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... I think your perspective is rather badly turned into word games, in a way that is only persuasive to lawyers.
((I also have some big rants about the extreme rarity of sanctions against prosecutors, even in view of high-profile and serious misconduct, but they're often not operating under civil procedures and I expect you have bigger complaints given your vocation.))
As a metaphor, have you ever heard of the Subway Tuna lawsuit? If not, the complaint is here. It's an absolutely fascinating read, filled with bombshell allegations where genetic testing revealed 'tuna' products containing not only no tuna but not even fish...
And which were fake. At best, the plaintiffs depended on a claim of this genetic testing's relevance for this sort of food authentication from some citation laundering out of context; more likely, they had to actively shop (as the New York Times did) to find a lab willing to take their money for a test that they'd have to disclaim was meaningless. And the plaintiffs (or at least their lawyers, did the whole monty of other trumpy behaviors, such that the eventual order about sanctions read:
Of course, there's a punchline:
By any reasonable colloquial (or normal human) use of the terms, they absolutely did. I'll be exceptionally charitable, and perhaps rather than trying to shakedown or embarrass a sandwich shop with false claims, Amin was merely incredibly go-focused and managed to find an unscrupulous lab on the very first try. When this returned chicken in most samples (for those in the audience, American tuna salad is made using mayonnaise, which in turn is made using chicken egg) in a substance that was not chicken to the naked eye, they perhaps genuinely believed Subway somehow had developed secret technology. The inappropriateness of DNA barcoding as a technique in many conditions is not hugely obvious; Derek Lowe rather famously let his preconceptions hit an industry he already (if reasonably) didn't like.
But two years in, faced with masses of documentation consistent with tuna sourcing, the plaintiffs had nothing but a single set of genetic tests. They did not investigate; academic discussion of the inappropriateness of DNA barcoding for canned or vacuum-packed pre-cooked tuna was well-established as early as 2015. They found (laundered) citations offering what they wanted to believe, and fought as hard as possible to obfuscate that.
There's some meaningful difference there, to judges and lawyers. To anyone else, it looks like the plaintiffs just carefully split off the people making hilariously false claims from the people making the lawsuit, despite clear connection in focus and interest.
I don't know what actually happened for TWA800. The official story is far more reasonable than the conspiracy theory, but I'd have said the same for Ted Stevens, Waco, etc. Shootdowns have happened, although the timeline
But I can tell you that this complaint stinks in the same way.
The complaint depends heavily -- in many ways, near-entirely -- on claims made by Thomas Stalcup of private conversations or interpretations of long-public knowledge in implausible ways. Nearly a page (76-82) consists of unnamed persons who supposedly encountered missiles after TWA 800 (and, perhaps more importantly, after the missile theory had been publicized). The named sources are often paraphrased aggressively, in exactly the sort of ways that would be done if attempting to mislead (most critically, "personally aware of at least a dozen Aegis missile tests off the East Coast of the United States around this same overall time period" would be absolutely critical evidence if it meant a dozen live tests near New York City in early 1996, and absolutely meaningless if it was the well-disclosed Wallops Island, VA testing center that the public knew about in September 1996).
Edit: to be clear, this is not a defense of the standard theory for twa800, or of your electionisy lawyers. And I do recognize there are reasons these symptoms are this way. But it looks a lot less like clear duty of candor to the court, or even focus on the dignity of the court; given your two examples, it seems more a matter of the dignity of the judge.
I'm not sure what your criticism is or what word games I'm playing. My post was addressing what is admittedly a very low bar to clear, namely how to present allegations of a conspiracy competently. I'm not denying that lawyers lie or conduct sloppy investigations or do some expert-shopping, but all that is collateral to whether or not the allegations are described coherently and with sufficient detail. Even knowing that the Subway Tuna lawyers shopped around and misrepresented their DNA findings, that doesn't change the fact that their theory was coherent and had enough details. The falsification of my argument would be if the Subway Tuna lawsuit didn't bother with any testing at all and instead filed an affidavit from some rando who said "I have come to believe that Subway Tuna is not in fact tuna" without explaining foundation.
I don't think you're playing word games, so much as you're getting played by word games.
At the trivial level, I think the Krick complaint has a pretty sizable amount of what O'Rouke's final order on sanctions on calls out as :
There's some sunlight between it and O'Rouke, but not much. Quite a lot of the 'specific' citations have nothing to do with the actual legal theory, and even some of the ones you highlight are just pulling statements by randos out of their original context, or taking routine actions as evidence of a dire conspiracy. And while you emphasize affidavits with a lot of padding, there's a number of specific and actual (though false!) claims with connections to violations of law (that the plaintiffs misunderstood or had no standing to challenge).
My deeper objection is that this distinction is pretty uncompelling to normal people, and in ways that undermine your point. The precise legal theory and the relevance of specific claims to it is interesting, and it does genuinely matter when someone submits unmoored claims or specious legal theories to the court, and hurt when people aim pants-on-head-crazy ones at you. There's reason that courts are more likely to assign sanctions for 11(b)2 than 11(b)3 for reason, and it's not just that judges can evaluate those questions more easily and review them more reliably, or even that lawyers can.
But it would be kinda nice to know that the lawyers in question had checked if a Pakistani Airlines pilot had actually seen a missile anywhere near an SM-2 (or even what his or her name was) or what if any conclusion the FBI had pronounced after investigation, or what the relevance of PCR for canned tuna would be, or if Wisconsin drop boxes were operated in violation of state law, in addition to whether this mattered for the underlying question of law and whether they are sufficiently specific. That's the more conventional read of "the attorney has made reasonable efforts to investigate it themselves to make sure they're not just re-shoveling whatever bullshit their client dropped on their lap". This is part of Rule 11 (b3, to be precise), and it's possible to get sanctioned for failing this test, but it's extraordinarily uncommon and the standard is extremely forgiving. (see discussion here under "Reasonable Inquiry").
There are reasons this stance is so forgiving, and I can be persuaded that fair and open access to the courts is worth the costs of spurious lawsuits. But if your selected example of one includes a full pepe silvia of questionable newspaper clippings and depends heavily on a couple bullet points that are little more than "Trust This Rando Pro Se Litigant, he totally has retired navy and FBI people dropping hot tips, bro," it runs into problems. Or where the complaint, across three amendments, launders claims because the PhD biologist must have missed the people citing him.
You're probably even right in the sense that the people with their names on the complaint are totally hands-clear. Krick doesn't have Stalcup on the complaint or submitting an affidavit; Amin merely hired rather than submitted as an honest expert witness Dr. Barber. But it's not like the behavior in O'Rouke was better where it followed that trick: the initial complaint launders several specific factual complaints originating from Johnson v. Benson in Detroit. But we recognize that the plaintiffs were on notice for O'Rouke when we seldom do the same for people with comparably bad factual allegations.
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