Another ‘Natural Born Citizen’ SCOTUS Ruling Gets Doctored

Another ‘Natural Born Citizen’ SCOTUS Ruling Gets Doctored


“Nothing To See Here, Folks - Let’s Move Along”



By Abraxas

Guest contributor, Abraxas, follows up on the scrubbing scandal that now plagues Justia.com’s Supreme Court rulings web site.

“Justia.com's founder, Tim Stanley, (a lawyer licensed to practice in California) blamed faulty computer code for erasing cites, text (and inserting new text) in 25 Supreme Court cases, all dealing with the definition of a 'natural born citizen' of the United States.  What is interesting is that these mysterious deletions took place just before Barack Hussein Obama won the Democratic nomination for President in 2008; an event which, as we all remember, triggered an immediate firestorm of suspicion amongst conservatives as to whether Obama was eligible to run for the Oval Office.  Unfortunately, once Justia erased all definition of 'natural born citizen' from its database, answering that question became nearly impossible .

Now, three years later, the deletions have been discovered and Stanley has gone into frantic CYA mode.  First, he's denied it was deliberate and instead blames an anonymous 'programmer' who mistyped a code.  But most of all, Stanley has loudly insisted that ALL of the damage has now been corrected.  The missing data had now been restored to the 25 Supreme Court cases, so there's nothing to see folks, move along now.

Well, one angry blogger isn't moving one inch.  He is Constitutional researcher, Dan Goodman, and he's just alerted the "Natural Born Citizen" site that there is a completely different United States Supreme Court case which Justia monkeyed with.  It is "Blake v. McClung" and Goodman cited it extensively in his article, “Natural (native) Born Citizen Defined“, published on Aug. 22, 2009 at the Social Science Research Network.  Below is the text from that Supreme Court case which Goodman quoted in his article.  (The relevant passage is in bold.):

“The constitution forbids only such legislation affecting citizens of the respective states as will substantially or practically put a citizen of one state in a condition of alienage when he is within or when he removes to another state, or when asserting in another state the rights that commonly appertain to those who are part of the political community known as the People of the United States, by and for whom the government of the Union was ordained and established.”

Directly afterwards, Goodman was shocked to discover that Justia had sabotaged this Supreme Court case on their site.  Someone there went in and removed "the People of" from it.  The Court opinion on the site now reads only "the United States..."

Goodman is steamed.  He insists this deletion had to have been done 'intentionally'.  Leo Donofrio, the lawyer who runs the "NBC" site clearly agrees with Goodman but there's nothing Donofrio can do to prove it.  Justia has blocked ALL access to its cases with robot text so that no one can go in and discover which ones have been tampered with.  The public is therefore forced to take Justia's words that all is now fine, nothing to see - everyone move on.

Well, Justia should have listened to that warning - "Be careful what you ask God for.  He might give it to you."  As a former legal secretary of many years' experience, I can assure you that 'moving on' from Justia is precisely what any self-respecting lawyer or legal scholar is going to do from now on.  They won't touch that site with a barge pole. In the legal world, entire firms can collapse and reputations can be destroyed by merely misquoting legal text - to have a site get caught in erasing that text (and inserting alien text in its place) is a crime too horrible to tolerate.  In my humble opinion, Justia is toast.  All that remains is for them to declare Chapter 11 and hope they can sell their office chairs on eBay for a good price.

As for me, all that remains is the question of whether Justia's founder, Tim Stanley, did all this on his own initiative - or at the request of a certain Community Organizer?  I'm not holding my breath for an answer.  Even if any paper proof of that request exists, I'll bet dollars to doughnuts it's already been shoveled into the same pit that holds all those Columbia and Harvard transcripts.  (And we all know what a lovely peek at those grades the Community Organizer has allowed us up till now, don't we?)