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Briefs are to be filed by February 7th, en banc argument (that is, before the entire court) on February 9th, and the lower court proceeding before Judge Green is stayed. I have never heard of an en banc argument set just over a week out! Tom Fortner seems to have got their attention. Update: [...]  Another Justice Court judge came before the Mississippi Supreme Court for misconduct. This one had been previosuly sanctioned, and so this time out, gets a thirty day suspension for not following the law in a way that wasn’t just mistaken, ex parte contact with parties, and generally interfering with cases either not before him [...] Brian Holleman was convicted of murder in Columbus. During closing argument, the prosecutor Forrest Allgood* made a flagrant “Golden Rule” argument, with the trial court ignoring repeated objections. A Golden Rule argument asks the jury to put themselves in the position of one of the other parties, and is improper because of the way [...] Ratliff v. Beale, 20 So. 865 (1896), the Mississippi Supreme Court case quoted in my last post, is a case of breathtaking honesty. Not in a good way. There are two passages which are particularly striking that I want to post here. The lawsuit seems to have been a set-up. On the one side, you have J.A.P. Campbell working with the state AG. Campbell was a congressman during the Confederacy and served for years on the Mississippi Supreme Court; he was considered one of the better justices on the court in the late 19th Century. On the other side, you have S. S. Calhoon, J. Z. George, and Frank Johnston. That would be James Zachariah George, who became one of Mississippi’s US Senators at the end of reconstruction, and was as prominent as lawyers and politicians got. He was at the 1890 constitutional convention and involved in the legal defenses of that constitution. S.S. Calhoon was the president of the 1890 convention and was within a couple of years on the Mississippi Supreme Court, writing well enough to be quoted over a hundred years later. The dispute was over the seizure of a piece of furniture by the Hinds County tax collector. Seriously. The tax collector (represented by Campbell and the Attorney General) had seized ”an article of household furniture,” by law exempt from taxation, to cover payment of a tax due; the property owner, represented by George and Calhoon, sought and obtained a permanent injunction against proceeding against the property. They appealed on agreed facts.
What was all this legal talent doing in a fight over a chair or the like? When nothing really was in factual dispute?
Here’s the statement of facts, in full: In September 2007, Judge Bustin executed a felony arrest warrant for David C. Lema, charging him with kidnapping his own child. The warrant was based upon an affidavit filed by Lema’s ex-wife, who claimed primary physical custody of the child. Judge Bustin, who is a licensed attorney, [...] In January, the Fifth Circuit certified a legal question to the Mississippi Supreme Court in Sears v. Learmonth: We hereby certify, on Sears’ unopposed motion, the following determinative question of law to the Supreme Court of Mississippi: Is Section 11-1-60(2) of the Mississippi Code, which generally limits non-economic damages to $1 million in civil cases, [...] I. First, a quick puzzlement. Justice Pierce’s majority opinion in the personhood amendment case has much to say about distinctions between form and substance. He writes: Form and substance are separable, because content relates to what composed something (i.e., the different fibers that together form cloth), whereas form involves appearance or shape [...] Alcorn County justice court judge Jimmy McGee intereferred in several ways with a criminal prosecution, culminating in a sentencing hearing in which he vowed to resort to, uh, self-help rather than await the criminal process should any future similar incident arise. The Mississippi Supreme Court did not accept the Judicial Performance commission recommendation [...] At a sentencing hearing in a case where a member of his family was an alleged victim, Justice Court Judge Jimmy McGee had this to say: I could assure you that if anything like this ever happened to anybody that I know, my advice to them would be do not use the court, handle [...] The AP is reporting two judicial misconduct cases to be submitted at the Mississippi Supreme Court, one involving a justice court judge and the other (submitted tomorrow without argument) involving Circuit Judge Albert Smith from the district over in the Delta that runs from Bolivar up to Tunica County. Judge Smith and the Judicial Performance [...] |
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