Paper: Coast Guard admin courts stacked

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/06/24/paper_coast_guard_admin_courts_stacked/?rss_id=Boston.com+%2F+News+%2F+Nation


The Associated Press
Paper: Coast Guard admin courts stacked

June 24, 2007

BALTIMORE --Decisions by judges in the Coast Guard's administrative court system almost always favor the agency over civilian mariners, according to a newspaper's review of court records and other documents.

One former judge testified that judges were pressured to side with the Coast Guard, The Sun of Baltimore reported Sunday.

The agency's administrative court system handles charges against tugboat captains, engineers, charter fishermen and others who need licenses or other documents from the Coast Guard to work. The harshest penalty in the system is revocation of those credentials.

Mariners have won just 14 cases out of more than 6,300 charges filed by Coast Guard investigators since 1999, when the agency restructured its judicial system to broaden defendant's rights, the paper said it found through a computer analysis of court records.

In a sworn statement, Judge Jeffie J. Massey has testified that Chief Judge Joseph N. Ingolia told her to always rule in the Coast Guard's favor, and she said she came under intense pressure when she did not, the newspaper said.

more...

pirates. Film at 11.

boat either. I do, however, have 3 nephews who are in the Coast Guard.

The USCG is the gov't agency that issues thee necessary documents and licenses, without which that person could NOT work aboard ship. That's the power to throw a person out of the entire industry, with a ripple out to other related trades. That's essentially, the power to destroy that person. But the USCG regards it as an "administrative matter", and operate under such rules as THEY deem appropriate.

In the years after WW2, the USCG "screened" many thousands of seafarers off the ships, and OUT of the industry, for so-called "security reasons". Affiliation or association with the Communist Party was the ostensible reason, but almost ANY "liberal" idea was grounds for suspicion. And there was NO "due process", since it was regarded as an "administrative matter". Leaders of right-wing unions fed LISTS of union dissidents to the USCG, where they were duly "screened" out of the industry (and out of the union). Many years later, the courts ruled that "due process" rules were necessary for such proceedings. The Coast Guard huffily discontinued the practice altogether. But by that time, Americans seafarers were already "housebroken" and docile.

pnorman

you.
No, it was a sarcasm thing.

Sorry you took it that way.

The Coast Guard Administrative court is not a Court authorized to try Admiralty Cases. In this country, any US Federal Court is empowered to hear cases involving Admiralty issue.

I was a mariner for 29 years, and I know a few of the people mentioned in the article. USCG oversight of mariners was at one time competent and fair, but it has come to the point where the typical marine inspector doesn't have a clue as to what they're doing. It's just one more embarrassment on top of the Deepwater fiasco.

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In April 2004, during a job interview, she said, Ingolia referred twice to the Coast Guard's "big happy family" and that the Coast Guard commandant, the agency's top official, told her that "we take care of our own." She recalled Ingolia talking on the telephone with another administrative law judge, then hanging up and saying, "He calls me from time to time and we talk about his cases."

She dismissed the comments as meaningless pleasantries but says they made her uncomfortable. Because administrative law judges are employed by one of the parties that appear before them in court, they are particularly sensitive about chumminess with the agency they work for, or any other perceived bias. Other agencies where she worked frowned on judges discussing open cases with anyone, much less someone in a position of influence and authority.

"I certainly never had a chief judge tell me anything like that before," she said of the "family" references.

Within eight months, Massey's simple concern grew into a firm belief that the Coast Guard system was not just different but rigged against the mariners.

On Dec. 7, 2004, Judge Walter J. Brudzinski, an ALJ for the Coast Guard in New York, came to New Orleans to hear a case concerning a marine engineer named Christopher Dresser, whose charge of failing a marijuana test had been plodding through the Coast Guard system since 1997. (Dresser's brother, Michael, is a staff reporter for The Sun but played no role in the newspaper's investigation.)

Massey attended the hearing as a spectator, and after listening to testimony from a scientist and from Dresser's mother, she and Brudzinski went to lunch. According to Massey's statement, Brudzinski expressed frustration that the evidence made him inclined to rule in Dresser's favor, but added: "If I ruled that way, the chief judge would have my job."

"He was not saying this in a kidding way," Massey said.

Brudzinski never directly said that Ingolia had told him how to rule, Massey said, "But the gist of the conversation was, in my professional opinion, that there had been conversations and the Chief Judge had indicated to him how the case needed to come out."

Massey left lunch convinced that the outcome of the case had been predetermined, and two days later began taking notes on her encounters with Ingolia and his staff. She said later in an affidavit, "The whole goal of the day was simply to go through the motions of holding a hearing. The hearing didn't make any difference. There was never an issue of the outcome of the case. Mr. Dresser was going to lose and the Coast Guard was going to win."

On June 14, 2005, Brudzinski ruled for the Coast Guard. He declined to discuss the case or Massey's statements with The Sun.
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pnorman