Judicial smackdown time

­“We now share Cardozo’s belief that an opin­ion may not be the worse for being light­ened by a smile.”

— Judge George R. Smith

“Law is like a book of surgery — there are a great many ter­ri­ble cases in it.”

— Law and Laugh­ter, 1913

Judges are sup­posed to be staid, calm and emo­tion­less beings who lis­ten atten­tively to the evi­dence and then issue a well-reasoned and bal­anced opin­ion. Most of the time, that’s what they strive to do. But judges are peo­ple and they are sub­ject to the same emo­tions and frus­tra­tions that we all are. Some­times those frus­tra­tions boil over into their writ­ten deci­sions and they can­not help but issue a judi­cial “smackdown.”

This week came two of the snarki­est judi­cial orders you’ll ever see. These were cases where the behav­ior of one of the par­ties was so extreme or the foun­da­tion of their case so obvi­ously friv­o­lous that the judges could not refrain from edi­to­ri­al­iz­ing in their writ­ten decisions.

In a Texas case, a law­suit had been filed by the mother of a for­mer high school cheer­leader. It seems that her daugh­ter and another, older girl on the team had got­ten into a dis­pute that cen­tered around a boy that they both liked. The older girl was the cap­tain of the squad (and the alleged boyfriend-stealer). The younger girl failed to make the cut for the var­sity squad the fol­low­ing year. What’s a mom to do in that circumstance?

Make a fed­eral case out it, apparently.

The mother of the younger girl filed a fed­eral civil rights action against the school. Her case was dis­missed by the fed­eral trial court and she appealed. A sim­ple find­ing that the case was with­out merit would have suf­ficed, but Judge Jerry Smith was so out­raged that the case had been brought at all and at the expense of the pub­lic school dis­trict that had to defend it, he editorialized.

His first para­graph set the tone, “Reduced to its essen­tials, this is noth­ing more than a dis­pute, fueled by a dis­grun­tled cheer­leader mom, over whether her daugh­ter should have made the squad. It is a petty squab­ble, mas­querad­ing as a civil rights mat­ter that has no place in fed­eral court or any other court.” Report­ing on the case, the Dal­las Observer noted that the lawsuit’s basic com­plaints included that the school failed to remove the other cheer­leader after she admit­ted to kiss­ing the plaintiff’s daughter’s boyfriend; that the way dances were chore­o­graphed was unfair; that the cheer­lead­ing ban­quet was set on a day the plaintiff’s daugh­ter could not attend; and that other par­ents threat­ened to sue the plain­tiff because she refused to return cheer­lead­ing videos that did not belong to her.

The court then under­took a very seri­ous and well-reasoned 24-page review of the facts and law. In par­tic­u­lar, the Court cited one pas­sage of the appeal that was sim­ply unin­tel­li­gi­ble. In a foot­note the Court stated, “Usu­ally we do not com­ment on tech­ni­cal and gram­mat­i­cal errors, because any­one can make such an occa­sional mis­take, but here the mis­cues are so egre­gious and obvi­ous that an aver­age fourth grader would have avoided most of them. The sen­tence con­tain­ing the word ‘incom­pe­tence’ makes no sense as a mat­ter of stan­dard Eng­lish prose, so it is not rea­son­ably pos­si­ble to under­stand the thought, if any, that is being con­veyed. It is ironic that the term ‘incom­pe­tence’ is used here, because the only thing that is incom­pe­tent is the pas­sage itself.”

Not to be out­done, the Fed­eral Dis­trict Court in Wash­ing­ton D.C. had to deal with a case in which the plain­tiff repeat­edly failed to com­ply with a rule that requires all but the final four dig­its of Social Secu­rity num­bers to be removed from doc­u­ments filed with the court. The plaintiff’s first fil­ing included the entire num­bers. Her sec­ond fil­ing cor­rectly removed them. Her third fil­ing put them back in again. Her fourth fil­ing left in the first five, but removed the last four — the oppo­site of what the rule requires. Then she claimed that the court clerk was delib­er­ately sab­o­tag­ing her case. At that point, the judge had had enough. He issued an order that con­tained the not-so-judicious state­ment, “wast­ing the court’s time with this non­sense is not the way for plain­tiff to have any hope of pre­vail­ing in this case” and the even more blunt, “Plain­tiff is either toy­ing with the court or dis­play­ing her own stupidity.”

Nei­ther of these deci­sions tops the best exer­cise of judi­cial frus­tra­tion in Amer­i­can his­tory. That dis­tinc­tion remains with fed­eral judge Gre­gory Pres­nell of Florida. In 2006, he had a case where the par­ties couldn’t even set­tle on where to meet to hold depo­si­tions. After they had filed repeated motions about that sim­ple issue he ordered the lawyers to meet, Wild-West shootout style, on the steps of the cour­t­house. Why? Rock-Paper-Scissors. Best two out of three. Win­ner gets to pick the depo­si­tion location.

David Hej­manowski is a mag­is­trate and court admin­is­tra­tor of the Delaware County Juve­nile Court and a for­mer assis­tant pros­e­cut­ing attorney.

Posted by Dave Hejmanowski on Jul 28 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.