17 Comments
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OnyxTay's avatar

Sure sounds like they tried to punish everyone who defended trans rights & could barely get a couple attacks to land.

I'm sure the court will do something legitimate & led by sound legal principles, not malice. When has our justice system behaved in a way that history regards as shameful, especially towards minorities?

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Piper Zappa's avatar

Japanese internment, jim crow, the dred scott case, the forced sterilization of indigenous and Latin Americans during operations with slurs in their names...

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David J. Sharp's avatar

Eugenics! Plessy v. Ferguson! The hits keep comin’ on.

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Desmond Daly's avatar

Really outstanding work Chris. Don't know how you manage to cover this while documenting all the Big Bad Law collapsing on top of us, but this story needs attention. Sanctions AND a felony charge for a momentary memory lapse? Reads like Gender Identity Jim Crow justice.

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Kent's avatar

Seems at best very petty and trivial, like maybe they’re out of regular crimes in central AL, at worst anti-trans.

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Jacobs-Meadway Roberta's avatar

The anti-trans part is the message to lawyers, I have little doubt

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Shelley Powers's avatar

I remember this. This was an obvious attempt to intimidate civil rights legal teams from defending anyone in the LGBTQ+ community, in general, and the trans community, specifically. Even the whole concept of judge shopping after what we've seen in Texas...

And this made up charge on the flimsiest pretext...do we even have a Constitution now? Do we have any rights other than what the right allows?

We have to fix more than just SCOTUS.

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b_e_calif's avatar

Thanks for your reply. At the time, I wondered if, by refusing to defend Burke's actions, the district court got the case to the Eleventh Circuit early, which kind of looks like judge shopping. After rereading, I'm not sure that's the case. Is the (possible) resulting advantage that Burke got his own lawyer and the other judges don't have to worry about defending him?

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David J. Sharp's avatar

Disgusting. Trump needs his scapegoats - trans people to distract from pedophilia - like the National Socialists needed Jews.

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Doug Tarnopol's avatar

Lawfare. A bunch of vile scum.

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b_e_calif's avatar

Are they . . . judge shopping by attempting to bypass the district court with regards to the appeal?

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Chris Geidner's avatar

No. The "judge-shopping" allegation is tangential to the charge so I didn't go into detail here, but I added a note up top to clarify that there are earlier links — earlier Law Dork reports — explaining all of that if you are interested.

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David J. Sharp's avatar

Or are the Trumpards jurisdiction-shopping?

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Emmet Bondurant's avatar

As I recall, in a grand jury proceeding, if a witness corrects a previous answer that was false in the same appearance before the grand jury, that correction precludes a subsequent prosecution for perjury. Am I wrong?

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CR Gandl's avatar

So, only conservatives are allowed to judge shop and forget things??

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Shelley Powers's avatar

So only conservatives are allowed...yeah, you can stop right there and paste this in relation to any news item nowadays.

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Zach's avatar

This

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