Occupy the Appellate Division

Last week a Marine exhorted the cops in Times Square to leave the Occupy Wall Street protestors alone. “It doesn’t make you tough to hurt these people,” Sergeant Shamar Thomas, wearing his desert camouflage and medals, shouted to a numb-faced platoon of cops. “This is not a war zone. They don’t have guns. It doesn’t make any sense. How do you sleep at night? There is no honor in this. Why are you hurting these people?” And the cops, after some feeble blustering about moving along, just melted away.

This heroic standoff inspired two new offshoots of Occupy Wall Street: OccupyMARINES and OccupyPolice (i.e. Marines and police in support of OWS).

It’s time for OccupyCourts. Starting with Judge Android and the First Department, whining about how we should cut our oral arguments short because otherwise they’ll have to stay past 5 o’clock. Assuring us that they know all about our cases when it’s painfully obvious that they mostly don’t.

When did it become okay for appellate judges not to look at the briefs until the authors are standing at the podium, if then? Apparently they think we come to oral argument to admire their good looks.

This is the Potemkin Village school of jurisprudence, a facade propped up by 2 x 4’s. They sit with piles of briefs on the bench, but mostly all they read is the bench memos cranked out by anonymous clerks who only read the People’s brief. The People know this and fill their briefs with all kinds of misrepresentations. You can write a reply and squawk at oral argument, and even expose the DA as a damn liar, but the affirmance is already written. It means people are sitting in jail who shouldn’t be, that their rights are going down the tubes because judges refuse to correct mistakes. There is no honor in this.