"Where does David Prosser go to get his reputation back?"

Asks David Blaska.

There are some people who need to apologize to Mr. Justice David Prosser now that he has been cleared and soon. They took a shallowly researched and preposterous allegation -- that Prosser held fellow justice Ann Walsh Bradley in a chokehold -- and ran to the guillotine with it.

Yes, let's look back on the public demonstrations. Let's remember that protesters had a big ugly balloon effigy of Justice Prosser, which they tied by the neck to a lamppost. Look at their signs. Let's remember how these protesters strung together "allegations about Justice Prosser choking Justice Bradley [with] much more general issues about abortion and violence against women." As I said at the time:

I heard no acknowledgements of the uncertainties about what we know about what happened and no sensitivity about fairness and due process. I heard: 1. declarations about the importance of women's issues and 2. a demonization of Justice Prosser.

This is the level of left-wing activism we witnessed here in Madison. A justice is despised because his decisions do not please liberals, and so, without thought, they forgot about things liberals like to love themselves for caring about, such as fairness and due process. These are the same people who have been chanting the chant "shame, shame, shame" for months up at the Capitol.



How are they not oppressed by their own shame? Seriously, for the purposes of writing the previous paragraph, I channeled the feeling of shame that I would feel if I had done that, and now I am literally nauseated. If I had said what the people in the video at the last link said, I would be weeping now and begging forgiveness. But I am not them, so I will simply ask that they stage a rally in support of Justice Prosser and they publicly retract their earlier statements and commit themselves to the core principles of liberalism: fairness and due process.

Blaska demands apologies from people who should be "ashamed of their lynch mob mentality." He names the "practitioners of the dark arts of 'by any means necessary.'" Check out his list (which unfortunately includes the name of a UW law student). I'll highlight this:

Ms. Emily Mills owes an apology for blogging that UW law professor and bloggress Ann Althouse "has gone to great and terrible lengths to excuse the alleged behavior, attack the credibility of only the anonymous sources with whom she disagrees, suggest that no arrests (yet) mean no wrongdoing, impugn the honor of Justice Bradley, and cast doubt on the very justice system of this state." Looks like it is the other way around, Ms. Emily.

(Here's my contemporaneous pushback of Mills.)  Blaska ends his column with a request for more names. I have one: Bill Wineke. Like Mills, he owes me an apology.

ADDED: My analysis of the investigative report that was released today is in the previous post.