-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: June 18, 2007 8:13:57 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Bush's Supreme Court -- Biased, Arbitrary, and Mean-Spirited
Editorial
Don’t Listen to What the Man Says
New York Times, June 17, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/opinion/17sun3.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
If the Supreme Court, with its new conservative majority, wanted to
announce that it was getting out of the fairness business, it could
hardly have done better than its decision last week in the case of
Keith Bowles. The court took away Mr. Bowles’s right to challenge
his murder conviction in a ruling that was so wrong and mean-
spirited that it seemed like an outtake from MTV’s practical joke
show “Punk’d.”
Mr. Bowles, an Ohio inmate, challenged his conviction in federal
district court and lost. The court told Mr. Bowles that he had
until Feb. 27 to appeal. He filed the appeal on Feb. 26, and was
ready to argue why he was wrongly convicted. But it turned out the
district court made a mistake. The appeal should have been filed by
Feb. 24.
The Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, in a majority opinion written by
Justice Clarence Thomas, that Mr. Bowles was out of luck, and his
appeal was invalid. So much for heeding a federal judge.
The decision was wrong for many reasons. The Supreme Court has made
clear in its past rulings that deadlines like this are not make-or-
break. Appeals could still be heard, the court recognized in the
past, if there were “unique circumstances” that accounted for the
delay. Clearly, following an order from a federal judge is such a
circumstance.
Courts also have the authority to create an exception to the rules
in the interest of fairness. The Supreme Court has recognized that
an “equitable exception” should be granted when a party has relied
on an order from a federal judge. By refusing to do so now, Justice
David Souter argued for the dissenters, the court was saying that
“every statement by a federal court is to be tagged with the
warning ‘Beware of the judge.’ ”
The four [dissenting Justices] distilled this case perfectly when
they said, “it is intolerable for the judicial system to treat
people this way.”
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