"Are any of the newspaper asking for them to step down? People have very serious disputes and their whole lives depend on decisions on the Supreme Court, and this isn't fair to the people. Are newspaper editors saying they got to go?"
The answer from her guest, Jason Stein of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
You are right this is sort of funny, but no joke. One thing that I've heard the time when this all came out Governor Walker talked about the possibility of having an appointed rather than elected court. And that didn't go anywhere. It didn't seem like that proposal -- seems like it would be dead on arrival in our legislature. But certainly there's been a number of people saying, look, this can't go on. Something has got to change.
Total failure to answer the question!
By the way, I'm hearing a rumor that Justice
Crooks might resign. I don't know what that's about, but I was just reading about the 1995 election that originally brought Justice Bradley to the court. She defeated none other than Patrick Crooks in that election, and Crooks (who later won election, in 1996), was the
conservative in the race, with the backing of Gov. Tommy Thompson and many Republicans. Bradley had the liberal backing, including the AFL-CIO. Both candidates portrayed themselves as "strict constructionists," and Bradley emphasized judicial independence and the importance of keeping the judiciary above politics. Crooks criticized her for her unwillingness to talk about how she would decide even cases that had been decided in the past. (Sorry for the absence of links there. I'm reading old newspaper articles, and they are not up on line.)
Crooks — who now votes in a bloc with Chief Justice Abrahamson and Justice Bradley, reaching liberal outcomes — called himself "the conservative for the court." When Bradley cited judicial ethics as her reason for refusing to address the issues, he said, after he lost: "I think it's unfortunate we didn't have a chance to show there was a clear, ideological difference between the two of us... It's important for the public to have a sense of candidates' judicial philosophy and how they go about making decisions." Bradley, by contrast, said she won because she refrained from labeling herself and Crooks did not. She said: "I think people ended up not wanting those kinds of conservative labels in a Supreme Court race... You have to be careful not to politicize the court."
A mere 3 years after joining the court, in 1999, Crooks considered resigning. He
told the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the problem was the “way Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson is running the court.... abusing her position by micromanaging the court system, making unilateral decisions on administrative matters that should come to the full court, and jeopardizing the court’s neutrality by awarding grants to groups with lobbyists and social agendas."
Crooks, you may remember, was the only justice who was not present for the "chokehold" incident. He had gone home for the day. On another occasion — in 2008, when Justice Bradley allegedly hit Justice Gableman in the head for calling the Chief "Shirley" — Crooks was — allegedly — reading the horoscopes. Crooks was born May 16, 1938. That makes him a Taurus. It says
here: "Can you take the day off? Now is the perfect time to do just that. If you’re locked in for some level of responsibility, you can still make the most of your freewheeling energy by creating a party atmosphere." So... no announcement today, probably.
ADDED:
From the investigative file (and relevant to Crooks's attitude toward the recent incident):
Justice Crooks said early in his tenure as Supreme Court Justice, he recalls a meeting in which Justice Prosser had called him a "viper" in an aggressive manner. Justice Crooks believed it was sometime around the fall of 1999 when Chief Justice Abrahamson was running for re-election for supreme court. Justice Crooks said he was not supporting her re-election at the time, and Justice Prosser was. It was during a meeting with the other Justices that Justice Crooks stated he was not going to support the Chief Justice's re-election. Justice Prosser had stood up and aggressively called him a "viper" during that meeting because he was not supporting the Chief Justice. Justice Crooks recalled Justice Prosser had walked out of the room, and slammed the door hard enough to cause the glass to vibrate. Justice Crooks said he had never forgotten that incident, and believes since then things have been either just as aggressive from Justice Prosser, and in some cases they have escalated.
पोस्ट्स
