Specifically, "slapping him down" took this form:
The cover-up aimed to keep concealed from creditors at least $673,657 in just one of the
unmanageable 3,907 open cases as of April 2, 2004, according to PACER15, brought by the same
trustee, George Reiber, before Judge Ninfo. To that end, Judge Sotomayor condoned her
Appointee‟s denial of, and denied me herself, every single document that I ever requested to defend
my claim from the motion to disallow it and evidentiary hearing concocted by the DeLanos and
J. Ninfo.16 That constituted a blatant denial of the right to discovery under FRBkrP 7026 and 7034
and FRCivP 26 and 34. By so doing, she showed contempt for the most important constitutional
guarantee that any judge, let alone a Supreme Court justice, must safeguard: due process of law.
I'm not a lawyer, but this strikes me as very serious. So do tell us, if you're qualified to do so, whether in your legal opinion Sotomayor had any legal justification for denying Cordero "every single document" he requested, and whether or not Sotomayor did indeed show contempt for due process of law.
Note that this question is not about whether or not Sotomayor was part of any conspiracy.
Instead, this question is about whether, in her dealings with Cordero, Sotomayor showed that she was incompetent, at best, and corrupt, at worst.
Sotomayor was neither incompetent nor corrupt, and she acted according to the due process of law.
I am, like you, not a lawyer, but I can read legalese and I've looked at the documents, and I believe that I can explain it all to you in plain English. Let me present to you a little legal drama that I call: "Pro Se;
or, The Madness Of Dr Cordero: A Tragicomedy In Five Acts". The part directly relevant to your questions is Act IV, but the rest of it provides context and sheds light on Dr Cordero and his accusations.
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Act I: The Molehill
Cordero had some property stored with the Premier storage company. This company defaulted on their loans to the M&T Bank, and went into receivership.
Cordero, fearing that his property might have been sold off in the bankruptcy proceedings, contacted M&T, where he spoke to DeLano, an employee of that bank. DeLano, acting in his capacity as an employee of M&T, told him that he thought that Cordero's property had been stored in the Jefferson-Henrietta Warehouse and that M&T had sold the property to some reputable storage company, though he couldn't remember which one.
In fact Cordero's property was in the Avon Warehouse, and M&T had never even taken possession of it, much less sold it. This misinformation undoubtedly made it harder for Cordero to track his missing property, and DeLano admitted as much during ...
Act II: Cordero's Revenge
In unrelated proceedings, DeLano and his wife subsequently filed for personal bankruptcy.
At this point Cordero popped up claiming that he was a creditor of the DeLanos on the grounds that DeLano's error had prevented Cordero from tracking down his property and so led to the loss and/or damage of his property (this isn't quite clear, but it doesn't seem to affect the legal issues), and so DeLano owed him. Cordero's claim was not backed by any court order saying that DeLano was so responsible or owed him any money --- he just turned up at the bankruptcy proceedings hoping that the judge would decide that this was so.
We may note that even if
M&T owed Cordero any compensation, DeLano didn't, since his mistake was made in his capacity as an employee of the bank --- he simply happened to be the guy that Cordero got on the phone. And as M&T never had possession of Cordero's property, and so were not legally responsible for loss or damage to it, it's far from clear that they owe him any compensation either.
For these and other reasons the judge decided, rightly, that Cordero was not a creditor of DeLano. The decision of the court is
here: it contains many interesting details which I haven't had time to go into in this brief summary, all of which tend to prove that Cordero's a flaming idiot.
Act III: The Plot Thickens
Cordero further alleged that the DeLanos had stashed away a nest-egg for themselves undisclosed to the bankruptcy court, which would of course be fraud, and demanded that the judge should make the DeLanos turn over documents to him (Cordero) by which he expected to prove this.
But since Cordero was not a creditor of the DeLanos in the first place, he had absolutely
no legal standing --- which is legalese for "it's none of his business". As someone with no
legal interest in the case, he can no more get the judge to order the DeLanos to turn over these documents any more than I can get a judge to order
you to turn over
your private documents to
me --- whatever I may suspect you of, and no matter how eager I am to stick my nose into your affairs.
Which is what the judge said.
Cordero then decided that the judge (Judge Ninfo) who brushed him off in this manner must be a conspirator in the DeLanos' (supposed) bankruptcy fraud scheme, and appealed (both in the legal and non-legal sense) to various judges, the FBI, the Attorney General, the Department of Justice, and so forth. Every time any of these further people brushed him off, he added their names to the list of conspirators, which is now so long that if and when they all get a share of the supposed DeLano loot, their average take will be a dollar and change.
The first judge that Cordero asked to review Ninfo's decision was Judge Larimer: you can read his opinion
here. It was scathingly unfavorable to Cordero. Obviously this did not satisfy Cordero, so he took it to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, on which Sotomayor sat.
Act IV: Enter Sotomayor
So this is where Sotomayor comes into it. You can read Cordero's appeal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals
here if you have any lingering doubts that the man is nuts in the head. The court of appeals dismissed his appeal on the grounds that the point was
moot, which is legalese for "there's nothing we can do about it now".
This needs some explanation. Recall, first of all, what an court of appeals does. It hears appeals. It is not their job --- it is not within their power as a court of appeals --- to don their crime-fighting capes and investigate Cordero's accusations of fraud on the part of the DeLanos or Judge Ninfo or anybody else. When Cordero appealed the decision in
In re DeLano & DeLano, the utmost they could do as a court of appeals was to decide that Judge Ninfo was wrong on some point of law, and that the decision should have been different.
But if you remember Act II of this enthralling drama, the entire point at issue in
In re DeLano & DeLano was whether Cordero was a creditor. So absolutely the nicest thing that it was in the power of the court of appeals to do for Cordero is to declare that yes, he
was a creditor in the DeLano bankruptcy.
And this is why his appeal is moot --- because the key word there is "
was". They could only have decided that he
was a creditor, or rather that he
should have been a creditor, but they can't decide that he
is a creditor. The DeLanos were declared bankrupt, and their assets at that time were divided between the people whom the court identified as creditors. The court of appeals
can't give Cordero a second bite at that cherry,
even if he deserved one, because the entire cherry has already been gobbled up by other people. So his appeal is moot.
This is the law in such cases, as the court showed by citing the precedents of
In re Metromedia Fiber Network, Inc and
In re Chateaugay Corp. In declaring Cordero's appeal moot, they did nothing but uphold the law as it stands, which is their job. And they did not investigate his conspiracy theory, because that isn't their job and they have no powers to do so. You can read their dismissal of the appeal
here, on page 6.
You ask specifically "whether [...] Sotomayor had any legal justification for denying Cordero "every single document" he requested". The answer, clearly, is yes she did, and she would have had
no legal justification for
granting his request. All an court of appeals can do is decide whether the decision being appealed was wrong in law, and as this particular appeal was moot they couldn't even do that. They have no power to decide, nor to help Cordero find out, whether his accusations of fraud against the DeLanos are justified. There is no legal theory by which the Second Circuit of Court of Appeals has the power to make the DeLanos turn over the much-coveted documents to Cordero even if they thought that this would be a jolly good idea: it's simply not within the scope of what a court of appeals can do.
Act V: Fame At Last
Cordero and his bizarre grievance would have languished forever in well-deserved obscurity --- but, of course, for the fact that President Obama nominated Judge Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Cordero then turned his full fury on Sotomayor, who, up until that point, had merited only one mention in his interminable list of people who he thinks are involved in the Great Big Bankruptcy Fraud. (See
here: pages 271-290 contain the list of people who Cordero thinks merit investigation.)
A gaggle of right-wing nutters, who hate Sotomayor simply because she's Obama's nominee, then started taking Cordero's accusations of conspiracy and fraud seriously as a means to smear Sotomayor, blithely ignoring the facts that:
(a) Cordero has also named a zillion other people as conspirators, including plenty of conservatives such as Bush's Attorney General Gonzales and former Chief Justice Rehnquist.
(b) Cordero is obviously stark raving mad.
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I hope that this makes the legal situation clear to you. Do you have any questions?
