Andrew Shirvell Loses Job as Assistant Attorney General

I wrote about this idiot a few days ago.  Here is the update.

Andrew Shirvell has been fired from his job as a Michigan assistant state attorney general, his attorney said this afternoon.

Shirvell was fired for using state resources for his campaign against University of Michigan student body President Chris Armstrong and for lying to investigators during his disciplinary hearing, Attorney General Mike Cox said in a statement.

Shirvell was called before the attorney general’s staff at 1:30 p.m. today, said Philip Thomas, Shirvell’s attorney.

“The only reason they gave was the fact that they felt his actions had made it impossible for him to continue in his role,” Thomas said.

Shirvell has been under fire for weeks for comments he made about Armstrong, who is openly gay. Shirvell has shown up at public events to condemn Armstrong’s “radical homosexual agenda.”

In a written statement, Cox said Shirvell was fired for "conduct unbecoming a state employee, especially that of an assistant attorney general."

"To be clear, I refuse to fire anyone for exercising their First Amendment rights, regardless of how popular or unpopular their positions might be," Cox said in the statement. "However, Mr. Shirvell repeatedly violated office policies, engaged in borderline stalking behavior, and inappropriately used state resources, our investigation showed.

Cox's investigation into Shirvell showed he:

• Showed up at Armstrong's home three separate times, including once at 1:30 a.m. "That incident is especially telling because it clearly was about harassing Mr. Armstrong, not engaging in free speech," the statement said.
• "Engaged in behavior that, while not perhaps sufficient to charge criminal stalking, was harassing, uninvited and showed a pattern that was in the everyday sense, stalking."
• Harassed Armstrong's friends as they were socializing in Ann Arbor.
• Called Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office, Armstrong's employer, in an attempt to "slander Armstrong and ultimately attempting to cause Pelosi to fire Armstrong.
• Attempted to "out" Armstrong's friends as homosexual — several of whom aren't gay.

The investigation found Shirvell engaged in his campaign on company time, Cox said. Shirvell called Pelosi's office while at work, during working hours, and sometimes posted online attacks about Armstrong while at work, the statement said.

In addition, Cox's statement said, Shirvell lied to investigating assistant attorneys general on several occasions during his disciplinary hearing.

"The cumulative effects of his use of state resources, harassing conduct that is not protected by the First Amendment, and his lies during the disciplinary conference all demonstrate adequate evidence of conduct unbecoming a state employee," the statement said. "Ultimately, Mr. Shirvell's conduct has brought his termination from state service."

Shirvell met for four hours on Friday with a panel made up of officials from the Attorney General’s Office. Shirvell has claimed his actions were both protected by Constitutional rights of free speech and were conducted away from his work on off-hours.

“I think it’s most unfortunate,” Thomas said. “This whole thing has a political aroma to me. I think my client is a victim of the liberal media piling on. In the first stories about this, (Attorney General Mike Cox) was quoted as saying that my client was doing this on his own time. What’s changed since then?”

The panel that conducted the hearing gave a summary to Cox, who decided to fire Shirvell, Cox’s spokesman, John Sellek, said in an e-mail.

"I think it's great that he was finally fired," said U-M third-year student Martell Lyons. "He really was abusing his position and I think he was stalking (Armstrong). I wish this would have happened sooner."

After Friday’s hearing, Thomas said he and Shirvell were expecting to come back before the panel on Tuesday or Wednesday. However, Thomas said he had a message on his office’s answering machine on Saturday, moving the time of the hearing up to today.

“I’m not sure what happened between Friday afternoon and Saturday,” Thomas said, adding he'll be consulting with his client on the next steps.

Shirvell has successfully appealed a University of Michigan order that barred him from any U-M owned property. The U-M Department of Public Safety modified the order last week.

But Shirvell stills faces complaints before the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission. Armstrong and his attorney, Deborah Gordon, have asked the commission to disbar Shirvell.

Gordon issued a statement today praising the firing. She also said she and Armstrong are pushing forward with their request to have Shirvell disbarred on the basis that he is not fit to be licensed to practice law, and said they continue to consider additional legal options.

"This clearly is the correct decision by the Attorney General's Office," Gordon said in her statement. "The next step must be a complete retraction of all the malicious lies and fabrications by Mr. Shirvell, and a public apology to Chris Armstrong, his family and the others Mr. Shirvell has slandered.

"It is past time for Shirvell to realize that there are consequences for his reckless, outrageous statements and actions and that he is solely responsible for those consequences."

David Jesse covers higher education for AnnnArbor.com. He can be reached atdavidjesse@annarbor.com or at 734-623-2534.

Student Loans are a pain but this pleading is probably over the top (Language Warning!!)

Ass Clown Petition

Don't Be a False Friend, Especially in New York

Okay, in New York, according to a new New York State Bar Association ethics opinion, you can gather information on adverse parties in litigation from their publicly accessible social media pages.  Just don't try "friending" them (or friending them by proxy) to do it.  Here's the opinion (PDF).  By the way, the Philadelphia Bar, which should really know the meaning of Friends, agrees.  

American Bar Association Recalls 230,000 Defective Lawyers

Solo Who Made Obscene Gesture Before Judge Loses Appeal

Ok so you can't do this!!

Adam Reposa, the Austin, Texas, criminal defense solo who made a gesture simulating masturbation toward a prosecutor while standing before Travis County Court-at-Law No. 6 Judge Jan Breland, faces 90 days in jail. In an 8-1 decision Wednesday, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied Reposa's application for a writ of habeas corpus in his contempt case.

Judge Lawrence Meyers, the lone dissenter in Ex Parte Adam Reposa, did not write an opinion. The CCA's unpublished opinion, written by Judge Paul Womack, presents the following summary of Breland's testimony at Reposa's contempt hearing: On March 11, 2008, Reposa appeared as counsel for a defendant in a criminal case in Breland's court. Breland asked Reposa to stop whispering to his client while she was trying to explain a plea offer to the client. After the prosecutor, Assistant County Attorney Bill Swaim, protested about Reposa's continued whispering, Reposa made the simulated masturbation gesture toward the prosecutor while looking at Breland.

Acting on Swaim's motion, Breland held Reposa in contempt. Senior Judge Paul Davis of Austin, sitting by assignment, subsequently found Reposa guilty of contempt and sentenced him to 90 days in jail. Reposa appealed to the CCA on June 2, 2008. The CCA had set bail for Reposa pending the disposition of his case.

In its decision Wednesday, the CCA overruled Reposa's five issues challenging the judgment of contempt and sentence. With regard to Reposa's challenge to the sufficiency of the evidence, Womack wrote for the majority, "Regardless of the fact that the gesture was not directed at Judge Breland, it nevertheless was a purposeful act of disrespect and an affront to the dignity of the court. As such, it rises to the level of criminal contempt."

Swaim declines comment on the CCA's decision.

When told of the CCA's decision, Reposa said, "Oh well." When asked what happens next, Reposa says he doesn't know. "I need to talk to my lawyer," he says.

Karyl Krug, who represents Reposa in the habeas corpus writ application, says she is surprised the CCA issued an unpublished opinion in a case involving issues of first impression. As noted in the CCA's opinion, Reposa had argued that the case was one of first impression because of the "extreme ‘extraneousness'" of evidence presented at the contempt hearing, including the introduction of Whoopsy!, a magazine distributed in Austin night clubs that featured an apparently satirical ad by a lawyer identified as "Bulletproof, the DWI stud." Reposa identifies himself as Adam "Bulletproof" Reposa on the State Bar of Texas Web site.

Krug says Reposa can file a motion for rehearing with the CCA but that there has been no decision to do so. Travis County Attorney David Escamilla says, "The real take-away from this legal saga goes beyond what happens to this lawyer. It's a sobering reminder to our profession that the standards of decorum in our courts apply to everyone -- defendants, victims, witnesses and lawyers."

NPR talks about Michigan Court Appointed Criminal Defense System and Shows What a Mess the System IS!!

"Groups of lawyers and advocates have filed lawsuits in states from New York to Florida to Arizona charging that low-income people can't get a fair trial. Public defenders in Kansas and Minnesota are refusing cases outright.

In Michigan, the system has been broken for decades. Detroit public defenders face abysmal pay, unmanageable caseloads and flimsy oversight."

Listen to this story from All Things Considered on National Public Radio. It really illustrates how high caseloads affect lawyers who have good hearts, but no time or resources to do the job. The lawyer featured in the story doesn't get paid for telephone calls or letters to his clients and is only paid for one jail visit. So he has practically no communication with his in-custody clients. To see how this guy deals with and talks about his clients is shocking but then you wonder how anyone can keep their humanity in that system.

It was a good reminder to me that I work for my clients, not a system, and I owe my clients time and respect and sincere concern.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111811319

No More Mr. Nice Guy

An article in the New Yorker by Jeffery Toobin who wrote one of the best recent books about the supreme court The Nine.

No More Mr. Nice Guy

The Supreme Court’s stealth hard-liner.
by Jeffrey Toobin May 25, 2009

When John G. Roberts, Jr., emerges from behind the red curtains and takes his place in the middle of the Supreme Court bench, he usually wears a pair of reading glasses, which he peers over to see the lawyers arguing before him. It’s an old-fashioned look for the Chief Justice of the United States, who is fifty-four, but, even with the glasses, there’s no mistaking that Roberts is the youngest person on the Court. (John Paul Stevens, the senior Associate Justice, who sits to Roberts’s right, is thirty-five years older.) Roberts’s face is unlined, his shoulders are broad and athletic, and only a few wisps of gray hair mark him as changed in any way from the judge who charmed the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearing, in 2005.
On April 29th, the last day of arguments for the Court’s current term, the Justices heard Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, a critical case about the future of the Voting Rights Act. Congress originally passed the law in 1965, and three years ago overwhelmingly passed its latest reauthorization, rejecting arguments that improvements in race relations had rendered the act unnecessary. Specifically, the bill, signed by President George W. Bush in 2006, kept in place Section 5 of the law, which says that certain jurisdictions, largely in the Old South, have to obtain the approval of the Justice Department before making any changes to their electoral rules, from the location of polling places to the boundaries of congressional districts. A small utility district in Texas challenged that part of the law, making the same argument that members of Congress had just discounted—that this process, known as preclearance, amounted to a form of discrimination against the citizens of the New South.
Roberts said little to the lawyer for the plaintiff, but when Neal K. Katyal, the Deputy Solicitor General, took to the lectern to defend the Voting Rights Act, the Chief Justice pounced. “As I understand it, one-twentieth of one per cent of the submissions are not precleared,” Roberts said. “That, to me, suggests that they are sweeping far more broadly than they need to to address the intentional discrimination under the Fifteenth Amendment”—which guarantees the right to vote regardless of race.
“I disagree with that, Mr. Chief Justice,” Katyal said. “I think what it represents is that Section 5 is actually working very well—that it provides a deterrent.” According to Katyal, the fact that the Justice Department cleared almost all electoral changes proved, in effect, that the South had been trained, if not totally reformed.
Roberts removed his glasses and stared down at Katyal. “That’s like the old elephant whistle,” he said. “You know, ‘I have this whistle to keep away the elephants.’ You know, well, that’s silly. ‘Well, there are no elephants, so it must work.’ ”
Roberts was relentless in challenging Katyal: “So your answer is that Congress can impose this disparate treatment forever because of the history in the South?”

“Absolutely not,” Katyal said.
“When can they—when do they have to stop?”
“Congress here said that twenty-five years was the appropriate reauthorization period.”
“Well, they said five years originally, and then another twenty years,” Roberts said, referring to previous reauthorizations of the act. “I mean, at some point it begins to look like the idea is that this is going to go on forever.”
And this, ultimately, was the source of Roberts’s frustration—and not just in this case. In a series of decisions in the past four years, the Chief Justice has expressed the view that the time has now passed when the Court should allow systemic remedies for racial discrimination. The previous week, the Court heard a challenge by a group of white firefighters in New Haven who were denied promotions even though they had scored better than black applicants on a test. Roberts was, if anything, even more belligerent in questioning the lawyer defending the city. “Now, why is this not intentional discrimination?” he asked. “You are going to have to explain that to me again, because there are particular individuals here,” he said. “And they say they didn’t get their jobs because of intentional racial action by the city.” He added, “You maybe don’t care whether it’s Jones or Smith who is not getting the promotion,” he said. “All you care about is who is getting the promotion. All you care about is his race.”
When Antonin Scalia joined the Court, in 1986, he brought a new gladiatorial spirit to oral arguments, and in subsequent years the Justices have often used their questions as much for campaign speeches as for requests for information. Roberts, though, has taken this practice to an extreme, and now, even more than the effervescent Scalia, it is the Chief Justice, with his slight Midwestern twang, who dominates the Court’s public sessions.
Roberts’s hard-edged performance at oral argument offers more than just a rhetorical contrast to the rendering of himself that he presented at his confirmation hearing. “Judges are like umpires,” Roberts said at the time. “Umpires don’t make the rules. They apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.” His jurisprudence as Chief Justice, Roberts said, would be characterized by “modesty and humility.” After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

Read the rest here:

http://www.newyorker.com/services/referral?messageKey=8e165b410f35df6a3bedb820ed1f2305

Scalia acts like a elitist cry baby again

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia resents a 20 year old asking him to be consistent.

WEST PALM BEACH - In a room filled with some of Palm Beach County's most powerful people, it took a 20-year-old political science student to throw off U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Tuesday afternoon. Student Sarah Jeck stood in front of 750 people and asked Scalia why cameras are not allowed in the U.S. Supreme Court even though the court hearings are open, transcripts are available and the court's justices are open enough to go "out on book tours." Scalia was at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in part to do a book signing and wasn't happy at the question. "Read the next question," Scalia replied. "That's a nasty, impolite question."

2nd Circuit Chief Judge Says Pro Bono Work is ‘Anti-Social’

From Here

he chief judge of the New York City-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blasted pro bono work as “anti-social” and “self-serving” at a Federalist Society meeting this week.

Judge Dennis Jacobs contended pro bono work is an “anti-social” activity that is sometimes used to expand courts’ reach into legislative matters, according to a Daily Record (sub. req.) account summarized on Legal Blog Watch and the American Constitution Society Blog.

Jacobs said pro bono work is used by law firms to recruit associates and develop their skills, according to the account. The pro bono lawyers honor each other “sometimes over and over again” without taking responsibility for the impact of their work, he said.

He cited one case in which his former law firm, Simpson Thacher, represented a tenant known as the “bird lady” because of her unhealthy collection of birds, prompting criticism from New York’s governor, the story said. Another case brought by an environmental group held up a levy project before Hurricane Katrina struck.

Legal Blog Watch points out that Jacobs is among the judges who solicited lawyers to become members of the 2nd Circuit’s own pro bono panel.

This is nice. Just what lawyers need.  Lets become more elitist and shut more people out of the system.  The Federalist Society fascists probably ate this up.