On November 25, 2013, Lewis County Family Judge Daniel King was prepared to throw a judicial temper tantrum. He was eager to avenge public exposure of his gross incompetence by Leon Koziol two months earlier before the state’s Moreland Commission on Public Corruption. Among other things, King had used two college degrees that this attorney-father never earned to raise his support obligations in a family court case then pending.

Some background is in order. Judge King was newly elected, demonstrably inexperienced and assigned to an outside case. That assignment was exploited to concoct degrees as a means for punishing a qualified whistleblower of court corruption. This would please other judges similarly exposed, and Dan was anxious to be a part of their club. He would issue the highest of obligations to justify a jail term for support violations while income was being deprived through similarly orchestrated license suspensions.

Now, on this day, November 25, 2013, King was hearing a custody matter involving the same targeted father of two girls. Based on the slightest allegations of a scorned ex-spouse bent on replacing this father with a substitute boyfriend, he issued an order directing both parents to refrain from any alcohol use in the presence of the children. He also directed that these same children be lodged in separate rooms at any hotel near the location of a wedding reception involving the dad’s niece one week earlier.

The nefarious agenda of this judge came into focus again when the attorney-whistleblower-dad was accused of alcohol consumption at that reception. A so-called “mini-hearing” was therefore held on a first appearance that day to decide whether King’s conditions for attending this reception were violated. Because the proceeding was not duly noticed consistent with due process requirements, no witnesses or evidence could be provided.

Nevertheless, Judge King concluded that a champaign toast, even if never consumed, constituted a “prohibited alcohol related gesture” sufficient to justify a suspension of parenting time, one that would extend over an ensuing eight-year period to the present day. To further support that barbaric outcome, he found that the girls, aged ten and eleven at the time, although lodged in separate bedrooms of a hotel suite, were not technically in a separate location from the dad’s then fiancee.

An appeals court temporarily blocked that bizarre decision unsupported by any unfit parenting. Indeed, there had never even been a complaint to any protection agency, no alcohol related event, and no criminal record while prison inmates were being favored. However, for reasons never disclosed, the same appeals court allowed a second fully noticed hearing to go forward one month later. In that proceeding, Judge King simply set aside basic trial protocols to orchestrate a record that could support his earlier bizarre rulings. It forced the victim to walk out of that hearing after undue threats were made from the bench.

It was all simply a foregone conclusion that this so-called family judge would abuse public office for illicit reasons. Accordingly, the victimized father commenced his own inquiry into the hypocrisy of this judge based on his rumored alcohol use in the presence of his own children at a bar near the family courthouse in Lowville, New York. Together with other court victims, he was able to find that Judge King was a regular at Jeb’s Restaurant.

The interviewed bar staff even had King’s standard cocktail committed to memory with his own children seated at a nearby table. It was much more than a “prohibited alcohol related gesture” because his subjects in the courtroom could not possibly know what such a gesture might be for violation purposes. Beyond the obvious, Daniel King was a judge held to the highest standards of public office exhibiting a hypocrisy of monumental proportion.

There is so much more to the abuses of judicial office not only by King, but by many of the forty trial level jurists removed or disqualified from Leon Koziol’s 15-year proceedings. The human rights violations and whistleblower punishments over this needlessly protracted period are more than sufficient to justify an investigation by the Justice Department and Civil Rights Bureau of the New York Attorney General. Complaints before both have been filed. The ordeal is detailed in a newly published book, Whistleblower in Paris, available at any Barnes and Noble store, Amazon, publisher Author House or major bookseller on-line.

If you are a resident, litigant or voter at Judge King’s upcoming re-election in 2022, you should make your own inquiry into this judge and his protected misconduct. Many readers have expressed doubt that such bizarre orders and outcomes could be real. But a copy of the December 2, 2013 decision containing them is available for inspection. If you have anything more to offer, feel free to contact Leon directly at (315) 796-4000 for the sake of victims, parents and children everywhere.