Remember the names: Kohler; Hansher; Matestic; Elliott.
Playwright George Bernard Shaw claimed, “Every profession is a conspiracy against the layman.” But it gets worse … sometimes lawyers work in gangs.
Milwaukee justice featured a gang of amoral lawyers who deliberately violated professional standards and the law, then worked hard to conceal violations from the public.
What the gang did: Rigged a trial (defence witnesses blocked; documentary evidence precluded); concealed trial history; advanced false claims of mental illness to delegitimise a father-critic; falsified court certified mental health reports; fraudulently invoked Interpol, the international policing organisation.
Like ordinary gang members, these lawyers demonstrated gang loyalty above all.
Details to these claims have already been posted on this blog. In brief: Lawyer Kohler demanded a plea bargain from his client to prevent information unfavourable to colleagues from reaching the courtroom and the public. The plea bargain would have required the concealment of extensive child abuse. The father resisted Kohler’s coercion for 18 months, angering Judge Hansher. The two then rigged the trial, discredited the father with false accusations of mental illness to help conceal the misconduct.
As revenge, Hansher separated the child from his protective father from ages 5 to 18, returning the child to the abuser. Prosecutor Matestic, a deeply religious man active at St. Mary parish, Hales Corners, enabled the rigged trial by concealing critical evidence kept in his file drawer. Matestic openly participated in a subsequent cover up. Kohler went on to hire Lawyer Robert Elliott to distort trial history and to shift public perception in favour of Kohler after the father published an account of the rigged trial.
For years the child had been abandoned by lawyers and a judge who could have protected him. The abuse had been well documented and witnessed. Kohler and assistant Margaret O’Connor were aware of the mother’s dangerous, intrusive thoughts, including her having forced the child’s head under water and talked of burning him with cigarettes. But that was too explosive an issue to allow the public to hear – best covered up with a false confession and a plea bargain. That particular truth would have cast too much shade on people responsible for negligence previous to Kohler, people who preferred to have Kohler keep the information quiet. The abuser, after all, had Thomas Bailey as a lawyer, and Bailey was a politician with significant influence in Milwaukee.
For these lawyers, the welfare and reputation of the lawyer gang counted for more – caused less career fear and required less personal courage – than did the future of an ordinary child.
When the father finally acted on his own to protect the child from further harm, the threat of exposure of past negligence by members of the legal system caused career anxiety. Kohler was called upon to use coercive tactics against his own client to force a plea bargain, thereby concealing previous collegial negligence and incompetence, sparing embarrassment to people who mattered more than a child.
Gangs demand loyalty, while loyalty can be gladly extended to the gang to maintain power and career security. The above named lawyers were motivated by and featured mutual loyalty outside of the law. Individually, none would have engaged in the conduct exposed here. As a group, however … they felt compelled to act as one, a so called “cultural organism” embedded within a larger lawyer tribe.
The four lawyers shared the compulsion to eliminate a perceived threat: an individual who refused the plea bargain and who ultimately knew too much and wouldn’t stay quiet. The plea bargain maintains defence lawyer careers as the de facto life blood of the justice system. Challenging the system presented a challenge to each lawyer, individually.
It is the blatancy and brazenness of what happened in this case that should deeply concern and disturb Milwaukee citizens … the level of impunity and entitlement that these men of the law felt. Core principles of American jurisprudence, which the public still entertains favourably in mind, were violated readily and easily and without any repercussion from other lawyers. No doubt, they feared Elliott’s wrath, considering what happened to Lawyer Mark Murphy (see below).
With confederates all along the line, including through the appeals process, theoretical law was sidestepped and, as lawyer Steve Glynn attested, was replaced by lawyer paternalism. When needed, the law and defendant interests can be supplanted for lawyer benefit and public tranquility, albeit deceitfully and with harm to their own client.
Just how blatant and brazen? Defence witnesses and evidence from doctors blocked from court by Kohler; official mental health reports critically beneficial to the father and contradicting Judge Hansher were fraudulently altered to bolster false claims of mental illness, ostensibly explaining the father’s “exaggerated figments of imagination.” The altered reports were suspiciously the offspring of Lawyer R. Elliott, with Officer Beth Farr officially submitting the fraudulent reports to the court, in line with Elliott’s slanderous mouthings to other lawyers.
The attempt at deception went so far as to invoke Interpol, the international policing agency. The ploy worked only until Interpol investigated the claims coming from the U.S. government. They discovered that the information they received was false and intentionally so. The information misled Interpol to make life difficult for the father as he travelled or to have him apprehended and returned to Milwaukee to, in effect, silence his criticism.
What could have been that important? To invoke Interpol? At sentencing, in court, Prosecutor Matestic stressed that, “No other jurisdiction must ever review this case.”
Why not?
Matestic didn’t want his dirty work exposed. And why stress the point in public like that, in the courtroom? Criminals make mistakes, as wrongdoing tends to seep out of each crack and crevice. Matestic claims to be a devout Catholic. Involuntary confession perhaps? Was the case the tip of an iceberg of corruption and paternalism that subconsciously took its toll on Matestic, leading to an inopportune compulsion for absolution?
The official of the U.S. government who permitted the misuse of Interpol… what motivated them to put government credibility at risk by providing Interpol with false information, as the government has occasionally accused the Russian government of doing, for example?
The lawyers mentioned here did not work alone in the cover up. Lawyers Thomas Frenn and Margaret O’Connor kept quiet throughout and to this day, but had and have full knowledge of the injustice and the harm to the child.
As to Lawyer R. Elliott’s role once more, when Milwaukee Lawyer Mark Murphy honourably and courageously offered criticism of Kohler and defence of the father, it was Elliott who was in charge of smacking Murphy down – putting him low – by hauling him in front of a judge, warning him to keep his mouth shut.
Elliott wanted Murphy and every other decent lawyer in Milwaukee to understand the needs of the dominant gang in the professional lawyer tribe. Stay in your own lane and ignore what you see. If you do not do so, your career will suffer.
Sadly, it is lawyers like the above who skew the legal system away from justice and toward the ubiquitous criticisms heard about lawyers, and the lawyer jokes that contain ample truth.
Mark Inglin Zermatt, Switzerland https://markinglin.com/blog/
