Sorry for the tag but
@AnOminous @Useful_Mistake you two are both lawyers (or at thw very least legally inclined), are there any safeguards againts Stabbins here?
You mean filing a completely bogus lawsuit against someone without any good reason to believe they're even the person who did whatever you're complaining about? Yes, they range from the civil, like Rule 11 sanctions, to extending the already existing vexatious litigant finding to yet another district, or as his tourism mounts, the entire federal system, although that is rare.
>Summarily punishing me for recording the call without giving me due process first
Don't judges have the power to do this? I'm pretty sure there are limits to that power, but Stabbins was a case of "You broke my rules so fuck you."
Contempt of course. Generally, indirect contempt not in the presence of the court requires a hearing first for anything like actually giving the bozo a stint in jail to get his attention, but judges can throw a person in jail immediately if they personally witness the contumacious act. I'm not sure about this court, but up to six months as a maximum for a summary punitive contempt finding is fairly common, although actually giving someone the max is uncommon. When it's coercive, like against a witness who refuses to testify without a valid Fifth Amendment claim or pay a judgment (that he could pay and chooses not to), it can be indefinite, like until the case is over or the detainee decides to comply with the order. In that case, he is said "to hold the key to his own cell."
For longer sentences, there generally needs to be an actual trial for criminal contempt, and even in the direct contempt cases, a judge unreasonably throwing the full six months at someone for merely being annoying is often swiftly overruled (as in a matter of days as an emergency appeal).
The contempt power is actually huge and encompasses a lot of different kinds of behavior with a lot of different kinds of sanction. In actual practice, few judges exercise this power to its fullest degree. It's usually reserved for the worst kinds of misconduct.
He cherry picks parts of precedent to seem to support his case then just thinks the court won't look up the actual case and realize that he took everything out of context and in fact the precedent actually disputes his logic.
He also doesn't get that especially in the kind of bullshit lawsuits he brings, there are usually a half dozen or so precedents that come up in nearly every case and that the judge, and the judge's clerks, are not only familiar with them but have written opinions and memos on them over and over again. If the first thing they read in your idiotic pro se pleading is something outright lying about a precedent they already know, they know to disregard anything else you say or even just go straight to the other guy's brief to get the real story.
So a retard like Mr. Stabby might think he's being clever trying to pull the wool over a judge's eyes but in reality he's just marked himself in his very first sentence as a clown who should be disregarded.
