Retired state Supreme Court justices usually don't dish the dirt, but Elizabeth Weaver has gripes she want to unload.
She does so in a 750-page book coming out this month, Chad Livengood and Gary Heinlein report in The Detroit News.
Weaver and co-author David Schock claim in "Judicial Deceit: Tyranny and Unnecessary Secrecy at the Michigan Supreme Court," there were countless instances of unethical behavior among justices during her 16-year career on the high court. . . .
Weaver, a former Republican nominee to the technically nonpartisan bench, and Schock contend the state Supreme Court is corrupted by ideology and secrecy and special interest groups that bankroll the campaigns of Michigan's statewide partisan election of justices. She argued campaign donations from Democratic and Republican party interests compromise judicial neutrality.
"It is very much like the 'Wizard of Oz' where Dorothy and Toto pulled back the curtain and found out the Wizard was deceiving everybody," Weaver said in describing her book.
Fieger asked the court in August 2006 to halt its reprimand against him for disparaging three appeals court judges in a malpractice lawsuit against Beaumont Hospital.
According to Weaver's book, Taylor, in a memo to fellow justices, offered to change his vote against granting Fieger a stay if Weaver would withdraw a dissenting opinion that the so-called "Engler Four" — Taylor and justices Stephen Markman, Robert Young Jr. and Maura Corrigan — had a bias against Fieger, a political enemy who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to defeat them at the ballot box.
