Word: skolnick
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That conspiratorial army of would-be historians who specialize in the assassination of John Kennedy may have a brand-new plot to play with. In Chicago last week, Legal Researcher Sherman H. Skolnick filed suit in federal district court against the National Archives and Records Service to release certain documents. He contended that the archives had unlawfully squirreled away the details of a hitherto unknown plot or plots to kill J.F.K. at the Nov. 2, 1963, Army-Air Force game in Chicago, 20 days before his assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald...
Quixotic as his quest may sound, Skolnick, who is a paraplegic, is not a man to be taken lightly. He is a well-known courtroom gadfly with a penchant for legal battles, and he played a key role in getting two Illinois Supreme Court judges to resign amid charges of conflict of interest brought by him (TIME, Aug. 29). Thus it was not surprising that people with information about the alleged plot sought him out to help make their case; among the informants is a former Secret Service agent...
...When Skolnick was 34, his parents lost a lawsuit against a brokerage house that they had accused of frittering away a stock fund set up for their son. Skolnick, now 39, recalls: "I kept running into judges who seemed unfair, dishonest and politically motivated." He was so embittered that he set out to improve Illinois justice by investigating judges and reforming the system under which they are elected in the state. The son of an immigrant garment cutter from Russia, Skolnick dropped out of Roosevelt University, where he was an A student but required special transportation to the campus, which...
Among his early efforts, Skolnick brought suits to reapportion electoral districts for the Illinois Supreme Court and the state appellate court, the Cook County board of commissioners and the Chicago city council. In the process, he devised a strategy called "guerrilla law," which he defines as an "unorthodox but legal means of fighting judicial impropriety." His favorite tactic is to move that a judge disqualify himself from a case because of alleged bias. During a 1966 suit calling for reapportionment of city-council electoral districts, Skolnick discovered that Federal Judge William J. Campbell had once been a director...
...Skolnick lives in his parents' modest duplex home on Chicago's South Side, supported mainly by his father's union pension and social security benefits. He can move his wheelchair, but only with difficulty, and must be chauffeured to his press conferences and court appearances. Working with him are 30 or so volunteers whom Skolnick has organized into the Committee to Clean Up the Courts. Like him, most of them have grievances against the courts. Each week, they pore over stock records, title transfers and other documents for evidence of judicial mischief. The eyes and ears...