On Crime and Pay

Priscilla Owen was confirmed to sit on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals today:

The 56-43 vote to appoint Owen to the New Orlean-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was a consequence of an agreement reached earlier this week that averted, for the time being, a bitter dispute over Democratic use of the filibuster to block Bush's judicial choices.

Owen, said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., "withstood an orchestrated partisan attack on her record."...

It wasn't easy for Owen, 50, to get to this point. She was subjected to nine hours of hearings, answered more than 500 questions and endured 22 days of floor debate.

Poor Pris--all that waiting, all that sitting. As for the "orchestrated partisan attack on her record?"

Hmmm.

In 1993, a fourteen-year-old boy, Willie Searcy, was in a car accident that left him a "ventilator-dependent quadriplegic." For the rest of his life he was going to need machines and constant nursing to keep him alive. His parents' insurance wouldn't cover it, and the family didn't have the money to pay for it. They had a ventilator, but no backup generator in case of a power failure. Medicaid provided 104 hours per week of nursing, but it was cut to 34 hours per week when he turned 21.

His injuries were partly caused by a defective seat belt in the Ford pickup his stepfather was driving at the time of the accident. An East Texas jury ordered Ford to pay Willie Searcy $30 million. That money would have kept him alive if he'd ever gotten it. But Ford's legal team took the case to the Texas Supreme Court, where, unfortunately for Willie Searcy, the judge who took the case was Priscilla Owen:

Jeanne D'Arc cites Salon:

Two years after the lawyers representing Willie Searcy and the lawyers representing Ford had requested an expedited hearing, Owen wrote the majority opinion. A process that could have been completed within months of the oral argument in November 1996 dragged on until Owen completed her opinion in March 1998.

Her opinion was stunning. Not because it ruled against Willie Searcy and his mother, Susan Miles, but because of how it ruled against them. Owens ruled the case would have to be retried in Dallas because it was initially filed in the wrong venue. Yet venue was not among the issues, or "points of error," the court said it would consider two years earlier when it took up the case...

Willie Searcy's case was a textbook example of "results oriented" justice that is common in Texas. Often, judges first determine the desired outcome of a case. Then they adapt the facts and the law to make it happen. It was also a glaring example of judicial activism, or making law from the bench, which is anathema to conservative Republicans -- unless it serves their purposes, as it did in the Terri Schiavo case.

These rulings are not entirely informed by the justices' love for certain principles of law. If the Texas Supreme Court is the most business-friendly bench in the nation -- and it is -- it's because corporate interests pay for the justices' election campaigns. Of the $175,328 Owen took in from the Texas defense bar while Willie Searcy's case moved through the courts, she got $20,450 from Baker Botts, the mega-firm run by Bush family consigliere James A. Baker III. Baker Botts was part of Ford's defense team.

Searcy's case eventually was decided in his favor--but, as noted above, the family couldn't afford 24 hour-a-day care while the judgement was pending. Hence, four days after the Dallas Court of Appeals upheld the verdict, Searcy's mother awoke to find her 21 year old son dead. The ventilator had malfunctioned.


She might as well have suffocated him herself.

I'm thinking of sending a pillow to the court, with instructions that it's a "Pillow for Priscilla"--she can use it to suffocate more victims. And, of course, we've learned that for certain criminals, a life of crime DOES pay. It just depends on making sure you don't get sucked into petty larceny, but go all out for the big bucks.