Here's an astonishing article that highlights just how far we have fallen. Ethan Greenberg, who is not a particularly awful judge, nonetheless issues a completely fraudulent ruling--and gets away with it. As it turns out, in an attempt to get a jump on Crawford, Greenberg issues a bogus (and totally politically motivated) decision saying that the complanant's call to 911 isn't testimonial under Crawford. The only problem is: the complainant didn't even make the call--turns out Greenberg issued his hasty decision without bothering to listen to the 911 tape. The complainant isn't even on it. Oops. But of course his dumb-ass pro-prosecutorial decision gets cited by prosecutors and followed by Judges eager to rule around the US Supreme Court and maintain their now untennable DV prosecutions.
"If the facts turn out to be wrong" snifs some prosecutor "I don't see how it changes much" Sure... The hell with those pesky facts.
The New York Times > New York Region > Legal Precedent Doesn't Let Facts Stand in the Way
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2 comments:
I just found this article, and I know it has been a while,...but I am a student of this judge, and am shocked by his views. For one, he thinks the exclusionary rule should be done away with, that being arrested and held without counsel for 24 hours is not a big deal, and that lawsuits for police misonduct are simply carried out by litigous persons with axes to grind. It is insane! ...and, to top it off, any disagreement--even when founded in 4th, 5th, and 6th amendment law--he declares that such opposition is simply the arbitrary, de facto liberal viewpoint. I think that the defense bar will always have a tough time in his courtroom, and I am not suggesting that the courts are biased in nyc, I am stating it outright! Anyone who can claim that police action is in anyway, a minor intrusion upon one's dignity, purportedly conceived of by the founders, combined with actual ignorance of what an oppresive state can do to an innocent person, is a danger to humanity.
"Legal history is not without cases of judges making decisions based on mistaken assumptions. In a landmark ruling for personal injury cases, Benjamin N. Cardozo, a Court of Appeals judge in New York, ruled in 1916 that a driver should be able to recover damages from a car maker, after one of the driver's car wheels collapsed.
But at trial, a more nuanced picture had emerged. The driver had been speeding and had hit a large patch of gravel in the road, said James A. Henderson Jr., a professor at Cornell Law School, who discovered the inconsistencies while studying the case for an academic article in 2002. "It's like an old friend you assumed you knew, and it turns out you didn't," he said, referring to the case.
Judge Cardozo "thought a good appellate judge should not let the facts of a particular case bind him," Mr. Henderson said. "The case was screaming for that new rule of law, and the facts were kind of annoyingly in the way."
Judge Greenberg's ruling, like Judge Cardozo's, is going down in the legal history books for its reasoning. Prosecutors and judges who cited it said in interviews this month that its legal thinking was sound." -from the same NY Times Article cited above.
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