Court Strike : Call for State Takeover of Santa Clara County Courts

 
Has Santa Clara County reached a tipping point on court dysfunction and corruption ?

Litigants who are forced to wait in long lines and  lawyers who claim court mismanamgent has caused missed filings that could harm their  clients ,  or  substiantially violate due process for  a class of county citizens , are calling for drastic measures and state intervention.  

​Litigants are not mad at the court clerks who are striking, they are furious at the court administrators including David Yamasaki, for not doing their job. 

One woman waiting in line for over two hours at Park Ave. , because  the Sunnyvale court was closed, was outraged , " what the hell they couldn't even build the new courthouse with American made products , they had to import Italian marble, and now can't pay the clerks a decent wage, and I have to wait in line and lose time from my job as well " .

​Calls for administrators  to be fired and the state to intervene are secretly coming from the legal community too. One lawyer , who wished to provide comment off the record, told reporters that the county recently added a COO , who was formerly a Sixth District Court of Appeal Judge. Those who know Judge Miguel Marquez, know he will not improve Santa Clara County Courts because he came from one of the most dysfunctional appeals courts in the state..

​" That is  the joke. The sixth district is nothing more than a rubber stamping body , rubber stamping the county's corruption" . An appeals clerk commented while  admitting  to having as much as a two year backlog in just preparing appeals for the court to hear..

​A research clerk from the sixth district commented that the judges at the sixth district were some of the laziest and most unspectacular in the state., stating , " these guys rubber stamp the orders of their good  old buddies as a matter of routine , then head out to drink , play golf and try to figure out how to abuse their expense accounts.

​" There is no research going on , they laugh and just uphold the trial  courts. They also work really hard to dismiss cases involving a pro pers and they cloak their incompetence by non publishing decisions so  the legal community will not know how truly incompetent they are .".

​Many in and out of the legal community are demanding state or Department of Justice intervention.

Ironically, as pressure mounts in Santa Clara County , pressure is also on the state's judicial watchdog, where state legislature will vote on August 10, 2016,  for  an audit of CJP, where it is widely known CJP has ignored complaints against Santa Clara county judges for decades .