(1) Federal nominees’ (inc Supremes) refusal to answer nomination queries (or simply dissembling) – and then ruling in exactly the fashion they ostensibly could not discuss at nomination hearings. If I mislead Congress in a hearing, I’m up shit creek. If I’m a nominee, I’m “Judge”.

There has always been a dance as to answering questions, but Alito and Roberts took this to a new level. There are scores of law reviews written on the failure of your Senator Diane Feinstein aka DiFi from your area to ask the questions and to demand answers. DiFi did the same thing when she and Schumner were the only Democrats to support Mike Mukasey.

As a result, you are stuck with Alito and Roberts for most of your adult life. Not a thing can be done about it. There was a nice piece on one aspect of their legacy in the NYT magazine Sunday, and you should read it.

Once in a while the’ll surprise you, but not often. Steve Bright won a much needed 7-2 opinion Snyder v. Louisiana (06-10119)and Alito wrote it,and cited a clear error standard that was violated, with Thomas joining him. It followed the lines of Batson. It involved strking black jurors for bad reasons.

As to collusion, you’re correct. Many deals on appellate judges and votes on the S.Ct. justices are based on behind the scenes deals.

These justices don’t see their public speeches anywhere near the way you perceive your psychiatric evaulation of liver/renal transplant candidates.

No one reviews the decisions by the Supremes as to whether they recuse themselves. Your recourse is DiFI and Barbie Boxer and your reps. You need more and better Senators and represenatives, because until they change this, you’re stuck. The Judicial Conference will lobby mightily against this as will AOC.

Transplantation in the US is hardly democratic, and inconsistent througout the US at best, and certainly does and has favored wealthy patients, and it will continue to be flawed until the medical profession develops better criteria.

The medical literature is replete with classic studies of this, including this one in NEJM:

Geographic Favoritism in Liver Transplantation — Unfortunate or Unfair?

The constituencey that Roberts, Alito, and Scalia are ruling for has a name. It’s called the Federalist Society and that has been precisely the objective of Bush and the tremendous lobbying effort that got them confirmed by Bush and in Scalia’s case by Reagan.

You remember Reagan–your former governor in California.

Bush has appointed approximately 240
Federalist Society members to the bench.

The demographic distribution has been grim. Why the Dems Lack Supreme Court Nominees

As to the perks judges get at their seminars, their are plenty of people agitating to curb them, but they are defended vigorously by the people who decide the rules, the judges at individual circuits, and the Judicial Conference until you can get your Congress and Senate people to do anything meaningful.

I read the word salad this calls his, ahem, book. It blamed Pat for not stopping/preenting events that happened when he was still in college and law school and could not possibly have known about, nor had the power or skill to do anything about at the time. It’s tone was nothing short of hysterical and it’s logic, pretty non existant.

The “author” of this word salad claimed to have read the trial transcripts of the major terroism trials held in SDNY and then advanced theories tat directly contradicted the testimony at those trials. Testimony that the juries found credible.

So, you see in Lance’s world, EVERYBODY is lying and only HE knows the truth. I’m not a shrink, but I think there is a name for that state of mind. Mental health professionals should feel free to jump in.

Here’s the skinny as to appeals in the Eleventh. Appeals in every circuit are according to rules called FRAPS. The FRAPS are tweaked locally by each circuit’s judges and revised. FRAPS=Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure. When you file an appeal in the Eleventh Circuit, you aren’t guaranteed you will have an oral argument or that your case will be published. To have precedent for future cases, the case has to be published in the Federal Reporter published by West company now owned by Thompson. Trial court opinions when published (usually as memorandum opinions, are published in Federal Supplement or “Fed Supp.”

When the brief is filed with the Eleventh Circuit it is screened by someone on a staff of several lawyers. These lawyers are not law clerks, and the panel of judges will in most cases never see the brief at that point. If they determine the issue is substantial enough for oral argument, after screening, they will pass the briefs onto the law clerk and judges.
The law clerks are usually top grads from a law school, who often have ambitions for a prestigious and well paying job with a law firm, or moving up in DOJ as an attorney there, or an academic career.

They indeed write most of the opinions that are released from the Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court and the judges meet with them, argue ideas, facts, and case precedents, and then they tweak those opinions. Sometimes the judges revise them on their pcs, etc. and write parts of them.

About 17.5% of all appeals that reach the Eleventh Circuit make the cut for oral argument. Those cases will have an opinion that is most often ordered to be published in the Federal Reporter and has precedent for citation in argument of future cases and interpretation by the panels of judges for opinions.

Siegelman’s case has a good chance of making said cut, because he is governor, and because of the issues involved.

Sadly, because of the glut caused by drug cases in all the Circuits, a couple things have come to pass. Most cases appealed, despite the fact that everyone pays the several hundred dollar fee, are decided and you never know what the thinking was that went into the opinion. Why? Because the ones that don’t make the cut for oral argument are usually decided with a 2-3 sentence so-called per curiam opinion where the lower court is affirmed. This is very unfortunate, and it’s unfair. But that’s the way it is due to the thousands of drug cases that clog the docket. In America we incarcerate low level drug users, instead of having meaningful rehabilitation. The DOJ’s drug rehab program is a huge joke–and often people sociopathically get into it via recommendations to cut their time not because they really have a legitimate drug history. The BOP personnel who run them or social workers and psychologists who are not particularly talented or well trained–that’s why they work for DOJ/BOP. They are nothing like the talent pool of attorneys who work for DOJ. Those are two different planets. DOJ lawyers know this, but they don’t really care or do anything about it. So we have Prison Nation in America where 1/100 people are incarcerated and warehoused like widgets on a shelf to rot for long periods of time. In the old system, people could get cuts in their sentences via parole. This changed when Bill Clinton became President. Prisoners now serve 85% of their federal sentence with no cuts available except through the over crowded and crappy drug programs, and most prisoners don’t get into them, and some of them lie to get into them. Recently, a former mayor in a big city who was in federal prison was removed from his half way house after newspapers exposed that his lawyers argued he had no drug history whatsoever, but he scooted into the drug rehab program to cut his sentence by about eight months. An embarassed DOJ (BOP is an agency totally controllled by DOJ in theory but not in fact) jerked the mayor out of the halfway house and back to his Florida prison to serve the remainder of his term.

The prisons are over crowded. Medicine in general sucks all accross the board in state prisons and federal prisons. It takes no one with a medical IQ a tenth the thermometer to pick up most charts of significantly medically ill people in the Federal Prison system and find that care is markedly substandard–equipment, treatment modalities, qualifications and clinical ability of the physicians and you name it.

So while Christy Hardin Smith and LHP the LHP are bright accomplished expierienced lawyers, who were nurtured/educated into a milieu of high legal standards and practice, the medical care in the system they sent people to was then, and is now totally horrendous. It’s nothing like the medical care you hope you receive in the private practice system. Medications that are used or significantly limited, and often times the formulary is not sophisticated and hardly cutting edge. If and when you train medically and review their charts for a legal or other proceding, you will learn this quickly.

It’s nothing like the medical care Christy hopes people in West Virgina receive or she expects to receive for her family. People die frequently who did not need to die, morbidity is high, and care is piss poor. If someone has lymphoma and needs specific treatement at the local tertiary university medical system, even though it is a few miles away they will not be released to receive it and DOJ will argue vigorously to make sure that they do not. DOJ will argue that they can get equal care at Bum Fuck medical facility administered by the DOJ/BOP and that is pure bullshit.

Physicians do not aspire to become doctors in any prison system–no way never and on on given day.

What Fuller did do though is to take his sweet time when the Eleventh Circuit Court of appeals told him they wanted him to elaborate on his order refusing to grant an appeals bond (totally separate issue from the appeal of the case in chief).

Here’s what happened. The Court reporter died of cancer. Although the judge has some responsibility to ensure a timely transcript, this was not really held up in light of the circumstances. AOC is responsible (Administrative Office of Courts) for getting a new court reporter to finish the transcript. Fuller did not obstruct that. Often these court reporters have other cases to transcribe, and in this situation, the court reporter had ongoing work to finish. Communication is done with a motion but since she wasn’t an attorney, she simply wrote Chief Judge Lanier Anderson at the Eleventh Circuit. Anderson gave her until the end of March to finish the transcript, and she finished it early.

However, what you’re missing is that the two attorneys for Siegelmen had not even filed their brief. I explained this in detail over at the Lake a few times.

A panel will decide the appeal in chief. The briefing schedule for it does not start until Siegelman’s attorneys file their opening brief. That is the appeal series of briefs (the government will reply and the defense will reply to that brief) that requires the transcript and Siegelman’s attorneys have not even finished their brief on the case in chief. The court reporter has finished the transcript so the transcript has hardly held up the appeal in chief.

What was held up was the opinion from twojudges at the Eleventh Circuit, Judge Stanley Marcus and Judge Black who have Siegelman’s release in their hands. This is not tied to a trial transcript, but rather is based on the argument by the defense and the government briefing a well known case when you ask for an appeal bond in the Eleventh Circuit. That case is called United States v. Giancola, 754 F.2d 898 (11th Cir. 1985).

Besides arguing that your client is not a threat to the community, and a flight risk, you have to argue within the framework of Giancola as previously interpreted by the Eleventh Circuit that the appeal of your client raises a substantial question. The Eleventh Circuit has defined the substantial question standard (which is always in dispute when you move for an appeal bond and this is interpreted differently in different Circuit Courts or appeal in the U.S. (Welcome to the United States of inconsistent America) and appellate law.

In United States v. Giancola, 754 F.2d 898 (11th Cir. 1985), the Eleventh Circuit noted that a frivolous question might well be one not decided by controlling precedent. defined “substantial question” as “a ‘close’ question or one that very well could be decided the other way.” Id. It also noted that what will constitute “substantial” should be determined on a case-by-case basis.

In other words, they pretty much can decide if the appeal raises a substantial question any way they want to.

I’m hopeful that since Black and Marcus twice asked Fuller to enlarge, clarify and justify his opinion he will be free on bond. The decision is pending. So Fuller himself held up release on bond if it is to be granted. Now the Eleventh Circuit has been holding it up because they are taking their own sweet time with the opinion.

The transcript is really not nor has not held up Siegelman’s appeal of the bigger eye on the prize, the case in chief.

I hope that clears this up–I have to fire out.

U.S. v. Nacchio

Brief Points on 10th Circuit Reversal in Nacchio

McJoan and Kagro over at KOS missed the point that despite their wishful thinking, the remand will be unlikely the discovery process providing a window to open up the dyanmics of the warrantless wiretapping fiasco by the government.

is parking/prostitute using (alleged) in C0 worse than withholding transcripts (proven) in AL (Siegelman judge) ?

IANAL, but methinks no transcript, no appeal, no appeal, defendants’ right to trial denied.