Easy Come, Easy Go

Posted on January 3, 2008 by Michael Froomkin

Looks like Orin may have to wait for that beer: I'm not going to the AALS after all, but instead am at home, felled by some horrible stomach bug.

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One Response to Easy Come, Easy Go

  1. anon says:
    January 4, 2008 at 9:32 pm

    Sorry to hear about your stomach bug :-(. Unfortunately, it appears you have much worse problems in Florida right now.

    If we believe Vanessa Blum’s January 3, 2008 report in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, “Gag order raises questions in Liberty City terror retrial”, then U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard has lost her mind.

    According to the article, Judge Lenard has decreed a “sweeping gag order”, which extends not only to the one defendant who was acquitted in the first trial, but also to his lawyers, and to his wife. From the article:

    “This is supposed to be America,” [one Miami criminal defense attorney] said. ‘Once you’re acquitted, it seems to me you should be able to stand on top of the tallest building and scream it.”

    […]

    Jamin Raskin, a law professor who teaches First Amendment issues at American University in Washington, D.C., said a gag order extending to the wife of an acquitted defendant might go too far.

    “That seems to tug very strongly against First Amendment principles,” Raskin said.

    ‘Tugging strongly against the First Amendment’ seems to be an early contender for understatement of the year. I’d put this the class of utterly unconstitutional. Manifestly unconstitional.

    The judge’s supposed “need to damp down media coverage” does not justify a prior restraint against the never-charged wife of a now-acquitted person.

    Judge Lenard has obviously lost her mind. If she doesn’t agree to resign voluntarily, then I think she needs to be impeached: The articles of impeachment should charge the common misdemeanor of lunacy.

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