DC Madam left instructions "in case found dead of suici

[professorpan]

http://www.legitgov.org/dc_madam_update_100808.html

Attorney: 'DC Madam' left instructions if 'ever found dead of apparent suicide' By Lori Price
www.legitgov.org

Attorney: "Jeane was very clear with me that if she was ever found dead of an apparent suicide, I was to make sure that all the evidence was publicly disseminated so that it could be independently evaluated."

Exclusive: Citizens For Legitimate Government has learned that Deborah Jeane Palfrey's lawyer, Montgomery Blair Sibley, has intervened to stop a lawsuit seeking to prevent the Tarpon Springs, Florida, Police Department from releasing information requested by Sibley pertaining to the investigation of Jeane's death.

On July 22, 2008, Sibley requested under the Florida Public Records Act, "copies of any and all records, including without limitation police reports and photographs, related to the investigation of the death of Deborah Jeane Palfrey on May 1, 2008, at [redacted] Tarpon Springs, Florida. This request includes copies of every document related to the matter, regardless of the format in which the information is stored. I note that information stored on a computer is as much a public record as a written page in a book or stored in a filing cabinet."

Citing his obligation to discharge explicit instructions from his former client, Jeane Palfrey, the so-called DC Madam, to "fully investigate and reveal the circumstances of her death if deemed a suicide by authorities," her attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, has moved to intervene in a lawsuit filed by Jeane's mother, Blanche Palfrey. That lawsuit seeks to prevent the Tarpon Springs, Florida Police Department from releasing information requested by Sibley pertaining the investigation of Jeane's death on May 1 of this year.

Sibley said, "While I don't mean to cause Jeane's family additional grief, an attorney's first duty is to his client, and Jeane was very clear with me that if she was ever found dead of an apparent suicide, I was to make sure that all the evidence was publicly disseminated so that it could be independently evaluated."

A hearing has been set in that matter on August 15 before Florida Circuit Court Judge Linda Allan in Clearwater, Florida.

10 August 2008

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Previous 'DC Madam' news and updates:

'D.C. Madam' trial scheduled for April 7 --Full jury trial is scheduled to take place on April 7th, in Federal District Court, in Washington, D.C. By Lori Price 28 Feb 2008 Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the 'DC Madam,' told Citizens for Legitimate Government Thursday, "In many respects, I can't wait to get into court and get this monkey off my back. This case has gone on far too long." Ms. Palfrey also told CLG that her former counsel, Preston Burton, has been reassigned as her CJA attorney.

New Judge Assigned to 'DC Madam' case 04 Dec 2007 As an administrative matter, Judge Gladys Kessler was transferred off the cases of the so-called DC Madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, and District of Columbia Judge James Robertson was assigned to preside over Ms. Palfrey's cases.

'D.C. Madam' Seeks Subpoenas for Senator Vitter and Harlan Ullman --By Lori Price 02 Nov 2007 Citizens for Legitimate Government has learned that subpoenas for Senator David Vitter and Harlan Ullman, former customers of Paula Neble, an independent-contractor escort of Ms. Palfrey's escort service, have been sought for a November 28, 2007 hearing.

Subpoenas Served On ABC's Brian Ross/New York Post's Cindy Adams By 'DC Madam' By Lori Price 26 Sep 2007 Citizens for Legitimate Government has learned that so-called DC Madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, has issued subpoenas for the depositions of (i) Troy Burrus, the IRS case agent on Palfrey's case, for Friday, September 28th in Washington, D.C., and (ii) Brian Ross of ABC News, (ii) Cindy Adams of the New York Post and (iv) Bill Bastone of The Smoking Gun for Friday October 5th in New York City.

'DC Madam' defense likely to disclose evidence, identities deemed classified' By Lori Price 01 Sep 2007 Citizens for Legitimate Government has learned that Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the 'DC Madam,' has filed with the Court a pro se "Motion for Pretrial Conference to Consider Matters Relating to Classified Information" under the Classified Information Procedures Act. This filing alerts the government that Palfrey's defense will likely involve the disclosure of evidence and identities presently deemed "Classified" by the U.S. government.

'DC Madam' Phone Records By Lori Price 09 Jul 2007

'D.C. Madam' Phone List Names & Places Posted by Lori Price

Citizens For Legitimate Government has received the 'DC Madam' phone records and is preparing the list for release. --Lori Price 09 Jul 2007

[Et in Arcadia ego]

Citizens For Legitimate Government has received the 'DC Madam' phone records and is preparing the list for release. --Lori Price 09 Jul 2007

This should get interesting. I'm surprised to see this thread sliding down the front page. The DC Madame played with fire. Now she's dead, one way or another, although its very easy to question her suicide.

All Problems Solved.

[compared2what?]

According to the stories you get when you click through on the page from which the OP comes, what Sibley's opposing is Palfrey's mom's attempt to prevent the release of photographs taken by cops at the scene.

There may be more to it than that going unmentioned. But a mother who wants is to stop the possible sale or distribution ofi pictures of her daughter's corpse is one thing, and the suppression of details regarding the circumstances of Palfrey's death in general is another one altogether.

Also, I'm really not sure how much legal standing, if any, Palfrey's mom could possibly have to influence a decision wrt the kind of material Sibley says he's seeking. I mean, if they're public records, they're either exempt from FOIA under the law or they're not. I guess....Some personal info is off-limits without the permission of the person it concerns, as it should be. And though I don't know, the right to withhold it may well default to family if that person is dead. But if so, that wouldn't cover much material that overlaps with what Sibley says he wants, anyway.

I'm confused. Who's suing whom for what, again, now?

[Penguin]

Ok, this settles this issue in my mind. You dont leave instructions like that - "in case I die and authorities decide its suicide" - unless you know thats a definite possibility, even likelihood.

It was cold blooded murder to silence a witness. No doubt about that now.
Not that there was much, previously..

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

Leaving instructions like that could also point to a preoccupation with suicide.

[compared2what?]

Leaving instructions like that could also point to a preoccupation with suicide.

Not any suicide I've ever known. How do you figure?

I agree that if she left those instructions, it means she felt she was in danger of being taken out.

But we only have Sibley's word for it that she did, and his word doesn't make sense when it comes to the suit he says he filed, which wouldn't be the first time that's happened. And I guess he could be pro se, but he's been disbarred in Florida, anyway, according to Overlawyered:

May 15th, 2008 at 12:01 am
Montgomery Blair Sibley suspended
» by Ted Frank

We’ve had a lot of Montgomery Blair Sibley coverage over the years:

* His meritless suit against the DC Circuit (followed by a self-defeating appeal to the Supreme Court, where there was no quorum because he had sued seven of the justices)
* his follies in the Palfrey case and in an earlier 2006 Florida prostitution case; and
* his vexatious pro se work in family court.

And we didn’t even mention his work representing Larry Sinclair (the fellow who unsuccessfully sued Barack Obama for denying Sinclair’s implausible claim that he had engaged in a homosexual tryst with him) in a lawsuit against three anonymous bloggers. (DBKP blog, Mar. 14.)

After years of over-the-top abusive litigation, the state bar finally took action, and he has been suspended by the Florida bar for three years. No doubt, this will result in a new round of frivolous pro se collateral litigation. It took a contempt-of-court citation for failure to pay child support before the Florida bar took action, so this can hardly be considered a rousing success of the bar in policing its own, even for someone as over-the-top as Sibley. (Florida Bar v. Sibley; ABA Journal, Apr. 25; MPGS blog, May 14; h/t S.G.).

Update: Two commenters (who never appeared on Overlawyered before) implausibly defend Sibley, both posting from BellSouth accounts in Atlanta, GA. Nothing about a divorce requires one to sue seven Supreme Court justices for “judicial treason” for denying a (frivolous) certiorari petition from a frivolous lawsuit. He should have been disbarred a long time ago; that he is only being suspended, and then only because of failure to obey court orders, is appalling. He’s been a hazard to his clients and to taxpayers; so, no, I don’t think he’s a “damn good lawyer.”

Update, May 16, 2:45 AM: We originally repeated a second-hand report sent to us that Sibley had also been suspended in DC as part of reciprocal discipline. It is possible that our correspondent confused a Rule 8.1 report, made by the DC Bar counsel recommending reciprocal suspension, with an actual suspension. If a Rule 8.1 report was filed, Sibley is entitled to file a response; no oral argument is scheduled at this time (though none is required to be scheduled) and no DC Board on Professional Responsibility report is listed as having issued with respect to Sibley. Rule 8.4 of the DC Board on Professional Responsibility Rules of Procedure is titled “Conclusive Effect of Adjudication in Other Jurisdiction,” which would appear to give Sibley nothing to argue in DC, and would likely make discipline inevitable, but the District of Columbia, in its typical competence, has posted the wrong text for 8.4 on its website, so I cannot say that for certain. Montgomery Sibley is, as of May 16, still listed on the DC Bar’s website as a member in good standing. If the error is ours, rather than that of the DC Bar website, we regret the error. Without written confirmation of the suspension, we retract the original statement that the DC Bar has suspended Sibley in response to the Florida bar’s three-year suspension of Sibley.

Update, May 20: We were right the first time.

Passel of links in original.

[compared2what?]

Yeah, okay. The very litigious multiply disbarred independently wealthy non-child-support-paying scion of American mega-wealth who is alleged Obama-blow-job-and-crack-buddy Larry Sinclair's attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, appears -- based on the filings prior to this one -- to be annoyed with Blanche Palfrey, a recently bereaved mother who was in the middle of the torturous process of staying the forfeiture of her daughter's assets by the state when she discovered that her attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, wasn't licensed to practice in Maryland, which is the venue in which the case will be heard. So she replaced him with a less idsbarred attorney.

Sibley has been hitting her with a stream of filings ever since. She's an elderly and frail woman whose primary financial support came from the same daughter whose tragic and shocking death -- which I can't imagine means less to her than it does to Sibley -- is the reason she has to go He's basically blocking her ability to receive whatever part of what her daugher left to her that the court might rule wasn't subject to seizure, an action he no longer has a reason to want to see realized, since he's no longer going to be getting a percentage of whatever his former client's mom might get. .

That doesn't exactly make his word very reliable. Not that it necessarily was before. But still.

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

Leaving instructions like that could also point to a preoccupation with suicide.

Not any suicide I've ever known. How do you figure?

How I figure is leaving instructions like that shows she envisioned herself dead from apparant suicide in the future. There are two ways this could happen, being suicided in which case the occupation with suicide is indirect but still there or taking her own life, in which case these instructions might be seen as a warning sign of her state of mind as well as possibly a way of trying to make her death easier on her family by implying it was murder instead of suicide which carries a greater stigma.

[Penguin]

Yes, thats a valid view.
Re: The lawyer..Aint they all the slimebags :p

[hava1]

A few weeks ago, a top notch criminal defense lawyer in Israsel published an op=ed in the daily newspaper, accusing the legal system (a judge, the AG and another DA) in the murder of a defense lawyer, by way of intentionally causing him to commit suicide.
THe AG of Israel replied to him with a personal letter, (now published in the web), accusing him of liable, and analyzing the offense of "manslaughter" in the code, to ask whether he means they actually murdered him or was that a figure of speech and demanding an apology and retraction.
Accusing lawyer (A. Feldman) responded that he thinks this demand is "hot air" and refuses, and responded that legally, yes, he thinks they actually intentionally murdered him by knowingly causing him to kill himself.
AG of Israel (M. LAdor) now filed a disciplinary complaint against Feldman, demanding to disbar him.

---
In said the case, the Deputry PD of Israel, attorney David Weiner, killed himself with a bullet to his head, after a court decided that his phone can be wiretapped, because he "conspired" with his client (a prisonder and murderer of a judge), to blackmail the legal system. The decision was brought to this PD, and a week later he shot himself to death. In the background, two of the "Israeli conspiracy legal cases" - the first, a false murer charge against a simple guy, with conection to a heinous murder-rapte of apparently a "sex bait" of the Israeli security service (Rachel Heler). The case was framed on some "joe" from no-where but he fought back and one police officer joined him, and also the judge who sat in his case, decided to act to release him. Only after almost 10 year, Mr. David Wiener, an idealist PD, took the case to an official request for a new trial based on arguments of false confession under torture. He won the case hich is a HUGE no no...and he made a big , HUGE fuss out of it.
----
Soon thereafter he was appointed PD of some thug who was already in jail for murder. The prisoner claimed "framing" as well, and asked for clemency based on "injustice". During that proceeding, a district judge was murdered. It turned out, this guy ordered the murder of the judge, and so the police said that this PD conspired with him to black mail the system through this murder.

[compared2what?]

Yes, thats a valid view.
Re: The lawyer..Aint they all the slimebags :p

It is a valid view.

There are slimebags.

And then there's Montgomery Blair Sibley. Who would have been in his mid-20s when all of the wharves of the Ocean Reef Club, an elite private community in the Keys run by his dad, were being used for coke trafficking, according to The Mafia, CIA & George Bush

The Ocean Reef Club is also where GHW Bush would later hold his press conference w/ Mitterand; where Gus Boulis, the guy who was murdered while selling off-shore casinos to Jack Abramoff; held his last business meeting; where Tom DeLay played golf to raise money for his bogus children's charities; etcetera. Jeb Bush had some dealings there, too, as I recall, though it's now just Sibley patronized, not Sibley owned or operated. It has the biggest private airstrip in the Keys, accessible to club members only! That would include Montgomery Blair Sibley!

Seriously. The guy is very, very shady. His father is an enormously powerful and wealthy land developer in FL. Almost all the present-day and recent-past Sibley family campaign contributions are big-time Republican, though they seem to be Obama backers this time out.

His grandfather headed the Chamber of Commerce under FDR, which is not as good as it sounds, if you think about it from an international banking perspective for a moment, and also chaired the Committee on Refugees and Migrants after WWII (ie -- Operation Paperclip, anyone?).

And his great-grandfather helped start Western Union (ie -- robber baron era, mobbed-up monopoly capitalism, anyone?).

Plus he's variously descended from the Blairs for whom Blair House, where we put up our visiting world leaders is named; the Harpers of (curently, I think) Harper Collins; and founding father George Mason. But those are all pretty far in the past, so the hell with them.

The immediate branch of the Sibley family of which our Sibley is a twig was active in Iran-Contra and S&L-collpase-related activities back in the day. Which puts our guy one degree of separation away from the Mafia, CIA, and Bush family.

That's on top of his really insane record as an attorney, and his numerous accomodation addresses, one for a crate-shipping company, according to the Washington Post, which I find intriquing. And his representation of Larry Sinclair. And his not reporting or evidently acting upon Palfrey's instructions to him in anticipation of her suicide at the time of her suicide, rather than at the time that he got into a conflict with her mother.

So I'd say the odds are that however valid a view it is, it's irrelevant. Because there's no evidence that she gave him those instructions, except that he says she did. And his word is not reliable, imo. And even if it were, his actions aren't. Because what he's doing is not an effective way to faithfully adhere to his client's putative instructions, in that it won't get him anything he wouldn't have gotten from the FOIA alone, without the lawsuit.

Other than publicity, of course. As to whether that adds up to info or disinfo: Everyone's free to make the call for him- or herself. But I'd at least argue that it wasn't definitive.

[FourthBase]

How exactly does a person concerned about being whacked/suicided in the future ensure that people will know he/she would never commit suicide? This woman did about as much as she could, and yet her attempt to make her unsuicidal-ness known in advance is still seen by some as a possible indication of suicidal-ness? Come on.

[compared2what?]

How exactly does a person concerned about being whacked/suicided in the future ensure that people will know he/she would never commit suicide? This woman did about as much as she could, and yet her attempt to make her unsuicidal-ness known in advance is still seen by some as a possible indication of suicidal-ness? Come on.

I don't think she killed herself. But I also don't think Sibley is telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Because I think he's a hinky, spooked-up character. It wasn't meant as a reflection on what actually happened with her. Merely on how his actions and assertions wrt to her death should be assessed.

[bks]

Been reading up on the case of DJP, and I just want to post a thank you to c2w? for the great spadework here on Sibley.

FTR I think she killed herself, but that was not an unforeseeable outcome given her personal history. The people inside federal law enforcement who were putting the squeeze on her would have known about her terrible experience in prison years before, and her great fear of returning. Whether she died by her own hand or not, they killed her.

[fruhmenschen]

Been reading up on the case of DJP, and I just want to post a thank you to c2w? for the great spadework here on Sibley.

FTR I think she killed herself, but that was not an unforeseeable outcome given her personal history. The people inside federal law enforcement who were putting the squeeze on her would have known about her terrible experience in prison years before, and her great fear of returning. Whether she died by her own hand or not, they killed her.

Like to see people look more closely at how local and federal law enforcement suicide people as a tool in
their neutralization tool box.
The most overt example is the FBI telling Martin Luther King to commit suicide after they sent him tapes of his alleged sexual trysts.
Gary Webb is another candidate . Mike Ruppert was almost a candidate. Also see the book

Bowen Roger. INNOCENCE IS NOT ENOUGH: The Life and Death of Herbert Norman
New York USA M.E. Sharpe Inc 1988
Looks at FBI suicide assassination of Herbert Norman, Canadian Ambassador to Egypt.