your 1968 and this is 2009. You represent nothing that resembles what I know to be Truth and Justice, and about 9,000 other PI’s agree with me. Just keep talking, your making our case for us.”

————–

Well, at least he spelled Stupid right this time…..maybe he doesn’t need MCE after all.