You just have to love the court system. When the big brokerage houses were charged with bogus analysis and paid fines to the SEC, a private class action suit was filed in Southern District of New York (SDNY) and it was dismissed when shareholders tried to file suit. Merrill Lynch & Company had won the dismissal of a suit filed in federal court in New York accusing it of artificially inflating the value of Tyco International Ltd. Judge Milton Pollack of United States District Court in New York threw out the suit that accused Merrill Lynch of defrauding investors by issuing biased analyst reports regarding Tyco. Now, just one day after announcing they’d hit a new milestone in user registrations, the near 50 lawsuits against Facebook have been combined into one class action suit, making it easier for Facebook to defend itself in court and for shareholders to be dismissed, which is on par for the SDNY. The investors involved in the suit were scattered across the country. While some fought to keep their cases confined to California courts, the real powers behind the curtain had it ordered that all cases will be transferred to U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet in Manhattan, New York. This will be the kiss of death and you can bet there will be no fair trial. Such a suit would drag in the banks and expose what they did as well. WILL NEVER BE ALLOWED IN NYC!
The SDNY court is unique for Judges alter the transcripts there and can change testimony as well as argument no less jury instructions all after the fact. The Court of Appeals claimed it had no power to tell the judges to stop even though altering federal court records is a felony for up to 5 years in prison. Here is what the Second Circuit Court of Appeals wrote on this outrageous practice:
“SDNY Practice
The problem in the instant case has led lawyers on both sides to highlight a problematic practice in the Southern District of New York and has prompted one of them to ask this court to order that the practice be eliminated. See Leiwant Decl. at 2. According to lawyers for both the government and defense, as well as Bologna, the “standard practice” in the Southern District is for a court reporter to submit the transcript of jury instructions to the district court before releasing it to the parties. See id.; Pomerantz Affirm. ¶ 11; Bologna 4/99499 Aff. ¶ 3. The district court is free to alter the transcript, and any changes are incorporated in the “official” transcript without disclosing such changes to the parties. See Bologna 4/99499 Aff. ¶ 3. According to counsel, the Southern District is somewhat unique in this practice. See Leiwant Decl. at 2.
Courts do not have power to alter transcripts in camera and to conceal the alterations from the parties.11 Given the issues that arose in this case as a direct result of this practice, there appears to be little justification for continuing the practice in its present form. To be sure, a procedure that corrects obvious mistakes in transmission is useful, and the parties have little interest in closely monitoring such a procedure so long as the alterations are cosmetic. Monitoring by the parties, however, provides some assurance that only cosmetic changes will be made or, if not, that changes will correctly reflect what transpired in the particular proceeding. Moreover, there is little cost in informing the parties of cosmetic changes or at least of directing court reporters to give parties access to the original transcript when they request it.
Nevertheless, whether we have the power to order a change in such a practice is unclear.12 We review judgments, and our review of the convictions and sentences here may not be an appropriate vehicle for the fine tuning of this practice. However, we invite the judges of the Southern District to consider revision.”
