A Constitutional Amendment to Democratize the Judicial Council

The “insiders” at 455 Golden Gate are sure not having a good month. First J McConnell and J Horn were finally thanked and excused from further tormenting the hard working trial judges of California. The Judicial Council blundered again by failing to end a telecommuting policy that was so abused that a AOC lawyer was allowed to work from Geneva for two years. This week, a fair balanced and specific call for bringing democracy to our branch has finally emerged. It sure looks like the ” overlords ” at the crystal palace will now have to justify in an election what they fear most , their many abuses of taxpayer funds and their unwillingness to ever accept any responsibility for any and all of it.

Even members of the State Legislature know that branch “leadership” behaves like a bully. From today’s Twitter Feed at Capitol Accounts, at The Recorder, the on-line publication of CalLaw:

Capital Accounts‏@CapitalAccounts

Summing up State if Judiciary speech: We’re more efficient, transparent & thrifty. But we need more money.

Chief Justice provides prepared text of speech to media. But it only vaguely resembles what she’s actually saying.

At the chief justice’s State of the Judiciary. Assemblyman tells CJ’s mother, “I hope she doesn’t beat us up too much.”

https://twitter.com/CapitalAccounts

Long live the ACJ.

The CJ’s speech to the legislature is Exhibit 1002 in the case for General Woodhull’s proposal to democratize the Judicial Council. What I am continually amazed at is the none of the “overlords” at 455 Golden Gate ever associates any of their repeated and numerous public policy failures with why our branch budget has been so radically cut back.To claim the JC and AOC have cleaned up their act also rings hollow given the vote just last week to reject the SEC recommendation on ending telecommuting. The bottom line is that the “insiders” at the crystal palace by never accepting responsibility for the waste of billions have lost their way and credibility with those that fund the courts. Wendy is absolutely correct as it sounds like the legislature and Governor appear to be saying ” that doesn’t mean we have to continue funding your poor judgment”. Democratize the Judicial Council so we can restore fiscal integrity, open and available courts, common sense and credibility to our branch of government.

Yes Lando . You nailed it. I think we have seen more evil than good and you left out in your litany of problems HRH 2 who is driving the branch into the ground given her lack of experience and lack of political skills including her misplaced attacks on the integrity of the legislators who fund our branch. HRH 2 is an unmitigated disaster. Her whining was poorly received in Sacramento this week.. My vote, she needs to resign so we can can save what is left of our branch.

Welcome back again, to the show that never ends. Published today, Wednesday, March 13, from Courthouse News Service, by Maria Dinzeo:

Proposed Search Fee Threatens Access to Public Court Records
By MARIA DINZEO

(CN) – A bill written by California’s Administrative Office of the Courts would impose a ten-dollar fee on every court file requested by a journalist, a fee that would inevitably limit access to public documents.

“It would be intolerable for a journalist and for press coverage in general,” said Terry Francke of the open government group Californians Aware. “The rate that you’re talking about is absolutely prohibitive.”

Judges and court clerks conceded that the fee would apply to nearly everyone who wants to look at a court file, including journalists who regularly review a large number of files in covering a courthouse.

“If you asked for 10 files and you’re a reporter, it’s probably going to be $100 in that situation,” said Santa Clara County’s head court clerk, David Yamasaki.

Sonoma’s Presiding Judge Rene Chouteau added, in reference to the press corps, “You may have a problem there.”

The fee has been put forward by the courts’ central administrative office as part of trailer bill, legislation that rides in the wake of the overall budget bill and receives little public deliberation. The trailer bill procedure has been used by the court administrative office in the past and brought intense controversy within the judiciary.

“Putting this in a trailer bill is going to strike most people as a deliberate attempt to lowball it,” said Francke.

According to the bill, a $10 fee would be levied for “each name, file or other information for which a search is requested.” The sole exception is for a person who is a party in the case where a file is requested.

The broad language of the trailer bill amends an earlier section of the state government code that applied a $15 fee to searches that took over ten minutes, tying the fee to the amount of work involved. It was rarely invoked because it normally takes less than ten minutes to retrieve a file.

“This approach completely ignores the public’s role in being able to see how the system operates,” said Jim Ewert, general counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Association, a group that includes 850 California newspapers, large and small, from the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee and San Jose Mercury News to the Fremont Argus, Lodi News-Herald, Santa Cruz Sentinel and Bakersfield Californian.

Closed Committees

The idea for the fee rose through a series of committees closed to the public.

A working group of seven judges and seven clerks took up the idea from suggestions by individual courts, passed it along to an ad hoc committee of judges and clerks who pushed it along to a legislative policy committee made up of judges and one clerk. All those committees were closed. That last one wrote a report on proposed “efficiencies” that was summarized in non-specific terms before the Judicial Council, which is open to the press.

The report was not debated or voted on by the council.

The language imposing the fee was then pushed by bureaucrats in the courts’ administrative office over to those in the governor’s finance department who then sent it over to the Legislature as a bill that is hooked to the budget. Trailer bills proceed in a group through the Legislature’s budget committees and become part of a furious round of horse trading that accompanies the budget’s passage.

“This is an issue to follow and it’s an issue we’re vetting,” said Anthony Ellis, a spokesperson for the office of Assembly member Bob Blumenfield, chair of the Assembly Budget Committee.

“I’m really concerned because that goes back to our basic idea of the role of the courts,” said Assembly member Bob Wieckowski (D-Fremont) who chairs the Assembly Judiciary Committee. “That’s our sense of democracy, and you’re limiting it to people who are rich and who can pay for that. I don’t want that.”

Along its complex and closed path, the fee idea morphed into something different than originally proposed.

The original idea from the working group of seven judges and seven clerks was to match the fee to the amount of staff work involved, said Chouteau in Sonoma Superior Court. “The exact language was not something we had discussions about. The discussion revolved around the fact that the fee had to be reasonably related to the services provided.”

But when the legal services office within the Administrative Office of the Courts finished drafting the specific words of the trailer bill, it no longer tied the fee to the amount of work on a search – the time element in the old law had been deleted. Instead, the language tied the fee to the number of files provided, regardless of time spent.

Court files are normally kept on shelves behind clerks at a records room counter, and generally take minutes to provide. Older files are often moved to archival storage. So a few files close by can take a few minutes to find while a single file in archives generally takes much longer to track down.

A lobbyist for the Administrative Office of the Courts, Donna Hershkowitz, worked with the original working group of judges and clerks that came up with the general idea. Her name is familiar to many judges in the state in connection with another trailer bill, proposed in 2008, that would have taken away the presiding judges’ power to manage their courts and choose their head clerks.

Described by a leading judge as “the dark-of-night trailer bill to subvert the local control of trial courts,” the gambit brought a furious reaction from trial judges and a four-year quest to find who had authored the language. Last year, Hershkowitz’s name was tied to the trailer bill by a member of the Judicial Council, but she was not said to be the bill’s drafter.

An analyst who also works for the administrative office’s lobbying arm defended the fee, saying it was aimed at “data miners.” That term is not included or defined in the proposed bill.

The analyst, Andi Liebenbaum, said a data miner would ask for a list of conservatorship petitions, for example, but the information is potentially dangerous and can lead to abuse. “Because they’re public records, we can’t say no, but until we change the law to make it so a lot of this info isn’t gettable by the public,” she said, “there are people — crackpots — who are going to go to a court and try to take advantage.”

A number of people involved said court officials from Placer, Tulare and Fresno counties pressed the idea of changing the old search fee of $15 after ten minutes.

Placer County’s head clerk Jake Chatters said it has less to do with data miners than with administrative simplicity. “The original reason it came up had to do with the ambiguity of the current law and the difficulty in handling the fee,” he said. “We don’t keep a timer or stop watch for staff to determine, ‘Was it a 14 minutes or 15 minutes?’ It was an administrative clarity issue.”

`You May Have a Problem’

The new fee of $10 fee would be assessed for every file or other “information” that is asked for. Its broad language falls on the press, public, researchers and anyone, other than someone directly involved in a lawsuit, who wants to look at records at a courthouse in California.

For example, a traditional part of a journalist’s work on the courthouse beat is to check the new filings at the end of the day, looking for news. In past years, journalists could often go behind the intake counter to do that part of their job. But most California courts now require that journalists ask a clerk for the new filings, often stacked up near the intake counter.

In San Jose’s superior court, for example, journalists look over a stack of 30-40 new cases filed on any given day.

In San Francisco, that number rises to 60-70.

“If someone wanted to pull a file, that would constitute a search,” said Yamasaki in San Jose. “We would look in our case management system and find where the case is located. In the last reading of the version it says. ‘each name, file for which a search is requested.’ It’s probably just as it reads, anybody who asks for a name or file would be required to pay that particular fee.”

Asked if the proposed fee would be charged to journalists reviewing new filings, Yamasaki answered candidly, “That’s a good question.”

“So here’s what happens,” he later added. “The way it’s written doesn’t draw a distinction between who the person is. Unfortunately, if you asked for 10 files and you’re a reporter it’s probably going to be $100 in that situation.”

Reviewing a stack of the approximately 40 cases filed on a given day in the San Jose court would thereby result in a daily fee of $400 — $64,000 a year. In San Francisco, the fee would rise to $700 a day – $182,000 a year.

“You may have a problem there,” said Judge Chouteau from Sonoma. “I’m not sure we can discriminate against people asking for the records.”

Arguments in favor of the fee often rely on anecdotal accounts of data miners, but the group is not defined in the legislation and has proved amorphous in the various accounts of malfeasance that generally have to do with seeking financial gain. Researchers, for example, comb court records for debt and eviction records, looking for information for employers and landlords. But the fee is not limited to that or any other group.

“Who supposedly is causing this problem by extraordinary demands for look up? I don’t know who they’re referring to,” said Francke with Californians Aware. “They have to be distinguished from organizations or individuals whose only reason for getting the information to report something to the public at little or no cost.”

The other main argument for the fee is that court budgets have been cut to the bone and courts need the money. But the fee’s backers have not estimated any amount that would be generated by the fee and its principal effect would inevitably be to cut back on requests to see court records.

Critics of the fee point also out that the records have already been paid for by California residents through their taxes.

“These records have already been paid for by the public once,” said Ewert with the California Newspaper Publishers Association. “The taxpayers pay the salaries of all the people in the court clerk’s office that organize, categorize and take care of these documents.”

Chouteau in Sonoma’s court disagreed with that argument.

“It’s not taxation, it’s payment for a service,” said the judge. “The tax dollars go to Sacramento and the general funding for the courts has been dramatically reduced. If the funding hadn’t been decreased, some of these fees might not be necessary.”

The Orange County Connection

Among those involved in the process of coming up with the trailer bill proposal, officials from the Orange County courts had a key role.

The original working group that recommended the idea was chaired by Orange County’s presiding judge, Tom Borris. Orange County’s head clerk Alan Carlson along with Orange County Judge Linda Marks were members of the ad hoc committee that was next up the line and vetted the idea.

Orange County court officials were early promoters of the Court Case Management System, a highly controversial and now defunct software promoted by the central administrative office. Orange County has also been a pioneer in selling records online, and the court is now running an e-filing pilot project based on legislation pushed by the central administrative office.

As part of that pilot project, the court and the administrative office have now proposed rules that create a new “officially filed” definition for court documents. In that proposed definition, a document only becomes officially filed after a set of set of bureaucratic tasks are finished, a process that takes days or weeks. In Orange County, that process culminates when documents are put online for sale at a price of $7.50 to $40.

Press and open government groups say the new rule appears intended to deny press access to newly filed controversies until long after they are actually filed. In a lengthy comment, the news organizations said that, used to deny access, the altered definition would cause a “fundamental change in access to court records” and would violate the federal constitutional right of access to government proceedings under the First Amendment.

The 109-page comment was written by Rachel Matteo-Boehm, Roger Myers and Katherine Keating with Bryan Cave on behalf of the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the First Amendment Coalition, Californians Aware and Courthouse News Service. Joining in the comments were the Bay Area News Group, the Press Democrat Media Company and the Los Angeles Times.

The trailer bill’s $10-per-file fee would similarly have a negative effect on press and public access to the courts, according to the newspaper representatives.

Judge Borris noted that his court provides for press coverage of new cases without a fee. “In Orange County, we have a place the media can go to see all the cases for that day that they were filed,” he said. “Here, because of the pilot project on e-filing, within two hours, it’s posted to a particular location, at least for civil cases, for free.”

Unlike big courts such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, new complaints filed in Orange County cannot be seen on the day they are actually filed, which is the date on which they are stamped as filed.

Orange County’s new cases take one to three days, sometimes longer, to show up on computer terminals at the courthouse, first in the form of a docket summary, followed within two hours by an image of the full complaint. At that point, the documents are also online for sale. The media can then see them without paying a fee on screens in a large common room at the court, shared by the media, researchers, attorney services and the public at large.

Borris also said that in the event a person knew a file’s case number, then one would be able to walk to a clerk’s desk and ask for it. “The way I’m reading it is there’s no search if you know exactly the case number,” he said. “If you have the case name and number, you should be able to go to a clerk’s desk and they won’t charge you for it.”

That view was contradicted by other members of the working group. Yamasaki, for example, said a request for a file by case number or any other means would trigger the fee. The words of the trailer bill make no exception for searches by case number.

Borris added that another way to combat the problem of large search requests is to sell the information directly to companies who, for example, sell background checks. He added that the purpose of the fee is to drive people away from the clerk’s counter or have them pay for the time it takes to find a file.

“Orange County puts all of our cases on CDs and we sell them to anybody who wants to buy them and those companies search through for a particular name for someone who applied for a particular job,” said the judge. Referring to the $10 search fee, Borris added, “It’s trying to drive people away from the clerk’s counter, and having them pay for the service of the clerks having to do all the work, in this time when courts are laying off employees.”

Orange County’s court appears to already have been largely successful in that effort. A former background checker in Orange County, the type of researcher often described as a data miner, said that in years past roughly 15 background researchers checked the court’s records every day. Now there is only one left.

`Courts Are Not a Private Enterprise’

The push to make money from court records has prompted newspaper representatives, open government advocates and journalists to point out that the records in fact belong to the public and that the courts are constitutionally required to remain open public institutions.

“The public and press have a right of access to adjudicative court records under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” said Matteo-Boehm who also represents Courthouse News. “The notion of conditioning that access on the ability to pay — and we are talking about potentially large sums of money here — strikes me as presumptively unconstitutional. It is also totally contrary to the bedrock principles, in our country, of open court proceedings and the nature of our court system as a branch of government. The public should be encouraged to observe the court system through review of the court record, as opposed to discouraged through the imposition of high fees.”

Ewert with the California Newspaper Publishers Association added, “It’s not their records, it’s the public’s records. This approach completely ignores the public’s role in being able to see how the system operates. They have created this one size fits all approach to the detriment of the public in attempting to go further than the purported problem. I understand their plight but their approach is wrong headed because it completely ignores and makes more difficult the public’s role in the judicial process.”

Linda Petersen, a writer and editor with the Society of Professional Journalists, argued that the courts are public institutions and charging $10 to look at a court file runs counter to that fundamentally open character of American government.

“The courts are not a private enterprise,” said Petersen who chairs the society’s Freedom of Information Committee. “This is an effort to produce funds for their budget, and that is not how government should work.”

“There’s no way to single out a group and make them pay for a perceived abuse of the system without hurting everyone else in the process,” she concluded. “When costs become prohibitive, then ordinary citizens or reporters can’t have access to the operation of our government. It really does have a negative effect on people’s ability to know what our courts are doing.”

http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/03/13/55701.htm

Long live the ACJ.

Finally someone in Sacramento asking about the Judicial Council/AOC’s latest fiasco, the Long Beach courthouse . It is the CCMS for 2013. Great to see J Jahr is just like a rehashed William C. Vickrey . Maybe something at the crystal place will be named after him when he exits. As Wendy has observed the more things change at 455 Golden Gate , the more they remain the same. Woodhull’s proposal is the way to reform. Thanks Ant for supporting my ideas about moving forward to get democracy for the branch on the ballot. What do all the other great bloggers here think ?

http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/ballot-measures/how-to-qualify-an-initiative.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_California (check out amendments and revisions)

We all need only look at where the branch is today, after 17 years of George/Sakauye “rule”. George was appointed Chief Justice in March of 1996. Is the branch better off, or worse off, now? LOL.

Many of us who are posting here have, for almost two decades, been watching the steady decline of our once-proud and respected branch – even as branch funding steadily rose. We have observed and documented the arrogance, tyranny, corruption, mismanagement, cronyism, retaliation and/or waste that have infested the branch at the highest branch “leadership” levels–on the public dime—and at the expense of service to the public.

Many of us know our way around the legislative halls because we have had to go to the Governor and Legislature to ask them to put a screeching halt to egregious branch debacles, because branch “leadership” took part in, protected, supported and perpetuated those debacles.

The CA Judicial Branch is reportedly the largest in the world. It purports to be an example to the world. It has some of the finest legal minds in the world.

The branch deserves ethical, competent, qualified, experienced, respected, credible, responsive leadership, dedicated to service to the public.

Ron George purposefully engaged the branch in politics and questionable projects and policies, at great cost to branch credibility.

The unintended result? Well, politics makes strange bedfellows. As the branch faces ongoing strife and disaster under current leadership, we should all put aside our differences to the extent we can and do what we can to bring about a positive, democratic change in the governance structure of the branch. We have the opportunity to do that, and we should take it.

And, for the public’s sake, the executive and legislative branches have a checks-and-balances duty to take part, and do its part, in cleaning up the judicial branch.

The CA legislature is intimately aware of many problems in the branch. They have done what they could to clean up financial waste and mismanagement. . . .but thus far they have not been able to help change branch governance so that it operates in a transparent, democratic and representative fashion. This may present an opportunity for them to help get the branch back on solid ground.

And if this is a serious endeavor, Lando’s ideas about coordinating this effort are terrific. A plan of action has to be created, and it is probably not a good idea to present it in advance, chapter and verse, to current “top leadership”. which we know opposes democratization and diverse viewpoints.

The SacBee is at it again.

http://www.sacbee.com/2013/03/15/5264331/state-courts-need-reform-and-dollars.html

Is it just me? Or doesn’t the below paragraph make it sound as though the courts statewide were responsible for the CCMess money-sucking waste of $$$ until the AOC came along on a white horse and “junked it” of its volition? Talk about a total rewrite of history and the omission of a few “minor” details as to the Herculean effort of OTHERS to expose and put an end to that fraud. Or maybe I just can’t see straight anymore cuz we’re too far down the rabbit hole.

The courts themselves are not blameless in this budget crisis. A badly administered statewide court case management system wasted hundreds of millions of dollars before the Administrative Office of the Courts junked it. While Cantil-Sakauye has cut AOC staffing by 30 percent over the last year or so, it had grown top-heavy even as trial courts suffered devastating reductions.

A rebuttal letter to at least a portion of this latest opinion piece has been delivered.

BTW, count me in as being ready for mobilization!

“Meanwhile, common-sense reforms, such as replacing expensive and inefficient court reporters with electronic recording devices, have not been implemented. The Legislative Analyst’s Office says that change alone would save the courts $100 million a year, but influential labor unions have kept that cost-saving reform bottled up in the Legislature for years.”

My mantra after all these years: keep records. I was tempted to burn mine when I moved, but fortunately did not.

Records provide proof and protection. Those who were informed cannot say they did not know.

The Sac Bee editorial is very disturbing. They appear to claim that the AOC ended CCMS??? Apparently they haven’t researched their history very well. The reason CCMS is gone is that the State Auditor was authorized by the legislature to investigate CCMS. That only occurred after the many groups for reform lobbied the legislature. The push back against reform was significant including from HRH 1 , Vickrey and J Bruinears who told the legislature CCMS was a great system and that an audit was not necessary. This is the same J Bruinears that would also later claim CCMS was ready to be deployed. After the legislature authorized the audit, the State Auditor slammed the AOC and the waste of a half billion dollars on a totally failed CCMS case management system. The devastating audit results and the disclosure that half a billion was totally wasted forced the hand of HRH 2 to put an end to the madness. To claim she is some type of reformer completely creates a false revisionist history as she sat on the Judicial Council while multi millions were spent on this state wide failure of incredible proportions.

The HRH 1 and Vickrey model was arrogant from the start. It assumed all the local trial courts were failures. While some smaller courts may have been underfunded, local control of the trial courts worked just fine. We now know that nothing HRH 1 , HRH 2 , Vickrey or Jahr had to offer improved anything. Before them did you ever see a local courthouse close in Clovis, Barstow, San Mateo, Malibu , San Pedro or San Diego ? Before them did you see court reporters lose their jobs by the hundreds all over the state and especially in civil trial courtrooms? Before them did you courts like San Joaquin completely close down all small claims cases? Before them did you see massive layoffs of Court Commissioners such as in San Francisco ? Before them did you see a self serving bureaucracy grow from less than 200 to 1,000? Before them did you see the waste of countless billions on ill conceived projects like CCMS, Long Beach, a telecommuting lawyer from Europe, and retirement benefits no one else employed by the state of California ever received. All of the above makes the case for voting out the dictatorship at 455 Golden Gate that has run our branch of government totally into the ground.

Justice CA, interesting video. I loved how HRH 2 described how she selects JC members…diverse, their “decision” making, yada, yada. Makes ya want to puke. OBT, I made it through most of it without my hair hurting because I was sitting out in my yard kickin back and drinking a beer listening to it 🙂 You gotta get loose to listen to this crap for any length of time.

Sidebar to the top leadership of the bar: The bar should be prepared to answer for their defense of patent bench/bar misconduct.

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offencesFor abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.