December 29, 2009

Wisconsin's award-winning justice

Albeit not a particularly coveted award:
Lying Hypocrite of the Year: Michael Gableman
The most recent inductee into Wisconsin's once-honorable Supreme Court isn't a great legal mind or even especially qualified. But he got elected in 2008 with big-time help from big business and a campaign ad falsely suggesting his opponent found a loophole to let a child molester re-offend. Faced with a Judicial Commission complaint, he argued that the deliberately misleading ad couldn't be punished because its component parts were true. In other words, noted one judge who recommended tossing the charges, he found a loophole! Here's a 100% true statement: Justice Gableman is a disgrace.
Bill Lueders, making me feel chaste and demure by comparison.
Jim Bopp [Gableman's defense lawyer*]: It is a loophole, that had nothing to do with [Mitchell's] guilt or innocence.

Judge Snyder: "Loophole" has kind of an emotional ring to it. It wasn't so much a loophole as it just was a properly argued application of the rape shield law, was it not?

Bopp: Well, uh, it turned out to be, yes.
That little exchange is always good for a mordant chuckle. Atty. Bopp is no dummy; he knows what total bullshit it is he's defending.

* Who hails not from Wisconsin but from Terre Haute (which — irony of all ironies — translates roughly as "higher ground"), Indiana.

It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. And it's funny, because Reuben Lee Mitchell had a constitutional right to Louis Butler's representation, whereas Gableman has none to Jim Bopp's, his current and ongoing predicament being a civil controversy (although there's nothing at all civil about the cheap sleaze at the heart of it).

5 comments:

Jim Bouman said...

"Lying hypocrite..."just doesn't give the reader a full description of this fellow.

"Lying, lightweight, lackluster, laughingstock, leaker hypocrite...." does it for me.

Anonymous said...

The problem is that people do not believe there is justice in the State and that started prior to Gableman.

illusory tenant said...

And has that perception improved since Gableman?

Anonymous said...

For some it's perception and for others it's reality.

The high court is responsible but so is every lawyer that participates in or does not speak out against injustice.

illusory tenant said...

As general philosophical principles, I doubt you'd find anybody who disagreed with those. For me a concern is the process by which lawyers get to be on the Supreme Court, which in Gableman's case was pretty damned corrupt. He shouldn't be rewarded for that.