Oh, To Be in Iowa

As you probably know, in April 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously held, in Varnum v. Brien,  that a 

state statute limiting civil marriage to a union between a man and a woman [was] unconstitutional.

One effect was to make Iowa the only state between the coasts to allow same sex marriage.
Another effect was to scare the bejesus out of (or perhaps into, since the academic study of bejesus makes clear that good Christians should want as much bejesus as possible) a whole lot of Hawkeyes whose own marriages are threatened by the idea that Jack and Dave or Susan and Cindy could be married too.  They also got righteously pissed off.  Monica Davey, reporting in the New York Times, quoted a woman who called in to a radio talk show.

I’m almost ready to up and leave Iowa and move back to Minnesota.

As Inspector Gadget might say, Wowsers.  Minnesota, well sure.  A state that boasts of being "The Land of 10,000 Lakes" when it actually has 12,000 won't do anything extreme like support same sex marriage or elect a wrestler as Governor.  Ooops.  My bad.  They did that last one.  Maybe she should almost be ready to move back to somewhere else.  But I digress.

Anyway, the enraged Iowans stormed the election halls in November and ousted the three of the justices who were on the ballot for their regular retention elections.  That won't change the law, and it not even change the attitude of the court since the Governor gets to appoint their replacements.   

But the Iowa Supremes don't just surprise and please (or surprise and infuriate, depending on how you feel about things) on same-sex marriage.

It turns out that they've got a history of being kind of gutsy.  In that article about the justices getting sacked, the Times notes:

From its first decision in 1839, the Iowa Supreme Court demonstrated a willingness to push ahead of public opinion on matters of minority rights, ruling against slavery, school segregation and discrimination decades before the national mood shifted toward racial equality.

And it's not just on issues of equality.  As I reported at the end of November, the court declared that lawyers appointed to do criminal appeals on behalf of indigent criminal defendants may not have their fees capped at a level which will tempt them to cut corners.

The implications of the inadequate compensation framework on the provision of effective assistance of appellate counsel are multiple. First, inadequate compensation will restrict the pool of attorneys willing to represent indigent defendants. See State ex rel. Friedrich v. Circuit Ct., 531 N.W.2d 32, 29–30, 35 (Wis. 1995); see also Coonrad, 362 N.W.2d at 201 (Schultz, J., concurring). Second, the low level of compensation threatens the quality of indigent representation because of the perverse economic incentives introduced into the criminal justice system. See, e.g.,Makemson, 491 So. 2d at 1112 (noting inextricable linkage between compensation and defendants‘ rights to effective assistance of counsel); Stephan, 747 P.2d at 831 (observing inadequate compensation causes inherent conflicts between attorney and client); Jewell, 383 S.E.2d at 544 (stating it is unrealistic to expect appointed counsel to remain insulated from economic reality when losing money). Low compensation pits a lawyer‘s economic interest (recall Lincoln‘s metaphor that a lawyer‘s time is his stock in trade) against the interest of the client in effective representation. See Adele Bernhard, Take Courage: What the Courts Can Do to Improve the Delivery of Criminal Defense Services, 63 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 293, 321 (2002) (declaring conflict of interest between attorney and client in fixed-fee cases as "real"); see also Smith, 681 P.2d at 1381 (holding fixed-price contract to represent defendants in county unconstitutional for, among other things, failure to take into account time that the attorney is expected to spend representing defendants, failure to provide support costs, and failure to take into account the complexity of each case); Olive v. Maas, 811 So. 2d 644, 652 (Fla. 2002) (stating mandatory fee caps create "economic disincentive[s] for appointed counsel to spend more than a minimal amount of time on case").

Well, they've gone and done it again.  This time it's criminal law, and Iowa now joins a minority of jurisdictions that refuse to endorse one of the stupider positions around.  The case is State v. Halstead, and I have to give a bit of explanation to make clear what they did and why it's both self-evidently right and rather daring.

Think of a crime that has two parts.  Say involuntary manslaughter which, with some slight variation among jurisdictions (in name, too) is roughly killing someone while in the course of robbing them.  The killing wasn't intended.  That's why it's "involuntary" manslaughter.  But the guy is every bit as dead as if the killer did it intentionally.

Now, the defendant goes on trial.  The evidence all comes in and the jury says

• Guilty of involuntary manslaughter.
• Not guilty of robbery.

You may rightly say,

Huh? How can that be?  He's guilty of killing the guy while robbing him but he didn't rob him?  That's nonsense.

As I said, you'd be right to say that.  Lawyers describe the robbery as a "predicate act," and simple logic says that if the predicate act didn't occur, then neither did the one that depends on it.  Oh, in the involuntary manslaughter example there could have been a killing, maybe murder, maybe something else.  But if there was no robbery, there cannot have been involuntary manslaughter.
Got that?
OK, now, in 1932, the US Supremes had one of these cases before them.  The case is Dunn v. United States.  Dunn was charged with maintaining a nuisance by keeping liquor for sale (remember, this was still prohibition).  The jury said he was maintaining the nuisance but that he neither possessed nor sold liquor.  It was one trial.  The jury heard the same evidence throughout.  The verdict is logically inconsistent.  What to do?
If you're Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., you write an opinion for the Court explaining that (1) there's no double jeopardy problem because there could have been separate trials with differing verdicts so why not a single trial, and (2) anyway, who's to say that the jury didn't just decide to give Dunn a partial break by find him not guilty of the liquor charges.

Consistency in the verdict is not necessary. Each count in an indictment is regarded as if it was a separate indictment. Latham v. The Queen, 5 Best & Smith, 635, 642, 643; Selvester v. United States, 170 U.S. 262 , 18 S. Ct. 580. If separate indictments had been presented against the defendant for possession and for maintenance of a nuisance, and had been separately tried, the same evidence being offered in support of each, an acquittal on one could not be pleaded as res judicata of the other. Where the offenses are separately charged in the counts of a single indictment the same rule must hold. As was said in Steckler v. United States (C. C. A.) 7 F.(2d) 59, 60:

'The most that can be said in such cases is that the verdict shows that either in the acquittal or the conviction the jury did not speak their real conclusions, but that does not show that they were not convinced of the defendant's guilt. We interpret the acquittal as no more than their assumption of a power which they had no right to exercise, but to which they were disposed through lenity.'

OK, that last part is just silly.  I mean, sure it's possible that the jury made a conscious decision to go easy on the guy and not convict him of the liquor stuff.  But it's also possible that they decided to shaft him on the nuisance charge even though there was no evidence to support it.

As for the first part, well, in United States v. Powell (1984), the Court admitted that it's double jeopardy analysis was hooey (not the word they used).  But since Powell might have gotten a break as easily as he might have gotten hammered, the only way to know would be to actually figure out what the jurors were doing.  And since that's a bad idea, and since uncertainty in criminal trials is supposed to go the defendant, we'll just assume that the conviction is good and declare that inconsistent verdicts are things to admire rather than condemn.

No, they didn't really say that last part.  But it was the basic point.

And so said state after state.

I represented a guy on appeal here in Ohio who was convicted of aggravated murder as an accomplice, but that he was not guilty of a specification saying that he was an accomplice rather than the actual killer.  (It was a lot more complicated than that, which your really couldn't tell from the court's opinion which is why I'm not bothering to link to it.)  So what, said the court.  Nobody thinks verdicts need to be consistent.  Just see Powell.

Except, you know, it turns out that some states think logical consistency is a fair request of a jury, which brings us back to the Iowa Supremes and Halstead.

Halstead was convicted of assault while committing a felony.  Except he was found not guilty of the felony.  The intermediate appellate courts in Iowa just followed Powell  and  Dunn.  Then the Iowa Supreme Court got involved.  After explaining that there are a variety of sorts of inconsistent verdicts, and that they were only looking at the kind in Dunn and Powell where the jury said the predicate act didn't occur but the crime did, the court took dead aim at the U.S. Supremes.

Before addressing the narrow issue presented in this case, it is important to note that the question of inconsistent verdicts has sometimes been characterized as not involving constitutional issues. See United States v. Powell, 469 U.S. 57, 65, 105 S. Ct. 471, 477, 83 L. Ed. 2d 461, 469 (1984). As will be seen below, the question of the validity of an inconsistent verdict, however, can be approached only with due regard to important constitutional concepts including double jeopardy, guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and the right to a unanimous jury verdict. At a minimum, the outcome in this case is affected by strong constitutional currents.

OK, so the Iowa Supreme Court basically begins by saying that the Justices of the US Supreme Court don't recognize a federal constitutional issue when it jumps up and bites them in the ass.

The court then does some more rooting around in what other courts have done and what scholars have said and then finally gets to its own view.  First, there's the fantasy that all inconsistent verdicts are efforts to give a break to the accused.

If all inconsistent verdicts were the result of lenity with respect to the acquittals, and rationality with respect to the convictions, the approach in Dunn and Powell would make sense. But, we think it obvious that this is not the case. At the outset, it is equally possible that an inconsistent verdict is the product of animus toward the defendant rather than lenity. See Muller, 111 Harv. L. Rev. at 798, 834. The presumption of lenity seems particularly doubtful if the jury convicts a defendant of the more serious component offense but acquits the defendant on predicate felonies. Further, aside from the animus-lenity coin, the inconsistent verdict may be a result of mistake, confusion, or compromise. See DeSacia, 469 P.2d at 377.

But if you can't buy into that with conficence, then you have to say that the verdicts aren't reliable.  And gee, it turns out that in Iowa reliability counts.

Because we do not accept the presumption of lenity in cases involving inconsistent verdicts, we place greater weight than Powell and Dunn on the lack of reliability of jury verdicts when compound inconsistency is present. The purpose of our criminal justice system is to find the truth. When a jury convicts a defendant of a compound offense, but acquits the defendant on a predicate offense, our confidence in the outcome of the trial is undermined.

And if you can't have confidence in the outcome, well, then the state probably hasn't proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

In constitutional terms, a jury verdict involving compound inconsistency insults the basic due process requirement that guilt must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. See In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358, 364, 90 S. Ct. 1068, 1072, 25 L. Ed. 2d 368, 375 (1970). When a jury returns a compound inconsistency, a legal error has occurred. There is a substantial possibility that the jury has simply made an error, engaged in compromise, or engaged in some other process that is inconsistent with the notion of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

That's all really good stuff.  But it can't hold a candle to the next paragraph.

Finally, we are concerned about the perceptions of the criminal justice system when inconsistent verdicts are allowed to stand. We are concerned that allowing a potentially long prison term arising from a compound felony to stand when a defendant has been found not guilty of predicate offenses will have a corrosive effect on confidence in the criminal justice system. When liberty is at stake, we do not think a shrug of the judicial shoulders is a sufficient response to an irrational conclusion. We are not playing legal horseshoes where close enough is sufficient. It is difficult to understand why we have a detailed trial procedure, where the forum is elaborate and carefully regulated, and then simply give up when the jury confounds us. See Alschuler, 56 U. Chi. L. Rev. at 154, 229-33; cf. Richard L. Lippke, The Case for Reasoned Criminal Trial Verdicts, 22 Can. J. L. & Jurisprudence 313, 318-19 (2009). It is also difficult to justify that we would afford less protection in a criminal matter than in a civil matter involving money damages. See Price, 949 A.2d at 626-30.

Maybe we should strip it down for focus.  Take out the citations.  Just look sentence by sentence at the good stuff.

We are concerned that allowing a potentially long prison term arising from a compound felony to stand when a defendant has been found not guilty of predicate offenses will have a corrosive effect on confidence in the criminal justice system. 

Court after court says the opposite.  Admitting that the court did something wrong will cause the public to lose faith.  We must pretend to be right even when we're not because otherwise the public will start to think that we aren't always right - which is true but dangerous because it's important that people have false faith in the system, and they'll never trust any institution that admits its mistakes instead of hiding them.  Recognizing that upholding a verdict that's logically unsustainable has a "corrosive effect on confidence," that's great stuff.
But it's not half as good as what comes next.

When liberty is at stake, we do not think a shrug of the judicial shoulders is a sufficient response to an irrational conclusion.

Can that just be tattooed on the forehead of every judge who deals with criminal cases?  Please?  Can someone arrange that?
OK, maybe something lighter in tone?

We are not playing legal horseshoes where close enough is sufficient.

Close enough for government work isn't close enough.  That's a lesson to remember.
And then there's the last part.  If we take the system seriously, we're obligated to be honest about it.

It is difficult to understand why we have a detailed trial procedure, where the forum is elaborate and carefully regulated, and then simply give up when the jury confounds us.

Difficult to understand?  Yep.  Most state courts don't even try.  They "shrug [their] judicial shoulders."  They play "legal horseshoes."  They pretend there are no corrosives.
Almost make you ready to pack up from Minnesota and move to Iowa.

Victims Upon Victims

I've written about victims before.  I've explained why it is that the victims of criminal acts have no proper role in the criminal system except, perhaps, witness.  I've talked about the hidden and ignored victims of crime, the families and friends of the accused and convicted.  Those are, of course, two very different sorts of victims.  But you know, there's a third sort, too.

Back in March, while writing about lethal injection, I told this story.

There was a death penalty trial in Toledo some years ago.  After the jury returned and said that the defendant should die, the judge thanked them for their service.  In very rough paraphrase, here's what he said.

What you've done is difficult, but the system required it.  Thank you for your service to the county and the system of justice.  We understand that this choice may continue to cause you stress and pain.  Should any of you need counseling as a consequence of this decision, the County will provide help you find a counselor and pay for the counseling.

And after the Steven Hayes trial, I noted in passing that the judge offered the jurors counseling (or something) for post-traumatic stress.

Because see, being a juror in a capital case means deciding whether to kill someone.  That's a hell of a note.  And it affects people.  I know judges who cry after sentencing people to die.  I know one who takes a week off, every time.  Another told me that she didn't impose an execution date, which she thought the law required of her, because she just couldn't bring herself to do it.  And one talked movingly about staring out the window of his courtroom and wondering just who he was to play god.

Oh, they do it all right; they're paid to, after all.  (Though some just refuse the job.)  But it eats them up.  Jurors, too.  This business of ordering a murder.

That's not what William Glaberson, writing in the New York Times, told us about though. His article on the trauma to the Hayes jurors isn't about what they suffer for ordering a killing.  It's what they suffer simply for living through the trial.

THEY check and recheck the locks on their doors and windows. Tears can come from nowhere. Images of one of the dead girls pop into their heads. Some have nightmares about children who need their help. 
“It reminds me of what men in war must go through,” said one of them, Paula A. Calzetta. “They bond in such a terrible experience, and no one else can understand.”
They are the 12 jurors who, for two months, heard the tale of the Petit family home invasion in Cheshire, Conn.: middle-of-the-night intruders; a mother raped and strangled; her two girls, ages 11 and 17, killed in a scorching blaze after gasoline was poured on the girls. Day after day, the 12 saw pictures they cannot forget and dwelled on the harrowing night and morning when random terror came to the suburbs. 

Sure.  It's horrific to have to sit through that.  (As it will be at Joshua Komisarjevsky's upcoming trial.)  To hear those events detailed.  To look at crime scene and autopsy photographs.  To hear the anguish in Dr. Petit's voice as he testified and to watch him, day after excruciating day, sitting in the courtroom.

So they have flashbacks.  

Diane N. Keim, of Madison, said she could be driving along and suddenly get a mental image of a fire, like the one they had heard so much about. It can be an instant, she said, “like a little stab.”

They have bad dreams.

Night can be the hardest. Maico S. Cardona, 31, of Hamden, says it is then that he checks the doors and windows. But going to sleep can be worse than staying awake. He has had a recurring dream. “It’s a little girl,” he said. “She’s tied up to a bed. She’s crying for my help. I’m unable to get to her.”

They hope time heals.

Ian Cassell, 35, of New Haven, takes his two little boys to tae kwon do lessons. Recovery from the trial, he said, is something of a “work in progress.” 

They want what the more readily recognized victims of criminal acts are said to want.

On Dec. 2, some of the jurors went to Superior Court in New Haven to see the judge impose the death sentence on Mr. Hayes, the habitual criminal who called himself “an angry monster.” They said they were looking for closure. 

The judge, the prosecutors, the defense lawyers, the cops who investigated, the experts who tested and examined and theorized, they all signed up for the work, if not this case specifically, for this sort of thing.  They're volunteers.  Not so the jurors.  They didn't ask for the job.  They were drafted, and they're the ones who didn't get kicked out.  Unwitting survivors.

In a capital case, regardless of the law, the state wants to show the jurors that the defendant is a monster.  It wants the jury to act out of prejudice and passion.  So it poisons them with gruesome slides and gory details.  That's improper, but the courts allow it because how the coroner peeled back the scalp to see the cracks in the skull (or whatever) is somehow relevant, and if she can testify about it, she can show pictures of it.  Oh, it's not really relevant.  But if the courts start saying it's not, then prosecutors can't put out those pictures.

And the jurors?

The Hayes trial was excruciating.  More than most.  It would have been even without the prospective murder of Hayes himself hanging over it.

But that prospective murder was there.

Glaberson wouldn't have been talking to the jurors otherwise. 

And though the article barely addresses it, it's the elephant in the drawing room.  Because when all was said and done, the jury said to kill.  Even Lenus Gibbs.

Lenus Gibbs, 65, an accident investigator who had the Vietnam War experience, said he had coped well with the gruesome evidence but still could not seem to shake his preoccupation with the sober experience of the trial. He voted for the death penalty, he said, though the trial convinced him that he is opposed to capital punishment.

Because nobody emerges from this process unscathed.

Victims upon victims.

• The Petits who died.
• Dr. Petit who survived.
• The cops.
• The prosecutors.
• The defense counsel.
• The judge.
• The jury.
• And, oh yeah, Steven Hayes.

And the rest of us.

Victims upon victims.

Who We Are and What We Do - Once More Into the Breach

Think of this as an extended comment on Mark Bennett's brilliant opening entry into the competition for best criminal law blot post of 2011.

Already Matt Brown and John Kindley and the anonymous scold Atticus have weighed in with their own posts on it (and Kindley pretty much made his a comment, too).  Me, I hesitated to weigh in at first because I couldn't think of anything to add beyond what Lee Stonum pointed out (and what I said above): This is a likely nominee for best criminal law blog post of 2011.  But as I've gone back and read the comments (and the posts by Brown and Kindley and Atticus), I started to write my own comment.  Except the damn thing was getting so long, I said (to myself) "the hell with it," and decided to just write my own post.

So, if you're interested enough to be reading this, and if you haven't read Bennett, you should.  Go ahead.  I can wait.

If you won't do that, here's the very quick version:

Prosecutor argues that guy who got convicted of causing a death while driving drunk should do life so as to send a message to others who would drive after drinking more than the law allows.

When the judge sentenced Howard to life in prison, he was not punishing him only for his bad act—driving a car after drinking too much—but also for the unintended and random consequences of that bad act. The difference between DWI and intoxicated manslaughter is nothing more than lousy luck; Jim Howard didn’t get life in prison because of his act, but because of the unforeseen consequence of that act, out of his control once he committed the act. His act would have been the same, and his culpability no less, if he had made it home safe.

But we have this impulse toward retribution.  And it gets in the way of making punishment actually relevant to conduct.  (Here we go back, although Mark doesn't reference it, to Jacqueline Goodman's brilliant punishment argument).  Nobody who drives drunk intends to kill by doing it.  And it almost never happens.  We can't deter people from things they don't intend to do by increasing the punishment for random consequences of conduct.
Then, it turns out that a prosecutor who argued for especially harsh sentences for those convicted of DUIs - on the theory that such sentences would deter others from the same offense - gets busted for a DUI.  And while it's almost instinctive, unless perhaps the arrestee is a friend or relative, to feel a frisson of pleasure in the irony. 

Schadenfreude, don't you know.  And blawger Murray Newman, a former prosecutor and friend of the newly arrested prosecutor, doesn't like it.

But Murray's missing the point.  Human emotions, like schadenfreude, simply aren't relevant to our work as criminal defense lawyers,  And the presumption of innocence isn't a mantra to apply at all moments and in every context.  Defending isn't about sharing our clients' emotional baggage or necessarily believing that they didn't do what they've been charged with.  We separate out the personal reactions we might have and defend.

That's not an altogether fair summary, certainly not as eloquent as what Mark wrote.  But it'll do for my purposes here.

So, First, I don't know any of the players.  I've never met Mark or Murray or (as far as I know) the arrested prosecutor.  I don't think that matters.  Maybe the distance even helps.

Second, the presumption of innocence, insofar as it exists at all, is a legal presumption that has to do with burdens of proof at trial (and is tied to why there's a right to bail/bond in most cases).  It is dangerously naive for a criminal defense lawyer (or a lawyer engaging in criminal defense - not necessarily the same thing) to equate the presumption of legal innocence with an assumption of factual innocence.

I cringe when I hear some wheezing civil lawyer suggest that he'd happily do a bit of pro bono criminal defense just as long as he knew the defendant was factually innocent, as if it would violate some noble principle to take on the defense of one who just might have done something akin to what was charged.

Most of my clients have, in fact, done something within hailing distance of the offense charged.   I've represented the factually innocent; it's not something I much like doing.  I don't know any criminal defense lawyer who does.  And I'm damn sure I'd rather live in a society where most of the folks who are arrested did, in fact, do something like what they are charged with.  I don't know anyone who'd prefer a world in which the cops mostly arrest factually innocent people.

Third, schadenfreude may not be the noblest of sentiments, but it's pretty well ingrained in the human psyche.  It strikes me as a lousy basis for moral judgment, but that's why it's not part of the so-called criminal justice system.  Still, pretending that we're immune to it - or being offended that others feel it too - is a whole different sort of problem.  There's a reason we wonder who watches the watchers, who spies on the spies, who polices the police.  The hypocrisy of the righteous nailed violating precisely the rules they would impose on others (think Eliot Spitzer or Larry Craig or Mark Foley, just to focus on politicians and sex) gives a hint of pleasure to those who appreciate irony and have no personal stake in the case.

Fourth, and this is really the point, neither schadenfreude nor retribution serves as much of a template for how any scheme of criminal "justice" should be employed.

I understand the desire for retribution.  I wrote before about being a crime victim.  I expressed my personal desire then.

And I'd like to see the bastard who did this spend a few years behind bars doing very hard time in the company of folks who are eager, willing, and able to inflict maximum pain and humiliation on him.

I have friends who've been raped, who've been sexually abused by family members, who've been victims of burglary and robbery.  I've known a couple of people who were murdered.  I get it why Michael Dukakis gave perhaps the worst presidential debate answer of all time to Bernard Shaw's question about the hypothetical rape and murder of Kitty Dukakis.

But I also get it that his answer was exactly right in substance.  The law is at its worst when it tries to satisfy our visceral reactions or our fears.  Megan's Law, the Adam Walsh Act, the death penalty, LWOP for kids.  Prohibition.  Censorship. Scope or grope.  Much as we might delude ourselves into believing otherwise, these don't make us safer.  They sure as hell don't make us more free.

We do what we do, we who are criminal defense lawyers, not because we don't have human emotions - fear, love, schadenfreude - and not because we believe that everyone charged with a crime is an innocent victim of police error (intentional or reckless or negligent or whatever).  We do what we do in spite of those things.

I wouldn't defend the guy who broke into my car (aside from that whole thing about being a witness against my client) precisely because I couldn't set my own feelings aside.  Beyond that, setting them aside is what we do.

If we can't do that, we're in the wrong business.

If we don't understand that, we may defend the criminally accused, but we're not criminal defense lawyers.

 

2011 Off to a Bad Start - for a Blawgger.

They settled the case, dammit.

Look, I'm not generally a rubbernecker.  I don't slow down to look at car wrecks on the other side of the highway.  I don't join the crowds jostling for a better look at the EMT giving CPR or hang around to watch firefighters at work.  But this is one I've had my eye on.  

What I'm talking about here is the $50 million lawsuit brought by Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold and her daughter Sidney against the Cleveland Plain Dealer for outing them as "Lawmiss" who comments on the paper's website on news stories about, among other things, cases before Saffold.

The judge claims she isn't the one who uses her e-address and registration as Lawmiss to do the commenting.  Sidney says she does some.  Ah, but the lawsuit meant depositions.  Which meant Shirley would be required actually to answer questions about it all.  Under oath.  

My neck was turning elastic merely from the thought.  

Maricopa? Phooey.  Killer Keller? Bah.  We had our own here in the Honorable SSS.  I'd already written some. I was virtually guaranteed copy for the new year.  (My son, then a columnist for his college newspaper, got the same sort of enthusiastic glimmer when Dick Cheney shot his friend:  Copy we've got copy.)

And then they went and settled the damn case.  

Let's review.  The Cleveland Plain Dealer publishes stories on line, and provides a mechanism for readers to post comments, but first they have to register.  The registration information is, under the PD's semi-contractual terms, confidential.  Saffold, a judge, was a registered commenter using the name Lawmiss.  When Lawmiss said some critical things about the PD and its reporters, they went and dug up the registration information and outed her.  And since Lawmiss has not only been commenting on Saffold's cases, but also offering racist and other offensive comments . . . . Well, Lawsuit, Ho as nobody says.

But 50 million smackeroos?  Of course, it wasn't about the money.  It was the principle of the thing.  As it always is.  Saffold explains in the PD.

"There are times in your life when no matter the odds or the size of your opponent, it is important to stand up for what you believe -- rights of privacy, defending yourself and your family, and the ability of judges to act independent of outside influence," Saffold said.

"Having done so, Sydney and I are very happy to end our litigation after reaching a positive resolution with Advance Internet, including the proactive steps taken by Advance Internet to better protect all its online posters' privacy." 

Sure.  Like I say, not about the money.  It was all about the principle.  Apparently, the principle could be best served with a settlement.

I don't know how much the PD forked over.  But Advanced Internet, which hosts the registration information and improperly allowed the PD to get access to it and then out SSS with it, kicked in some.  The PD reports that AI funded a charity.

"I would like to thank Advance Internet for also funding a charitable donation in my mother's name to the Olivet Institutional Baptist Church choir," Saffold said. "This episode was very difficult for my mother to deal with in her last days and the donation to a cause that she felt strongly about means a lot to my family and me. We appreciate everyone who has continued to stand by and support us, including our attorney, Brian Spitz, who provided us with quality representation to bring this case to resolution."

A settlement is probably the right ending for the lawsuit.  But not much fun for this Blawgger.

Oh well.  The new year is young.