Joseph W. Blackburn, Judge Blackburn's ex husband, filed the hunting-club lawsuit on January 25, 2007, alleging violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and other wrongs. Joe Blackburn hardly is your standard-issue litigant. He is a certified public accountant and professor of taxation at Cumberland School of Law on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham. His teaching and research interests include corporate taxation, basic federal income tax, estate and gift taxation, business planning, accounting for lawyers, and international tax.
Joe Blackburn clearly is not a frivolous guy. He also does not appear to take kindly to being getting hammered in a divorce case, which is exactly what appears to have happened. Did U.S. Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackburn, when the divorce case commenced, know what was going to happen to her soon-to-be ex husband?
If your tax dollars help fund federal courts--and they almost certainly do, regardless of where you live--that question should be worth pondering.
We have written before about the hunting-club problem in Alabama courts. It actually involves two federal lawsuits. In the first, Blackburn was a plaintiff, representing himself against certain judge/lawyer defendants. In the second, Blackburn served as an attorney, representing others who claim to have been the victims of corruption in Alabama divorce courts.
For now, we will focus on the first lawsuit, but we soon will be writing extensively about the second. It speaks volumes about the ugly culture in Alabama's legal community--and at Cumberland School of Law, where Joe Blackburn has been threatened with loss of his job for bringing the hunting-club allegations to light.
Who were the key players in the RICO enterprise? Joe Blackburn names them in the first lawsuit as former Alabama state-court judge John C. Calhoun and "known attorney defendants" Charles Gorham, George Richard Fernambucq, and L. Stephen Wright.
Fernambucq, of the Birmingham firm Boyd Fernambucq & Dunn, represented Joe Blackburn in the divorce case. Wright, of the Birmingham firm Najjar Denaburg, represented Sharon Blackburn. Calhoun presided over the case. And Gorham, of the Birmingham firm Gorham & Cason, is identified as a key organizer of the hunting club.
Blackburn's lawsuit raises perhaps the dirtiest secret in the legal profession--one that I have personally witnessed over and over. Blackburn alleges that his own lawyer, Fernambucq, worked against him--at the behest of the judge and opposing counsel. This might be shocking stuff to regular citizens, but it's not to me. After 10-plus years of battling legal corruption, Schnauzer Rule No. 1 is this: "Your worst enemy in any legal case could very well be your own lawyer, especially if a corrupt judge is involved." A lawyer's duty to a rogue judge will take precedence over his duty to you every time.
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