WorldNetDaily staff writer Bob Unruh published an article today titled ‘Green light’ to see Obama’s Hawaii files.
According to Taitz (and I guess she would know), Obama’s attorney sent a copy of the President’s long-form birth certificate to Judge Malihi and to Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp. However, as with many things in the past, Orly believes that this gives her the right to look at the original:
That act, Taitz explained, effectively gave the court a copy of the White House documentation, and under ordinary rules of evidence the opposing side is supposed to have access to the original to verify the authenticity of the purported copy.
“They submitted a copy and said this is a copy of the original birth certificate. Now the other party has a right to examine the original,” she said.
I am not a lawyer so I can’t say for sure whether there is any validity to this claim insofar as the original stamped and sealed certified copy that was shown to the Press last April. My feeling is that it does not. Evidence gathering in the Georgia administrative courts seems to be a much more informal process than in Superior Court. The administrative court just collects information to aid in recommendations. Lots of things were admitted into the record of Farrar v. Obama that violate “ordinary rules of evidence.” However, Taitz isn’t stopping at the certified copy; she wants the whole enchilada, a subpoena to Hawaii for the original hospital form, something which the State of Hawaii has already said it was illegal for her to have.
Orly’s “green light” came from Judge Malihi who said, “feel free to petition the Superior Court, if you so choose.” That’s not a green light so much as it is an unmarked intersection. The red light is down the street at Superior Court.
WorldNetDaily published this and a series of other articles that encourage Orly Taitz’s delusions, instead of urging her to get the help she needs.
While we’re on this article, I wanted to point out one other paragraph by Unruh:
Top constitutional expert Herb Titus contends that a “natural-born citizen” is born of parents who are citizens. That argument also is supported by a 19th-century U.S. Supreme Court decision, Minor vs. Happersett in 1875. The case includes one of very few references in the nation’s archives that addresses the definition of “natural-born citizen.”
Herb Titus is not a “top constitutional expert,” but that’s not what I wanted to point out. Note that Unruh says “argument is also supported by.” He says that because to my knowledge Titus himself didn’t cite Minor (which is reasonable because Minor doesn’t further his argument and Titus reasonably knows that). Titus believes that “natural-born citizen” is defined not by the courts said but by natural law, and that derives from his reading of the Bible.
Orly is famously unreliable in her characterization of events. If Jablonski gave a record of Obama’s birth to the SoS, I seriously doubt that it was a copy of the LFBC. That would just be playing into the birfer meme that the short form is not a real birth certificate, which, of course, it is.
“. . . and that derives from his reading of the Bible.”
Is that the Jefferson Bible (The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth)?
So, the judge said to Orly “Feel free to petition” and she petitioned. i wonder what would happen if he said, “Go ahead, knock yourself out”?
No, he uses portions of the Hebrew scriptures for his argument.
She probably has access to plenty of Propofol.
I agree that Taitz is an unreliable witness, but she would have seen a copy of whatever Jablonski submitted to the court and I don’t think she would have ever called the COLB a copy of the original.
One gets the impression (and it can’t be true) that Jablonski is feeling his way around and is not the sharpest knife in the anti-birther drawer. In any case the long form is a certified copy and it’s as good as the other. What with the hospital name and the doctor on it, perhaps he thought the judge might be more impressed.
Let me see if I have this correct. Yesterday the birthers were alleging that the judge would grant their case by default because the other side did not present evidence. Today Orly is claiming that Jablonski actually did submit evidence, Obama’s birth certificate.
Well, if the latter is true, that is good. It has the official seal on it and it is prima facie evidence of birth in Hawaii. But, we do not know whether it was the long form birth certificate or the short form birth certificate, or both.
In either case Orly’s claim that she has the right to go to Hawaii and see the original in the records is absurd. An administrative law court cannot order that. I don’t even think that a Georgia district court or appeals court could order it. Perhaps a federal court could.
In her her January 30, 2012 petition to Judge Malihi, Taitz wrote:
My understanding is that one has a right to inspect an “original document” when a copy is introduced as an exhibit in lieu of said original document in a deposition or at a hearing. Copies are also handed out to all the parties of any document introduced. That’s it.
If someone wants to introduce a passport, they’re obviously not going to want to leave the original to be placed in the case file. They’re going to make copies of the signature page, enter a copy as an exhibit, and allow the parties to check the passport to make sure the copies are an accurate representation. That’s the intent of the rule.
However, the rule doesn’t seem to apply to something that was never in the hearing or deposition room. At best maybe she might have a right to inspect the PDF file saved to a CD-ROM, which I’m sure she’s already got.
As hypothetical, suppose someone introduces a printout of the following image (a contemporary print of the Declaration of Independence) at a Georgia administrative hearing pre-trial deposition:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/rbc/rbc0001/2004/2004pe76546/001v.jpg
Several copies are printed out and/or photocopied, one is introduced as an exhibit, and the others are distributed to the parties. This sounds a lot like what happened at the hearing, where copies of an original were issued under FOIA, and the parties would be allowed to inspect the first-generation copy (for these purposes the “original”) brought into the hearing room.
So according to Orly-Think, in my hypothetical case of the Declaration of Independence, one of the parties should be able to subpoena the original from the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division because the parties have a right to compare it to the absolute original. I suppose one could introduce a photo of an exhibit at the Smithsonian, issue copies at a deposition, and sudden there exists a right to subpoena a museum piece to compare them to the photocopies. I think I know where this is going. Just find any rule, apply some Orly-Think to it, and suddenly there exists a right to get some original document that may or may not be protected by privacy laws.
IAAL (but not your lawyer) and Orly, as usual, doesn’t have the slightest clue what she’s talking about. If Jablonski did send the ALJ a copy of the birth certificate, I’m guessing it was a certified copy of one of the forms the President has kicking around (long or short, doesn’t matter). If they submitted a certified copy from the State of Hawaii, that’s pretty much the end of the story (assuming the Georgia rules of evidence are at least similar to the Federal). It’s a self authenticating document. While for most evidence, you have to establish a basis for why it can be entered, provide chain of custody, establish a foundation for having it entered, determining reliability, etc., you get a short cut for government documents. You stand up and say, I have a certified document issued by the state. In actual court, the opposing counsel does get the opportunity to look at it, but that’s it. You don’t get to say, “well, I want to see the source document it’s based on.” If you are going to object to it, you had better have something real to back up why it shouldn’t be entered (you know, actual proof that it didn’t come from the state, evidence that it was altered, etc.). We’ve been though all this a thousand times. Orly does not get any special right to go poking her nose about anywhere. It’s the same thing like her claim that getting sanctioned entitles her to discovery. It has no basis in the law.
I discussed her letter rogatory elsewhere…it was pretty much the ALJ saying “knock yourself out.” Even if the court does issue the letters rogatory, it doesn’t get her access to the document. All it gets her is a letter from the Georgia court asking the Hawaiian courts to issue a subpoena. Doesn’t mean the Hawaiian court will issue it, and even if the Hawaiian court did, it just means the State files another motion to quash, and the subpoena is killed for the exact same reasons every single one in the past has been.
I say the same thing I did before the long-form birth certificate was released. Even if it was released, Orly wouldn’t be satisfied with it. The actual original won’t change her mind anyway.
That’s what Orly has been asking for in almost every case she’s been handling since the LFBC came out..
I’ve been on jury duty several times, and saw photocopies of police or accident reports introduced as evidence. They weren’t necessarily self-authenticating, but the officers who authored the reports were brought into court and testified that they were accurate and complete copies of what they authored. There is NO WAY that any attorney in those cases would have had the chutzpah to request from the judge that he issue an order to compel the police to pull the absolute original report from the file and bring it into open court.
I’m guessing it was a print out from the Internet. If, as you guess, it was a real physical certified copy, then I agree that it’s Game Over for Orly’s case. Welden, Swensson and Powell’s cases were over before they started.
The way this thing is being played (whether true or not), Jablonski appears as the only character and the Georgia Democratic Party as his real client. In that scenario Jablonski doesn’t have any more documentation than I do. Whether the scenario is true or just how it is supposed to look, Jablonski wouldn’t submit a certified copy.
The underlying issue here is we are not in court. It’s an administrative hearing, and as we saw with the insanity that went on during the hearing, the rules of evidence are much looser. The ALJ’s role is weigh the two sides and see what is more likely the truth than the other. While a certified copy would be a slam dunk, and a photo copy probably wouldn’t get admitted without some rather lenghty testimony to establish its foundation in a trial, we’re fudging things here, and a photocopy will probably make due. Even with a photocopy, the ALJ is looking that no one has provided the slightest bit of evidence that the President was born anywhere else. No one even tried. And two of the birther attorneys even conceeded that President was born in the US, and one entered a copy of the birth certificate into the evidence. So you have everything pointing to a US birth, and nothing (short of Orly’s mad ranting) pointing to birth anywhere else.
Again, a certified copy would be ideal. There would be no way around it. But, absent that, a photocopy should pass for a hearing of this nature (especially since there is no evidence to counter it).
And even a photocopy doesn’t get Orly the right to see the original (although it could get the state to confirm that it is a copy…Orly mistakenly raised that rule in a hearing in Hawaii some time ago).
I discovered yet more craziness from Orly. She moved for a default judgment against Secretary of State Brian Kemp and the Democratic Party of Georgia because of their failure to respond.
Judge Malihi denied her motion, explaining that they weren’t parties to the suit.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/79683398/2012-01-04-ORDER-Denying-Farrar-s-Motion-for-Default
The certified transcript of the hearing in Farrar v Obama is up on Scribd:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/79854011/Georgia-Farrar-et-al-v-Obama-Certified-Transcript-1-26-12-Hearing-tfb
Oh, and I thought I should add my two bits on Herb Titus. While Titus is by far the closest thing the birthers have to a genuine legal scholar (Harvard JD, well published, was a professor), since about 1980, he has been anything but main stream (and by not main stream, I mean off his rocker). His legal theories are not generally accepted as anything more than fringe, his teaching experience is limited to the likes of Oral Roberts University School of Law/Regent, and he is far more an advocate than a scholar. Just to get a taste of his theories the titles of a few of his articles (most of which are published in the Regent’s law journal or the Journal of Christian Jurispurdence):
God’s Revelation: Foundation for the Common Law
Bible and American Law
Response – More Robust View of the Bible
God, Evolution, Legal Education and Law
Religious Freedom: The War Between Two Faiths
Defining Marriage and the Family
Not exactly what I would call the musings of a “Constitutional scholar.” What he is doing is political advocacy, not scholarship.
Orly’s contention is preposterous, but then what else is new? Further overlooked by all these so called ‘Constitutionalists’ is their apparent ignorance of the Full Faith and Credit clause found at Article IV, Section 1 of the U. S. Constitution, which states, “Full faith and credit shall be given in each State to the public acts, records and judicial proceedings of every other state.” A copy of the President’s birth certificate showing his birth in Hawaii, certified by that state as to it’s authenticity certainly falls under this category.
Yesterday I got a few birth certificates for my daughter from the branch office of the Orange County California Register Recorders Office. Steps were: 1 Use their computer to input my name and address, my relationship to my daughter, and the number of copies requested. 2. Wait about five minutes in line. 3. Go to the clerk, show ID, driver’s license in wallet. 4. Confirm the number of copies wanted. 5. Put the cost on my credit card. 6. Clerk presses print on her computer. 7. Clerk takes out the forms and stamps them with a date, puts them in a vise and impresses the seal. 7. Clerk gives me the copies.
The birth certificates are absolutely valid. They have the date of birth, the name and the name of her parents. They even state who the person who gave the information is, and who the delivery doctor was. And they have a sentence along the bottom that states that they are prima facia evidence of the fact stated in the certificate.
If I take them into court they prove those facts. Merely by existing.
However, other than the fact of birth, all that Obama needs to prove citizenship, under California law, the gender and the parentage of the child may legally be what is stated, but the actuality may be different. Under CA law, a person born to one gender who changes gender can get a new b/c with the new gender, also, more common, when a child is adopted, the adoptive parents will obtain a new b/c with their names on it.
Yeah, definitely a NUT. I’d call it more fundamentalist theocratic advocacy than political advocacy, though…
Which by definition, would put his positions in direct conflict with everything the Constitution actually stands for…
You could order copies from the California Department of Public Health. If you do so, you’ll probably get a document with the state file number in addition to the local file number.
http://www.cdph.ca.gov/certlic/birthdeathmar/Pages/CertifiedCopiesofBirthDeathRecords.aspx
It is a pain to some degree since they have no public counter, and requests for authorized copies via mail in California require a notarized statement, which costs extra. I ordered a few this way. They take longer than most counties, and they generally recommend going to the county or city office. I would note that the copies I got had the weakest looking embossed seal I’ve seen. You could barely make out that it was supposed to be the Great Seal of California.
I’ve ordered vital records before at county offices. I had to fill out an application and wait in line (if there was one). I think they’re supposed to charge fo a search fee if they can’t find a record (issuing a certificate of no record) although I suspect they’ll just tell you in person and save you the expense. I was always asked to pay after the certificate was printed and I had a chance to inspect it. I doubt they’re going to sic security on anyone who find out a record doesn’t exist and walks out without paying. If you mail it in and they can’t find anything, I’m darn sure the county or state will issue a certificate of no record. If you ordered three copies, they’ll probably print it out three times.
Once I had a clerk pull up the wrong record and printed up the wrong birth certificate. I remember he had a basket for oopsies, which I’m guessing had to be properly accounted for before there were destroyed. The clerk noticed the error before applying the stamp and the date.
California has a pretty standard security paper format (with multiple vendors) although I believe the individual stuff varies a lot. The location of the signatures, seal, date of issue, banknote serial number, etc vary. The certification text isn’t standardized. I’ve even seen one county where certified vital records are always personally signed by a deputy clerk in addition to the reproduction of the county clerk-recorder.
re hospital records: i don’t know about hawaii but when trump made (BOGUS) assertions about HIS hospital records, a hospital spokesperson said they destroy those records once the “baby” reaches 21
Oh, don’t get me started on ORU, this town’s “other” university…thanksfully, Tulsa is quite a sprawl, and I’m about as far as one can get from the golden spires and praying hands!
HIPAA also wouldn’t let the hospitals say anything.
I think Doc C meant “hospital form” as the one that was prepared by hospital staff for submission to the Hawaii Dept of Health.
I would also note that Hawaii’s birth certificate for at the time required the attendant to sign. I’m not sure what happens if something rare happened such as the attendant delivering a baby and then keeling over the next day before having a chance to sign.
In many states the attendant isn’t even required to be the certifier. It could be some other hospital staff that bases the certification on hospital records. The place my kid was born at has a birth certificate office, and the standard procedure there is for a hospital administrator to sign off as the certifier. The form my wife and I signed (we scrunched both our sigs into one box) was pre-printed on the form except for the place for the county/state to fill in the blanks. The preparer has already printed PARENTS where it said who the informant was as well as BIRTH CERT COORD where it said name of certifier if other than attendant.
Of course even Hawaii’s form at the time allowed for an informant who isn’t a parent to sign. I’m pretty sure this was there because of the possibility of a mother dying or being incapacitated during childbirth and the father being unavailable, even though it wouldn’t preclude another informant from signing even if they were.
I don’t know if they couldn’t say anything. They can’t confirm or deny a medical record per se without the patient’s permissions, but I would think they would be allowed to talk about hospital precedures in general.
On a related note, I was listening to a radio show by the nut that runs the ACLJ (the Pat Robertson knock off the ACLU), and one of those nutters made the comment to the effect of, “the founders believed any law not in accordance with God’s law is not valid” and that we should return to that standard….all I could think was what is his reaction any time a Muslim nation has a similar provision in their laws?
American Taliban anyone?
I think this is the Georgia rule.24-9-902.
(4) A duplicate of an official record or report or entry therein or of a document authorized by law to be recorded or filed and actually recorded or filed in a public office, including data compilations in any form, certified as correct by the custodian or other person authorized to make the certification by certificate complying with paragraph (1), (2), or (3) of this Code section or complying with any law of the United States or of this state, including Code Section 24-9-920;
This is pretty close to the federal rule of evidence.
I agree 100%
IANAL, so JoeZeppy, please correct me. But I suspect “original” means only whatever pice of paper was shoved into the photocopier that produced the photocopies, nothing more.
But if we play with OrlyLaw a bit, what do we get? Orly insists both the COLB and the LFBC are fakes. Either they are, or they aren’t. Orly wants to hop on her trusty steed and go galloping back up Provenance Trail, expecting that will lead her straight to what’s behind door number 3 in Hawaii.
But if the BCs are fakes, the only place Provenance Trail is going to lead is back to the MacIntosh computer in Washington or Seattle that produced them. If they’re not fakes, then, being self-authenticating, they are themselves the originals, and once again Orly doesn’t get anywhere near the vault copy.
Orly wants to have her cake and eat it too. But if the BCs are fakes, then the vault copy isn’t the original. If they’re not fakes, they ARE the originals. End of the trail either way for OrlyPosse.
while i´ve been scuttling around sites proclaiming oily´s `victory in court´ ( 😀 ) there have been more than a few posts popping up mentioning natural law and god´s law.
not quite moving the goalposts yet again, more sort of shuffling them back with a whispered `halleluja´