Posted on 12/08/2002 9:26:22 AM PST by vannrox
Is rhyme a crime of judicial decorum when people implore 'em?
Sunday, December 08, 2002
It seems more a question for Jerry Springer than for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
A 45-year-old multimillionaire meets a 17-year-old girl working in a ski shop. They begin a two-year courtship. He gives her a car, a couple of credit cards and sets her up in an apartment. Finally he proposes, handing her an engagement ring -- with a fake diamond.
They get married, but not before she signs a prenuptial agreement. She agrees that about all she'll keep after a divorce is $3,500 for each year of marriage, a car, insurance and her personal assets. Those include the engagement ring with a value the husband lists at 21 grand -- pretty steep for a cubic zirconium stone.
Despite this rock-solid foundation, the union crumbles after 10 years. Only then does the wife discover the truth. She files a petition to set aside the prenuptial agreement and get more dough. A trial court agrees. The state Superior Court affirms the lower court. Louis J. Porreco takes his appeal to the state Supreme Court.
Late last month, the high court decided that Susan J. Porreco had screwed up by trusting her husband's word.
"She had sufficient opportunity to inform herself fully of the nature and extent of her own assets, rather than rely on Louis' statements concerning the value of her holdings," Justice Sandra Schultz Newman wrote. "We find her failure to do this simple investigation unreasonable."
So the court let the prenuptial agreement stand. It did, however, order the case back to the Superior Court for review of another issue in the case.
I disagree with the decision. A man should be as good as his word. But that's not why I'm writing today. I'm writing because a couple of Supreme Court justices got their robes bunched up because one of their own also disagreed.
It wasn't Justice J. Michael Eakin's opinion that bothered Chief Justice Stephen A. Zappala Sr. and Justice Ralph Cappy, though. It was the way Eakin wrote his dissent, which began this way:
A groom must expect matrimonial pandemonium
when his spouse finds he's given her a cubic zirconium
Eakin is the rhyming judge. As a Superior Court judge, he wrote three opinions in rhyme. Eakin -- rhymes with bacon -- won election to the Supreme Court in November. Clearly, voters were not bothered by his penchant for verse.
She was 19, he was nearly 30 years older;
was it unreasonable for her to believe what he told her?
Given their history and Pygmalion relation,
I find her reliance was with justification . .
Or for every prenuptial is it now a must
that you treat your betrothed with presumptive mistrust?
These are just eight lines from a 28-line opinion, but you get the idea. Eakin was clear, concise and displayed some wit, three qualities that his colleagues apparently cannot abide.
"I write separately to address my grave concern that the filing of an opinion that expresses itself in rhyme reflects poorly on the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania," Zappala petulantly penned in his opinion concurring with Newman.
"My concern," added Cappy, "lies with the perception that litigants and the public at large might form when an opinion of this court is reduced to rhyme."
No, we can't have a judge saying anything clever, anything that anyone might easily understand. That's a clear and present danger to the commonwealth.
I called Eakin, of Mechanicsburg, to see if this meant the end of his rhyming days. He wouldn't comment, but said his relationship with Zappala and Cappy remained "very collegial."
When I mentioned that his critics were Democrats and he is the new Republican, he discounted that with a laugh.
"You'll notice none of the Republicans joined me, either."
I hope his humorless colleagues don't deter Eakin from the occasional verse. Given that a recent predecessor on the court, Justice Rolf Larsen, was convicted of conspiring to accept mood-altering drugs in the names of his employees, a little poetry seems a refreshing way to alter the court's mood.
Zappy and Cappy might be unhappy
With Eakin's cute little verse.
But in Pennsylvania we don't often blame
a guy until he does worse.
Yeah, I know that stinks. That only goes to show how good Eakin is.
The woman was "legal," I suppose, but she was all of 19 (17 when they met) against a 45-year old man. She might have known better but the guy is scum.
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