Posts Tagged ‘sotomayor’

Question: How would a “Wise Latina” describe a man who on the Stand wears a Hitler Moustache, gives a Nazi Salute and says he will kill again and names his victims?

Posted: October 14, 2009 by datechguy in oddities, opinion/news
Tags: , , ,

Answer: Apparently as a man who has “ineffective assistance of counsel.”

Maybe it’s just me but if I have a defendant who takes the stand with a Hitler mustache and says he’s glad for what he’s done and he will do it again I’d say that a closing Argument by Clarance Darrow or even Perry Mason wouldn’t make a difference.

As Althouse notes Scalia asked:

“What would you have done? It makes sense logically to say he has the worst defendant he has ever seen. He’s murdered lots of people in cold blood. He gets up on the stand and says, ‘I’m going to kill a lot more.’ He sounds totally bonkers.”

but Sotomayor saw it differently:

remarking on the lawyer’s strategy of using the crimes themselves as evidence of mental illness”: “At some point you can have a strategy and execute it so poorly, so incompetently, that you’re providing ineffective assistance of counsel.”

If this is a “wise Latina” I’m afraid to see what a blithering idiot would be like.

One more thing on the Sotomayor hearings…

Posted: July 15, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news
Tags: , ,

…This is the moment where the defection of Arlen Specter is paying big dividends. Can you imagine the pass she would be getting if Specter was the chief republican questioner on this panel?

That’s pretty blunt

Posted: July 15, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news
Tags: , , ,

Well at the Volokh Conspiracy (via Glenn) we discover what law professor Louis Michael Seidman of Georgetown thinks of the hearings so far. He doesn’t like what he heard yesterday:

Speaking only for myself (I guess that’s obvious), I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor’s testimony today. If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified. How could someone who has been on the bench for seventeen years possibly believe that judging in hard cases involves no more than applying the law to the facts? First year law students understand within a month that many areas of the law are open textured and indeterminate—that the legal material frequently (actually, I would say always) must be supplemented by contestable presuppositions, empirical assumptions, and moral judgments. To claim otherwise—to claim that fidelity to uncontested legal principles dictates results—is to claim that whenever Justices disagree among themselves, someone is either a fool or acting in bad faith.

Not what you’d call a ringing enforcement is it.

I’m not a law professor, or a lawyer, I’ve only argued one civil case before a judge and jury personally against an experienced lawyer (I won.) so I can’t claim anywhere near the experience of law or how it works that the many lawyers who blog can, but I can say this…

…I’ve read Glenn Reynolds for a lot of years and I don’t recall too many assessments this blunt about an individual’s professional competence that wasn’t cloaked in comedy:

If her politics were different, this would be clear evidence that she is unfit.

Professor Reynolds is one of the most honest men in blogs and has been for a decade. The law is his profession, he teaches the law. If after this statement anyone is going to convince me that Judge Sotomayor deserves this position they have quite a hill to climb. Her professional experience on her resume may meet the minimums necessary for the position she is up for, but that’s all.

I guess membership brings ignorance

Posted: July 15, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news
Tags: , ,

Haven’t really been in the mood to blog lately but I was really taken by the idea the Judge Sotomayor was on the board of an organization that she seems to have no idea what it advocates or believes.

Any normal person who would attempt to make that case would be laughed out of that room.

It is rather amazing to see this going on. Jeff Sessions has been devastating, but unfortunately it will be ignored by the MSM.

After a night of studying Sotomayor’s testimony, Republicans will have more questions about what they view as her misrepresentation of her record. GOP senators know that Democrats are committed to confirming Sotomayor, and, with a 12-to-7 advantage in the committee and 60 votes in the full Senate, they don’t need any Republican support to get it done. But they are troubled by her answers, by her attempts to deny the clear meaning of her words from the past. And that could result in growing, rather than diminishing, Republican opposition. “We heard a lot of things that were not factually buttoned down,” the senior GOP aide said. “If that’s because she and the White House think she has the votes and doesn’t have to answer, then some Republicans are going to be troubled by that.”

I can’t see how any conservative can support this person, and unless a liberal or moderate doesn’t believe that the truth is important or actually believing what you say you believe matters this has to be a problem.

This vote should be a litmus test for conservatives, any republican who can vote for this woman after yesterday’s testimony is not worth our votes or our money.

Older Entries