Previously I blogged about how Virginia attorney Clifford Shoemaker, counsel for a litigant claiming harm from vaccines, sent an abusive subpoena to blogger Kathleen Seidel at Neurodiversity in an apparent attempt to chill her criticism of his litigation campaign. Here’s an update to restore a bit of your faith in the legal system.
First, Kathleen Seidel reports that the public interest law group Public Citizen stepped in to represent her in connection with her attempt to quash the subpoena. That was major trouble for Shoemaker, as Public Citizen has substantial credibility and would draw a lot of attention to her arguments that the subpoena was calculated to retaliate against her for writing about Shoemaker.
Second, Seidel also reports that Shoemaker went even further, hitting a Harvard professor and former members of the Immunization Safety Review Committee of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) with a subpoena, apparently in an attempt to attack the credibility of that organization’s conclusions about vaccine safety. Once again, the professor is not a party to the case; she just has the misfortune to have said something publically that a thuggish lawyer doesn’t like.
Third, here’s the good news: the judge quashed the subpoena and ordered Shoemaker to show cause why he should not be sanctioned under Rule 11. That’s a fairly unusual and grave step in federal court. Shoemaker is in trouble. If he’s sanctioned for this, the sanctions will probably be reported to his State Bar. It’s not clear to me, but it appears that the court may have issued the order based on Seidel’s pro se motion to quash, which is quite a coup — and a humiliation for Shoemaker.
The system is all too slow to punish sleazy lawyers who use the law to chill speech, punish dissent, and inflict pain and trouble on adversaries. This is good news.
Via Overlawyered.
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April 23rd, 2008 at 5:06 am
A comment from Ms. Seidel, on the neurodiversity blog:
Public Citizen made a few phone calls on my behalf, attempting to contact Mr. Shoemaker and solicit local counsel, but hadn’t filed anything yet. Fortunately, it appears that it will not be necessary. Judge Muirhead took action as soon as it was legally permissible for him to do so. I did not have to further argue the matter of sanctions (that is, beyond my minimalist assertion that issuance of the subpoena constituted a sanctionable abuse of judicial authority) for him to recognize that sanctions might be appropriate under the circumstances. (comment 61).
So she did this all by herself, with presumably a little help from the magistrate and the public interest this affair created.
Quite a coup!
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May 16th, 2008 at 10:34 am
[…] blog, in apparent retaliation for her blogging about his anti-vaccine case. Seidel’s pro se motion to quash Shoemaker’s subpoena was granted and Shoemaker was ordered to show caus… an utterly humiliating defeat for […]
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May 19th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
[…] her in service of his client, vaccine opponent Lisa Sykes. Previous blogging on the subject here, here, and […]
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