A type of fraud is practiced by criminal defence lawyers, yet it remains ignored and concealed: the deception of clients.
This type of lawyer fraud is organised in the same way that the Vatican organised pedophilia: by ignoring the problem and intimidating those who would expose it.
The impact of the fraud on clients is severe; it has a name: the lawyer betrayal syndrome.
The instrument that facilitates the fraud is lawyer-imposed coercion to force a plea bargain. Confidentiality, wiliness and intimidation in a lawyer’s office make exposing this lawyer misconduct extremely difficult.
The regulatory bodies responsible for monitoring lawyer conduct suffer the disadvantage that the fox has, when he is asked to protect chickens from another fox.
Journalists fear litigation and the termination of sources, if their reporting offends influential lawyers.
The texts that follow here describe a case of lawyer fraud in Milwaukee. It has been simmering for years. It has gone largely unreported, or has been reported per corrupt lawyer expectations.
Of what value is exposing and rehashing a case of legal system corruption years old? No different from the value an adult finds in seeking justice from the Catholic Church, reaching back 25 years to their childhood. Or the value the prosecutor or the FBI invokes when they ferrets out a fugitive, escaped 25 years ago. (“You can run, and you can hide, but we will find you.”)
The perpetrator’s clock says minutes are hours, and hours are days, and days are years, years are another life. The victim’s clock stopped on the day his child was returned to his abuser, lawyers concealed gross misconduct, other lawyers aided them, and the child was gone forever. Psychological reports were altered and laundered through the courts. Information on the web was and is intended to destroy the evidence by destroying the voice of the victim.
The people who did these things, they have names and they are still around.
And the victim’s clock has stood still.
While unethical lawyer conduct is an open secret among lawyers, the public should be more aware that the lawyer’s office can become a place of injustice, treachery, and fraud against a client perpetrated and concealed by one’s own lawyer.
Extensive media reports have often exposed lawyer misconduct years later. Pushing against denial by lawyers induced by guilt can take a long time. These reports support the idea that the story presented here is a model for general criminal defence lawyer misconduct. The methodology used to coerce a plea bargain is grounded in settled psychology. The story here is also a model for what happens when a client’s refuses to yield to coercion and lawyer-imposed injustice.
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Writer Ernest Hemingway was obsessed with themes of personal courage; he hated cowards. In his stories he characterised courage as it fit the times – like the man who failed to shoot a charging lion, ran away instead, and was rewarded by his wife’s disgust.
The word “coward:” is defined as a person who contemptibly lacks the courage to do or endure dangerous or unpleasant things. I don’t know if Milwaukee Lawyer Martin Kohler’s wife left him, but maybe she didn’t know. I lot of people didn’t know and still don’t; it takes courage for a journalist to commit career suicide in his or her hometown.
In the story here, female disgust could have abounded as cowardly conduct was in plentiful supply. You don’t have to be female to be disgusted, but criminal defence lawyers of both genders will require courage just to read this story –– as they may see flickering shadows of themselves.
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For years, Lawyer Martin Kohler had heard clients firmly demand a courtroom trial to prove innocence… and he had seen those same clients come around to accepting a plea deal. This “change of mind” was no accident; it resulted from Kohler’s strategy of undermining clients psychologically to the point of nervous system exhaustion. The strategy included repeated but unfulfilled promises, misinformation, outright lies and any form of coercion available to weaken and bend clients to his will. The coercion included the use of threats of harsh incarceration and even the possibility of harm to a child. Like a maestro in his 35th year of conducting Sousa on the Fourth of July, Kohler knew he had client change of mind nailed.
Kohler demanded that a specific client plea bargain. The deal would have spared people friendly with him from embarrassment or worse. They had failed in the history of the case. The deal, however, required concealment of horrendous child abuse – the mother had been forcing the child’s head under water for loving the father and wanting to see him. The father informed Kohler: “If we don’t reveal the abuse, my child can be harmed further; She can kill him. You need to show the medical evidence and call the witnesses, for the child’s safety. There can be no plea bargain without that.”
Kohler saw things differently. For 18 months he worked his client over like Pavlov worked over his salivating dogs. The machinations began at the time of bail. “The sooner you are released, the sooner you can protect your child,“ Kohler emphasised. He promised a release date, then repeatedly switched the dates due to “unavoidable circumstances.” This set a pattern of heightened anxieties, raised expectations, followed by threats to the child’s safety due to failure to plea bargain. … the results of which came close to succeeding.
The ploy of dangling possible harm to the child as he sat on evidence of the abuse arose numerous times, each time with the disingenuous suggestion that the plea bargain would solve the problem. But the plea bargain would have prevented his client from pointing to the evidence, including a mother’s threats of harm the child. Yet Kohler wanted the client to state that there had been no abuse, and to sign to it. One one occasion, in court, a document stating precisely what Kohler wanted was slipped in among other documents to be signed. The client caught the deceit and refused to sign.
To increase the anxiety and thus also suggestibility, Kohler, with the Judge’s permission, scheduled and then postponed five trial dates at the last minute. Each date was used to coax, cajole, coerce and finally again conceal evidence. Kohler’s office became a meat grinder intended to be a laundromat. Grind the client to launder wrongdoing by those more influential.
“Five years hard time in Waupun and the loss of your child!” was Kohler’s last gambit and final offer after 18 months. The client refused.
Enraged to redness, he and Judge Hansher locked eyes through the glass partition. The stage was set for revenge. Jury selection commenced minutes later. Kohler rigged the jury (see below).
He had also failed to turn in a witness list, but never mind. No witness and no evidence prepared or provided because that was not part of the plan. Plan A was the plea bargain to hide the evidence; plan B was simply to hide the evidence. Plan B ultimately extended to altering court-ordered psychological reports (three of them). The reports stated that there were no negative psychological issues respective Kohler’s client, and that his client had likely bee truthful about the severe abuse suffered by the child, abuse intentionally concealed by Kohler.
Not find specks of leftover vomit on toile seats, like the soldier who knows he’s going to die in a wave of assault, but residues of cocain as the client is betrayed.
no need to handle fear if you can betray your client.
The sinks with cocaine residue, the toilet seats specks of vomit.
how does theccoward handle info like this
aracter is his fate, says Heraclitus,
Some men face their duties and wrench their guts to get it done. You can see the results from speck ofvomit on the toilet seat before a planned military engagement. You probably won’t see this specks in the court house head, but you might pick up cocaine residue.
whatbkind of inspiration do such men provide?
the opposite: expulsion. But not if you don’t know their story.
his through coercion of a psychological nature that was essentially impossible to prove or impugn.