Paula Price...

The Somerset County Attorney enjoys a cozy relationship with state court staff that may be an actionable conflict of interest. In my civil case, subordinate clerical staff unethically, unlawfully tampered with pleadings, made untruthful statements to a sitting state court judge in spontaneous statements during a recorded civil court proceeding; materially caused procedural defaults on three (3) timely, properly filed appeals from an inept, stumbling, bumbling, and mumbling (literally) state Circuit Court judge's unconstitutional, unlawful orders, who must've been rolled out of mothballs in a wheelchair from some assisted living facility in the swamps or backwaters of the Eastern Shore just to hear the case, cackling like a hen and laughing it up with Simpleton at my expense as case-in-point. They could have spared everyone the charade: the time and expense by propping up an animated corpse, fitted with the requisite electric leads and connected a car battery, to preside over the [state] kangaroo court instead of that ancient, alabaster relic of the Confederacy. We would have gotten the same decision without all of the expense of time and coin. The performative shenanigans, all of which were predicated on an utter disaster in a state District Court judge named Paula A. Price, who is a racist, privileged, duplicitous white woman a/k/a "Karen" despite her innumeracy, not to mention cultural incompetence, among other disqualifying factors, which should've barred her 10-year appointment, was recklessly thrust dangerously into black robes by co-opted, brought, lock, stock, and barrel stooges on the MD judicial selection committee. Paula's deceitful, unmitigated hubris is only exceeded by her hypocrisy. Her corruption on the bench, moreover, aggravated by an in-over-her-head ineptitude, manifests in an exasperation by even simple civil litigation a first year law student from a third rate law school could figure out after an hour of research: interpreting laws, treaties, interstate agreements, and MOUs, which are "settled law"; simple shit that confounds her because she lacks the chops [read that: legal acumen] to comprehend nuance and subtlety. Paul is also utterly incapable of doing simple math: like counting the days from when an extradition [interstate] waiver is signed by a criminal defendant (who has lived in Maryland and surrounding state of Delaware for over twenty years and has never, ever been arrested in either Maryland or Pennsylvania but she pompously states with stern certainty on the public record that the defendant (an elderly, college-educated Black professional, with two undergraduate, and three advance degrees, one professional, the other terminal, who was "totally and permanently" injured in the line of duty as an emergency medical technician at Ground Zero on 9/11) has an "extensive criminal history record"; relying entirely on forty-year old records from a private, third-party vendor, not original court records or even ones based on nationwide FBI finger print scan. Like the typical overbearing, undereducated Karen she is, Paula claimed that because of alleged 40-year-old conviction in New York, the elderly gentleman was not entitled to bail for a quality of life offense. The Black defendant was actually "wanted" for a violation (that is not typical executed because it is below a misdemeanor offense in the State of Maryland and allegedly committed in Bucks County (PA) "years," not months ago). Culturally incompetent, Paua does not know that "when a person tells you who they are believe them." But Paula has never read Maya Angelou. So, she unethically, unlawfully, openly engages in ex parte communications with detention facility staff in both Somerset and Bucks county respectively without once notifying the State Attorney's office or the defendant, who was lawfully entitled to know that Bucks County Sheriff Department unofficially requested an additional week to retrieve the defendant. Or that she was seriously contemplating granting the extension to a Buck's County sheriff's deputy who lacked the legal authority to even request the extension. One not to be bothered with pesky constitutional nicieties, Paula who no longer had any personal jurisdiction whatsoever granted the ex parte extension sua sponte. And concealed that fact from the defendant until the day he was due to be released from detention. Paula is a Karen masquerading as a judge who ruled against a licensed attorney in the jurisdiction. A lawyer that contested her rubber stamp decision to remove personal property from privately-owned property owned by the elderly gentleman in another case. And her imprudent ruling is the one that pushed the snowball down the hill, which stands as a testament to not only her confidence that institutional racism would shield her from the consequences of her disqualifying judicial misconduct but also the bigotry that drives it. Thankfully, she has been relegated to the scrapheap of courts: the lowest (most obscure and, as such, powerless) court in the state where the damage she can inflict on poor helpless, hapless defendants or litigants (typically POCs), recklessly wielding her statutory authorities like a whip on the bowed, scarred back of a recalcitrant slave, is delimited by the constitutional authorities accorded to the MD District Court by the Maryland General Assembly. Nevertheless, both Paula and the other klown, collectively, know as much about Maryland Property and, even less, about US Constitutional law, respectively, to barely fill a thimble; pass muster in a high school civics class; or, score high enough on the LSAT to gain entry into anything other than a correspondence school, which is beyond scary and, in fact, is as scandalous as it is disqualifying. Neither of these "judges" (used advisedly) should hold such a sensitive position of public trust to wreak havoc on poor brown and Black folks who have no formal legal training - whether from incarceration as a "jailhouse lawyer" or from an accredited and, thereby, recognized law school as a licensed lawyer whose has successfully applied for and, consequently, gained admission to the practice of law in the State of Maryland. The poor sap in this story's loss is not an indictment of his own 'formal' training but one that holds that privileged, connected folks with the right credentials from the right school with the right skin color can at the least weasel their way on to the 'bench," by cracking a lame joke, batting an eye, or flashing a leg, well-turned ankle or sucking a couple of cocks to get appointed: a lower, state court where appointees can do good or bad depending on their political ideology, personal ambition, or social consciousness. The two jokes I mean folks who are the subject of this story did bad, however. And the results have been calamitous. But it will not happen again.