What do you know, but it was Patrick Roggensack!

Calumniates the justifiably notorious Journal Communications, Inc. calumnist Patrick McIlheran:

[T]he union ... got a judge — what do you know, but it was Marilyn Sumi!

First of all, it's Maryann Sumi, but I guess you can't really blame the award-winning journalist Patagonia McIlheran, as Judge Sumi's not really been in the news much lately. Evidently Patrice McIlheran finds it comical that Judge Sumi was presiding. He doesn't give any reason why; he doesn't need to. As per usual, he's pandering to his little audience of ill-informed wing-nuts. Here's something else for them.

Supreme Court Justice Patience Roggensack — who comprises that court's hard-right conservative bloc together with Justices Ziegler and Gableman and more often than not Justice David Prosser — was once a judge on the District IV Court of Appeals, which presides over Dane County, which is where Judge Maryann Sumi sits. In that capacity then-Judge Roggensack heard 13 appeals of Judge Sumi's decisions.

Roggensack affirmed 11 of them, affirmed in part and reversed in part one of them, and reversed the one other. The reversal in part had to do with that portion of Judge Sumi's domestic restraining order prohibiting a stalkerish man from possessing a firearm.

However it was pure clerical, and not judicial, error:

It appears from the trial court's statements from the bench that it also found the evidence insufficient on this point, and that the firearm prohibition box was checked on the final written order by mistake. — Per curiam [by the court]

In other words, Judge Maryann Sumi was correctly non-reversible in her judicial findings, but somebody ticked the wrong box on a form.*

In her lone reversal of Judge Sumi, then-Judge Roggensack concluded that while the information provided to a defendant by an arresting officer "created some confusion," it was not erroneous information, and thus Judge Sumi had erred in determining that the defendant's demand for a blood test instead of a breath test was reasonable.

And whenever reasonableness is an issue on appeal, it's a close call.

You know that saying, "reasonable minds can disagree."

So just don't expect to be informed by the award-winning Journal Communications, Inc. journalist Patricio McIlheran that Judge Sumi was affirmed 12 out of 13 times by the most conservative justice on the State Supreme Court, as that would explode his and his disciples' disturbed political fantasies. However you will hear it here, and not through Journal Communications, Inc., which doesn't do corrections.

But thanks for all you do do, JRN.

* Not quite as erroneous as a "journalist" calling a Maryann "Marilyn."