Book Reviews

• Citation: Vol. 43 No. 1 Pg. 48
• Publication year: 2017
• Pages: 48
• Year: 2017

BOOK REVIEWS No. Vol. 43 No. 1 Pg. 48 Vermont Bar Journal Spring, 2017

Bad Minds, High Places America’s Archipelago of Legal Failure

Robert Grundstein, J.

Reviewed by Ken Ditkowsky, Esq.

I persistently call for honest investigations of defective state legal systems. The prevailing question remains: what state actor or agency will conduct them? Mr. Grundstein’s book provides an answer: None of them. In his experience, Ohio and Washington proved that it is possible for a region to deteriorate into a criminal enterprise from the smallest municipal court to the local Federal District. He believes that without a federal intervention, Cleveland, Ohio would have continued to operate like a benign version of Albania. The “soggy white people” of Washington State, as Mr. Grundstein refers to them, have established the courts as a private means of income distribution.

Mr. Grundstein has written an entertaining first-person account of how he believes he was persistently prosecuted, pursued and jailed for exercising his First Amendment rights to expose this happenstance. He was extradited from Vermont to Ohio on what he calls falsifed charges to a Grand Jury after being exonerated by the same panel. It took an allegedly illegal represent-ment in Cleveland for the County sheriff to get desired results after the author published an editorial about a Cleveland suburban judge. The author has not been wrong yet. In his account, which reads like a crime drama, the FBI confirmed his claims by conducting a huge corruption investigation using 125 agents over 10 years. Arrests are still being made. Not only was the judge about whom Mr. Grundstein wrote subject to investigation and removal, the law director and associate judge in that court were convicted of bribery and activities related to prostitution. The County Sheriff was put in jail as was the docket clerk who he claims falsifed the Mr. Grundstein’s court record. The prosecutor was forced to resign and another prosecutor related to his Ohio case was put in jail.

From Grunstein’s perspective, the state made sure he had no voice. An order was entered ruling that he was not allowed to file in any Ohio court. The appellate courts would not review his exclusion from their state courts; all of them. When he went to Federal Court, the local federal court immediately imposed a permanent fling ban against him.

His book is an important book for several reasons; first, it shows the grass root character failure of America’s ethical consensus. Organized failures of this...