By Pam Martens: March 5, 2015

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) has a slogan: “The constitution won’t defend itself.” Today, the dedicated attorneys that battle for the little guy at PCJF must be thinking – “the constitution won’t be defended by flip-flopping judges either.”

PCJF finds itself in a uniquely bizarre situation. Two prominent judges with brain-trust status on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which is based in Manhattan, have overturned their own decision that they handed down just six months ago. That’s strange enough but what really has tongues wagging in legal circles is that they reversed themselves with no party asking them for a rehearing. The case had been accepted for an en banc (full court) hearing at the Second Circuit when the two suddenly reversed themselves.

The case involves Occupy Wall Street – the largest protest movement against Wall Street bankers’ pillaging of the 99 percent with impunity from Washington since Wall Street first began trading under the Buttonwood tree in lower Manhattan. PCJF had filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of approximately 700 Occupy Wall Street peaceful protesters who had been herded and corralled on the Brooklyn Bridge by the NYPD on October 1, 2011, then arrested en masse. Three days after the mass arrest, PCJF filed the class action lawsuit.

The case was first heard at the U.S. District Court level by Judge Jed Rakoff, the same Judge who attempted to stop the cozy deals between Washington and Citigroup and was himself slapped down by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

PCJF submitted video footage to the District Court showing that the NYPD led and escorted the marchers onto the Bridge, thus suggesting to the marchers that the police were allowing the procession to cross the Bridge. Police then blocked the means of dispersal from both the front and back end of the procession, removing any possibility of marchers being able to disperse even if they had heard an order to disperse.

Judge Rakoff handed down a 29-page decision on June 7, 2012, dismissing the claims against the City of New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly but allowing the claims against the individual arresting police officers to move forward.

Judge Jed Rakoff wrote in the opening sentences of his decision:

“What a huge debt this nation owes to its ‘troublemakers.’ From Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King, Jr., they have forced us to focus on problems we would prefer to downplay or ignore. Yet it is often only with hindsight that we can distinguish those troublemakers who brought us to our senses from those who were simply…troublemakers. Prudence, and respect for the constitutional rights to free speech and free association, therefore dictate that the legal system cut all non-violent protesters a fair amount of slack.”

Concerns of an unseen hand operating between Washington and Wall Street to quash protesters demands for a realignment of their democracy finds substance in the fact that the Department of Homeland Security had funded a high-tech, joint spy center in the heart of Wall Street where the New York Federal Reserve, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and other Wall Street mega banks had their own personnel working alongside NYPD officers to spy on the activities of Occupy Wall Street protesters as well as law abiding citizens on the streets.

Additionally,

http://wallstreetonparade.com/2015/03/two-prominent-judges-take-bizarre-action-in-occupy-wall-street-case/