Thursday, July 23, 2009
Motion for Review in U.S.A. v. Whitfield
I got this yesterday, but didn't get a chance to post it until today. Jackson attorney Melissa Selman Martin has filed a Motion for Review of the District Court's Denial of Release Pending Appeal on behalf of former Circuit Judge John Whitfield, who was convicted along with Paul Minor and former Chancellor Wes Teel in a judicial bribery prosecution. The appeal seems to have garnered considerable attention from the 5th Circuit, which has twice asked for supplemental briefing. The language of the Motion is fairly strident, and may not rub Judge Wingate the right way. We'll see. There's a good synopsis of the Minor-Diaz-Whitfield-Teel matter at the start of the Motion, and a well-developed section on the law surrounding release pending appeal in federal cases.
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6 comments:
This whole "Minor et al was politically prosecuted" has been a house built on sand.
They hire a PR guy to get stories done. Then they use the PR basis to get a congressional inquiry (purely political on the D side). Then they point to the congressional inquiry to support their appeal. But no one has shown one shred of actual evidence that anything untoward happened with regards to their prosecution. It's all circumstantial, black-helicopter stuff.
HOWEVER, there is a trainload of evidence that they violated the law AND their oaths as lawyers. That is something that all the fancy PR and political stringpulling in the world won't matter to real jurists.
The language of the Motion is fairly strident, and may not rub Judge Wingate the right way.
And this should be a concern, why? The 5th Circuit is considering this motion and they have heard far worse about Judge Wingate in this appeal.
Slabbed provides some background in its article on this motion.
http://slabbed.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/whitfield-appeal-provides-timely-review-of-law-re-judicial-bribery-usa-v-minor/
HOWEVER, there is a trainload of evidence that they violated the law AND their oaths as lawyers. That is something that all the fancy PR and political stringpulling in the world won't matter to real jurists.
Yeah, I guess that is why the 5th circuit has requested supplemental briefing twice. Speaking of briefs, have you read any of them? Quick quiz, no looking now, how many pages of briefs have been filed in the 5th Circuit by the appellants?
Anon@3:19, the tightrope every appellate lawyer must walk is:
(1) get the attention of the appeals court and make them address the injustice to your client; but
(2) preserve the possibility of a favorable resolution in the trial court, where the case is likely to be returned.
There is always the possibility that the 5th Circuit will render a judgment of acquittal for the defendants in this case. But it is far more likely that -- if the case is reversed at all -- it will go right back to Chief Judge Wingate for re-trial.
I assume that Mr. Whitfield -- who was a Circuit Judge at one time -- thought through those concerns before filing the motion. To me, it means he does not think his chances on the present briefing are very good.
There is always the possibility that the 5th Circuit will render a judgment of acquittal for the defendants in this case. But it is far more likely that -- if the case is reversed at all -- it will go right back to Chief Judge Wingate for re-trial.
May I suggest you use Pacer and print out a copy of the briefs filed in this case. The briefs enumerate, in great detail, the many mistakes made by the trial judge. The failures as outlined in the motion are nothing in comparison to the failures outlined in the briefs filed by all three appellants. You may want to listen to the Oral Argument that was had on April 1.
http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/OralArgumentRecordings.aspx
Anon@4:14: I wasn't referring to that part of the previous post. I was responding to the question:
And this should be a concern, why? The 5th Circuit is considering this motion and they have heard far worse about Judge Wingate in this appeal.
To me, although the Court may have "heard far worse" one would still weigh each new motion with respect to the concerns I mentioned previously.
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