Fifth Circuit Tells Wrongly Convicted Woman She Can’t Sue Over Obvious Judicial Fuckery

Legal Issues

from the welcome-to-the-altered-states-of-America dept

When we’re young, impressionable, and financially incapable of donating significant amounts of money to super PACs, we’re taught that the American government is a system of checks and balances. Civics classes explain there are three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial — all of which are supposed to be independent and equally powerful.

The theory proposed by this instruction suggests all three are dependent on each other. Without equal resistance, the fragile triangle will collapse, with one branch ending up on top of the heap.

Years later we discover the governmental triangle remains upright — not because of the counteractive pressures of checks and balances, but rather through something akin to collusion. At this point, all three branches wield considerable power. And they’re rarely willing to use their power to thwart the ill intentions of other branches.

It’s ugly. But it’s what makes America the nation it is: a land of convoluted laws, even more convoluted regulation, and three equal branches that can be easily converted to political hobby horses.

Somewhere in the middle of all this mess is the far-too-common reality: the courts can’t help you because… well, the courts have not historically helped you. To obtain this assistance requires the laws to change or precedential case law to change. But when the people desiring this change are just regular people — or even worse, criminally charged regular people — the government (all three branches) simply doesn’t care what happens to them.

When you’ve obviously been fucked by one branch of the government, it’s up to another branch to sort it out. But when that branch has had its hands tied by decades of jurisprudence that says the government is almost always right and people who’ve had their rights violated are almost always wrong, we end up with this sort of thing. (h/t Short Circuit)

The violation is obvious. The rest is just the muddying of the jurisprudence waters the federal government has managed to achieve with a heady blend of absolute immunity and a long-standing disdain for anyone accused of crime.

Texas resident Erma Wilson was arrested and charged with cocaine possession. She has always maintained her innocence. She rejected several plea deals from the government, preferring to take her chances in front of a jury. That didn’t work out. She was convicted of drug possession and stripped of her nursing license, terminating a career Wilson had pursued since she was a child.

Where did she go wrong? She trusted the court to be an impartial arbiter of justice. From the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court decision [PDF]:

Wilson’s faith was misplaced.

In Wilson’s trial—and in hundreds of others in Midland County spanning decades—bedrock judicial norms were dishonored. Unbeknownst to Wilson, a Midland County assistant district attorney, Ralph Petty, had been moonlighting, acting as both accuser and adjudicator. For nearly 20 years, the multitasking Petty had worn two hats: (1) by day, a prosecutor in the public courtrooms of Midland County judges; and (2) by night, a law clerk in the private chambers of Midland County judges. Disturbingly, Petty was working both sides of the bench, seeking favorable rulings while also writing them.

The Fifth Circuit — the law enforcement-friendliest circuit in the land — sees an obvious problem with this. This sort of thing isn’t America. This sort of thing straight out of the autocrat playbook: a system that pretends to be interested in justice while ensuring the deck is always thoroughly stacked against the accused.

The only amazing thing about this is the fact that Wilson got sentenced to nothing more than eight years of supervised release. Most drug cases are handled with book-throwing by Texas judges. However, she still had a felony drug conviction on her record, which meant (unlike a similarly charged police officers) she was no longer welcome to pursue a career as a nurse.

The Fifth Circuit is disturbed by the allegations in this case.

Lady Justice wears a blindfold because justice is supposed to be meted out evenhandedly. She holds scales because evidence is supposed to be weighed impartially. These ancient symbols of fairness and clear-sightedness—the very moral force underlying a just legal system—are mocked if one side can rig the game by calling its own balls and strikes. Petty’s conflict of interest was undeniable, and it flattened Wilson’s constitutional guarantee of a fair trial.

But even as it decries the violation of Lady Liberty and the ideals she represents, the Appeals Court is bound by decades of precedent that say being horrified by the government’s actions and holding the government responsible for these actions are two very different things. The government and its employees have tons of immunity variants at their disposal.

And, in this case, they have something else: two decades of cover-up, as well as the fact that Wilson never served any time in prison (even if that particular saving grace didn’t save her from seeing her reputation and her career destroyed by a prosecutor who spent two decades placing his fingers on the scale of justice).

Under the Supreme Court’s Heck decision, a convicted party cannot seek § 1983 damages for unconstitutional conviction or imprisonment without first showing that the conviction or sentence has been reversed on appeal or otherwise declared invalid, such as by federal habeas relief. The wrinkle here is that Petty’s conflicted dual-hat arrangement came to light only after Wilson had served her whole sentence, making federal habeas a non-option

This opinion — which is almost as aggrieved by its own limitations as Wilson herself — is penned by Judge Don Willett, the same judge who crafted a scathing critique of qualified immunity shortly after taking his post at the Fifth Circuit. Willett’s anger at the injustice baked into the system by years of bad precedent and lazy legislation is something that bleeds over into the footnotes.

For instance, there’s this footnote, which takes all forms of governmental immunity to task [internal citations removed]:

Prosecutors, for example, enjoy absolute immunity for actions taken in their prosecutorial role. […] (“[I]t has been thought in the end better to leave unredressed the wrongs done by dishonest officers than to subject those who try to do their duty to the constant dread of retaliation.” (quoting Gregoire v Biddle, 177 F.2d 579, 581 (2d Cir. 1949)). Local and county governments enjoy immunity unless unconstitutional actions were taken pursuant to an official policy or custom. […] Other government officials enjoy the judge-created doctrine of qualified immunity, which lets wrongdoers duck consequences for rights-robbing violations—no matter how deliberate, brazen, and knowingly corrupt—unless plaintiffs can point to a functionally identical case that previously declared the same misconduct unlawful. […] Upshot: Many Americans’ rights are violated but not vindicated.

Then there’s this paragraph and its footnote. The paragraph expresses Willett’s exasperation at being forced to fuck Wilson over one more time. The footnote calls out who’s truly responsible for this mess.

This result is unseemly. Absent § 1983, noncustodial individuals on the receiving end of violative conduct, however egregious, will have no federal forum to vindicate their federal constitutional rights. But as a three-judge panel bound by controlling circuit precedent, our hands are tied. Onlythe en banc court, or the United States Supreme Court, can deliver a different result that better aligns with Congress’ broad textual command in § 1983.⁷

The footnote:

Or, and hear me out, Congress can always legislate, reclaiming its lawmaking prerogative against court-invented, counter-textual limitations on the broad statutory remedy that Congress crafted.

Willett is right to be angry — both at what happened here and how the law has developed to ensure he can’t right this wrong. I mean, look at this bullshit:

As an assistant district attorney, Petty worked on cases at all stages of prosecution. The same was true of his work on the other side of the bench. For instance, Petty was responsible for opposing habeas corpus petitions as an assistant district attorney and for working on habeas corpus rulings as a law clerk. Petty worked in these two conflicting roles from 2001–2014, and again in 2017 and 2018. Over his career, Petty is alleged to have been both the lead prosecutor and the law clerk on more than 300 cases. He retired in 2019.

Even the Texas court system thought this was wrong. After having been informed of this, it found Petty had engaged in professional misconduct and stripped him of his law license. Despite all of this happening, Wilson is still out of luck because case law says she wasn’t punished enough and did not discover this malfeasance soon enough to survive the government’s motion to dismiss.

Judge Willett is outraged at what courts have allowed themselves to become, even as its top practitioners proclaim publicly that the federal court system is the epitome of fairness:

When the current Chief Justice of the United States appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005, he famously invoked baseball, assuring the nation, “I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” By this time, the criminal justice playing field in Midland County was already lopsided, with one side secretly acting as pitcher, batter, and umpire all at once.

Rabid sports fans howl nonstop about blown calls and revel in accusing officials of losing their team the game—or even rigging it. We expect fair play in sports. So too in courts. We want all of life’s arbiters to enforce the rulesimpartially. And in litigation, America’s other national pastime, judges (unlike umpires who simply shout, “You’re out!”) are expected to painstakingly explain why something is inside or outside the legal strike zone.

Today’s result is difficult to explain. What allegedly happened here (and in hundreds of other criminal cases in Midland County) is utterly bonkers: the presiding judge employed a member of the prosecution team as a right-hand adviser.

And yet, the rules are in place: precedent says Wilson cannot continue to sue. The government loaded the dice, got caught, and still gets to walk away with a win. The government is running more than one rigged game, and it’s using court precedent to ensure it can keep racking up unearned wins. The prevailing case law was put in place to keep well-meaning public servants from being bankrupted despite acting in good faith. But when it comes to obvious bad faith, the law is powerless to help those with the least power, ensuring an extensive list of wrongs can never be righted by the part of the system of checks and balances that has continually sided with the most powerful entities in the nation.

Filed Under: 5th circuit, erma wilson, ralph petty