Dr. Leon Koziol
Published Author and Civil Rights Advocate
The ongoing ordeal of a judicial whistleblower has necessitated an update to the epilogue (concluding summary) of my recently published book, Whistleblower in Paris. If you have already purchased a copy, available at any Barnes and Noble store, Amazon or major bookseller on-line, this update should energize you to demand reform and accountability. It may also prevent you from becoming a victim of abuse, prevent undue fees and educate you to the realities of these courts. If you are learning of the book for the first time, this update might convince you to obtain a copy. It is a highly intriguing insight based on more than thirty years of litigation experience from a former trial and appellate attorney. That concluding summary is reproduced below:
Epilogue
As a civil rights attorney, I spent over two decades litigating for victims of race, gender, religion and ethnic discrimination. This included sexual harassment cases when they were unpopular. Many successful verdicts, monetary recoveries and precedent outcomes resulted. But my crusade for justice was not limited to minorities. It also extended to white landowners wrongfully threatened with eviction in the Oneida Indian land claim. Police brutality cases were similarly prosecuted for diverse victims, and I represented a public safety commissioner, police chief and rank and file officers whenever they were falsely accused.
In short, I was motivated to correct injustices to a point where I managed to have a billion-dollar casino compact invalidated on constitutional grounds in New York Supreme Court. The Las Vegas Sun reported it as a David-Goliath battle won by “the small Utica law firm that won the case.” [66] Among the defense firms was Cravath, Swaine and Moore, one of the most powerful in the nation. These achievements earned me praise from federal and state judges. The court transcripts, headline news and published opinions bear this out.
However, when I turned my energies to correcting human rights violations in divorce and family courts, I was viciously targeted. Suddenly, my arguments were incomprehensible, rambling and frivolous after twenty-three unblemished years. Even I underestimated the wrath of a corrupt regime bent on retaliation for my exposure of corruption involving a judge-lawyer gold mine. In numerous public statements, I cited federal funding abuses and lucrative custody battles that were inciting child murders, veteran suicides and needless parental conflict.
As a consequentially victimized parent, I was then forced to assume the mantra of a judicial whistleblower devoid of legal protection. The horrific ordeal here remains unprecedented in modern times. Among the practices I condemned in chapter two and an earlier book, Satan’s Docket, was the abuse of forensic custody evaluations. Then, in January, 2022, a blue-ribbon panel appointed by New York’s governor voted to eliminate these evaluations altogether. I made a presentation at a virtual public hearing sponsored by that panel asking for this very outcome, but like the Moreland Commission on Public Corruption (where I also appeared), it is doubtful that any genuine reform will be implemented. That is how powerful this gold mine has become.
So, in the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, I sponsored a three-day event at our nation’s capital in May, 2019. Its goal was to elicit a Justice Department investigation and congressional hearings into the rampant human rights violations and federal funding abuses which continue to be ignored in these custody and support courts. We featured planning sessions, a lobby day among the offices of Congress, expert speakers at a hotel ballroom, a candlelight vigil in front of the U.S. Capitol, and a march down Pennsylvania Avenue under police escort from the White House to the Supreme Court.
All of this was accomplished without incident on a shoestring budget. At least four necessary permits were obtained together with regulatory compliance. Parents came from all parts of the country to register their peaceful protest against divorce and family court corruption. Yet not a single member of Congress responded. Then-president Donald Trump never materialized in front of the crowd assembled at the White House. Not even a representative was sent. The Justice Department weighed in with the same message that parental rights were not even on their radar. His successor, Joe Biden, proved oblivious to this crisis altogether.
So what is the lesson to be realized from all this? Peaceful protests to benefit parents, children and families of all races, religions and ethnic backgrounds will be ignored. They yield no respect whatsoever while the same politicians beg for our support on election day through such things as a voting rights bill. Therefore, it is time for those struggling against parental alienation, custody abuses and support debtor prisons to take matters into their own hands. Stay away from lawyers and these courts, set aside your custody and support disputes, and keep abreast of fellow victims who need your help. In this way at least, we might succeed in closing the gold mine.
Thinking back to all the craziness I endured for more than a decade under the yoke of this antiquated child custody regime, it still amazes me that not a single inquiry was made by the New York Commission on Judicial Conduct regarding the many complaints I lodged. How could so much corruption become so buried? I am also amazed at all the physical restraint I practiced. Under our form of government, when the courts break down, victims can seek recourse outside the system. Nevertheless, my restraint led to poetic justice in so many ways.
Among the Sadistic Seven, Michael Daley is no longer a judge, having failed to garner enough support for re-election to the bench. His unpopularity was borne out later when he was defeated in an election for his old job as a local prosecutor. Last I heard he was representing traffic clients in Utica city court.
Judge Martha Walsh-Hood continues to serve as a family court judge as does her colleague Michele Pirro-Bailey in Syracuse. Judge Daniel King is still on the family court bench in Lowville, New York, but is up for re-election in 2022. At a minimum, my whistleblower testimony before the Moreland Commission on Public Corruption should be raised by any opposing candidate. The judge collusion inferred by King’s sudden removal of his gag order during my mandamus action in state Supreme Court remains a part of the public record. The manner in which this was all arranged behind closed doors demands a proper investigation.
Regardless, not one of these judges was elevated to higher office. This includes Judge James Eby who no longer presides over my case in Oswego, New York. In the aftermath of his uncorrected bias, innocent third parties were irreparably harmed. During his bombastic antics directed at me, he gave no concern for extended family similarly denied all contact with my daughters. He simply pressed on with his ego-driven agenda of retaliation to maintain favor among colleagues on and off the bench.
To be sure, as director of the Parenting Rights Institute, I continue to receive complaints about him, one from a custodial mother regarding his knack for keeping the fees coming. He makes a mockery of this self-serving rationale of acting “in the best interests” of our children whose basic needs and college funds are raided. Entire families are bankrupted in the process while inciting domestic violence. An adversarial process rationalized by truth-seeking objectives cannot withstand the ultimate injury it yields when children are placed at needless risk compelling parents to resort to uncharacteristic extremes to protect them.
Similarly, Judge Gerald Popeo in Utica is also no longer presiding. He declined re-election prospects following my crusade against him in 2018. The judge censure which he blamed partly on me no doubt played a role in his decision. Magistrate Natalie Carraway continues her routine in support courts of Herkimer County, presumably charting a course for higher judgeship. Meanwhile, I continue to receive unsolicited praise from countless parents who publicly credit me for private changes in attitude among certain well-meaning jurists.
But it may also be said that poetic justice was served beyond the Sadistic Seven. My pedophile custody judge, Bryan Hedges, was permanently banned from the bench by the high court of New York, his colleague in Syracuse, Michael Hanuszczak, was forced to step down for sexual harassment of his court clerks, and Magistrate G. Stephen Getman lost an election for family court judge. His license suspension for mishandling client money caught up to him in that race.
My ex-secretary was jailed for crimes upon later victims. Her scheme with outsiders to orchestrate ethics issues in my office together with her tampering of mail and files resulted in the removal of a $220,000 mortgage claim on my home. It is unlikely that she will ever be hired for another law-related position given her felony convictions and our creation of a pretend lawyer website that features her. She would not have contemplated such crimes unless cloaked with some concealed protection while my office supervision was derailed by the family court battles.
My ex-wife was removed from the millionaire’s home in 2016 after wasting untold resources to pursue a needless parent alienation campaign bent on greed, revenge and jealousy. She too could not have succeeded without the undisclosed backing of many of the judges assigned to our case. But this particular campaign exceeded the worst I have come across. It can only be described as something hatched out of hell itself, a new form of evil. It harmed not only her children and their father but it devastated her own world. Yet she pressed on like the proverbial energizer bunny.
You would think that this “custodial parent” learned a profound lesson when her relocation scheme to that millionaire’s home was exposed. It featured the “gmai.com” concoction which she and the child attorney tried to pass as proper notice of a new residency. At a minimum, a parent has a right to know where his or her children are residing and with whom so that they can be better safeguarded. But here, despite undeniable proof of deceit upon the father, court and schools, this scheme was accorded no accountability in contrast with money obligations (child support) which were hounded to a point of arrest warrants, jail commitments and even death.
This one-sided persecution had no effect on her commitment to forever end all father-daughter relationships developed since birth. In August, 2021, the newly married Kelly Usherwood contrived an exit from the region on the day after my youngest daughter’s eighteenth birthday. She placed her home on the market and relocated both my girls to an undisclosed residence without even an identity of colleges they were now attending. By text message, she directed that any information was to be exchanged through the maternal grandmother nearby.
As fate would have it, this grandmother deceased only three months later. Meanwhile, circumstances showed that the e-mail exchanges made between father and his daughters were actually being made by the mother. This is how devious the alienator had become to achieve her objective of a family unit completely isolated from the biological father, one who had never even been found to be an unfit parent. It proved to be spite, greed and status which motivated Kelly Usherwood to pursue the unimaginable while the band played on in these corrupt family courts.
None of this should surprise the reader given the content of earlier chapters and the growing horrors of parental alienation throughout the country. The unilateral directives of this deranged mother comported with no court order, but with the long confirmed systemic bias among numerous assigned judges in New York’s Fifth Judicial District, and the deference repeatedly given them by federal court, all courthouse doors had been closed in terms of any civil recourse. If Daniel King could invent a “prohibited alcohol related gesture” (wedding toast) as a reason to suspend child contact, how could I expect any sanity from the judges who replaced him?
The recent concealment of my daughters raises concerns that could warrant an amber alert given the bizarre conduct of the alienator-abductor. It occurred in the aftermath of my extended hospital stay only months earlier. Despite a life-threatening condition, no direct contact was received from my daughters. By the time the realities of brainwashing caught up to them, it would be too late to revisit countless precious moments captured in home videos and photos.
In the end, it begs the question: what kind of evil lurks in the body of Kelly Usherwood? The answer may lie in some sequel of American Greed or a psycho movie. Even my girls were not spared the karma behind their immoral disregard of dad during his hospital stay, the man who made their existence possible. Both daughters were forced to suffer through a pandemic which is continuing. Graduations, proms and other once-in-a-lifetime events were either canceled or subjected to highly diluting regulations.
As for the ethics lawyers who helped facilitate this chaos, they were forced to resign after an investigation into falsified time sheets. Would-be clients continue to be denied qualified representation. Even after eleven years of license suspension, I continue to receive calls from victims who cannot secure basic legal advice. The system justified this by support obligations that cannot be satisfied without the licenses, resources and liberties that were seized.
This so-called disciplinary process was abused to achieve censorship, thereby making its perpetrators complicit in the resulting crimes upon humanity. Despite all this, corruption was exposed on a vast scale after unprecedented numbers of jurists were removed from my originally uncontested divorce. Those removals helped alter the divorce culture in a positive way while exposing the underbelly of a court system hell-bent on revenues and profits.
But I paid a high price. Out of law school in 1987, I was able to secure a restraining order on a $30 million high school project, [67] I won my first interstate divorce appeal two years later, [68] my name appears on two dedication plagues of the Utica city courthouse as an elected councilman and corporation counsel, I was a featured speaker regarding Native American land claims across upstate New York, and I won a $300,000 civil rights recovery against my local Sheriff which may have factored into the later antics. Other high-profile cases are cited at footnotes 7-11.
Today I am unable to get a family judge to order phone contact with my own daughters.
In raw terms, you can kill a targeted person with a gun or accomplish the same outcome with a drawn-out process that chips away at your existence. Parent alienation is such a process. It is more than a psychological syndrome or human rights violation, it is a proven killer of victimized parents. Whether it be a suicide, terminal illness or some other brutal consequence, the needless separation of a loving parent from his or her children is simply unconscionable. And when forcing the victim to pay for the child abduction through support payments under penalty of a debtor prison, it becomes utterly barbaric.
Judges are quick to overlook this reality as they routinely find breaches of various duties in personal injury cases to achieve million-dollar verdicts. But when greater breaches of ethical duties are presented regarding their own conduct, they cloak themselves with judicial immunity on the rationale that such liability would deter qualified candidates from seeking judgeships. Utter nonsense, most lawyers crave these prestigious titles, and a judge complying with job requirements has nothing to fear. If anything, this absolute immunity encourages misconduct while politically-appointed oversight commissions fail us time and again.
This ordeal warrants a Justice Department investigation and congressional inquiry. It would benefit countless moms, dads and families similarly situated. There are tremors of unrest throughout this country which are being ignored. Hardly a day goes by without some child murder, needless suicide or unpredictable homicide traced to these dysfunctional courts. What remains of a stable society is largely made possible by the free exercise of parental liberties and self-governance. It is my fervent hope, therefore, that a powerful movement emerges from my sacrifices that forces our government to pay attention to its own parents.
This literary work is by no means an indictment of our justice system or legal profession. However, it verifies in painstaking detail how a conscientious attorney, model parent and judicial whistleblower can be so ruthlessly punished for his crusade to deliver overdue reforms to our system of family court justice. The people rely on qualified insiders to alert them to corruption in our third branch of government. It accentuates the need for attorney whistleblower protection.
Finally, this book is directed against the divorce industry and the family court predators who are dragging justice down to hell, a people’s courthouse reduced to a giant profit center. All this corruption might compel another victim to resort to violence. But I was able to forbear it and achieve some justice in more constructive ways. My old friend, Sir Walter Scott, gave me sage advice in that regard:
For he that does good, having the unlimited power to do evil, deserves praise not only for the good he performs, but the evil he forbears
66. Michael Gormley, Judge strikes down pact, Las Vegas Sun, June 29, 2004. Peterman v Pataki, 2004 Slip. Op. 51092. The final judgment was affirmed on appeal.
67. In Rome Concerns Citizens v Rome City School District, this restraining order made possible a state-of-the art high school now located at the Griffiss Technology Park. As fate would go, a base realignment commission led to the closure of the former Griffiss Air Force Base after my controversial litigation. It was the region’s top employer. A tech park became its replacement which benefits faculty and students in a myriad of ways today. The former proposed school location could not have facilitated such benefits due to remoteness and land constraints.
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