Ninth Circuit Reaches New Heights of Idiocy

You are looking at the grand corridor on the first floor of the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. When it was first opened as a replacement for the old Post Office, it was called by Sunset Magazine the most magnificent public building in America. But beauty is only skin deep. It is the most frequently reversed Court of Appeals in the country, with reversals totaling nearly as many as all the other Circuits combined.

Like a wounded pigeon arising from the ashes, the building was spared destructive damage in the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, and after reconstruction and remodeling as a courthouse, the building has become the preeminent whited sepulcher of the law in America. Bookies have stopped taking bets on Ninth Circuit rulings which will be overturned at the United States Supreme Court since everybody knows the odds of that occurring are extremely high.

The most recent dangerous nonsense came recently as part of a Ninth Circuit Social Engineers reversal of a conviction in the brutal rape and murder of a 72 year old woman in Sacramento. The reason for the reversal? Racism, what else? The vicious murderer is black, the victim was white, and the jury was [largely] white. But it isn't the obvious agenda of the liberal judges on the court that is noteworthy. It's the utterly crazed reasoning they used to reverse the trial court conviction.

You see, there were no facts at issue on appeal. Only the arcane lawyering of leftist lawyers and judicial stooges. All the evidence, including substantial DNA evidence, convicted career violent criminal Steven Frank Jackson. Since it was Jackson's third conviction of a violent felony, he was sentenced to 100 years to life in prison. Even the sentence wasn't appealed, only the conviction. And that was based solely on the racial makeup of the jury. Felkner v. Jackson, 10-797.

Once again, even that might have a slight ring of truth to it if it weren't for the arguments the lawyers used on appeal. Here's the Alice-in-Wonderland reasoning. The District Attorney had three black people in the jury panel. Of the three, he challenged two, but allowed the third to be seated. The prosecutor dismissed one of the black potential jurors after he answered that he had experienced repeated police harassment over his lifetime. Aha, that must be it! Well, no. The juror that the prosecutor accepted answered the same question the same way. I should mention that the defendant's appellate lawyers had no serious problem with the prosecutor dismissing the third black person, a woman with a degree in social work. However, she was brought up in the appeal because it turned out that the prosecutor was in error since he always dismisses social workers and it turned out the prospective juror was not a social worker, though she does hold the degree.

For sane people with normal reasoning ability, the fact that one black man was dismissed and another with almost identical qualifications and responses was agreeable to the prosecution would be sufficient to dispel any concept that the dismissal was based on race and hostility toward the police. Not in the wonderful world of the Ninth Circuit. The court stated that the record reflected "different treatment of similarly situated individuals." Huh? If you think that's an unreasonable stretch of illogic, you need to know how the court explained it. Oh, wait, the court didn't explain it. What it did was throw a legal non sequitur into the ring, then based its decision on it. The statement is correct, but what the hell does it explain? Nothing. Why would it be grounds for a reversal? Who knows?

The United States Supreme Court reviewed the case. It found multiple fatal errors in the Ninth Circuit's ruling. But it summed up the Ninth Circuit's ruling in one quick word--"inexplicable." That was far too kind. In the body of the unanimous reversal of the Ninth Circuit and reinstatement of the lower court rulings, the high court held that the trial judge found that the prosecutor had very adequately explained his reasons for accepting or dismissing jurors, and that both the California Court of Appeal and the state Supreme Court had found no error. The unanimous decision means that even wise Latina Sotomayor and senile Ginsburg couldn't find anything wrong with the state's case.

The high court made it clear that it did not appreciate federal courts taking jurisdiction of state cases where there were already clear findings on constitutional issues. It also indicated its distaste for the imperial federal judiciary making up nonsensical rules ad hoc by holding that: "There was simply no basis for the Ninth Circuit to reach the opposite conclusion [from the state courts], particularly in such a dismissive manner (emphasis added). And if that doesn't grab your attention, remember that Barack Obama's nominees for the Ninth Circuit bench are to the left of the current court.