Why won't Rush Limbaugh denounce Ronnie White?
Maybe he knows White is no more pro-criminal than his own cousin, Missouri
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Limbaugh Jr.
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By Eric Boehlert
Jan. 17, 2001 | As the battle over Attorney General-designate John Ashcroft
rages and the rhetoric is ratcheted up, more and more of Ashcroft's allies
are taking aim at the man emerging as his most damaging nemesis, Judge Ronnie
White. Yet one person remains conspicuously absent from the conservative's
amen chorus: Rush Limbaugh.
Of course, the conservative talker is ranting about the "disgusting" attempt
to kill Ashcroft's nomination, led by "dangerous," "fundamentally lawless"
and "undemocratic" liberals who live "outside the mainstream of American
life."
But in recent days Limbaugh has seemed reluctant to pull the character
assassin's trigger the way so many of his conservative colleagues have when
it comes to defaming White, Missouri's first black state Supreme Court
justice whose nomination to the federal bench Ashcroft derailed last year.
That episode of hardball has returned to haunt Ashcroft as his critics
prepare to use it to question both the nominee's racial tolerance and his
sense of political fair play during his confirmation hearings this week.
To help soften those blows, Ashcroft's allies are busy once again ridiculing
White. Republican National Committee chairman Jim Nicholson sent an e-mail
alert last week stressing, "Ashcroft voted against that judge because of the
lack of content of Ronnie White's character, not the color of his skin."
Beverly LaHaye, founder of Concerned Women for America, told National Public
Radio, "John Ashcroft has shown his respect for the law. Unlike White, he
realizes there are laws that are meant to protect the innocent and bring
justice to the guilty." And asked how Ashcroft allies should respond to the
Ronnie White question, G. Gordon Liddy told MSNBC's Chris Matthews, "First
thing I'd do would be counterattack. I'd really expose the guy."
So why isn't Limbaugh skewering White's judicial record and holding him up to
public ridicule as a liberal, soft-on-crime judge in advance of White's
crucial testimony during Ashcroft's nomination this week? Maybe it's because
Limbaugh, whose family is steeped in Missouri law and its judiciary, actually
knows better than trying to judge a state Supreme Court justice based on a
single opinion. Maybe it's because Limbaugh's cousin, Justice Stephen
Limbaugh Jr., sits on the Missouri Supreme Court with White and might not sit
by quietly if Rush started demagoguing White the way others on the right
have. The two judges represent opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Limbaugh is easily the most conservative member of the Missouri Supreme
Court. But White and Limbaugh have become friends. When named to the Missouri
Supreme Court, neither Limbaugh nor White moved his family to the state
capital of Jefferson City, so the men often eat dinner together and read
briefs late into the night in their next-door offices.
Should Rush decide to tell his listeners that Ashcroft was right to oppose
White because the black jurist could not be trusted to be tough on criminals
(killers in particular), then the dozens of times White and Limbaugh have
agreed on death penalty cases might pose a bigger problem. In most of those
instances, the two voted to affirm executions. But on occasion, they teamed
up to overturn death sentences for murderers whose guilt was never in doubt.
Instead, White and Limbaugh joined majority decisions in ruling that due to
inadequate counsel or legal missteps by trial judges, convicted killers were
entitled to new sentencing trials.
Yet according to the Ashcroft camp, White was rightfully denied a seat on the
federal bench simply because of one 1998 case, State vs. Johnson, in which he
wrote a lone dissent suggesting that cop-killer James Johnson deserved
another sentencing trial because of his attorneys' botched defense. That's
how White, in the words of Ashcroft, morphed into a "dangerous," "activist"
justice who "would use his lifetime [federal] appointment to push the law in
a pro-criminal direction." Since White has voted to affirm death sentences
roughly 70 percent of the time, that's a characterization almost no one
familiar with the Missouri Supreme Court would likely take seriously,
including Justice Limbaugh.
The fact is, if the new Ashcroft standard for federal judicial nominees were
adopted and opponents of nominees could simply cherry-pick one or two
opinions in which nominees voted to overturn death sentences in particularly
shocking, cold-blooded cases, Stephen Limbaugh Jr., the law-and-order
justice, might no longer be qualified for the federal bench.
On April 14, 1994, Leon Taylor robbed a gas station in Independence, Mo.
While Taylor's accomplice ran back to the car with $400 in a bag, Taylor took
the gas station manager and his 8-year-old stepdaughter to the station's
backroom. There he shot the manager once in the head, killing him, and then
aimed the gun at the girl only to have the trigger jam. Frustrated, he fled.
After Taylor was found guilty, his prosecutor told jurors they should "get
mad" during their penalty phase deliberations and decide the case based on
their emotions. Taylor's lawyer objected but was overruled. Upon review,
White and Limbaugh both agreed that the prosecutor stepped over the line with
his comments, and joined in a majority decision that "because the trial court
overruled defense counsel's objection to the argument, the appeal to emotion
had the stamp of judicial approval." They voted for a new penalty trial,
reasoning that "a reasonable probability exists that the jury would have
reached a different result without the improper argument."
A similar case arose in 1999's State vs. Rhodes, in which Bernard Rhodes
entered the house of 81-year-old Dorothy Martin on July 16, 1997, looking for
something to steal. He bound the old woman's legs and arms and then beat her.
Annoyed by her screams, he suffocated her by placing a plastic bag over her
head. He later confessed.
But his death sentence was appealed because Rhodes' prosecutor appealed to
jurors' emotions when he asked that they put themselves in the old woman's
shoes the day she was beaten and killed. White and Limbaugh agreed in the
majority opinion that "arguments for the death penalty designed to cause the
jury to abandon reason in favor of passion are improper" and reversed the
death sentence.
If Ronnie White is "pro-criminal," as Ashcroft insists, the judge has hid it
well. He wrote the unanimous Missouri Supreme Court decision upholding the
death sentence of career criminal James Henry Hampton. On the night of Aug.
2, 1992, Hampton, wearing dark clothing and a stocking cap over his face,
entered the home of a 58-year-old hairdresser and her fiancé, demanding
$30,000. Hampton forced her into his car and warned the fiancé that if news
of the kidnapping came over the police scanner he had in his car he would
kill the woman. Around 2 a.m., after hearing just such a dispatch over the
scanner, Hampton took the woman to a wooded area and killed her with several
hammer blows to the head.
Writing for the court, White, joined by Limbaugh, affirmed Hampton's
first-degree murder conviction. Hampton died in Missouri's death chamber last
March.
Maybe that's why Rush isn't talking.
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About the writer
Eric Boehlert is a senior writer at Salon.
http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/01/17/rush/print.html
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