WHEELS OF JUSTICE: Kelly Rindfleisch’s petition for review before the U.S. Supreme Court is stalled with the high court on summer recess.
Posted on 08/12/2015 9:38:37 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
MADISON, Wisconsin — If Kelly Rindfleisch finally does receive justice at the U.S. Supreme Court, it will come after she completes her six-month sentence as the first — and hopefully last — political prisoner in Wisconsin’s secret John Doe investigation.
Rindfleisch, the former aide to Gov. Scott Walker when Walker was Milwaukee County executive, in June asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review her 2012 conviction on a charge of misconduct in office. She cited the highly questionable search-and-seizure practices of the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office.
As Wisconsin Watchdog reported last month, some of the brightest constitutional minds in the country — on the right and left — have filed amicus briefs urging the high court to review a criminal conviction they say is riddled with Fourth Amendment abuses and prosecutorial overreach.
There had been some hope that Rindfleisch could be released from custody while her appeal moved through the judicial process. Those hopes were quickly dashed.
With the U.S. Supreme Court on summer recess, there will be no further word on Rindfleisch’s petition until Oct. 5, when the court returns.
At that time the court will either deny the case, as it will do with hundreds of others that have accumulated over the summer, or, if at least one justice expresses interest in the case, the court will order the state to file a response to the petition. To date, the prosecutors have waived a response.
If the Supreme Court asks the prosecutors to reply it could open the door to further briefs in support or opposition to Rindfleisch’s petition, extending the clock. If that’s the case, it would be no earlier than Dec. 11 before the court rules on whether to take up Rindfleisch’s case.
While the odds are generally long against petitioners — the Supreme Court takes up about 2 percent of the petitions for review it receives — Rindfleisch’s Fourth Amendment case may be of keen interest to the high court. There certainly are unsettled areas of law involving police searches and seizures in the Digital Age.
“Does the Fourth Amendment permit a search warrant authorizing the unfettered seizure of all of an individual’s emails from her internet service provider for a specified period of time, without limiting the seizure to communications containing evidence of a crime?” poses Rindfleisch’s petition.
Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, a Democrat, launched the probe; in 2012 it expanded into a multi-county dragnet into Walker’s campaign and dozens of conservative activist organizations.
No one in the investigation into the conservative groups was charged with wrongdoing, and multiple judges have rejected the prosecutors’ theory the right-of-center groups engaged in illegal coordination with Walker’s campaign.
Rindfleisch, Chisholm’s political prize in the first phase of the probe, began serving her six-month sentence in April.
Chisholm used wide-ranging warrants approved by the John Doe judge to go through tens of thousands of Rindfleisch’s professional and personal digital communications beginning in 2010. The DA’s office found the aide, who was also working for the campaign of Republican lieutenant governor candidate Brett Davis at the time, responded to campaign emails at her government job.
Rindfleisch has said prosecutors threatened her with lengthy prison time if she didn’t give them incriminating information on Walker. She had no information to give, and they charged her with a felony.
Rindfleisch immediately appealed her conviction in 2012, saying prosecutors violated her Fourth Amendment rights through general warrant searches. A state appeals court last year upheld the conviction on a 2-to-1 vote, with the dissenting judge concluding the prosecutor’s search was overly broad and unconstitutional.
Because Rindfleisch was not the original target of the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office’s John Doe investigation into a theft of a veterans fund, Rindfleisch’s petition before the U.S. Supreme Court alleges the state appeals court allowed a “meandering” search that allows “investigators to seize and search every email (an individual has) sent, received, or deleted over an extended period.”
Erwin Chemerinsky, founding dean and distinguished professor of First Amendment law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, is one of three constitutional law experts who has collectively filed a friend of the court brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review Rindfleisch’s case.
Chemerinsky’s involvement should give pause to left-wing cheerleaders of the lengthy and very political John Doe probe.
The eminent law professor has “for decades been a prominent liberal public intellectual and litigator, and he has written scores of opinion articles taking liberal positions,” according to a New York Times article in 2007.
Chemerinsky adds his voice to a chorus of legal professionals, on the right and left, critical of the tactics used by prosecutors of the secret probe.
Last month, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, in a 4-2 ruling, ended the John Doe investigation, with the majority opinion denouncing the probe of “citizens who were wholly innocent of any wrongdoing.”
Among the lineup of Rindfleish petition supporters are the Cato Institute and the DKT Liberty Project, jointly filing a friend-of-the court brief in the case.
“The reason this is so dangerous a precedent for police searches of electronic information is because it means that anybody who has gotten an email from any individual suspected of a crime is at risk of having all of their communications collected and reviewed by law enforcement,” AC Bushnell, program director of the Liberty Project told Wisconsin Reporter said Monday on the Vicki McKenna Show.
WHEELS OF JUSTICE: Kelly Rindfleisch’s petition for review before the U.S. Supreme Court is stalled with the high court on summer recess.
Justice delayed is justice denied.
FReep Mail me if you want on, or off, this Wisconsin interest ping list.
. . . when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism . . .
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