“Thanks for the update, sounds like an intelligent judge.”
I must disagree. The decision shouldn’t have taken 5 minutes. The man is on his own property minding his business and not bothering anyone. Even IF he wasnt on his own property it is an open carry state. How can peaceably carrying a holstered gun on your own property be creating a disturbance. THE JUDGE IS A COMPLETE MORON. It is troubling that this OBVIOUSLY open and shut case should be so hard to decide.
The judge was not great, and he wasn’t bad. He is a municipal level judge, he did do his homework, he wanted to take time to spell out his reasoning because he was delivering an oral verdict rather than a more detailed, written, annotated verdict. The reason is that he knows this case is almost 100% guaranteed not to end with him. He just wanted to do enough due diligence and citing of case laws to show he has given the issue thought, and be able to give sufficient justification for his verdict. But he knew this was not going to be the final stop for this issue. He wants to make sure nobody can later come back and point to a poorly reasoned verdict by him and overturn him, and for that, I don’t blame him. He did his homework and he came to what most of us believe is the only correct decision he could have, given current Wisconsin law.
And it took more than five minutes. It was about 20-25 minutes worth of reasoning and the verdict.
Echoing Secret’s comments. A municipal judge is a political animal and all but the most secure will carefully weigh political as well as judicial factors. I’m not familiar with that locale in specific so I can’t judge (npi) how courageous a stand this might be, but I suspect he stuck his neck out a bit.