The Lost Albatross

Emily at the Lost Albatross runs a fine blog out of Fitchburg Madison. She also writes for a number of the local papers there, and recently did a good straight news piece on the Butler/Gableman campaign. She was asking for comments on it at her blog, so I left this one:

There has also been much bickering back and forth over exactly how many criminal convictions Butler upheld during his time on the bench ...

I like that word, "bickering." There has been bickering, it's true. But the larger question is anything but petty, since Gableman has pretty much made it the centerpiece of his campaign.

It's unfortunate that the analysis that leads to any meaningful conclusion is both complex and subtle.

But, and here's the main thing, the figures that are emanating from several of Gableman's supporters have never even been close to adequately supported.

And, I just noticed, one of those supporters, in an attempt to classify Supreme Court opinions as either "pro-criminal" or otherwise, actually describes Justice Butler's involvement with a certain decision of the court as "siding with criminal's interest."

The "criminal," in that case, is a physically and mentally disabled woman and the circumstances of the case are both horrific and tragic.

It's the very case I discuss at the top of this post here.

It takes a rather conspicuous degree of callousness to describe this particular individual as a "criminal," especially since the conviction that resulted from her guilty plea was reversed, because she was deemed to not have understood what she was pleading guilty to in the first place.

It turns out that she may very well have been the one who was sexually assaulted. Furthermore, the description is about as blinding a beacon of allegedly "journalistic" bias against an individual I've come across in some time.

Careful readers may have noted that I have been very critical of attempts to label decisions of the Wisconsin Supreme Court as "pro-criminal," generally on constitutional grounds, and there is yet another reason why, one that would have never occurred to me.

Inadvertent or not, it's stooping pretty low, I'd say. If inadvertent, then the compiler of the "analysis" has clearly not read the case, the required initial step in constructing any purported "analysis."