Various legal conundrums and bad reporting

First rule of appellate clerking: Don't spend in excess of five hours working on something if the trial court hasn't addressed it first. I can assure that I won't do that again.

Since a lot of legal stuff has been on the news as of late, I thought I would comment on two or three recent articles that caught my attention. Some thoughts on Blackwater and the Genarlow Wilson case appear at the end of this entry.

The first is the one that said "U.S. Supreme Court lets Liz Taylor keep van Gogh painting." Well, this caught my attention for the obvious reasons. Unfortunately (or fortunately for the advertising cookies that were deposited into my cache), the article title is very misleading, at least from a court perspective. First, as the article reports, the U.S. Supreme Court didn't do anything but deny cert. While the effect is the same, as any lawyer knows, the denial of cert. doesn't mean anything except that the circuit court ruling is upheld. I need not dwell on this point further other than to express my disappointment that I was duped into clicking onto the article

Second, this whole Blackwater thing. See Immunity Deal Hampers Blackwater Inquiry. While I am not working on anything to do with this particular case, there may be some issues involved that could intersect with various things I am working on, so in a public forum and to remain consistent with my other posts and current commentary dialog, I will simply state that the Blackwater contracts as reported throughout the news are certainly interesting on all legal and academic levels. Personally, I think that mercenaries have been used in wars since Roman times, so I'm not sure exactly how, if at all, this issue can be resolved.

Third, and this is the most interesting case from an appellate court standpoint. Genarlow Wilson of Georgia got caught up in a legal nightmare surrounding a party he went to as a teenager. Although it looked like it was finally over back in June, the State of Georgia decided to appeal. After years of fighting the good fight, justice has finally prevailed and the Georgia Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, let him go. See Genarlow Wilson: Plea Deal would have left me without a home and the WSJ's Blog regarding that the voided sentence. I'm not sure I would call this "real, strange news" as the WSJ columnist suggests. In fact, I'm not endorsing the coverage of either of these articles. The Atlanta Journal Constitution does a pretty good job covering it, but the link to what you are looking for is right here, and you can read it for yourself. Wilson v. State. The Supreme Court of Georgia also posts their own press release about it. Read both and judge for yourself.

I will reserve any comment about it because I haven't read the opinion, but from my own following of the case, I would suspect that the court reached the correct result. By contrast, I will state that the whole "evolving standards of decency" standard is too mushy for my liking, and the mushiness appears to have helped Wilson win his argument. I guess in a few months, the whole world will know out how exactly the Framer's intended "cruel and unusual" to mean. Enough for now.

Tags: genarlow wilson, genarlow wilson case, blackwater loopholes, cruel and unusual standard, evolving standards of decency standard, liz taylor van gogh