Debt Reduction Law Center review: Illigal Loan Modifications & Debt Settlement Practice 2

DRLC Among Others Use Frivolous Defamation Actions to Silence the Truth About Illegal Loan Modifications

[protected]:35:57 - “Truth” is an absolute defense against defamation. The law does not even require that a statement be perfectly accurate in every conceivable way to be considered “true.” As a matter of fact, Courts have held that some false statements must be protected for the wider purpose of allowing the dissemination of truthful speech - aka "the doctrine of substantial truth."

In addition, the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment Freedom of Speech without Prior Restraint has been neglected in these actions. Bad Biz Finder is 100% absent a profit motive and seeks only to inform consumers about the facts pertaining to loan modifications. Restraining this information from reaching the public is a crime in and of itself.

Bad Biz Finder is a consumer advocate. We report the facts about companies that intentionally harm consumers. We are an information resource. Use the information; don’t use the information - it’s entirely up to you. Although our writing style is "no holds barred, " every fact is backed by a link to a source outside our organization. We don’t give our opinion nor do we tell consumers what to do.

Here are a couple of very important facts:

1. When criminal cash flow is interrupted – criminals get upset.
2. When criminals get upset – they will do and say anything to reinstate the criminal cash flow so they can resume the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.
3. Criminals love to sue people that interrupt their criminal cash flow (especially attorney criminals). This is nothing new. Often, attorneys, sheriffs, politicians, and executives of publicly-traded companies believe they are "above the law" and these white collar criminals pay a lot of money to maintain that status.
4. In the meantime, consumers don’t stand a chance because the very people who are supposed to protect them are working in collusion with the other white collar criminals; hence, criminal cash flow.
5. So, where does a consumer go for help? That’s a great question. Bad Biz Finder is making a lot of progress exposing fraud, illegalities, oppression - but we are paying the price with ridiculously frivolous lawsuits with the singular purpose of silencing our mission to tell the truth.

Unfortunately, our court system is not set up to dispense justice; it’s set up to make money. So, in the past we've presented the law in our defense and it’s patently ignored because many judges who are supposed to interpret "the law" are also beneficiaries of the criminal cash flow. Thus, in court, THE TRUTH AND THE LAW IS COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT.

From day one, our motto has been "Bad Biz Finder does not fight the bad guys — we help the good guys." From now on – if you want to sue us – have at it, because:

1. We know you’re doing it to divert us from our mission.
2. We know that YOU know that you don’t have a cause of action for defamation and rather rely on sleazy attorney tactics to win in court to stop our reporting.
3. We know you’re doing it to win some ridiculous judgment that you have a snowball’s chance in hell of collecting;
4. We know that everything you do is an attempt to intimidate us so we run away and shut the hell up; and
5. We know YOU know that we won’t win in Court because we have no money.

Consequently, we refuse to spin anymore. We’ll just keep reporting the truth because the Constitution of the United States has this great thing called the First Amendment and we are guaranteed free speech without fear of prior restraint. (We’ll explain the law and what we presented in court below.) It’s true, folks: "The pen is mightier than the sword."

Here is the text of a legal document we filed in a Defamation Action brought against us by DEBT REDUCTION LAW CENTER entitled DEBT REDUCTION LAW CENTER v. Bad Biz Finder, filed on January 26, 2009 (13 days after we set up our blog) in Orange County Superior Court, Case No. 30-2009-[protected]-CU-DF-CJC. It’s still active; the next hearing is August 31, 2009.

(By the way, UDR, Inc.; Traut Law Firm; Jeffrey Cancilla; Craig Laverty; and a host of others are also suing us.)

Here’s the text:

1. For an action of defamation to prevail, it must contain five elements: (1) an intentional publication of a statement of fact (2) that is false; (3) unprivileged; (4) has a natural tendency to injure or which causes “special damage and (4) the defendant’s fault in publishing the statement amounted to at least negligence.

2. “Truth” is an absolute defense against defamation. See New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), and Time Inc. v. Hill, 385 U.S. 411 (1967). Consequently, Plaintiff must provide convincing evidence of the alleged defamatory statement’s falsity in order to prove defamation. To this end, Plaintiff has failed utterly. Plaintiff pleads volumes of paper containing copies of posts written by Defendant yet does not even attempt to show that the content in said posts are false by any manner of substantiation. Rather, Plaintiff uses the same boilerplate biographical information in all its marketing, public relations, and electronic media campaigns:

“Since 1991, I have been providing legal services to the Southern California community. My firm, DEBT REDUCTION LAW CENTER, currently provides legal services in the areas of Bankruptcy, Foreclosure, Mortgage Litigation, Personal Injury, Workers’ Compensation and Loan Modification

3. DEBT REDUCTION LAW CENTER, APC, was founded one year and one month ago on April 16, 2008 (California Secretary of State Number C3082463) in an attempt to profit from the growing trend of California attorneys forming loan modification companies to circumvent the prohibition of advanced fees guidelines for foreclosure consultants. At all times since April 16, 2008, Plaintiff has held himself out to the public as an expert in “bankruptcy, foreclosure, mortgage litigation and loan modification This information is patently false and he should be held liable for his fraud in false promise, fraud in intentional misrepresentation, and fraud in concealment.

4. Prior to April 16, 2008, Plaintiff was strictly a personal injury and workers’ compensation attorney. Until thirty (30) days ago, Plaintiff did not include within its boilerplate language the practice areas of personal injury and workers’ compensation law. It wasn’t until Defendant exposed this fact in its post entitled, “James Parsa: Personal Injury Attorney or Mortgage And Real Property Attorney? You Decide” on April 21, 2009, that Plaintiff added personal injury and workers’ compensation to his roster of legal specialties.

5. Since 1996, EMILIO FRANCISCO has filed a total of 21 cases in Orange County Superior Court (his main venue); of which 20 were personal injury automobile cases and the other a legal malpractice matter for a fellow attorney. Yet Plaintiff has the audacity to claim that he is qualified to practice “mortgage litigation” and other areas of law where he is absolutely void of experience. It is deceptive, at best, for an attorney to hold himself out to the public as a mortgage litigator (or having experience and expertise in related matters) when in fact he does not and has not filed one single mortgage-related lawsuit. It is an even more egregious matter when his target market is a group of vulnerable and emotionally distraught homeowners facing foreclosure.

6. California Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 1-400, specifically prohibits “any communication delivered to a potential client whom the attorney / law firm knows or should reasonably know is in such a physical, emotional, or mental state that he or she would not be expected to exercise reasonable judgment as to the retention of counsel

7. Plaintiff substantially based its operations on the predictability of this consumer state of mind. It not only launched its “law firm” with no attorneys (other than James Parsa until a couple of weeks ago) but also formed six (6) loan modification companies under his law license, i.e., National Loan Modification Center, 3-2-1 Foreclosure, Modify 1-2-3, HomeGrabber, Home ForeClosure Fighter, National Legal Alliance and there could be many more. All of these entities (with the exception of National Loan Modification Center) are telephone- and/or internet-based services. They are run by foreclosure consultants and even if Plaintiff had the requisite experience and expertise which he does not, it could not be transmitted for the benefit of consumers in this type of business forum. The reality is that non-lawyers were and are performing activities that Plaintiff promised would be performed by attorneys in its Legal Retainer Agreement. The foreclosure consultants are absent a law license, no specialized education and certainly no legal training which is required to competently assert the proper defenses required to modify a loan with a financial institution.

8. In addition, California Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 1-400, specifically prohibits attorney communications with prospective clients that 1) contains any untrue statement; (2) contains any matter that is false, deceptive, or which could confuse, deceive, or mislead the public; (3) omits to state any fact necessary to ensure that an attorney / law firm is not misleading the public; (4) fails to indicate clearly, expressly, or by context, that it is a communication or solicitation; (5) is transmitted in any manner which involves intrusion, coercion, duress, compulsion, intimidation, threats, or vexatious or harassing conduct; and (6) states that an attorney / law firm is a “certified specialist” unless the attorney / law firm holds a current certificate as a specialist issued by the Board of Legal Specialization of the State Bar

9. With the express written consent from a very recent client of Plaintiff, Robin Schaufus, sets forth her testimony on Plaintiff’s mortgage litigation experience. This was also reported on Defendant’s blog on Friday, May 22, 2009:

“My husband is disabled and on social security, we run a small business for the past 31 years that is down almost 60% in sales. We called James Parsa Law Group when he advertised his law firm with President Obama stating his rescue plan on March 4th, a nationwide law firm. His record was clear with The State Bar. Now he is being investigated by the Attorney General for loan modification scams and fraud. We were offered pro bono services from James Parsa Law Firm for a loan modification and bankruptcy filing, mostly because he states on his website they also have attorneys litigating the Respa and Tila Federal Violations which we are also victim to. Have spent a month providing them 100’s of pages of requested loan and financial documentation, only no lawyer counselers were there to help, weve never talked to an attorney! Where do we go from here? We have been scammed twice in 2 months trusting lawyers with no previous complaints on their record and have lost money and valuable time. Who can you trust?

10. As a direct result of Plaintiff’s deceptive advertising and claims of expertise in mortgage litigation, and other areas where he is not qualified, this couple may lose their home. And instead of spending the time necessary to help them, we are drafting this legal document so that our ability to reach out to folks like the Schaufus family won’t be interrupted. Defendant asserts that this fact, in and of itself, is symptomatic of a frivolous law suit and we should be compensated for such disruption as well as for attorneys’ fees.

11. We cannot express in adequate words the infuriation that we feel that this matter is taking us away from our organization’s objectives and is contrary in every regard to what we consider to be equitable relief under the law and the very essence of why we remain anonymous. But for the anonymity of our organization, our leaders and volunteers, all of our group’s valuable time (which is unpaid volunteer time) would be spent responding to unfounded complaints of defamation such as the present action.

12. The law does not require that a statement be perfectly accurate in every conceivable way to be considered “true Courts have said that some false statements must be protected for the wider purpose of allowing the dissemination of truthful speech. The resulting doctrine is known as “substantial truth Under the substantial truth doctrine, minor factual inaccuracies will be ignored so long as the inaccuracies do not materially alter the substance or impact of what is being communicated. In other words, only the “gist” or “sting” of a statement must be correct. If Plaintiff objects to the tone or manner in which the information was written although all facts contained therein were true, Plaintiff would absolutely fail in a cause of action for defamation.

13. The substantial truth defense is particularly powerful because a judge will often grant summary judgment in favor of a defendant (thus disposing of the case before it goes to trial) if the defendant can show that the statement the plaintiff is complaining about is substantially true, making the defense a quick and relatively easy way to get out of a long (and potentially expensive) defamation case. Plaintiff has quoted text from Defendant’s blog that it finds objectionable; however, it has not identified statements that it believes are untrue. Had Plaintiff served the complaint on Defendant and identified the statements that it believes are untrue, Defendant would have a basis to answer a Complaint. Since Plaintiff failed utterly in this regard, and muddies the water by pleading a long litany of baseless examples of “objectionable statements” without asserting that they are false, it is nonactionable and frivolous.

14. Plaintiff has failed to prove that Defendant published any statement that was false, deceptive, or which could confuse, deceive, or mislead the public and which resulted in Plaintiff loss in revenue and business relationships. On the contrary, as it is Defendants’ sole mission to uncover and expose those claims made by business and organizations that are false, deceptive, or which could confuse, deceive, or mislead the public. And we certainly had no obstacle to achieving that goal whatsoever. From our experience, when a company is formed specifically for the purpose to defraud the public, it will most certainly market the business in the same manner. Plaintiff was no exception to this rule and we pointed those facts out to consumers strictly as a means to warn them.

15. Since January 10, 2009, when Defendant began its blog, it has reviewed 29 other companies in addition to Plaintiff. However, Plaintiff positions its arguments as though Defendant’s blog is all about him and his business and that we have some sort of personal vendetta against him. Had that been the case, we would have focused all our efforts on reporting on Plaintiff’s activities to the exclusion of others. Defendant’s blog currently contains 288 posts and pages and only 37 of them pertain directly to Plaintiff. The higher than average posts per business points to the higher than average egregious activities perpetrated by Plaintiff upon which we must report.

16. In Cobb v. Time Inc. 24 Media L. Rep. 585 (M.D. Tenn 1995), Defendant made a statement that a boxer tested positive for cocaine, when actually he had tested positive for marijuana. Plaintiff has tested positive for reprehensible behavior, the question may be argued to what degree of reprehensibility, but the substantial truth is that he has behaved reprehensibly.

17. In Koniak v. Heritage Newspapers, Inc., 198 Mich. App. 577 (1993), a newspaper printed that a father had sexually assaulted his stepdaughter 30-50 times, when the stepdaughter testified he had done so only 8 times. The number of times is irrelevant as the damage was sustained on the first incident. Not more than one occasion was necessary to show the criminal intent and action. Whether Plaintiff by way of a lack of expertise and experience in the relevant legal areas has injured one consumer or a thousand consumers is irrelevant. The injury was sustained ab initio when he offered legal services that (a) he was not qualified to offer, and (b) outsourced the legal work to non-lawyers, i.e., foreclosure consultants. The substantial truth is that he offered legal services for which he was not qualified.

18. In People for Ethical Treatment of Animals v. Berosini, 895 P.2d 1269 (Nev. 1995), an animal trainer was charged with beating his animals with steel rods, when actually he had beaten them with wooden rods. He was still culpable for the injuries sustained by the animals. James Parsa has never injured a client in a tax-related legal matter, but he has injured hundreds if not thousands of clients that came seeking his advertised expertise in bankruptcy, mortgage litigation, foreclosure and loan modifications. The substantial truth is that but for the fraudulent advertising of his legal expertise, clients would not have suffered injury.

19. The aggregate point here is that Defendant made statements about Plaintiff on its blog that were true. If a date was inaccurate as to the true statement or a name was misspelled within the true statement, the statement is still substantially true and as such and Plaintiff’s embarrassment or anger for having the truth revealed does not mitigate the substantial truth of the statement and as such, cannot be a cause of action for defamation.

20. Defendant can also assert that the statements on its blog fall into the “fair report privilege” as set forth in California Civil Code section 47 (d) and (e). Defendant reported on facts contained in publicly available government reports, government records, and statements made by government officials. Every post published on Defendant’s blog had at least one reference to the following categories:

(a) Links to online corroborating, documentary evidence from a state governmental or regulatory body including the California State Bar, California Secretary of State, the California Department of Real Estate, and/or the Department of Corporations;

(b) Law specific to the legal practice area of mortgage loan modifications, i.e., California Civil Code section [protected].11 (also known as “The California Foreclosure Consultants Act and the California Rules of Professional Conduct specifically Rule 1-320 prohibiting attorneys from sharing legal fees with non-attorneys and Rule 1-400 governing allowable advertising and solicitation methods.

(c) Plaintiff’s very own business contracts and addenda to said business. Contracts that were boilerplate documents and were constantly sent by Plaintiff via the Internet and was, as such, in the public domain; and

(d) Plaintiff’s very own marketing materials, press releases, blog reports, and Website content all of which was mass marketed in the public domain.

(e) Defendant also drew facts from the Attorney General’s “Consumer Alert” dated February 5, 2009 warning consumer against paying upfront fees for loan modifications among other warning; California State Bar “Ethics Alert warning its member attorneys from accepting solicitations from mortgage and real estate professionals to front loan modification companies; and various and sundry quotes from nationally-recognized publications properly crediting back the source.

21. Defendant can also adequately assert the defense of “Opinion and Fair Comment Privileges The right to speak guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution includes the right to voice opinions, criticize others, and comment on matters of public interest. It also protects the use of hyperbole and extreme statements when it is clear these are rhetorical ploys. Accordingly, you can safely state your opinion that others are inept, stupid, jerks, failures, etc. even though these statements might hurt the subject’s feelings or diminish their reputations. Such terms represent what is called “pure opinions” because they can’t be proven true or false. As a result, they cannot form the basis for a defamation claim.

22. Even if Plaintiff argues that the “opinion” of Defendant was stated on its blog due to ulterior motives that predicated its injured reputation resulting in lost revenue, they were still derived from truthful facts, thus protected even if Defendant’s opinion turns out to be incorrect. The Court must look at the totality of the circumstances surrounding the statement and its publication to determine how a reasonable person would view the statement. Under this test, the difference between an opinion and a fact often comes down to a case-by-case analysis of the publication’s context. Since Plaintiff fails to draw any such comparisons in its pleadings, the ability of Defendant to argue its position on such comparison is not available.

23. In Jewell v. NYP Holdings, Inc., 23 F. Supp.2d 348 (S.D.N.Y. 1998) the Court ruled that a statement in the New York Post that referred to the plaintiff as a “fat, failed, former sheriff’s deputy” was protected opinion because it was hyperbole and had an “alliterative quality” with a “rhetorical effect indicative of a statement of opinion

24. In Seelig v. Infinity Broadcasting, 97 Cal. App. 4th 798 (Cal. Ct. App. 2002), the Court found that Statements on a radio talk show that described the plaintiff as a “chicken butt “local loser” and “big skank” were not defamatory because they were “too vague to be capable of being proven true or false” and had “no generally accepted meaning

25. And finally, defamation has a natural tendency to injure the plaintiff in its office, business, or occupation within the meaning of the rule when it strikes to the qualification for the performance of his duties in the situation, or when it alleges such misconduct or negligence in the course of transacting those duties. {Camp v. Martin, 23 Conn. 86).

26. Defendant has already established that Plaintiff lacks the requisite qualifications to perform the duties for which he claims to be an expert. Defendant has also shown through this pleading and one other in this matter that Plaintiff has shown exorbitant negligence and misconduct in the course of transacting the duties for which he claims to be an expert. It is Defendant’s position that it is its obligation to its readers to alert them of said facts and that by doing so is serving the greater good of the public and in no way constitutes defamation.

27. In additional to these arguments, there exists an issue of prior restraint. The Court ordered an injunction prohibiting Defendant from publishing information about Plaintiff vital to the welfare of consumers in foreclosure.

28. As soon as the Judgment was entered (albeit in a very underhanded manner), Plaintiff set out on an aggressive course of action to eliminate every single published report about its fraud against consumers in foreclosure and used the ensuing time to source different geographical areas it had not yet marketed to reclaim its standing with other loan modification “law firms” in the competitive arena.

29. The Judgment entered against Defendant prohibiting the good work it did to warn consumers about Plaintiff acted in concert with the fraud and was the catalyst to hundreds of additional consumers losing thousands of dollars and eventually their homes.

30. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger finally answered Defendant’s constant barrage of requests on Sacramento and introduced Senate Bill 194 which will prohibit attorneys from collecting advanced payment in connection with loan modification services.

31. In 2007, when the California Foreclosure Consultant’s Act (Civil Code Section [protected].11) was enacted, it contained a grave legislative error. It exempted attorneys from the prohibition of collecting upfront fees. Thousands of law firms, including Plaintiff, formed loan modification “law firms” to circumvent this Act but failed to provide licensed and qualified attorneys to perform the legal services. Rather, Plaintiff and the others staffed the “law firms” with foreclosure consultants for whom the statute had been written.

32. Had it not been for Defendant’s grueling (yet rewarding) work for the past nine (9) months diligently researching and reporting about law firms operating in this illegal manner, thousands more consumers would have been defrauded in the same manner that Plaintiff defrauded thousands of consumers over the past two years. As such, the Judgment entered against Defendant aided and abetted Parsa Law Group in the perpetuation of its illegal activities because it prohibited Defendant from warning consumers through its blog in direct violation of its First Amendment right against prior restraint.

33. Plaintiff could not even prove defamation as evidenced by the ruling on the Preliminary Injunction; how is it possible that it was successful in obtaining a Permanent Injunction and award of $650, 000 against Defendant?

34. In light of these facts, Defendant has no qualms whatsoever and does not for one moment believe that this request is in conflict with its mission to offer free resources to consumers. Defendant believes that the monetary award of $20, 000.00 will go a long way toward continuing our good work. We do not accept gifts, donations or payment of any kind and we simply ask that the consumer we help “pay it forward” and help someone else for free. The award will also allow us to reward the attorneys that have helped us throughout the past sic months for an extremely nominal charge. Defendant’s time away from its work to defend this ill-intentioned and frivolous action is worth 100 times more than the requested monetary award. However, Defendant values the notion of fairness and equity and wants to get back to work without restraint as quickly as possible.

35. In accordance with the Judgment, Defendant’s future publications were stopped before they were started and represent a cause of action for unconstitutional prior restraint of free speech. In William Blackstone’s Commentaries, “Freedom of the Press this constitutional right is defined as “the right to be free from prior restraints In addition, Blackstone held that “a person should not be punished for speaking or writing the truth with good motives and for justifiable ends

36. Blackstone continues, “Every free man has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he please before the public; to forbid this, is to destroy the freedom of the press�� (4 Bl.Com.151) This was the cornerstone of the First Amendment and although the law has become much more sophisticated, this simple truth cannot be denied in this action or any other action of this sort.

37. Prior restraint is often considered a particularly oppressive form of censorship in because it prevents the restricted material from being heard or distributed at all. Other forms of restrictions on expression (such as suits for libel, slander, defamation, or actions for criminal libel) generally involve punishment only after the offending material has been published. While such punishment might lead to a chilling effect, legal commentators argue that at least such actions do not directly impoverish the marketplace of ideas. Prior restraint, on the other hand, takes an idea or material completely out of the marketplace. Thus it is often considered to be the most extreme form of censorship. The United States Supreme Court expressed this view in Nebraska Press Assn. v. Stuart (427 U.S. [protected]) by noting:

“The thread running through all these cases is that prior restraints on speech and publication are the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights. A criminal penalty or a judgment in a defamation case is subject to the whole panoply of protections afforded by deferring the impact of the judgment until all avenues of appellate review have been exhausted. Only after judgment has become final, correct or otherwise, does the law’s sanction become fully operative.

“A prior restraint, by contrast and by definition, has an immediate and irreversible sanction. If it can be said that a threat of criminal or civil sanctions after publication ‘chills’ speech, prior restraint ‘freezes’ it at least for the time

38. The first notable case in which the United States Supreme Court ruled on a prior restraint issue was Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 (1931). In that case the Court held prior restraints to be unconstitutional, except in extremely limited circumstances such as national security issues. The ruling came about after Jay Near’s newspaper, The Saturday Press, a small local paper that ran countless exposés of Minneapolis’s elected officials’ alleged illicit activities, including gambling, racketeering, and graft, was silenced by the Minnesota Gag Law of 1925, also known as The Public Nuisance Law. Near’s critics called his paper a scandal sheet, and alleged that he tried to extort money threatening to publish attacks on officials and others. In the Near case the Court held that the state had no power to enjoin the publication of the paper in this way – that any such action would be unconstitutional under the First Amendment. It wrote:

”If we cut through mere details of procedure, the operation and effect of the statute in substance is that public authorities may bring the owner or publisher of a newspaper or periodical before a judge upon a charge of conducting a business of publishing scandalous and defamatory matter-in particular that the matter consists of charges against public officers of official dereliction-and, unless the owner or publisher is able and disposed to bring competent evidence to satisfy the judge that the charges are true and are published with good motives and for justifiable ends, his newspaper or periodical is suppressed and further publication is made punishable as a contempt. This is of the essence of censorship."

And

”The statute in question cannot be justified by reason of the fact that the publisher is permitted to show, before injunction issues, that the matter published is true and is published with good motives and for justifiable ends. … it would be but a step to a complete system of censorship. … The preliminary freedom, by virtue of the very reason for its existence, does not depend, as this court has said, on proof of truth. (Patterson v. Colorado 205 U.S. 454, 462.

39. This was an extension of the Court’s earlier views, which had followed Blackstone. In Patterson v. Colorado, the Court had written:

“In the first place, the main purpose of such constitutional provisions is ‘to prevent all such previous restraints upon publications as had been practiced by other governments and they do not prevent the subsequent punishment of such as may be deemed contrary to the public welfare (quoted in the Near decision). The Near decision was the first time that it was held that even alleged untruth or malicious intent would not be sufficient reason to impose prior restraints. Near was decided 5-4, and the four dissenting justices strongly approved of the “gag law and felt that the nature of the articles in the Saturday Press, including their recurrent anti-Semitism, their frequent (allegedly false) accusations of official misconduct, and their disrespectful and confrontational tone, made them unworthy of protection. But this view did not prevail. After the Near decision, newspapers had a clearly established freedom to criticize public officials without fear of retribution, even when charges made by the papers could not be proven in court. Newspapers could still be punished through libel laws, if they published material found to be untrue. It should be noted that the “Gag Law” was unique in the United States at that time, and even in Minnesota had only been used on two occasions. Indeed the Court commented on the unusual nature of the proceeding in its decision

40. The Court in Near left open the possibility of prior restraints for various exceptional purposes, such as national security, control of obscenity, and the like. It wrote: "The protection even as to previous restraint is not absolutely unlimited. But the limitation has been recognized only in exceptional cases. ‘When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right (Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 52, 39 S. Ct. 247, 249). No one would question but that a government might prevent actual obstruction to its recruiting service or the publication of the sailing dates of transports or the number and location of troops. On similar grounds, the primary requirements of decency may be enforced against obscene publications. The security of the community life may be protected against incitements to acts of violence and the overthrow by force of orderly government

41. In Nebraska Press Assn. v. Stuart, the Court wrote:

“The principles enunciated in Near were so universally accepted that the precise issue did not come before us again until Organization for a Better Austin v. Keefe (402 U.S. [protected]). There the state courts had enjoined the petitioners from picketing or passing out literature of any kind in a specified area. Noting the similarity to Near v. Minnesota, a unanimous Court held:

“Here, as in that case, the injunction operates, not to redress alleged private wrongs, but to suppress, on the basis of previous publications, distribution of literature `of any kind’ in a city of 18, 000. . . . . .

“Any prior restraint on expression comes to this Court with a `heavy presumption’ against its constitutional validity. Carroll v. Princess Anne, 393 U.S. 175, 181 (1968); Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58, 70 (1963). Respondent thus carries a heavy burden of showing justification for the imposition of such a restraint

The bottom line is that we refuse to play in the same sand lot as the criminals. We don't see a reason to defend ourselves anymore; the truth is the truth.

By the way, the text above was for a Motion which was denied on a technicality - not on the merits. Shame on you Judge Franz Miller. You should know better.

Bad Biz Finder