lettertolegalservicescommissioner20090929 (devriesdraft)

8/14/2019 LetterToLegalServicesCommissioner20090929 (devriesdraft)

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H J AMES J OHNSONHUMAN RIGHTS § CIVIL RIGHTS § CORRUPTION § MEDIA

DEFAMATION § PROFESSIONAL NEGL IGENCE LAW1 S T F L O O R 1 4 1 O S B O R N E S T R E E T S O U T H YA R R A V I C T OR I A 3 1 4 1

T EL EP H O N E : +6 13 92 79 39 32 FA CS I MI L E: + 61 3 9 27 9 3 95 5

Tuesday 29 September 2009 *** IMPORTANT COMMUNICATION

Ms Victoria MarlesLegal Services Comissioner Legal Services Commissioner Level 9, 330 Collins StreetMelbourne Victoria 3000

Attention: Ms Penny Antonov

By Facsimile: 9679 8101 (... pages)

Dear Ms Antonov

COMPLAINTS AGAINST AUSTRALIAN LEGAL PRACTITIONER -

AUSSIES IN WONDERLAND: WITCH HUNT, WATERGATE, WATERLOO - VICTORIAN SUPREME COURTPROCEEDINGS 9665 OF 2007, 9263 AND 10222 OF 2008 AND 3731 AND 3766 OF 2009

1. I refer to the fourteen letters that I received from the Legal Services Commissioner's Office last Wednesday

23 September 2009. Thirteen of these letters (mostly dated 11 September, but some dated 14 September)

listed you as the relevant contact officer.

2. I also refer to my letter of 24 September 2009 in partial response to three of those letters.

3. I also refer to my letter of # expressing my concerns at the lack of integrity, competence and independence

of your organisation, expressing my suspicion as to the lack of genuity of your letters purporting to

investigate my complaints against several Australian legal practitioners, and expressing my criticisms of your

pseudo-bureacratic, lip-serving statements that you do not understand the extensive complaint materials I

have sent to your office, while all the while your letters repeat past misstatements of law from your office that

your office lacks legal responsibility and powers to conduct investigations according to its duty under section

6.3.2 of the Legal Practice Act.

4. I believe that the only way that my complaints about these Australian legal practitioners, and my complaints

about your office (regarding the Legal Services Board and the Legal Services Comissioner as being one

and the same government agency with one and the same head officer) is for the Government to appoint an

Independent Corruption and Misconduct Commission .

5. To assist a proper lawful investigation of my complaints, and without derrogating from the information

contained in the extensive complaint materials I have already supplied to your office, the following is a brief

overview of some of the more frightening misconduct by one of these Australian legal professionals, Mr

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Graeme Devries of the Victorian Bar, instructed by two other Australian legal practitioners, James Turnbull

and Peter Berry of the family law firm 'Berry Family Law'.

6. #

7. I trust that the investigators in your office should have sufficient mental capacity, and sufficient literacy, to

understand the extensive complaint materials that I provided to your office previously. These include my

substantial affidavit of 8 July 2008 and exhibts that describe some of the pre-trial misconduct of Devries and

his instructors. This included, contrary to professional conduct rules, actioning the plaintiff's claims (eg by

registering and taking caveats, by seeking interlocutory orders and reliefs that the plaintiff was not entitled to

seek or obtain etc) in circumstances where it is inconceivable that they can claim to have satiisfied

professional conduct rules requiring them to first form a reasonable opinion that she had a worthwhile claim.

8. ##

9. To help you to appreciate the severity of Devries' misconduct (and his instructors misconduct), the following

is an outline of some of his (and their) more outrageous misconduct during the trial itself.

10. On 2 December 2008 Devries (instructed by Turnbull and his employer Berry) turned up for work at the

Supreme Court at Melbourne. Devries had been briefed eight months earlier to represent a plaintiff who

claimed to have been the de facto wife of the defendant from 1998 up until 2007.

11. There was almost nothing by way of evidence in Devries' brief. What was there was incredibly

circumstantial at best. This included a couple of valentine cards dated as ancient as February 1999 and

February 2000. The February 2000 card recorded that the plaintiff was not speaking to the defendant in

February 2000; that their dating relationship, recorded in the 1999 card had ended.

12. None of the evidence in Devries brief had been disclosed to the defendant, due to gross absences of all

normal pre-trial procedures, such as discovery. These absences of normal pre-trial procedures had all been

unlawfully engineered by Devries and his instructors, Turnbull and Berry. The trial date of 2 December 2008

was another of their unlawfully engineered achievements. This was obtained in August 2008 by misleading

the Court's listing master, that the trial would only take 2 days. The defendant, who had 8 months earlier

informed them his estimate of a 3 to 4 week trial, was not given notice of that hearing. Devries and/or his

instructors hid the defendant's estimate from the Court that day. Devries, his instructors, and even the

Court, hid the 2 December 2008 trial date for almost 2 months. It was mid-October 2008 by the time the

defendant obtained from the Court the information of the 2 December 2008 trial date.

13. Included in Devries brief was a secret psychiatric report on the plaintiff. This had been hurriedly prepared in

the context of a custody application issued by the defendant in respect of the plaintiff's three children,

towards whom the defendant had assumed the role of a 'non-live with' dad. Of the plaintiff's three children,

the defendant had since 1999 been the only effective father figure to all three of her children, each of whom

has a different biological father. The plaintiff had at all times alleged that the defendant was the biological

father of her youngest child. And those allegations might be true, though the plaintiff has at all times (since

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the outbreak of litigation hostilities) refused the defendant's attempts to have her substantiate that claim. The

plaintiff also raised her second child to believe that the defendant was his biological father.

14. This secret psychiatric report had been in Devries and his instructors possession since at least September

2008 but had never been disclosed to the defendant. Devries failed to provide a copy to the defendant at

the start of the trial. The Trial Judge failed to order him to do so, despite the gross irregularity of process of

allowing the plaintiff's counsel to use an undisclosed psychiatric report for grossly prejudicial purposes. That

comprises two instances of misconduct by Devries and his instructors. It also counts as two instances of

misconduct by the Trial Judge. Despite the defendant's repeated requests to be given a copy of that secret

psychiatric report during the course of the trial, the defendant was not provided with a copy of the report

until May 2009, well after the Trial Judge had completed the hearing and issued judgements. The defendant

obtained the secret psychiatric report.

15. The defendant's responded to the plaintiff's claims of a 9 year de facto relationship by denying that the two

had ever been a de facto couple and by reporting that the plaintiff was a seasoned fraudster and blackmailer

with a long history of physical, emotional and mental health problems on top of her criminal tendencies.

16. The secret psychiatric report included a preliminary diagnosis that the plaintiff was a seasoned fraudster with

serious emotional and meltal health problems who had confessed to criminal activities such as burglary and

theft (from the defendant) and including physically assaulting her own three children, which the psychiatrist

reported as 'vivid and disturbing'.

17. On 2 December 2008 Devries opened his client's case with an application to have the defendant declared

as mentally unfit to defend himself against Devries own client's claims. The gist of Devries application was

that the defendant was mentally ill for claiming that the plaintiff's claim was fraudulent, and that she was a

seasoned fraudster and blackmailer, a mentally and emotionally ill young woman of criminal behaviour.

18. It was gross professional misconduct (even criminal) for Devries to make this application. It was gross

professional misconduct (even criminal) for Devries to continue to represent the plaintiff. If Devries had

been a man of integrity and proper professional standards, Devries should have:

a. informed the Court that his client had insufficient evidence on which to assert her claims;

b. informed the Court (and the defendant) of the details of the psychiatric diagnosis of the plaintiff,

including her fraudulent and criminal nature;

c. informed his instructors that their financial terms of engagement by the plaintiff, $300,000 plus of

champtery and maintenance with a 25% uplift, were almost certainly legally unenforceable, on

account of the lack of mental capacity of the plaintiff (let alone the almost as certain failure of his

instructors to comply with mandatory fee disclosure rules of practice).

19. Instead:

a. Devies persuaded the Trial Judge to conduct an unlawful examination of the mental health of the

defendant (to which the Trial Judge acquiesced despite knowing full well, and even stating on the

Court record, that this was an unlawful process);

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b. Devries presented a misleading and selective description of the psychiatrist's report, kept secret from

the defendant, ellucidating those passages where the psychiatrist had misdiagnosed the defendant

as suffering a narcistic personality disorder

c. #

d. #

20.

Kind regards

JAMES JOHNSON

cc: Victorian Attorney-General Rob Hulls

cc: Hon Premier of Victoria, Mr John Brumby

cc: Mr Colin Neave AM, Chairman, and all other Board Members (including Ms Marles), Legal Services Board

cc: Mr George Brouwer, Victorian State Ombudsman's

cc: Media Colleagues

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lettertolegalservicescommissioner20090929 (devriesdraft)

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