Florida Bar Governors - Guardians of Democracy or Guards of a Gulag?

Jack Thompson July 16th, 2007

In 1976, having graduated from Vanderbilt Law School, I came to Miami and became a Christian and then a lawyer, in that order. I have tried to keep those two roles in that particular order.

In 1989 I secured the first fines ever levied by the Federal Communications Commission for airing indecent material in violation of 18 USC 1464. The radio station's attorneys retaliated by collaborating with the former chairman of the Florida ACLU to persuade The Florida Bar to go to the state Supreme Court, which required me to submit to psychiatric and psychological tests to determine if "Jack Thompson's obsession against pornography is so severe that he is mentally incapacitated by that obsession and thus unfit to practice law."

The Bar's own shrinks examined me and found that "Jack Thompson is a Christian acting out his faith." I am now the only officially Bar-certified sane lawyer in Florida. The Bar's insurer paid me damages for the honor"“but now The Bar is pursuing me again.

Meantime, I was amicus curiae in the 1990 federal trial that found Miami rap group 2 Live Crew's album As Nasty As They Wanna Be was "obscene" under Miller v. California's three-prong test.

In 1992, with Charlton Heston, I persuaded Time Warner, largest communications company in the world, to pull rapper Ice-T's "Cop Killer" from store shelves worldwide. The ACLU then declared me one of its "Censors of the Year," a false sobriquet I wear as badge of honor. Ice-T has gone from advocating the killing of police officers to portraying one on NBC's Law and Order: SVU. The irony is sweet vindication of what I have spent two decades doing.

In 2004 I got the Howard Stern Show canceled by all Clear Channel Communications radio stations when I sent the FCC and Clear Channel, a transcript of this comment aired by shockjock Stern: "Ever bang any famous nigger chicks? What do they smell like? Watermelons?"

Clear Channel was fined $495,000 for airing indecent material because of my formal FCC complaint, the basis for which is the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in FCC v. Pacifica which establishes the constitutionality of Congress' laws that prohibit indecent material on the public airwaves between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., when minors are likely to be in the audience in significant numbers.

So, I have used laws that have been held constitutional to try to protect children from adult entertainment. Has this made me an "unethical" lawyer? The Florida Bar thinks so.

In 2005 I was interviewed on CBS' 60 Minutes, by Ed Bradley about my wrongful death lawsuit in Alabama on behalf of the families of three cops shot and killed by a teen who had trained on Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a cop-killing murder-simulation video game.

Reader's Digest, the world's widest-read publication, produced an original report that favorably treated the case, one buttressed by testimony from four experts who also have testified before Congress on the violent video game copycatting phenomenon.

Remember Jeffrey Wigand after he appeared on 60 Minutes to blow the whistle on predatory tobacco-industry marketing and selling an adult product to minors? Big Tobacco launched a "shoot the messenger" strategy to try to destroy him. It didn't work (see why in the movie The Insider, starring Al Pacino.)

Similarly, the giant video-game maker of Grand Theft Auto, Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc., hired the Philadelphia law firm of Blank Rome, with offices in Florida, to do to me what Big Tobacco did to Wigand after my appearance on 60 Minutes. Blank Rome, by the way, is not only Take-Two's registered lobbyist in both the U.S. House and Senate, but is the largest "bundler" of campaign cash to Bush-Cheney in both 2000 and 2004. (Don't you love a "family values" administration that takes money from the lobbyist for the company that embedded the "Hot Coffee" porn mod in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and sold it to children?)

Blank Rome's task for porn-to-kids client Take-Two was to gin up baseless SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) Florida Bar complaints to stigmatize, exhaust, and intimidate me. I have had to file a federal civil rights lawsuit to prove the illegality of these SLAPP complaints in which The Florida Bar has enthusiastically participated with Blank Rome, violating its own procedural rules in doing so. This is "payback" for my success against The Bar's similar collaboration with the shock-radio industry years ago.

The Florida Bar has subverted its solemn charge from the Florida Supreme Court to protect the public from unethical lawyers. It is now the politically correct, left-wing thought police and has chosen a side in "the culture war" to gut the public-spirited effort to enforce constitutional laws that protect kids from adult-rated material. The American Psychological Association has found these products modify behavior and constitute a health and safety hazard to our society.

The Florida Bar a few years ago conducted a poll to see what we lawyers thought of The Bar's disciplinary machinery. A disturbingly high number of us responded by stating that "who you are and whom you know" can determine what discipline is pursued and meted out.

My attorney and I met in Tallahassee May 15, 2006, at the offices of Greenberg Traurig's Barry Richards with Bar general counsel Paul Hill, executive director John Harkness, then Bar president Alan Bookman, and president-elect and now president Hank Coxe. Mr. Coxe looked at me and said, "You need to be suspended from the practice of law because of the vitriol with which you have addressed these entertainment industry lawyers." Excuse me, Hank. I've sat with families whose loved ones are dead because of these products. "Vitriol" is the least that shameless lawyers deserve, especially when they file, in violation of federal criminal civil-rights laws, SLAPP Bar complaints. Coxe is the guy who rather vitriolically and publicly went after the Bush Administration for keeping terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay. One man's vitriol is another man's altruism, it seems. Just ask Hank.

There is more proof Coxe and his "Guardians of Democracy" (how Bar Governors described themselves in a brochure) have become thought police. After that May 15 Tallahassee sit-down, Bar prosecutor Sheila Tuma demanded, in writing no less, on behalf of The Florida Bar, that I submit to a battery of psych tests again by The Bar to determine once more whether my successful activism is pathological.

Thus, the thoroughly recidivist Florida Bar has adopted the Stalinist techniques of the Soviet gulag. The Bar seeks to pathologize my Christian faith and public activism because my agenda is not theirs. More than shocking, this is a criminal violation of the right to engage in First Amendment-protected speech and acts, as codified in federal civil rights laws.

"An appeaser," said Churchill, "is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." If The Bar can get away with this illegal hijacking of our disciplinary system at my expense and while you look on, then you may be next.

That's why I have filed a civil rights suit against The Florida Bar that may cost its membership millions of dollars. This lawsuit will ask the jury for tens of millions of dollars so that even Hank Coxe will understand that such Bar nonsense must end.

If you want to know more about what The Florida Bar is doing in the above regards, or if you have your own horror story, please contact me, Jack Thompson, at 305-666-4366 (office), 305-588-3005 (cell), or e-mail amendmentone@comcast.net

You can read Jack Thompson's fully researched and corroborated book about what The Florida Bar tried to do to him the last time it lost its mind. Published by Tyndale House, it is entitled Out of Harm's Way.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 9:28 am and is filed under Civil Liberties, Culture, Jack Thompson, Out of Harms Way. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.