Cold as ice

This is a few days old but I just learned of it and I think it bears mentioning. The individual case, in isolation, may not seem important but what it signifies and exemplifies, is.

From Lawyers, Guns, and Money we learn of a Supreme Court decision this past Thursday in which by a bare 5-4 majority the Court

overruled two precedents to throw out an appeal to a murder conviction as being outside of the deadline.

The deadline, in this case, meaning the time limit to file the appeal.

The basic facts are not in dispute, as noted by David Souter in his dissent.

The District Court told petitioner Keith Bowles that his notice of appeal was due on February 27, 2004. He filed a notice of appeal on February 26, only to be told that he was too late because his deadline had actually been February 24.

It's worthy of note that even opposing counsel had not raised an objection to the filing of the appeal on technical grounds. The issue did not appear until the Appeals Court tossed the appeal.

The narrow legal issue on which the Supreme Court ruled was whether or not the time limit was "jurisdictional," in which case the District Court could not extend it. According to the two precedents, both cited by Souter, the answer should have been no. The majority disagreed, preferring the narrowest possible interpretation of technicalities. So even though it was the District Court that made the error, it was "TS, Mac, you're screwed."

There were a fair number of comments about the case at LGM, including some who tried to justify the decision on the grounds that it was up to defense counsel to know the law and to know that what they were specifically told was wrong and should be ignored. But even those discussions, as informative about some arcane aspects of law as they were, were in their own way every bit as bad as the actual decision and every bit as revealing of the philosophical rot at the core of our "justice system" as presently practiced. Because in all the discussions about technicalities of the law, about how the lawyer "should have known," about how the judge "should have known," one thing kept getting forgotten if indeed it was ever remembered:

Neither the lawyer nor the judge are the ones who suffer as the result of their screw-ups!

It's the defendant who suffers, someone who was once a living, breathing human being but now appears to exist as nothing more than a legal concept, a disembodied, free-floating, philosophical point whose humanity, indeed whose name, doesn't even appear in the discussion.

Yes, yes, I know the smug, evasive, legal-system-self-serving cliché that courts are about "the law, not justice." But if in the face and fact of such a result, one which when we recall a real person's life is really affected is manifestly improper, manifestly wrong, if in the face of that courts are unable to make an exception, unable to slip even a pinkie onto the scales of justice, then we have gone far beyond the elevation of form over substance, of procedure over people, we have sliced justice into "just ice."

And there is a reason that both cruelty and indifference are associated with being cold.