Posted on 11/07/2013 3:54:05 PM PST by neverdem
An appeals court rightly throws a biased judge off the city’s policing lawsuit.
The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals has confirmed what was already apparent to disinterested observers of the policing battles in New York City: the federal judge who ruled against the New York Police Department in August is deeply biased. U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin declared that the NYPD’s stop, question, and frisk practices were deliberately targeted against innocent black and Hispanic New Yorkers. That opinion rested on patent lies against the department and a profound ignorance of policing and crime. But as I argued earlier this year, and as the Second Circuit just corroborated, Scheindlin never should have had the case, Floyd v. New York, in the first place.
Scheindlin had encouraged the Center for Constitutional Rights to file Floyd and promised to take jurisdiction over it under the doctrine of the “related case”: If a judge is already hearing a case on one particular topic, he can take jurisdiction over a subsequently filed case on the same topic with similar facts and parties, thus circumventing the usual random assignment for cases. But when Scheindlin took jurisdiction over Floyd, there was no extant stop, question, and frisk case before her to which Floyd was related. Her assumption of jurisdiction was a power grab, pure and simple, intended to prolong her hold over the NYPD. She used that grip to the max, installing a federal monitor over the department, who reports to her, to implement her spurious idea that policing should mirror population demographics rather than the incidence of crime.
The Second Circuit has now removed Scheindlin from the case on the ground that her encouragement to file Floyd, as well as several interviews she gave to the press during the trial, compromised the appearance of judicial impartiality. It is impossible to overstate the humiliation of such a rare rebuke. The appellate court’s action casts doubt on all of Scheindlin’s rulings, not just in Floyd, but in the other two stop, question, and frisk cases over which she has grabbed jurisdiction.
New York mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio, predicted to win City Hall next Tuesday, has yoked himself to Scheindlin’s and the Center for Constitutional Rights’ calumnies against the NYPD; he has promised to drop the city’s appeal of Floyd v. New York and to curtail radically the NYPD’s stop practices. New Yorkers have one last opportunity to reconsider their support for de Blasio and to ensure that New York remains the safest big city in the country.
And as is often the case depending on the rules of the jurisdiction, many lawyers in the district will file motions for the judge’s recusal in many cases, to the point where the smooth flow of the caseload will be adversely impacted because it will throw the workload onto the other judges.
I don’t know if that will happen here, but I know it has happened elsewhere, especially if the rules of court allow an attorney one free opportunity to dismiss a judge within a short time after assignment of the judge to the case.
If none of the lawyers will allow the judge to sit on a case, they end up in small claims court.
The law needs to be thrown out, but not on spurious racial discrimination grounds. It needs to be thrown out on simple 4th amendment grounds.
I agree. the 4th is as clear as the 2nd and Stop and Frisk is clearly unconstitutional.
Exactly. The only question that matters is whether they’re stopping people because they have a reasonable belief that the people they’re stopping are involved in criminal activity. And it’s clear that they’re not. That’s all that matters - all the nonsense about racial profiling, etc., is irrelevant, but that doesn’t mean the program is justified or legal.
That’s a damn hard ridden 67 year old, are we sure she hasn’t fudged her age by a decade...or two. She looks like a poster child for the stoned in that picture. I have to say that it sucks living in California, but thank God I don’t live in New York.
Thanks neverdem.
Does it use common sense to target those most likely to commit violent crime? Yes.
Is it unconstitutional? Yes
My fear is that if it is upheld that it will leak out of that cesspool NYC and contaminate the free states.
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