Originally Posted by Villages Kahuna

Picked up from watching the Sunday news shows this morning...

-- David Brooks, appearing on Face The Nation, commented that Sotomayor adjudicated about 90-100 cases that were rooted in a question regarding the rights of immigrants or minorities. According to Brooks, she ruled against the minorities in almost all cases.

-- In the New Haven firefighter's case, as one of three appellate court judges, she upheld the ruling of the lower court. That's a far cry from trampling on the rights of non-minorities who were clearly mistreated in the promotion exam process. The lower court judge made his ruling documented with a 47-page brief. Apparently both the written as well as the case precedents gave neither the lower court judge or the appeals judges a clear standard for making a ruling. So apparently the appeals court simply upheld the ruling of the lower court. Many have opined that the decision was a clear signal to the appropriate legislative bodies that the applicable law needed to be re-written. It will be interesting to see how the Supreme Court rules on this case in a few months. They will have no more written or case law than the lower courts, so any decision to overturn the decisions of the lower courts could truly be criticized as SCOTUS "making law" from the bench.
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I have the first-hand experience with how the courts work in anticipation of an appeal. The case I was involved with was a capital case, the murder of a relative. While the evidence proving the guilt of the accused was overwhelming, the case seemed to meander at a very slow pace thru the pre-trial hearings process--a total of almost four years from the date of the crime until the start of the trail.

When I complained to the assistant state attorneys who were prosecuting the case, they explained that the judge was being extremely careful in documenting each of his rulings during the hearing phase of the proceedings, documenting each of his decisions with written or case law, much of which was researched and provided to the judge by the prosecutors.

The prosecutors explained the appeals process in this way...They explained that if the judge actually made an error in the admission of evidence or the conduct of the trial, those could be grounds for a successful appeal. They noted, however, that if the decisions made by the judge in the process were in compliance with written and case law precedents, and even if the judge could have justifiably ruled either for or against the accused based on the law and precedents, they explained that the appeals court would never overturn a lower court decision based only on their belief that the lower court judge made an error in judgement. The prosecutors explained that an appeals court will NEVER overturn the judgement of a lower court judge, particularly when his decisions were documented with briefs indicating the written and case law he used in arriving at a decision. Appeals are only successful if errors in procedure or evidence or the application of incorrect law were made by the lower court--not his judgement in deciding based on those things.

I don't know whether criminal case appeals are any different than some of the cases heard by appeals judges or SCOTUS. Nor do I know whether the explanation provided to me applies anywhere outside the State of Illinois. But if the theory that an appeals court will never overturn a lower court decision based on the judgement of the judge, that may go a long way to explain what happened in the New Haven case, and provide some indication of what might happen when SCOTUS rules on thee case later this summer.